What was not a type of program started by the black panthers in urban areas?

Black Power began as revolutionary movement in the 1960s and 1970s. It emphasized racial pride, economic empowerment, and the creation of political and cultural institutions. During this era, there was a rise in the demand for Black history courses, a greater embrace of African culture, and a spread of raw artistic expression displaying the realities of African Americans.

The term "Black Power" has various origins. Its roots can be traced to author Richard Wright’s non-fiction work Black Power, published in 1954. In 1965, the Lowndes County [Alabama] Freedom Organization (LCFO) used the slogan “Black Power for Black People” for its political candidates. The next year saw Black Power enter the mainstream. During the Meredith March against Fear in Mississippi, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Chairman Stokely Carmichael rallied marchers by chanting “we want Black Power.”

This portal highlights records of Federal agencies and collections that related to the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The selected records contain information on various organizations, including the Nation of Islam (NOI), Deacons for Defense and Justice, and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). It also includes records on several individuals, including Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Elaine Brown, Angela Davis, Fred Hampton, Amiri Baraka, and Shirley Chisholm. This portal is not meant to be exhaustive, but to provide guidance to researchers interested in the Black Power Movement and its relation to the Federal government.

The records in this guide were created by Federal agencies, therefore, the topics included had some sort of interaction with the United States Government. This subject guide includes textual and electronic records, photographs, moving images, audio recordings, and artifacts. Records can be found at the National Archives at College Park, as well as various presidential libraries and regional archives throughout the country.

NOTE: See Josh Bloom’s comments. Other comments are welcome. They are moderated to avoid spam and trolls, but serious engagement with the issues is welcomed.

Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panthers, by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., has received wide praise for its depth and scope of research on the politics of the Black Panthers. Based on more than a decade of work, the book was originally published in 2013 and was republished with a brief new preface in 2016. Its sources include nearly all the issues of the Black Panther newspaper, hundreds of contemporaneous and radio interviews, and dozens of interviews with participants. It stresses the changes in Black Panther ideology and practice over time. The book moves roughly chronologically through movement history, with the first three chapters devoted to events through 1967, three chapters devoted to late 1967 and 1968, seven chapters that focus primarily on the peak year of 1969, and two chapters that trace the unraveling that began in 1970. Within these rough chronological sections, however, the narrative moves back and forth in time to trace different threads. In my review, after summarizing the main arguments, I want to focus specifically on the role of repression in the Party’s rise and demise.

The key argument of the book is that the Black Panthers succeeded briefly (1968-1970) in gaining widespread support for a politics that defined Black people in the US as an internal colony and the Black movement as an anti-imperialist anti-colonial struggle in alliance with other anti-imperialist struggles, particularly the [North] Vietnamese resistance to US neo-colonial aggression. They advocated armed self-defense: they did not initiate conflicts with police, but would use weapons to defend themselves if the police entered their premises without warrants or hassled them inappropriately on the street. At the same time, beginning in early 1969, the Black Panthers devoted substantial resources to a free breakfast program for children and other services of direct benefit to low income Black urban communities. Unlike many other Black nationalist groups, including SNCC after 1966, they avoided anti-White rhetoric and formed alliances with predominantly-White anti-war groups like the Peace and Freedom Party and the SDS, as well as with other insurgent minority groups. The anti-imperialism frame made the alliance logical from both sides. Bloom and Martin stress that, despite stereotypes of anti-war activists as White, the earliest draft resistance was among Blacks, including SNCC and Muhammad Ali, and that Martin Luther King, Jr. was speaking against the war by 1967.

The book stresses the changes in the Black Panther Party (BPP) over time. Originally named the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, it began in late 1966 when Huey Newton and Bobby Seale (who had been involved in prior Black radical groups) hit on the strategy of openly and legally carrying loaded weapons and challenging police abuses. This attracted a great deal of popular support among poor Black people in Oakland. The BPP broke into national prominence in May 1967 when a group of Black Panthers openly (and legally) carried weapons into the California State Legislature to protest a vote on the Mulford Act which outlawed open carry. After the Mulford Act passed and openly carrying weapons became illegal in California, Newton and Seale developed theories of Black self defence and armed resistance, drawing on writings of Malcolm X, which they felt were confirmed by the Newark and Detroit riots of July 1967. In October 1967, a confrontation between Huey Newton and a police officer left the officer dead and Newton wounded. Newton was charged with murder. His defense was political: it did not matter exactly what had happened in the confrontation, but Newton was a political insurrectionary and the trial was a political trial. At the same time, the BPP formed a coalition with the Peace and Freedom Party, which  had refused to meet the demands of the original group of Black radicals they sought to work with and knew they needed Black participation to be legitimate. For their part, the BPP knew they needed non-Black allies, rejected separatism and analyzed the Black struggle as linked to other anti-imperialist struggles. “Free Huey” became linked to opposition to the Vietnam war among radicals.

The FBI did not even mention the Black Panthers in its 1967 reports and in early 1968 mentioned it only once. At that time, the FBI called civil rights organizations, including Martin Luther King Jr. and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) dangerous “Black hate” organizations and devoted significant effort to trying to stop King and the SCLC. By 1968, King had spoken out against the Vietnam War, had become estranged from most White politicians, and was considered a radical extremist by a majority of White Americans. At the same time, SNCC was advocating Black Power, waves of Black urban insurrectionary riots had occurred each year since 1963, and the politics of nonviolence and integration were losing appeal among Black Americans. Then King was killed in April 1968 and a huge wave of Black protest riots ensued. After King was killed, White politicians quickly remade their discursive image of King into a peaceful and non-threatening proponent of brotherly love to be used as an ideological weapon against Black Power. King’s murder also led to the collapse of support for the politics of integration among Black Americans. Black Power quickly became the dominant Black ideology, especially among northern urban Black young people. The Black Panthers quickly became the main symbol of Black Power and standing up to police oppression. The Black Panthers also quickly rose to the top of the FBI’s list of dangerous organizations. Nearly simultaneously, the anti-war movement persuaded President Johnson not to seek a second term, the Democratic Party was divided between anti-war and pro-war factions, and the anti-war movement on college campuses escalated, with ongoing alliances between the Black Panthers and leftist anti-war organizations united by a broad general ideology linking anti-imperialism and Marxism.

1969 was the year of both the most extreme repression against the Black Panthers and also the year of its greatest growth. Early in 1969 the Black Panthers initiated its program of free breakfasts for children, which was widely popular among Black urban residents and attracted many new members. As 1969 wore on, the Panthers were growing rapidly as an organization that simultaneously  provided real services to their communities and was engaged in violent conflicts with the police. It had widespread Black support, even among non-members.

Richard Nixon was elected president in November 1968 and issued directives to repress the Black Panthers after he took office in January 1969, although the first police raids on Panther offices began in December 1968. Throughout 1969, the FBI and local police engaged in a large number of overtly repressive actions, in which they broke into Black Panther offices without warrants, destroyed property, engaged in gun battles with the Black Panthers, and arrested them for resisting arrest. Documents later released showed that the FBI was concerned about the popularity of the Black Panthers, and in its raids confiscated and destroyed food intended for the breakfast program and other property and money intended for Panther social service actions. In a number of cases, Black Panther offices were bombed, probably by police. On the Black Panther side, Huey Newton issued a directive to the Black Panthers that all members must arm themselves and must engage in armed defense if the police sought entry to their offices or homes without a warrant; any Panther who failed to offer armed resistance was to be purged from the Party.

In the most extreme and widely-publicized instance of overt police repression, Fred Hampton was assassinated by police in December 1969 as he slept (probably having been drugged by the police informant) after police broke into his home without a warrant; another Panther was also killed in a fight with police. The Black Panthers captured the media narrative in this incident, and it was condemned by nearly all Black organizations, including the NAACP and other moderate organizations, as well as many White organizations. There was an immediate outpouring of support for the Black Panthers among Blacks, even among organizations and people who opposed their ideology, and also among liberal to left Whites. This and other incidents of obvious overt and aggressive repression can be said to have backfired, and increased rather than reduced the support for and strength of the Black Panthers.

The seven chapters of the book that center on 1969 are a rich compendium of the different threads of Panther politics and activism that I cannot do justice to. These include deep discussions of the Panthers in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, including issues of the boundaries of armed struggle, the role of wealthy donors, debates about bail funds and bail jumping Panthers and their conflicts with Oakland, including conflicts over wealthy donors,  bail funds, and bail jumping; of the San Francisco State protests and alliances and of the alliances with other ethnic groups elsewhere. There is also a chapter devoted to international relations centering on Eldridge Cleaver, who had gone into exile, and Panther recognition by Algeria and China as an anti-colonial liberation movement. The full picture is one of complexity, conflicts between different Pather formations that were about both organizational and personal jockeying for position and about central issues of political analysis and practice, and internal contradictions that even in the heyday seem to point to the impending  unraveling of the movement.

Because the Black Panthers period of greatest growth in 1969 coincided with the period of greatest violent repression, Bloom and Martin discount repression as a factor in the decline of the BPP. Instead, they attribute the decline of the Black Panthers after 1970 to a loss of allies as the US involvement in the Vietnam War and the draft declined, Black electoral victories and affirmative action provided opportunities for Black moderates, and the US improved its relations with China and Algeria, countries that had provided international support. Their emphasis on loss of allies as the most important cause of decline is in tension with other materials in the book that give clear evidence of internal organizational conflicts over strategy after the mid-1970s that could be read as embodying the inherent contradictions and conflicts in the Party from its beginnings.

At its peak in the early 1970s, the Black Panthers had broad support and allies among both moderate Blacks and White liberals and radicals. It was recognized internationally as a voice, perhaps the voice, of the Black American insurgency. But then the organization began to unravel. Bloom and Martin trace the threads of the unraveling. The short version includes internal contradictions about the logic of self-defense, an above-ground if militant strategy that claimed liminal legality, versus guerilla warfare, an underground strategy of armed attack. FBI repression shifted from overt violence to infiltration, dirty tricks, sowing dissent among members, and disinformation campaigns. Bloom and Martin emphasize the loss of allies as the central cause of decline, and assert that this loss of allies was due to elite strategies that gave them some benefits, including political opportunities and chances of economic and educational advancement through affirmative action to middle class Blacks, poverty programs to meet some people’s dire economic needs, a reduction in US involvement in the Vietnam War that reduced the impact of the draft on young American men, and shifting US support for post-colonial nations along with a more open policy to China that weakened international support for the Black Panthers. These were surely factors, but it is hard to imagine the Black Panthers surviving the internal factionalism and ideological disputes that the book describes, and it is hard to discount the impact of the FBI’s less overt repressive tactics in fueling some of that factionalism.

As a side note, the Black Panther name and image had its origins in SNCC’s work in Mississippi in 1966. SNCC encouraged the formation of Black Panther parties around the US in 1966 and 1967. There were originally two groups in Oakland with the Black Panther name, and independently-founded groups in Los Angeles and many other cities. Between 1968 and 1971, most groups using the Black Panther name were under the leadership of the Oakland Black Panthers and Huey Newton and Bobby Seale as other Black Panther groups either affiliated with “the” Black Panthers or were intimidated into changing their names. The proliferation of groups claiming the Black Panther name after the mid-1970s is consistent with its diffuse origins.

I first listened to the book in audio–it was an engaging book to listen to–and then took notes from the ebook version. The book is long and rich on details, so it is not a fast read, but it is a fascinating and important and quite readable analytic history of an important Black organization and the larger political context in which it was embedded.

Edit: Readers may be interested in some extended interviews with Josh Bloom I found on line that continue the discussion of revolutionary black politics. Here is one. and here is part 2 of that interview.

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