Origins ,
Huey P. Newton (Defense Minister), Sherwin Forte,
Bobby Seale (Chairman); Bottom:
Reggie Forte and
Little Bobby Hutton (Treasurer).|261x261px from 1968 in which
Kathleen Cleaver speaks at Hutton Memorial Park in
Alameda County, California. The footage also shows a student protest demonstration at Alameda County Courthouse,
Oakland, California. Black Panther Party leaders
Huey P. Newton,
Eldridge Cleaver, and
Bobby Seale spoke on
a 10-point program they wanted from the administration which was to include full employment, decent housing and education, an end to
police brutality, and black people to be exempt from the military. Black Panther Party members are shown as they marched in uniform. Students at the rally marched, sang, clapped hands, and carried protest signs. Police in
riot gear controlled marchers.|272x272px During
World War II, tens of thousands of black people left the
Southern states during the
Second Great Migration, moving to
Oakland and other cities in the
Bay Area to find work in the war industries such as
Kaiser Shipyards. The sweeping migration transformed the Bay Area as well as cities throughout the
West and
North, altering the once white-dominated demographics. A new generation of young black people growing up in these cities faced new forms of poverty and racism unfamiliar to their parents, and they sought to develop new forms of politics to address them. Black Panther Party membership "consisted of recent migrants whose families traveled north and west to escape the southern racial regime, only to be confronted with new forms of segregation and repression". In the early 1960s, the
Civil rights movement had dismantled the
Jim Crow system of racial subordination in the South with tactics of
non-violent civil disobedience, and demanding full citizenship rights for black people. However, not much changed in the cities of the North and West. As the wartime and post-war jobs which drew much of the black migration "fled to the suburbs along with white residents", the black population was concentrated in poor "urban ghettos" with high unemployment and substandard housing and was mostly excluded from political representation, top universities, and the middle class. Northern and Western police departments were almost all white. In 1966, only 16 of Oakland's 661 police officers were African American (less than 2.5%). Civil rights tactics proved incapable of redressing these conditions, and the organizations that had "led much of the
nonviolent civil disobedience", such as
SNCC and
CORE, went into decline.
Founding In late October 1966,
Huey P. Newton and
Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense). Newton and Seale first met in 1962 when they were both students at
Merritt College. They joined Donald Warden's
Afro-American Association (AAA), where they read widely, debated, and organized in an emergent
black nationalist tradition inspired by
Malcolm X and others. Eventually dissatisfied with Warden's accommodationism, the two split from AAA after they developed a revolutionary
anti-imperialist perspective from working with more active and militant groups like the Soul Students Advisory Council and the
Revolutionary Action Movement. Their paid jobs running youth service programs at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center allowed them to develop a revolutionary nationalist approach to community service, later a key element in the Black Panther Party's "
community survival programs." Dissatisfied with the failure of these organizations to directly challenge
police brutality and appeal to the "brothers on the block", Huey and Bobby took matters into their own hands. After the police killed Matthew Johnson, an unarmed young black man in San Francisco, Newton observed the violent insurrection that followed. He had an epiphany that would distinguish the Black Panther Party from the multitude of
Black Power organizations. Newton saw the explosive rebellious anger of the ghetto as a social force and believed that if he could stand up to the police, he could organize that force into political power. Inspired by
Robert F. Williams' armed resistance to the
Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and Williams' book
Negroes with Guns, Newton studied
gun laws in California extensively. Like the Community Alert Patrol in Los Angeles after the
Watts Rebellion, he decided to organize patrols to follow the police around to monitor for incidents of brutality. But with a crucial difference: his patrols would carry loaded guns. Huey and Bobby raised enough money to buy two shotguns by buying bulk quantities of the recently publicized
Mao Zedong's Little Red Book and reselling them to leftists and liberals on the
Berkeley campus at three times the price. According to Bobby Seale, they would "sell the books, make the money, buy the guns, and go on the streets with the guns. We'll protect a mother, protect a brother, and protect the community from the racist cops." On October 29, 1966,
Stokely Carmichael – a leader of SNCC – championed the call for "
Black Power" and came to
Berkeley to keynote a Black Power conference. At the time, he was promoting the armed organizing efforts of the
Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) in Alabama and their use of the Black Panther symbol. Newton and Seale decided to adopt the Black Panther logo and form their own organization called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Newton and Seale decided on a uniform of blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets, black berets, the latter adopted as an homage to
Che Guevara. Sixteen-year-old
Bobby Hutton was their first recruit. from July 1970.|335x335px By January 1967, the BPP opened its first official headquarters in an Oakland storefront and published the first issue of
The Black Panther: Black Community News Service. The newspaper would be in continuous circulation, though varying in length, format, title, and frequency until the party dissolved. At its height, it sold one hundred thousand copies a week.
Late 1966 to early 1967 and
Huey P. Newton standing in the street, armed with a
Colt .45 and a shotgun|288x288px
Oakland patrols of police The initial tactic of the party used contemporary
open-carry gun laws to protect Party members when policing the police. This act was done to record incidents of police brutality by distantly following police cars around neighborhoods. When confronted by a police officer, Party members cited laws proving they had done nothing wrong and threatened to take to court any officer that violated their constitutional rights. Between the end of 1966 to the start of 1967, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense's armed police patrols in Oakland black communities attracted a small handful of members. Numbers grew slightly starting in February 1967, when the party provided an
armed escort at the San Francisco airport for
Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow and keynote speaker for a conference held in his honor. The Black Panther Party's focus on militancy was often construed as open hostility, feeding a reputation of violence even though early efforts by the Panthers focused primarily on promoting social issues and the exercise of their legal right to carry arms. The Panthers employed a California law that permitted carrying a loaded rifle or shotgun as long as it was publicly displayed and pointed at no one. helped create the Panthers' reputation as a violent organization.
Rallies in Richmond, California The black community of
Richmond, California wanted protection against police brutality. With only three main streets for entering and exiting the neighborhood, it was easy for police to control, contain, and suppress the population. On April 1, 1967, a black unarmed twenty-two-year-old construction worker named
Denzil Dowell was shot dead by police in North Richmond. Dowell's family contacted the Black Panther Party for assistance after county officials refused to investigate the case. The party held rallies in North Richmond that educated the community on armed self-defense and the Denzil Dowell incident. Police seldom interfered at these rallies because every Panther was armed and no laws were broken. The party's ideals resonated with several community members, who then brought their own guns to the next rallies.
Protest at the Statehouse Awareness of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense grew rapidly after their May 2, 1967, protest at the
California State Capitol. On that day, the
California State Assembly Committee on Criminal Procedure was scheduled to convene to discuss what was known as the "
Mulford Act," which would make the public carrying of loaded firearms illegal. Newton, with Minister of Information
Eldridge Cleaver, put together a plan to send a group of 26 armed Panthers led by Seale from Oakland to Sacramento to protest the bill. The group entered the assembly carrying their weapons, an incident which was widely publicized, and which prompted police to arrest Seale and five others. The group pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of disrupting a legislative session. At the time of the protest, the party had fewer than 100 members in total. , June 19, 1970 In 1967, the
Mulford Act was passed by the California legislature and signed by governor
Ronald Reagan. The bill was crafted in response to members of the Black Panther Party who were copwatching. The bill repealed a law that allowed the public carrying of loaded firearms.
Ten-point program The Black Panther Party first publicized its original "What We Want Now!" Ten-Point program on May 15, 1967, following the Sacramento action, in the second issue of
The Black Panther newspaper. By 1969, the Black Panthers and their allies had become primary COINTELPRO targets, singled out in 233 of the 295 authorized "
Black Nationalist" COINTELPRO actions. The goals of the program were to prevent the unification of militant black nationalist groups and to weaken their leadership, as well as to discredit them to reduce their support and growth. The initial targets included the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Revolutionary Action Movement and the
Nation of Islam, as well as leaders including the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr.,
Stokely Carmichael,
H. Rap Brown, Maxwell Stanford and
Elijah Muhammad. As assistant FBI director
William Sullivan later testified in front of the
Church Committee, the bureau "did not differentiate" between Soviet spies and suspected Communists in black nationalist movements when deploying surveillance and neutralization tactics. COINTELPRO attempted to create rivalries between black nationalist factions and to exploit existing ones. One such attempt was to "intensify the degree of animosity" between the Black Panthers and the
Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago street gang. The FBI sent an anonymous letter to the Rangers' gang leader claiming that the Panthers were threatening his life, a letter whose intent was to provoke "preemptive" violence against Panther leadership. In Southern California, the FBI made similar efforts to exacerbate a "gang war" between the Black Panther Party and a black nationalist group called the
US Organization, allegedly sending a provocative letter to the US Organization to increase existing antagonism. COINTELPRO also aimed to dismantle the Black Panther Party by targeting their social/community programs, including its Free Breakfast for Children program, whose success had served to "shed light on the government's failure to address child poverty and hunger—pointing to the limits of the nation's War on Poverty". Black Panther Party members were involved in many fatal firefights with police. Newton declared:
Huey Newton charged with murdering John Frey On October 28, 1967,
Oakland police officer John Frey was shot to death in an altercation with
Huey P. Newton during a traffic stop in which Newton and backup officer Herbert Heanes also sustained gunshot wounds. Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter at trial, but the conviction was later overturned. In his book
Shadow of the Panther, writer Hugh Pearson alleges that Newton was intoxicated in the hours before the incident, and claimed to have willfully killed John Frey.
Free Huey! campaign , founder of the Black Panther Party. At the time, Newton claimed that he had been falsely accused, leading to the party's "Free Huey!" campaign. The police killing gained the party even wider recognition by the radical American left and it stimulated the growth of the party nationwide. As Newton awaited trial, the "Free Huey" campaign developed alliances with numerous students and anti-war activists, "advancing an anti-imperialist political ideology that linked the oppression of antiwar protestors to the oppression of blacks and Vietnamese". The "Free Huey" campaign attracted black power organizations,
New Left groups, and other activist groups such as the
Progressive Labor Party,
Bob Avakian of the Community for New Politics, and the
Red Guard. For example, the Black Panther Party collaborated with the
Peace and Freedom Party, which sought to promote a strong
antiwar and antiracist politics in opposition to the establishment
Democratic Party. The Black Panther Party provided needed legitimacy to the Peace and Freedom Party's racial politics and in return received invaluable support for the "Free Huey" campaign.
Founding of the L. A. Chapter In 1968 the southern California chapter was founded by
Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter in Los Angeles. Carter was the leader of the
Slauson Street gang, and many of the L.A. chapter's early recruits were Slausons.
Killing of Bobby Hutton Bobby James Hutton was born April 21, 1950, in Jefferson County, Arkansas. At the age of three, he and his family moved to Oakland, California after being harassed by racist vigilante groups associated with the
Ku Klux Klan. In December 1966, he became the first treasurer and recruit of the Black Panther Party at the age of just 16 years old. On April 6, 1968, two days after the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and with riots raging across cities in the United States, the 17-year-old Hutton was traveling with
Eldridge Cleaver and other BPP members in a car. The group confronted Oakland Police officers, then fled to an apartment building where they engaged in a 90-minute gun battle with the police. The standoff ended with Cleaver wounded and Hutton voluntarily surrendering. According to Cleaver, although Hutton had stripped down to his underwear and had his hands raised in the air to prove that he was unarmed, Oakland Police shot Hutton more than 12 times, killing him. Two police officers were also shot. He became the first member of the party to be killed by police. Although at the time the BPP claimed that the police had ambushed them, several party members later admitted that Cleaver had led the Panther group on a deliberate ambush of the police officers, provoking the shoot-out. Seven other Panthers, including Chief of Staff
David Hilliard, were also arrested. Hutton's death became a rallying issue for Panther supporters.
Late 1968 Chronology • Early Spring 1968: Eldridge Cleaver's
Soul on Ice published. • April 6, 1968: Death of Bobby James Hutton, killed in a gunfight with Oakland police. • Early September 1968: Newton convicted of manslaughter. • Late September 1968: Days before he is due to return to prison to serve out a rape conviction, Cleaver flees to Cuba and later Algeria. • October 5, 1968: A Panther is killed in a gunfight with police in Los Angeles. In 1968, the group shortened its name to the Black Panther Party and sought to focus directly on political action. Members were encouraged to carry guns and to defend themselves against violence. An influx of college students joined the group, which had consisted chiefly of "brothers off the block". This created some tension in the group. Some members were more interested in supporting the Panthers' social programs, while others wanted to maintain their "street mentality". By 1968, the party had expanded into many U.S. cities, With the Ten-Point program, "What We Want, What We Believe," the Black Panther Party expressed its economic and political grievances. Curtis Austin states that by late 1968, Black Panther ideology had evolved from black nationalism to become more a "revolutionary
internationalist movement": Panther slogans and iconography spread. At the
1968 Summer Olympics,
Tommie Smith and
John Carlos, two American
track and field medalists, gave the
black power salute during the American national anthem. The
International Olympic Committee banned them from all future Olympic Games. Film star
Jane Fonda publicly supported Huey Newton and the Black Panthers during the early 1970s. She ended up informally adopting
Mary Luana Williams, the daughter of two BPP members. Fonda and other Hollywood celebrities became involved in the Panthers' leftist programs. The Panthers attracted a wide variety of left-wing revolutionaries and political activists, including writer
Jean Genet, former
Ramparts magazine editor
David Horowitz (who later became a harsh critic of what he described as Panther criminality), and left-wing lawyer
Charles R. Garry, who acted as counsel in the Panthers' many legal battles. The BPP adopted a "Serve the People" program, which at first involved a
free breakfast program for children. By the end of 1968, the BPP had established 38 chapters and branches, claiming more than 5,000 members. Eldridge and
Kathleen Cleaver left the country days before Cleaver was to turn himself in to serve the remainder of a thirteen-year sentence for a 1958 rape conviction. They settled in Algeria.
Survival programs Inspired by
Mao Zedong's advice to revolutionaries in
The Little Red Book, Newton called on the Panthers to "serve the people" and to make "survival programs" a priority within its branches. The most famous of their programs was the
Free Breakfast for Children Program, initially run out of an
Oakland church. The Free Breakfast For Children program was especially significant because it served as a space for educating youth about the current condition of the Black community, and the actions that the party was taking to address that condition. "While the children ate their meal[s], members [of the party] taught them liberation lessons consisting of Party messages and Black history." Through this program, the party was able to influence young minds, and strengthen their ties to communities as well as gain widespread support for their ideologies. The breakfast program became so popular that the Panthers Party claimed to have fed twenty thousand children in the 1968–69 school year. Other survival programs were free services such as clothing distribution, classes on politics and economics, free medical clinics, lessons on self-defense and first aid, transportation to upstate prisons for family members of inmates, an emergency-response ambulance program, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and testing for
sickle-cell disease. The free medical clinics were very significant because they modeled an idea of how the world might work with
free medical care, eventually being established in 13 places across the country. These clinics were involved in community-based health care that had roots connected to the Civil Rights Movement, which made it possible to establish the Medical Committee for Human Rights.
Political activities In 1968, BPP Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver ran for presidential office on the
Peace and Freedom Party ticket. They were a big influence on the
White Panther Party, tied to the Detroit/Ann Arbor band
MC5 and their manager
John Sinclair (author of the book
Guitar Army), which also promulgated a ten-point program.
1969 Chronology • Early 1969: In late 1968 and January 1969, the BPP began to purge members due to fears about
law enforcement infiltration and various petty disagreements. • January 14, 1969: The Los Angeles chapter was involved in a shootout with members of the black nationalist
US Organization, and two Panthers are killed. • January 1969: The Oakland BPP begins the first free breakfast program for children. • March 1969: There is a second purge of BPP members. • April 1969: Members of the New York chapter, known as the
Panther 21, are indicted and jailed for a bombing conspiracy. All would eventually be acquitted. • May 1969: Two more southern California Panthers are killed in violent disputes with US Organization members. • July 17, 1969: Two policemen are shot, and a Panther is killed in a gun battle in Chicago. •
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by
Malcolm X and
Alex Haley •
The Wretched of the Earth by
Frantz Fanon •
I Speak of Freedom by
Kwame Nkrumah •
The Lost Cities of Africa by
Basil Davidson •
The Nat Turner Slave Revolt by
Herbert Aptheker •
American Negro Slave Revolts by Herbert Aptheker •
A Documentary History of the Negro People of the United States by Herbert Aptheker •
Before the Mayflower by
Lerone Bennett Jr. •
American Negro Poetry by
Arna W. Bontemps •
Story of the Negro by Arna W. Bontemps •
Black Moses: The Story of Garvey and the UNIA by E.D. Cronin •
Black Reconstruction in America by
W.E.B. Du Bois •
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois •
The World and Africa by W.E.B. Du Bois •
Black Mother: The Years of the African Slave Trade by Basil Davidson •
Studies in a Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon •
From Slavery to Freedom by
John Hope Franklin •
Black Bourgeoisie by E.F. Frazier •
The Other America by
Michael Harrington •
Garvey & Garveyism by
Marcus Garvey •
The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey by Marcus Garvey •
The Myth of the Negro Past by
Melville J. Herskovits •
A History of Negro Revolt by
C.L.R. James •
MUNTU: The New African Culture by
Janheinz Jahn •
Blues People by
LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) •
Black Muslims in America by C.E. Lincoln •
Malcolm X Speaks by Malcolm X •
The Colonizer and the Colonized by
Albert Memmi •
Ghana by Kwame Nkrumah •
We Charge Genocide by
William L. Patterson • ''Africa's Gift to America, World's Great Men of Color: 3,000 B.C. to 1946 A.D.'' by
J.A. Rogers •
The Negro in Our History by
Charles H. Wesley &
Carter G. Woodson •
The Strange Career of Jim Crow by
C. Vann Woodward •
Native Son by
Richard Wright Number 5 of the "What We Want Now!" section of the Ten-Point Program reads: "We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society." To ensure that this occurred, the Black Panther Party took the education of their youth into their own hands by first establishing
after-school programs and then opening up
Liberation Schools in a variety of locations throughout the country which focused their curriculum on
Black history, writing skills, and political science.
Intercommunal Youth Institute The first Liberation School was opened by the Richmond Black Panthers in July 1969 with brunch served and snacks provided to students. Another school was opened in Mt. Vernon New York on July 17 of the subsequent year. While these campuses were the first to open, the first full-time and longest-running Liberation School was opened in January 1971 in Oakland in response to the inequitable conditions in the Oakland Unified School District which was ranked one of the lowest-scoring districts in California. Named the Intercommunal Youth Institute (IYI), this school, under the directorship of Brenda Bay, and later
Ericka Huggins, enrolled twenty-eight students in its first year, with the majority being the children of Black Panther parents. This number grew to fifty by the 1973–1974 school year. To provide full support for Black Panther parents whose time was spent organizing, some of the students and faculty members lived together year around. The school itself was dissimilar to traditional schools in a variety of ways including the fact that students were separated by academic performance rather than age, and students were often provided one-on-one support as the faculty to student ratio was 1:10. as the public schools in the district employed a
Eurocentric assimilationist curriculum with little to no attention to black history and culture. While students were provided with traditional courses such as English, Math, and Science, they were also exposed to activities focused on class structure and the prevalence of
institutional racism. The overall goal of the school was to instill a sense of revolutionary consciousness in the students. The only shot fired by the Panthers was from Mark Clark, who appeared to fire a single round determined to be the result of a reflexive death convulsion after he was immediately struck in the chest by shots from the police at the start of the raid. Hampton was sleeping next to his pregnant fiancée and was subsequently shot twice in the head at point-blank range while unconscious. Coroner reports show that Hampton was drugged with a
powerful barbiturate that night and would have been unable to have been awoken by the sounds of the police raid. His body was then dragged into the hallway. He was 21 years old and unarmed at the time of his death. Seven other Panthers sleeping at the house at the time of the raid were then beaten and seriously wounded, then arrested under charges of aggravated assault and attempted murder of the officers involved in the raid. These charges would later be dropped. Cook County state's attorney
Edward Hanrahan announced to the media later that the Panthers were first to shoot in the interaction and that they showed a "refusal to cease firing... when urged to do so several times."
New York Times reporting would later demonstrate that this was not in fact the case and found a great deal of fake evidence being used by Chicago Police to assert their claims. Former FBI agent
Wesley Swearingen asserts that the Bureau was guilty of a "plot to murder" the Panthers. Hampton had been slipped the barbiturates which had left him unconscious by
William O'Neal, who had been working as an FBI informant. Hanrahan, his assistant, and eight Chicago police officers were indicted by a
federal grand jury over the raid, but the charges were later dismissed. In 1979 civil action, Hampton's family won $1.85 million from the city of Chicago in a
wrongful death settlement.
Torture-murder of Alex Rackley In May 1969, three members of the New Haven chapter tortured and murdered
Alex Rackley, a 19-year-old member of the New York chapter, because they suspected him of being a police informant. Three party officers—
Warren Kimbro,
George Sams, Jr., and
Lonnie McLucas—later admitted taking part. Sams, who gave the order to shoot Rackley at the murder scene,
turned state's evidence and testified that he had received orders personally from
Bobby Seale to carry out the execution. Party supporters responded that Sams was himself the informant and an
agent provocateur employed by the FBI. The case resulted in the
New Haven Black Panther trials of 1970. Kimbro, Sams and McLucas were convicted of the murder, but the trials of Seale and
Ericka Huggins ended with a hung jury, and the prosecution chose not to seek another trial.
International ties Activists from many countries around the globe supported the Panthers and their cause. In Scandinavian countries such as Norway and Finland, for example, left-wing activists organized a tour for Bobby Seale and Masai Hewitt in 1969. At each destination along the tour, the Panthers talked about their goals and the "Free Huey!" campaign. Seale and Hewitt made a stop in Germany as well, gaining support for the "Free Huey!" campaign.
1970 Chronology • January 1970:
Leonard Bernstein holds a fundraiser for the BPP, which was notoriously mocked by
Tom Wolfe in
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. • Spring 1970: The Oakland BPP engages in another ambush of police officers with guns and
fragmentation bombs. Two officers are wounded. • May 1970: Huey Newton's conviction is overturned, but he remains incarcerated. • July 1970: Newton tells
The New York Times that "we've never advocated violence". • August 1970: Newton is released from prison.
International travels In 1970, a group of Panthers including
Eldridge Cleaver and
Elaine Brown traveled to Asia and they were welcomed as guests of the governments of China,
North Vietnam, and
North Korea. The group's first stop was in North Korea, where the Panthers met with local officials to discuss ways in which they could help each other fight against American imperialism. Cleaver traveled to
Pyongyang twice in 1969 and 1970 and following these trips he made an effort to publicize the writings and works of North Korean leader
Kim Il Sung in the United States. After leaving North Korea, the group traveled to North Vietnam with the same agenda in mind: finding ways to put an end to American imperialism. Eldridge Cleaver was invited to speak to Black GIs by the North Vietnamese government. He encouraged them to join the Black Liberation Struggle by arguing that the United States government was only using them for its own purposes. Instead of risking their lives on the battlefield for a country that continued to oppress them, Cleaver believed that the black GIs should risk their lives in support of their own liberation. After leaving Vietnam, Cleaver met with the Chinese ambassador to Algeria to express their mutual animosity towards the American government. When Algeria held its first Pan-African Cultural Festival, they invited many important figures from the United States. Among the important figures invited to the festival were Bobby Seale and Cleaver. The cultural festival allowed Black Panthers to network with representatives of various international anti-imperialist movements. This was a significant time, which led to the formation of the International Section of the party. It is at this festival that Cleaver met with the ambassador of North Korea, who later invited him to an International Conference of Revolutionary Journalists in Pyongyang. Eldridge also met with
Yasser Arafat and gave a speech supporting the Palestinians and their goal of achieving liberation. In fall 1971, a larger group of Panthers visited China. with the intent of demonstrating how black youth ought to be educated.
Ericka Huggins was the director of the school and Regina Davis was an administrator. The school was unique in that it did not have grade levels but instead had different skill levels so an 11-year-old could be in second-level English and fifth-level science. The school children were given free busing; breakfast, lunch, and dinner; books and school supplies; children were taken to have medical checkups; many children were given free clothes.
Split Significant disagreements among the party's leaders over how to confront ideological differences led to a split within the party. Some Panther leaders, such as
Huey P. Newton and
David Hilliard, favored a focus on community service coupled with self-defense; others, such as
Eldridge Cleaver, embraced a more confrontational strategy. For some of the party's supporters, the separations among political action, criminal activity, social services, access to power, and grass-roots identity became confusing and contradictory as the Panthers' political momentum was bogged down in the
criminal justice system. These (and other) disagreements led to a split. In January 1971, Newton expelled
Geronimo Pratt who, since 1970, had been in jail facing a pending murder charge. Newton also expelled two of the
New York 21 and his own secretary,
Connie Matthews, who fled the country. In February 1971, Cleaver deepened the schism in the party when he publicly criticized the party for adopting a "
reformist" rather than "
revolutionary" agenda and called for Hilliard's removal. Cleaver was expelled from the
Central Committee but went on to lead a splinter group, the
Black Liberation Army, which had previously existed as an underground paramilitary wing of the party. The split turned violent, as the Newton and Cleaver factions carried out retaliatory assassinations of each other's members, resulting in the deaths of four people. From mid-to-late 1971, hundreds of members throughout the country quit the Black Panther Party. In May 1971, Bobby Seale was
acquitted of ordering the Rackley murder, and returned to Oakland.
Delegation to China In late September 1971, Huey P. Newton led a delegation to China and stayed for 10 days. At every airport in China, Huey was greeted by thousands of people waving copies of the
Little Red Book and displaying signs that said, "We support the Black Panther Party, down with US imperialism" or, "We support the American people but the Nixon imperialist regime must be overthrown." During the trip, the Chinese delegate arranged for him to meet and have dinner with a
DPRK ambassador, a Tanzanian ambassador, and delegations from both
North Vietnam and the
Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam. Huey was under the impression he was going to meet Mao Zedong, but instead had two meetings with the first Premier of the People's Republic of China
Zhou Enlai. One of these meetings also included Mao Zedong's wife
Jiang Qing. Huey described China as "a free and liberated territory with a socialist government."
Newton solidifies control and centralizes power in Oakland In early 1972, the party began closing down dozens of chapters and branches all over the country and bringing members and operations to Oakland. The political arm of the Southern California chapter was shut down and its members moved to Oakland, although the underground military arm remained for a time. The underground remnants of the LA chapter, which had emerged from the Slausons street gang, eventually re-emerged as the
Crips, a street gang who at first advocated social reform before devolving into racketeering. Minister of Education
Ray "Masai" Hewitt created the Buddha Samurai, the party's underground security cadre in Oakland. Newton expelled Hewitt from the party later in 1972, but the security cadre remained in operation under the leadership of Flores Forbes. One of the cadre's main functions was to extort and rob drug dealers and after-hours clubs. Newton was also acquitted of assaulting Preston Callins after Callins refused to press charges.
1974–1977 The Panthers under Elaine Brown In 1974, as Huey Newton prepared to go into exile in Cuba, he appointed
Elaine Brown as the first chairwoman of the party. Under Brown's leadership, the party became involved in organizing for more radical electoral campaigns, including Brown's 1975 unsuccessful run for Oakland City Council. The party supported
Lionel Wilson in his successful election as the first black mayor of Oakland, in exchange for Wilson's assistance in having criminal charges dropped against party member Flores Forbes, leader of the Buddha Samurai cadre. Later that year, after a dispute with Brown over financial irregularities, Van Patter went missing on December 13, 1974. Some weeks later, her severely beaten corpse was found on a
San Francisco Bay beach. There was insufficient evidence for police to charge anyone with van Patter's murder, but the Black Panther Party leadership was "almost universally believed to be responsible". Huey Newton later allegedly confessed to a friend that he had ordered Van Patter's murder, and that Van Patter had been tortured and raped before being killed. FBI files investigating Van Patter were destroyed in 2009 for reasons the FBI has declined to provide.
1977–1982 Return of Huey Newton and the demise of the party In 1977, Newton returned from
exile in Cuba, and received complaints from male members about the excessive power of women in the organization, who now outnumbered men. According to Elaine Brown, Newton authorized the physical punishment of school administrator Regina Davis for scolding a male coworker. Davis was hospitalized with a broken jaw. Brown said, "The beating of Regina would be taken as a clear signal that the words 'Panther' and 'comrade' had taken a gender-on-gender connotation, denoting an inferiority in the female half of us." Brown resigned from the party and fled to LA. Although many scholars and activists date the party's downfall to the period before Brown's leadership, a shrinking cadre of Panthers struggled through the 1970s. By 1980, Panther membership had dwindled to 27, and the Panther-sponsored Oakland Community School closed in 1982 amid a scandal over Newton embezzling funds for his drug addiction, which marked the formal end of the Black Panther Party. One of them, Flores Forbes, fled to
Las Vegas, Nevada, with the help of Panther paramedic Nelson Malloy. Fearing that Malloy would discover the truth behind the botched assassination attempt, Newton allegedly ordered a "house cleaning", and Malloy was shot and buried alive in the desert. Although permanently
paralyzed from the waist down, Malloy escaped and told police that fellow Panthers Rollin Reid and Allen Lewis were behind his attempted murder. Newton denied any involvement or knowledge and said the events "might have been the result of overzealous party members". Newton was ultimately acquitted of the murder of Kathleen Smith, after Crystal Gray's testimony was impeached by her admission that she had smoked marijuana on the night of the murder, and he was acquitted of assaulting Preston Callins after Callins refused to press charges. ==Women and womanism==