The Black Panther Party, Who Were They, And What Did They Do?

The Black Panthers, no, not the marvel superhero, the political group. For a very important set of people, who were a huge part in the Civil Rights Movement, you don’t really know much about them, do you? Well maybe it’s time we changed that.

The Black Panther Party, or sometimes known simply as the Black Panthers, was a black power group formed in 1966 in Oakland California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. These men, who met at Merritt College, came together to form a group dedicated to bettering the black community, and fighting back against police brutality.

Before they founded the Black Panthers, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Negro History Fact Group, calling upon their college to teach factually correct black history. Later, The Black Panthers, originally called the Black Panther Party For Self Defense, were formed in the wake of Malcom X’s assasination, and the Murder of an unarmed black teenager named Matthew Johnson.

In the beginning the groups main goal was to monitor police activity in black communities, and preventing police brutality. Though other social programs would be added later, this mainly involved following police on patrol, ready to fight back for any unarmed black person that was pulled over and harassed.

Now, fighting back against, and preventing police brutality wasn’t the only thing that the Black Panthers did for black communities, not only in California, but across America. They started free breakfast programs for black children as well as after school clubs and programs, raised money for bail and other legal funds, ran a newspaper, and taught self defense and other weapons training. They encouraged people to protest what they thought was unfair, noticed the community of there rights, set up free medical centers, blood drives and clothing drives.

Naturally, the government, and the FBI thought that all of this was a bit too radical, and so something was coming to destroy the Black Panthers, or at least beat them into silence. That something was COINTELPRO.

COINTELPRO, short for counterintelligence program, was a program conducted by the FBI from 1956 to 1971, coincidentally, around the same time as the civil rights and equal rights movements, that was meant to ‘restore the country to political stability’ and stop ‘criminal’ social movements.

In short, COINTELPRO existed solely to find and exterminate any social movements that were deemed criminalized, such as the Black Panther Party, the Civil Rights movement as a whole and the Peurtrican Independence Movement.

The program used tactics such as surveillance, police harassment, anonymous mailing, and infiltration to create discourse, both within and simply about these social movements.

If you already know some information about the Black Panther Party then you might be thinking, ‘well then at this point they’ll tell us about how the FBI broke up the group?’ and well that is slightly true, it isn’t right.

Though the Black Panthers weren’t officially dissolved until 1982, everything began to fall apart in 1969, when the FBI intentionally created discourse between the Black Panthers and other black nationalist groups, as well as between members themselves. But, that isn't the worst of it. The FBI raided many homes of Black Panther Party members, claiming that they were communists, plotting against the government. In one of the worst of these such attacks over one hundred rounds were fired, and though it was claimed that the violent shootout had been started by the Black Panthers, later it was discovered that only one of those bullets was fired from the black panthers side.

Agree with everything the Black Panthers did politically or not, you should at least agree in saying that they did not need to be met with such violence, and that they did great things within the black community. Many of their programs helped people, the free breakfast programs even helping black children avoid starvation and malnutrition. Many people agree that in this day and age it would be nice if the Black Panther Party was still around, to help fight police brutality. Remember, even though the civil rights movement was a success, and the Black Panther Party helped many people, Black Lives still Matter, keep fighting, like the Black Panthers would have.