A 10-point plan
“They’re always seen as more armed and confrontational, but that’s the sensational part of their history,” says Manisha Sinha, a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “What’s really forgotten is that they were a continuation of the civil rights struggle. They’re part of the forgotten black freedom struggle in Northern cities,” she says.
Newton and Seale crafted a very political 10-point plan to empower Black communities economically. Whereas the more mainstream civil rights movement focused on the largely rural South, the Black Panthers were perhaps better known for their actions in the North, in inner cities and on the West Coast.
The plan contained basic demands such as self-determination, decent housing, full employment, education that included African-American history, and an end to police brutality.
It also included more radical demands that were very much in tune with the times. They included freedom for all incarcerated black men, their exemption from military service and a national vote in which only black people would be allowed to participate in order to determine their will “as to their national destiny,” according to the document.
The Party gained followers and momentum in the late 1960s, launching multiple “survival until revolution” efforts such as a free breakfast program for children, food banks, health clinics and education outreach. These community-based programs garnered goodwill and support in black and other communities nationwide.
By the 1970s, historians note, women made up more than 50% of the membership of the Panthers. But there was also a macho, violent streak to the Panthers, with an emphasis on armed revolution.
That came to the fore early on in a 1967 gun battle between Newton and Oakland police, which left Officer John Frey dead and Newton wounded. He was arrested, and a massive “Free Huey” movement sprang up, sparking interest far outside the black community. After an overturned manslaughter conviction, two retrials and hung juries, the case against Newton was dismissed.
Both the goodwill and the violence, along with the revolutionary ideals, worried J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI. In response, he launched an investigation of the Black Panther Party, and an eventual covert attack. Hoover came to see the group as one of the most potentially destabilizing groups in the country and actively set out to discredit, disrupt, subvert and destroy it.
“The term at the time was ‘community control,’” says Amilcar Shabazz, vice president of the National Council for Black Studies, who lectures on African-American history at Massachusetts-Amherst.
Hoover targeted Panthers for surveillance by COINTELPRO, a covert program he created to track individuals and groups he deemed subversive. Other targets including Martin Luther King Jr., Vietnam War protesters, feminists and Puerto Rican activists.
Internal divisions, personality cults, and the efforts of the FBI created bitter divisions within the party. Members began to turn on each other. Violence flared.
In a shootout with Oakland police in 1968, Panthers national treasurer Bobby Hutton, just 17, was killed. Police raids and other conflicts with Panthers in Los Angeles and Chicago ended with shootouts and deaths.
Internally, there were violent disputes between factions and a series of purges. Members of the New Haven chapter tortured and killed Alex Rackley, a 19-year-old Panther whom they believed was an FBI informant, in 1969.
Three Panthers were convicted of murder in the case. Seale was accused of having ordered the killing because he had visited the building where Rackley was being held. The jury deadlocked on the charges, and the prosecution declined to retry the case.
It was the beginning of the end.
Still, the Panthers struggled on for several more years. In 1973, Seale ran for mayor of Oakland, and fellow Panther Elaine Brown — who would lead the group from 1974 to 1977 — ran for the Oakland City Council.
“That was part of the agenda, to run for political office. We were a political party, we were not a gang. We were concerned with issues and programs,” Seale says.
Neither was elected, and by the late 1970s the Party was effectively defunct.
The film
Nelson spent seven years working on the documentary.
“I hope that it will be an inspiration to people to see that they can make change,” the New York-based documentarian says. The Panthers’ story, he says, is extraordinary and important, despite the group’s eventual demise.
“The Panthers were not as successful as they wanted to be,” he says. “They were very young. They said, ‘It’s up to us to make the changes, not anybody else – and we can do it.’”
With criticism coming from both directions — those who say it overstates the good as well as those who say it dwells too much on the bad — Nelson says it would be impossible to make a single film that everybody would like because the party went through so many permutations.
“You have to understand that the Panthers were different things to different people in different cities at different times. The Black Panther Party in Oakland in 1967 was different from the party in New York in 1969 or the one in Chicago in 1968,” he says.
The legacy today
The legacy of the Panthers very much lives on in black empowerment groups today, the most visible of which is Black Lives Matter.
“(The Panthers) made ‘black’ a word to be proud of,” says Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. “Their legacy is about challenging a narrative that our black lives don’t matter, that actually what is true and honest is that we know best what we need to live our lives.”
Today’s groups spring from the concerns of a younger generation of activists who focus on social justice, economic equality and back self-determination. They also see an object lesson in the Panthers, learning from their successes and their failures.
“The Panther Party in a lot of ways was dealing with a significant amount of patriarchy and violence that our movement is trying to ensure doesn’t repeat itself,” Cullors says.
Shabazz says he sees the Panthers’ legacy every day in his students: “They’re holding our feel to the fire, they’re demanding greater accountability from us.”
He notes proudly that students begin or end their gatherings in a circle, reciting lines written by Assata Shakur, a Black Panther in exile in Cuba.
Shabazz quotes them from memory:
“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
