Revisited: The Black Panther Party

Salim Muwakkil went straight to the Black Panther Party office in Jersey City, NJ., after his discharge from the U.S. Air Force in late 1969. Frustrated by the pacifism of civil rights leaders and embittered by his own experiences with police brutality, Muwakkil joined the militant Black Panthers to make a difference.

Rosemari Mealey's motivation was much the same. Visiting the bullet-riddled apartment of Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton shortly after his violent death on December 4, 1969, pushed Mealey, a Philadelphia cultural activist, "off the fence" and into the Black Panthers. Hampton's death, which came during a police raid orchestrated by the FBI, was nothing short of an assassination, according to evidence uncovered years later.

Curbing police abuse was a high priority for college students Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale when they established the Black Panther Party For Self-Defense in their hometown of Oakland, Cal., in October 1966. Mealey Muwakkil and most of the 5,000 others who joined the Black Panther Party shared the co-founders' intense commitment to challenge police misconduct and other racist practices that historically relegated blacks to second-class citizenship.

Propelled by '60s-era activism and streetcorner rambunctiousness, the Panthers elevated the struggle for black rights. They embraced Malcolm X, eschewed Martin Luther King Jr. and initiated a movement whose impact outlived its demise in the mid1970s.

"The Panther Party helped broaden the reach of the Civil Rights Movement," says U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), who succeeded Fred Hampton as Chicago's Black Panther leader. "The Movement's scope, which originally was a rural, southern movement based on the issues of ending segregation, expanded to include a northern movement that dealt with issues like police brutality, open housing and poverty."

The Black Panther Party was not the first black militant organization to use bodacious rhetoric or publicly brandish guns. it was not the first black organization to initiate grass-roots programs or establish linkages with international revolutionaries. But the Panthers were the first black organization to attain a near mythical stature in all sectors of American society.

The Panthers' panache inspired millions. Black Panther political posters filled the walls of black inner-city neighborhoods and dormitory rooms at white colleges. The Panthers' signature attire of black berets and black leather jackets became a fashion statement. Panther phrases like "Off The Pigs" became lingua franca. The Panthers garnered a larger-than-life persona by adroitly generating unprecedented media coverage and publishing their own nationally distributed newspaper.

The Panthers' swagger evoked both support and scorn across color fines. Many white liberals lavishly supported the self-proclaimed revolutionaries who brazenly provoked America's power structure, while many traditional black leaders assailed them for being needlessly confrontational.

Over a dozen shoot-outs erupted between Panthers and police between October 1967 and the end of 1969, leaving ten Panthers and two policemen dead. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Black Panthers in September 1968 as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." Hoover belittled the Panthers' folk-hero image of providing protection against abusive police.

While best known for battles with police, the Black Panther Party made significant contributions through other initiatives, such as community health clinics and transportation programs for senior citizens. The Panthers' famous Free Breakfast for Children program fed an estimated 200,000 children daily in cities nationwide. Today, the federal government funds free breakfasts and lunches for low-income children.

"Our community programs are totally overlooked today," says David Hilliard, a childhood friend of Huey Newton, who served as chief-of-staff for the Black Panthers. "What used to be considered subversive is now mainstream. We called for universal health care and now President Clinton supports the concept. We called for community control of police and now many cities have civilian review boards," says Hilliard, who heads the Huey R Newton Foundation, an organization in Oakland, Cal., dedicated to "reclaiming" the Panthers' history.

The Black Panther Party was as much evolutionary as revolutionary. Their demands for better employment, educational opportunities and an end to racism in the justice system included in their Ten Point Program echoed themes in the Declaration of Principles issued in 1905 by the Niagara Movement, a black rights group organized by Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, a founding member of the NAACP.

Decades before the Black Panthers' program demanded "an immediate end to police murder of black people," an NAACP report on Detroit's 1943 race riot criticized the "cold-blooded killings of Negroes by policemen" for instigating the disturbance. Many Panthers formerly belonged to civil rights and other black organizations. Fred Hampton, for example, was the former youth leader of the NAACP branch in Maywood, Ill.

"The Black Panther Party was not a monolithic organization composed entirely of disenfranchised street youth," says Rosemari Mealey, now public affairs director for WBAI-FM in New York City. "Many of us were influenced by our parents. My father was an NAACP activist in the South."

Another similarity the Black Panthers shared with older black organizations was surveillance and sabotage by federal authorities. Declassified federal records detail how FBI agents were assigned byj. Edgar Hoover to undermine Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s. Four decades later, Hoover ordered a secret, vicious onslaught against Panther branches nationwide months after Black Power firebrands Stokley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown became honorary Panther officers in February 1968.

Covert actions against the Black Panthers, under the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO program, involved greater "physical, emotional and economic damage" than bureau operations against white racist groups, according to congressional reports. Actions ranged from sabotaging the breakfast program in San Francisco, by spreading rumors that Black Panther personnel had venereal diseases, to instigating fatal confrontations like the Fred Hampton raid.

"The fact that no FBI official or agent faced criminal prosecution for their illegal actions against black nationalists shows that white supremacy still corrupts America's justice system," says Dr. Imari Obadele, associate professor of political science at Prairie View A&M University and a COINTELPRO target.

By the early 1970s, the cumulative damage of external assaults combined with internat errors left the Black Panthers fractured and disintegrating. With leaders in prison or in exile and programs floundering, membership dwindled. Huey Newton, less than a quarter-century after co-founding the Black Panther Party@ died in 1989 on an Oakland street during a drug deal. Bobby Seale lectures widely on the Panthers and gained momentary acclaim as a barbecue rib chef.

The legacy of the Black Panther Party, however, is evident today on many fronts. Obtaining reparations from the federal government, one item in the Panthers' Ten Point Program, continues to be the focus of black groups and members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Gaining release of unjustly incarcerated black prisoners is another goal. Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, former leader of the Southern California Black Panthers, is a leader in the effort to free black political prisoners, including many Panthers languishing on COINTELPRO charges. Pratt, now known as ji jaga, spent 27 years in prison before

California courts overturned his murder conviction, citing misconduct by authorities including the FBI. Los Angeles prosecutors dropped attempts to retry Pratt last February.

Young people today envy the Black Panthers despite misunderstanding their social mission, says Salim Muwakkil, a senior editor at In These Times magazine. But many young people today have the same Black Panther audacity, Muwakkil says, particularly in the "Hip-Hop attitude... that willingness to say, 'This is me - take it or leave it!",

Linn Washington Jr. is an award-winning journalist and columnist for the Philadelphia Tribune. He also teaches journalism at Temple University.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Sep/Oct 1999
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