The FBI vs The Black Panther Party

On May 15, 1967 following the Sacramento incident the Panthers released their The Ten-Point program in the second issue of BPP weekly newspaper. The document was created in 1966 by the founders of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, championing solutions to the pressing needs of the black community: decent housing, employment, education, and freedom.. Each one of the statements were put in place for all of the Black Panther Party members to live by and actively practice every day. All succeeding 537 issues of the BPP newspaper would contain the ten point program, titled "What We Want Now!." which emphasized the Party’s commitment to advancing a revolution that addressed the needs and interests of the black community

The Ten-Point Program is a set of guidelines to the Black Panther Party and states their ideals and ways of operation, a "combination of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. The Party want to not just be about armed action; they wanted to be a legitimate voice of black people, and as such, The program intended to take care a broad range of the community’s needs. The platform drew heavily from the ten-point platform that Malcolm X crafted for Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, published in August 1963. , The plan emulated Malcolm X’s nationalism but without the Islamic aspect. 

We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
We want full employment for our people.
We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
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.
We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

Intro

While the The Black Panthers were charged with a Felony of conspiracy to invade assembly chambers, the group would pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of disrupting a legislative session but the The Panthers’s actions had other consquenses, beacuse of their armed presence the Mulford’s bill was swifty approved. Mulford act even added a new clause barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the Capitol. Worse yet the demonstration in sacramento had drew the attention of the FBI. head J. Edgar Hoover, and he wanted to be sure “black nationalist hate groups” were further scrutinized. 

In 1956, the FBI formalized and consolidated its intelligence-gathering and disruptive activities into the first counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO, orginally it was designed to specifically targeting the Communist Party USA, during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, the FBI did monitored the activities of civil rights activists but did little to actively and directly repress the Civil Rights Movement. However, by the end of 1963, as the movement gained international coverage and support, the FBI started undertaken extensive efforts to hound and discredit Martin Luther King Jr, and it continued these activities until his death. 

In the summer of 1967, the FBI dramatically shifted the direction and intensity of its repression of black political organizations. the summer of 1966, Stokely Carmichael first called for Black Power, and the Black Liberation Struggle entered a new phase. Organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Revolutionary Action Movement declared common cause with the Vietnamese in opposion to American. By the following year, the movement had become more nationalist and more confrontational. Urban rebellions raged in black areas throughout the country. Black nationalist orgs called for armed resistance against the state. Thousands of young blacks rebelled and rioted. On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. joined the younger generation of black movement leaders in publicly denouncing U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam.

Meanwhile in 1967, Richard Nixon was running for President and he positioning himself to capture the conservatives in the Democratic Party who were deeply troubled by social unrest and wanting to attract as much of the white vote as he could, Nixon conflated crime, rebellion, civil rights, and student protest. The gamble worked. On November, Nixon was elected the 37th president of the United States. From the first days of his presidency, Nixon took a personal interest in the Black Panther Party. 

In March 4, 1968, J. Edgar Hoover expanded the COINTELPRO against black nationalists and other dissident groups, In 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Black Panthers as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and By 1969, the Black Panthers and their allies had become primary COINTELPRO targets. 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 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would even support of efforts to repress “ideological organizations,” the IRS established the Activist Organizations Committee in July 1969 to “collect basic intelligence data” on members of the Black Panther Party, organizations that did business with the Black Panther Party, and other “radical” political organizations. The FBI supplied the IRS with the names of individuals and organizations. The IRS, in return, supplied detailed personal financial information and also targeted these individuals for special enforcement of tax regulations. As assistant FBI Director William Sullivan later testified, the Bureau "did not differentiate" between Soviet spies and suspected Communists in black nationalist movements when deploying surveillance and neutralization tactics.

The Black Panthers wouldnt initially realize the depths of the actions of the FBI against them but they also have other issues to deal with, On October 28, 1967, John Frey of the Oakland police force sat alone in his patrol car on Willow Avenue at the corner of Seventh Street. Officer Frey had developed quite a reputation. Frey is not what could be categorized as a good cop. Frey had been implicated in numerous incidents of racism. Frey had been called to a dispute between a black grocery clerk named Daniel King and a white man without pants on who claimed King had stolen his pants. According to King, Frey called him a nigger and held his arms so the white man could beat him. Several hours after Frey had released King, Newton and Gene McKinney drove by his parked patrol car. Frey had a list of twenty cars that the Oakland police had identified as Black Panther vehicles. One of the cars on that list was “Volkswagen, 1958, sedan, tan, AZM489.” Frey called for backup and pulled out after the Volkswagen and turned his lights on to make the stop.

Now there are conflicting accounts of what happened near the corner of Seventh and Campbell Streets in Oakland that morning. Officer Herbert Heanes testified that upon responding to the request for backup, states he asked Newton to step outside of the vehicle while Officer Frey informed Newton of his arrest. Officer Heanes stated that he heard a gunshot, which struck his arm, as Officer Frey accompanied Newton to the patrol car. During an ensuing physical altercation between Officer Frey and Newton, Officer Heanes shot Newton in the midsection. Officer Heanes further testified that he heard additional shots fired, though there was some discrepancy as to the order of the gunshots in the altercation. A nearby bus driver, however, witnessed the shooting. The bus driver testified that Newton produced a concealed firearm that "went off," striking Officer Heanes and that Newton also used this firearm to fire several more shots into Officer Frey, who ultimately was pronounced dead on arrival at Merritt Hospital.  

What is clear is that at some point during the early hours of the day, Newton and Gene McKinney arrived at David Hilliard’s house. Newton had a gunshot wound in his abdomen, so David and his brother June Hilliard rushed Newton to the Kaiser Hospital emergency room. Newton was later arrested that morning in the emergency room at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland.

At his murder trial, Newton testified in his own defense that Officer Frey hurled racial epithets at him and struck him in the face. Newton further testified that after Officer Frey allegedly brandished his firearm, he experienced a "sensation like boiling hot soup had been spilled on my stomach. Newton testified that after hearing a "volley of shots," he remembered nothing else until he arrived at Kaiser Hospital. Newton "expressly testified that he was 'unconscious or semiconscious' during this interval." In order to corroborate that testimony, the defense called Dr. Bernard Diamond, who stated that Newton's recollection is consistent with a gunshot wound to the abdominal cavity, which is likely to produce a "profound reflex shock reaction" that can lead to a loss of consciousness.

Soon the story was all over the news: Officer Frey was dead, and Huey P. Newton, minister of defense for the Black Panther Party, had been arrested as the prime suspect in his murder.

From the start, Newton and the Black Panther Party viewed the trial as a political contest rather than merely a legal proceeding. The Party put an issue of its newspaper with the picture of Huey in his wicker throne on the front page and the bold headline, “Huey Must Be Set Free!” After explaining that Huey had been shot and arrested and that Officer Frey had been shot and killed, the editorial discussed the case in terms of racial politics:

The shooting occurred in the heart of Oakland’s black ghetto. Huey is a black man, a resident of Oakland’s black ghetto, and the two cops were white and lived in the white suburbs. On the night that the shooting occurred, there were 400 years of oppression of black people by white people manifested in the incident. We are at that crossroads in history where black people are determined to bring down the final curtain on the drama of their struggle to free themselves from the boot of the white man that is on their collective neck. . . . Through murder, brutality, and the terror of their image, the police of America have kept black people intimidated, locked in a mortal fear, and paralyzed in their bid for freedom. . . . They are brutal beasts who have been gunning down black people and getting away with it. . . . Huey Newton’s case is the showdown case. . . . We say that we have had enough of black men and women being shot down like dogs in the street. We say that black people in America have the right to self defense. Huey Newton has laid his life on the line so that 20,000,000 black people can find out just where they are at and so that we can find out just where America is at.6The Panthers argued that Newton was resisting the long-perpetrated oppression of blacks by police when he was shot and imprisoned. The Party turned the state’s accusations against Newton around, using the case to mobilize support and put America on trial.

In the weeks leading up to Newton’s arrest, the Bay Area antiwar movement had experienced its own conflict with the Oakland police. As resistance to the Vietnam War intensified, white antiwar activists began getting experinsing police repression which deepened their alliances with the Panthers. By October, the draft resistance movement was gathering steam. No longer were the students and the antiwar activists simply Americans expressing their view within established channels. Inspired by Black Power, emboldened by the rebellions, many saw themselves as subjects of empire, much like the Vietnamese. They rejected the legitimacy of the war, the draft, and the government more generally, seeking to resist by any means

Following Newtons Arrest, Eldridge Cleaver's role became “increasingly important, especially in the Party’s collaboration with the white groups in the Free Huey movement. the "Free Huey" campaign developed alliances with numerous students and anti-war activistst. “Free Huey!” bumper stickers appeared all over the Bay Area, this movement helped receive invaluable support for the "Free Huey" campaign and help advance their anti-imperialist political ideology that linked the oppression of antiwar protestors to the oppression of blacks and Vietnamese.

One of those groups was the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), founded by Ramparts editor Robert Scheer and other leaders of the Community for New Politics. The Peace and Freedom Party sought to promote a strong antiwar and antiracist politics. At the time the party was exclusively white and began approaching black organizations for support. SNCC and other black group and all of them had rebuffed them. So working with the The Black Panther Party offered much needed legitimacy to the Peace and Freedom Party’s racial politics. The Panthers also keenly understood the isolation of the black radical movement and that the Struggle needed nonblack allies, particularly progressive white allies.

Later in 1968, Newton was convicted of manslaughter in the killing of Officer Frey and sentenced to two to fifteen years in prison. He was acquitted of wounding the other officer. Many Panthers and their supporters were disappointed that their efforts had not saved Huey. Newton’s lawyer, Charles Garry, promised to appeal the decision. Many police saw the sentence very differently and wanted Newton executed for the killing of Frey.

Eldridge Cleaver's used his new fame to be the candidiate for the Peace and Freedom Party nomination for president of the united states in 1968, The Black Panthers saw the presidential campaign as an opportunity to build influence and broaden their support within the Left, they had no plans on actually winning the presidenteny 

Eldridge Cleaver’s run for president represented disaffection with both the Democratic and Republican Parties and was, The idea was to use the traditional election process to win an audience and to organize for the radical movement. ”As Eldridge explained the Panthers sought to “focus attention on a revolutionary leader with a revolutionary program within the conventional political context. In practical terms, this kind of campaign becomes another tool for political organization for black power.  We want to pull people out of the Democratic Party, out of the Republican Party, and swell the ranks of the Black Panther Party and the Peace and Freedom Party.”  Cleaver and his running mate Judith Mage received 36,571 votes (0.05%)

April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m., Martin Luther King Jr. stepped onto the balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee and was shot and killed by James Earl Ray. Two days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr with riots raging across cities in the United States, On the evening of April 6, three carloads of armed Black Panthers pulled over by police on Union and 28th Streets in west Oakland. Eldridge Cleaver was driving the lead car, an old white Ford with a Florida license plate that a member of the Peace and Freedom Party had donated to the Panthers. The entourage included David Hilliard, seventeen-yearold Lil’ Bobby Hutton, and six other rank-and-file Panthers. Cleaver opened the door and walked around to the passenger side of the Ford, reportedly to urinate. A moment later, several police cars pulled up and shined a spotlight on Cleaver. Words were exchanged, then gunfire. The Panthers ran for cover, the police quickly cordoned off a two-block area, and neighbors gathered in the streets. An hour and a half later, Cleaver, having been shot in the foot and rear, his lungs burning from tear gas and firebomb smoke, emerged stark naked from a burning basement, surrendered, and was taken into custody. But Bobby, 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. 

Although intialy 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, in an attempt to provoke a shoot-out. 

At the funeral for Hutton, two thousand people packed into the Church in Berkeley, with a hundred uniformed Black Panthers forming the honor guard. The Reverend E. E. Cleveland called down “shame” on the powerful for failing to improve the lot of blacks. After the service, the Panthers held an outdoor rally and proclaimed that Bobby Hutton had been assassinated because of his Panther politics. The Black Panther leadership charged that Hutton had posed a challenge to racism and that the police had killed him to repress this challenge.

Following the incident, Eldridge Cleaver was changed with charged with attempted murder and jumped bail to flee to Cuba in late 1968. Initially treated with luxury by the Cuban government, the hospitality ended upon reports Fidel Castro had received information of the CIA infiltrating the Black Panther Party. Cleaver then decided to head to Algeria where he stayed till 1975

In early 1968, the Oakland-based Black Panther Party began organizing a chapter in Los Angeles and  Eldridge Cleaver recruited Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter to organize a chapter of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, after the Watts riots, the Black Power movement in Los Angeles centered on the Black Congress. After the Watts rebellion in 1965, Black Power organizations had proliferated and one of those groups was the Black Congress. the dynamics in the Black Congress quickly changed with the rise of the black panthers. The politics developed by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver resonated with young blacks in Los Angeles, providing new conduits for change. the Black Panthers had a compelling ideas about of black people’s suffering, a vision for advancing black dignity and power, and they had created a organization to advance that vision.

But by early April of 1968, the Black Panther Party was essentially a local organization based in Oakland, with a satellite chapter beginning to organize in Los Angeles. Although the Black Power movement was brewing in most major U.S. cities, the Panthers had not yet achieved national influence. This would quickly changed in 1968. The murder of King changed the whole dynamic of this country. That one event changed how the Panthers were perceived by the black community. Seeking effective ways to advance the black communities’ interests, young blacks flocked to the Black Panther Party and its politics of armed self-defense. The Panther did very little recruiting. Instead, young activists from around the country contacted the Panthers asking how they could join, and the Party responded by opening new Black Panther offices. These office were in 25 major cities like Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia,  and Washington, D.C. Peak membership was near 5,000 by 1969. Young blacks were drawn by the Panthers’ strategy of armed self defense against the police because it gave them a powerful means to resist and avoid repression. Facing the resistance of organized and armed young blacks, police departments could no longer maintain brutal policing practices with competely impunity. By arming and organizing, and advocating revolution, Black Panthers challenged the legitimacy of the state and By framing this practice of armed self-defense as part of a global anti-imperialist struggle, the Panthers were able to draw broad support both from other black political organizations and from many non blacks. These allies provided crucial financial, political, and legal support that enabled the Panthers to mount top-notch, unprecedented legal defenses against the many charges they faced, and they often wontheir cases in court. Without allied support, the Party would have quickly dissolved. Instead, the Black Panther Party rapidly expanded to become the most influential black movement organization in the United States by the late 60s

As Party membership and influence grew, so did push back by the state. The Panthers sought meaningful activities for members that would serve the community, strengthen the Party, and improve its public image. So they deployed community programs and they quickly became a cornerstone of Party's activities nationwide.The Black Panther community programs began in early 1969 under Bobby Seale’s leadership, marking an important transformation in the Party’s political practice. The idea were 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. In the fall of 1968, Eldridge Cleaver went into exile to avoid returning to prison when his parole was revoked. With Huey Newton in prison, Seale, a staunch advocate of community programs since his days working in the government poverty program in Oakland, became primarily responsible for setting Party policy. 

The Panthers launched its first Breakfast for Children Program at Father Earl A. Neil’s St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in west Oakland. Parishioner Ruth Beckford-Smith coordinated the program. When the Party decided to organize a breakfast for children at St. Augustine’s, Beckford-Smith volunteered to coordinate the program and helped organize it. The first day the program opened it served 11 children. By the end of the week, the program was serving 135 children daily at St. Augustine’s. 

When Bobby Seale went to prison that 1969, David Hilliard, chief of staffof the Party, took the reins of the national Party organization. Hilliard continued to give priority to development of the Free Breakfast for Children Program, and during his tenure, the program spread like wildfire, becoming the most important Panther activity

The breakfast program was an important public face of the Party but it was also matched the Panthers politically and ideologically. The Party claimed to have fed twenty thousand children in the 1968–69 school year and said it hoped to feed one hundred thousand in 1969–70  these breakfast services enjoyed widespread support within black neighborhoods. The Free Breakfast for Children Programs adopted a rigorous routine. Members had to be at the sites early in the morning, in time to prepare the food and be ready for the arriving children before they ate and then headed off to school. Transporting some of the children from home to the site and then to school was another vital yet often trying logistical job. While the children ate their meal, members taught them black liberation lessons consisting of Party messages and black history. 

Businesses donated food and supplies to the local breakfast programs mostly due to altruism and the promotion of positive community relations but Businesses that chose not to help out faced theParty’s wrath. At times the Panthers’ persuation blended into harassment and sometimes strong-arming. Far more common were boycotts and pickets of businesses that refused to assist the programs. Equally common was the tactic of calling out, or publicly shaming, those who refused to help. Also Churches and other community-based organizations that refused to sponsor or allow breakfast programs on their premises, faced similar treatment.

Politically,the breakfasts shed light on the government’s failure to address childhood poverty and hunger. The U.S. government spent only $600,000 on breakfast programs in all of 1967 but Government-sponsored breakfast programs grew rapidly as the Panthers pioneered their free breakfast program. By 1972, government-sponsored breakfast programs were feeding 1.18million children out of the approximately 5 million who qualified for such help

The success of the Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children Program led the Party to initiate free health clinics and a range of other commuity programs. Many blacks were poorly served by the health care system, some had never seen a doctor. Once again Despite the health care initiatives within the federal government in the urban communitiy residents received only limited, if any, health care attention.

The Panther run free medical clinics relied on the volunteer services of local doctors, medical students, interns, residents, nurses, and community folk as well as donated or low-rent clinic space. These public Panther-run clinics, offered services to all who came, black and nonblack alike. In some cities, like Baltimore, the Party formed coalitions with like-minded individuals and groups to run free clinics in the community. For the Party, the focus was plain and urgent: to address within its limited resources the pressing health care concerns of poor black communities that sorely lacked adequate medical facilities and professionals.

Clinic services “included first aid care, physical examinations, prenatalcare, and testing for lead poisoning, high blood pressure, and sickle cell anemia.” If necessary, clinician referred patients to specialistsfor follow-up care. There were at least eleven such clinics, Chicago Free Medical Care Center was one of the best-run and most-respected Panther health clinics, serving over two thousand people in its initial two months. Medical teams from the clinic went door-to-door assisting people with their health problems, and The clinic’s staff included obstetricians, gynecologists, pediatricians, and general practitioners.

Despite these successes, COINTELPRO still aimed to dismantle the Black Panther Party by targeting their social/community programs, No aspect of the Black Panther program was of greater concern to the FBI than the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which fostered widespread support for the Panthers’ revolutionary politics. Hoover explained that one of the FBIs primary aims for in counter intelligence for the Panthers is to keep the group isolated from the moderate black and white community that supported it. the FBI denounced their efforts as a means of indoctrination and took extensive measures to undermine support for the Panthers’ breakfast program. For example, agents sent forged letters and incendiary propaganda to supermarkets to dissuade them from providing food, impersonated concerned parishioners to dissuade churches from providing space for the program and regularly harassed and intimidated program participants, supporters, and Party workers

By Late 1968, the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party was no longer a saterall office, The Party had consolidated its status as a leading black nationalist organization in the LA, rivaled only by Ron Karenga’s US organization

the FBI would take note ofthe growing tensions between the Black Panther Party and the US organization in Southern California, the FBI sought to escalate the conflict preparing an anonymous letter for which would be sent to the Los Angeles Black Panther Party supposedly from a member of the ‘US’ organization in which it will be stated that the youth group of the ‘US’ organization is aware of the [Black Panther Party] ‘contract’ to kill RON KARENGA, leader of ‘US,’ and they, ‘US’ members, in retaliation, have made plans to ambush leaders of the [Party] in Los Angeles. 

Tensions between Ron Karenga’s US organization and the Panthers came to a head over the leadership of the Black Student Union on the UCLA campus and the direction of the new Black Studies Program. Karenga, was a formal community adviser appointed by the university administration, supported one candidate for director of the new program; the Black Panthers wanted a role in the decision-making process and opposed Karenga’s candidate

The university administration planned to announce the new director of the Black Studies Program on January 21. At two large and confrontational meetings of the Black Student Union on January 15 and January 17, afterward no resolution was achieved. Most of the black students appeared to support the Black Panther position. Elaine Brown and John Huggins would be elected to an ad hoc committee to represent Black Student Union concerns, and John Huggins and Bunchy Carter emerged as leading contenders in the upcoming election for the Black Student Union presidency.

At about 2:40 p.m. on January 17, as the Black Student Union adjourned and about 150 students poured out of the meeting at Campbell Hall, the conflict became violent. Ranking members of the US organization fired guns at Los Angeles Black Panther leaders; they shot John Huggins in the back and Bunchy Carter in the chest, killing them both. Fleeing campus, Panthers gathered at the home of John and Ericka Huggins, Soon about 150 police officers surrounded the house and kicked down the door. Police arrested all seventeen Panthers in the house.

Initially, no members of US were arrested. the National Lawyers Guild, and other Panther allies quickly mobilized to raise bail and activate a legal defense. Within a few days, all charges against the Panthers were dropped, and the Panthers were released. Funeral services for Bunchy Carter took place at the Trinit yBaptist Church in Los Angeles on Friday, January 24. At Bunchy Carter’s funeral,Bobby Seale denounced Ron Karenga as a “reactionary” and a “tool ofthe power structure.” The Panther leadership believed from the start that the attack was part of a government plot and the Panthers were correct in surmising that the killings were not part of the normal course of conflict between the Partyand a rival black nationalist organization. Evidence would emerge later showing that the state had a hand in stirring up the conflict that contributedto the killings of John Huggins and Bunchy Carter. Yet  we still do not know today, to what extent US members were working directly with the FBI orpolice and whether the killings were planned and implemented underdirection of the government.

Later the Police would issued warrants for the arrest ofthe Stiner brothers, George and Larry, members of US, who had been present at the time of the killing. The Stiner brothers turned themselves in to police and received life sentences for conspiracy to commit murder.

In Chicago Fredrick Hampton would come to prominence in chicago as the chairman of the illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party

Hampton grew up in Maywood, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago. In September 1967, he became the president of the youth council for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where he would demonstrated his natural leadership abilities

around the same time Bobby Rush who had grown up with the Chicago Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and began seeking partners to build aPanther chapter in Chicago. When Rush heard Hampton speak at a black leadership conference at the headquarters of the Chicago gang Black P. Stone Nation, he knew Hampton was his key to success; Rush recruited him to join the Panthers. Rush and Hampton, along with Bob Brown — Rush’s SNCC director — organized what would soon become illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party

The FBI believed that Hampton's leadership and talent for communication made him a major threat among Black Panther leaders. It began keeping close tabs on his activities. Investigations have shown that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was determined to prevent the formation of a cohesive Black movement in the United States. Hoover believed the Panthers, Young Patriots, Young Lords, and similar radical coalitions that Hampton forged in Chicago were a stepping stone to the rise of a revolution that could cause a radical change in the U.S. government.

The FBI opened a file on Hampton in 1967. It tapped Hampton's mother's phone in February 1968 and placed Hampton on the bureau's "Agitator Index" as a "key militant leader".[30] In late 1968, the Racial Matters squad of the FBI's Chicago field office recruited William O'Neal to work with them; he had recently been arrested twice for interstate car theft and impersonating a federal officer. In exchange for having his felony charges dropped and receiving a monthly stipend, O'Neal agreed to infiltrate the BPP as a counterintelligence operative.

O'Neal would join the party and quickly rose in the organization, becoming Director of Chapter Security and Hampton's bodyguard

In Chicago in the late 1960s, gangs were an important political forcein black neighborhoods none more so than the Blackstone Rangers. From their start in the early 1960s, the Rangers had focused on community building as an adjunct to their illegal activities, which included drugtrafficking and extortion. As a result, they constituted a sort of parallel government on the South Side, protecting members of their neighborhood from other gangs and the police and providing some community services. By the late 1960s, they had swallowed up most of the smaller gangs in the area as part of the “P. Stone Nation” 

In December 1968, having quickly built a powerful Panther base in Chicago, Fred Hampton entered discussions with Jeff Fort, leader of the Rangers, about merging the Panthers and the Rangers. The merger promised to boost the Panthers’ membership and street presence. Hampton suggested to Fort that by joining forces,  Fort was interested in a merger, The FBI saw the potential merger as a political threat and sought to foster conflict between the two groups. The Chicago FBI felt that spreadingfalse rumors that the Black Panther Party leadership was disparagingFort “might result in Fort having active steps taken to exact some formof retribution towards the leadership of the Panthers. As discussions deteriorated, and the Chicagooffice of the FBI suggested to headquarters that the time was right toprovoke the Rangers to take violent action by sending a forged letterto Fort. The FBI field office suggested sending the letter to Fort rather than Hampton because Fort was more likely to respond with violence. The FBI’s effort may have helped prevent a merger between the Panthers and the Rangers, but it did not precipitate widespread violence between the groups. Hampton and Fort figured out that the government was attempting to create a deadly conflict between them and decided not to take the bait

In 1968, Hampton was accused of assaulting an ice cream truck driver, apparently Hampton had “appropriated” an ice cream truck, passing out more than four hundred ice cream bars—worth a total of seventyone dollars—to neighborhood children. 

In the weeks that followed, Hampton and the Chicago Panthers organized their Free Breakfast for Children Program, which opened on April 1, 1969. Within two weeks, the Panthershad fed more than 1100 children, drawing community support and also making it hard to ignore the political dimensions of Hampton’s case. During his trial that April, Hampton appeared on a local television show publicizing the free breakfast program,and appealing for public support for the Panthers. In April 9, 1969, Hampton was convicted of robbery and assault but released on bonding the per sentencing hearing,  Hampton planed to appeal the conviction on the grounds that newspaper articles about the Panthers during the trial had prejudiced the jury.

Following the ice cream trial and the attention it brought, Hampton called the Chicago Panthers’ first press conference, Hampton announced that the Chicago Panthers intended to establish a community patrolof police, open liberation schools throughout the city, and set up free health clinics.

The Chicago Panthers sought to mobilize a broad New Left alliance in support of Hampton. While Hampton was out on bail,

On Monday May 26, with Illinois state attorney Edward V. Hanrahanpublicly pressuring the judge, Fred Hampton was sentenced to two to five years in prison for robbery and assault

By the end of May, advancing their community programs and alliancepolitics in the face of overt repression, the Panthers were buildinga strong organization in Chicago. 
As the Chicago Panthers grew in number and political strength, state efforts to repress them escalated.

The Chicago FBI worked closely with local law enforcement, That June, as the FBI began coordinating raids on the Chicago Panther office. special squad of nine Chicago police officers was assigned to report directly to the Special Prosecutions Unit, which in turn was working closely with the FBI Racial Matters Squad.
June 4, the FBI raided the Chicago Black Panther headquarterson Without presenting search warrants, theyproceeded to sack the office and arrest the eight Panthers present. TheFBI agents told the press they had found several guns and ammunition

Rush said the FBI agents left the office in completedisarray, creating more than $20,000 in property damage, includingconfiscatinga safe containing $3,000, which the Panthers planned to use to equipa health clinic they hoped to open in July. Rush described the raid as partof a concerted national effort by the FBI to crush the Panthers, citingsimilar raids in Detroit, New York, Connecticut, San Francisco,Indianapolis, Des Moines, and Denver. Michael Klonsky, area leaderof the Students for a Democratic Society.

On Tuesday June 10, 1969, a Cook County grand jury indicted Fred Hampton, his bodyguard William O’Neal, and fourteen otherleading members of the Illinois Black Panther Party on charges thatincluded kidnapping and unlawful use of a weapon. The state’s attorney,Edward V. Hanrahan, said that the charges stemmed from the kidnapping and torture of a woman who had stored guns for the Panthersand then hidden them. Bail was originally set at $100,000 for most ofthe accused but only $10,000 for O’Neal. Hampton was never convicted onthe charges, but William O’Neal was later exposed as a provocateur working secretly for the FBI.

On the morning of July 14, 1969, Larry Roberson and fellow PantherGrady Moore were selling the Black Panther newspaper whenthey saw two police officers questioning black patrons about a suspectedtheft of two baskets of produce from a nearby market. Accordingto the Panthers, the police had lined up more than a dozen people —mostly older black men — against the wall and were harassing them.The police maintained that they were simply investigating a reportof stolen produce when Roberson and Moore approached and askedthem what they were doing. The officers said that when they told Robersonand Moore to leave, they became belligerent, calling themselves “protectors of the community.” The Panther reported that Moore and Roberson were not armed, but police told the press thatRoberson drew a gun and started shooting at them. Roberson was shot three times by police and taken by ambulance to the county hospital,where he was admitted in good condition. Both Moore and Roberson were arrested on charges of attempted murder. No police officers were wounded.

Two weeks later, Chicago police raided the Black Panther office a second time. Twenty-four police cars shut down Madison Street in front ofthe Panther office, and the officers attempted to storm the building. Hampton was in jail on the ice cream charges, and no Panther leaderswere in the office at the time, but three rank-and-file Panthers held off police for thirty-five minutes until they ran out of ammunition. Eventually, police shot through the steel door and madetheir way upstairs, beating the Panthers with rifle butts, knocking one of the memebers unconscious and breaking his jaw, badly injuring the others,and arresting them on charges of attempted murder. Then, the police used gasoline to burn down the upper half of the Panther office.

On Saturday October 4, police raided the Chicago Panther headquarters a third time. The raid was in many respects a repeat of the July 31 police raid. Officers’ bullets riddled the front door and walls of the office. The police set the office on fire, smashed equipment, and destroyed stores of food designated for the free breakfast programs. After Panther resistance abated, police arrested six Party members on charges of attempted murder, alleging that theyhad tried to snipe at police from the headquarters rooftop. Again, Panthers
alleged that the police intentionally set the fire. Neighbors carried water up to the office in buckets to help extinguish the flames. Hampton,from jail, maintained that again police took money intended forthe breakfast program. With the repeated raids and arrests of local Panthers that fall, manyblack organizations lined up in support of the Panthers. Many believedthat such repression posed a threat to all black people: what could bedone to the Panthers could be done to them as well.

December 4, dozen police officers executed a search warrant for illegal weapons and raided Fred Hampton's apartment. William O’Neal provided a map out the exact layout of Fred Hampton’s apartment Armed with this information They did not bring the standard raiding equipment they had used in previous Chicago Panther raids, such as tear gas or sound equipment; instead, they carried a Thompson submachine gun, shotguns, a carbine, several pistols. The assault was quick and decisive. Within fifteen minutes, Fred Hampton was dead, shot twice through the head while he lay in bed. Peoria, Illinois, Panther leader Mark Clark, in Chicago attending a statewide meeting of Party leaders, was also dead. The seven other Panthers in the apartment—four with bullet wounds—were arrested on charges of attempted murder, aggravated battery, and unlawful use of weapons. 

Friday December 5, the morning after Hamptonand Clark were killed, police raided Bobby Rush’s South Side apartment, but Rush was not there. 

Bobby Rush would give tours of the apartment where Hampton and Clark had been killed. He told thereporters and community residents who lined up to see the apartment, The New York Times reported, “Most ofthe rooms and walls appeared to be free of scars, pockmarks and bulletholes. There were clusters of bullet holes and the gouges of shotgunblasts in the places wherethe Panthers said the two men had been killed and four others had been wounded. . . . There were no bulletmarks in the area of the two doors through which the police said they
entered.

On January 6, Bobby Rush informed the press that results of a blood test of Fred Hampton in the independent autopsy revealed a heavy dose of Seconal, a drug that induces sleep. Rush charged that the killing ofHampton was a government conspiracy and that Hampton had been drugged by an FBI infiltrator to facilitate his murder. Hampton’s fiancée, Deborah Johnson (Akua Njeri), who was eight months pregnantat the time of his killing and was arrested in the raid, later recounted Hampton’s strange behavior the night of the raid. She said that Hampton never got up from bed during the raid and remained silent. He woke up and slightly lifted his head as guns were being fired but barelymoved and never said anything. After the first wave of shooting, police arrested Johnson and pulled her out of the bedroom and into thekitchen. She said she heard a police officer say, “He’s barely alive, he will barely make it.” Then the police started shooting again. Then a police officer said, “He is good and dead now.” 

There was an immediate outpouring of support for Hampton, The Panthers used the public attention to organize support through popular education, offering more tours of the apartment where Fred Hampton and Mark Clark had been murdered. The National Black Panther Party understood and sought to portraythe killing of Hampton and Clark as political assassination and as partof a national government conspiracy to repress the Party

Early in 1969 Connecticut Panther chapter opened and was led by Ericka Huggins They offered political education classes, tried to start a breakfast program, regularlymade public speeches, and started attracting attention. The FBI paid close attention to the New Haven Panthers, tappingtheir phones and infiltrating their ranks with several undercover informants.In March, FBI Director Hoover fiercely reprimanded the NewHaven field office for not producing hard-hitting counterintelligencemeasures for dealing with the Panthers there

In early May, New Haven Police Department wiretaps revealed that Bobby Seale would be speaking at Yale University later that month to raise funds for legal fees. The police passed on this information to the FBI. On Saturday May 17, New York Panther George Sams showed upat the New Haven Panther office with Alex Rackley in tow. Rackleywas nineteen years old, homeless, desperate, and eager to please. Hehad joined the Panthers in New York looking for a place to fit in. Samswas a bully who had been expelled from theParty for stabbing another Panther in Oakland, Sams was reinstatedat the request of Stokely Carmichael, whom he had once served as a bodyguard.

Sams had shown up in New York earlier that spring as police began arresting most of the Party leadership there in multiple raids. He called himself “Crazy George” and claimed that he was sent “to straightenout” unreliable Party chapters. When Sams arrived in New Haven, he claimed that he had been sen tby the national headquarters to weed out spies. he immediately took control of the fledgling New Havenchapter. He charged Rackley with being a spy and set up a kangaroo court to interrogate him. With the help of Warren Kimbro and young new Panther recruit Lonnie McLucas, Sams tied Rackley to a chair and tortured him. The two beat Rackley with a club, twisted coat hangers around his neck, and poured boiling water over him. On the evening of May 20, three days after Sams had brought Rackley to New Haven, Sams announced that he would drive Rackley to the bus station and let him go. With Kimbro and McLucas, Sams took Rackley to a wooded swamp in the suburbs. Sams handed Kimbro his .45 and Kimbro shot Rackley in the back of the head, killing him. Sams then took the gun back and handed it to McLucas, telling him to finish Rackley off. McLucas shotRackley in the chest.

The police and FBI had gathered extensive information on the New Haven Panther headquarters through paid informants and wiretapping. The night of May 20, Kelly Moye, a police informant, called Nick Pastore, the head of the information division of the New Haven police, and warned him that Sams and others were about to transport something important in Sams’s green Buick Riviera. New Haven policechief James Ahern later said that he suspected that the Panthers had kidnapped someone and that the hostage was in transit. however, did nothing to stop Rackley’s torture or murder, later claiming that they did not know he was being tortured and that they had tried to follow the car that carried Rackley to his death, but it had eluded them.The next day, police recovered Rackley’s body, and late that night,they conducted raids to arrest Ericka Huggins, Warren Kimbro, LonnieMcLucas, Francis Carter, and four other young female Panthers onmurder charges

When police arrested the Black Panther suspects in New Haven theday after Rackley was murdered, Sams had already left town. But he left behind the tape recording he had made of Rackley’s torture, and policehad no trouble locating and confiscating the tape when they arrestedthe New Haven Panthers. After those arrests, Sams traipsed in and out of various Panther offices nationally, with police and FBI raids following close behind. 

In early August of 69, Sams was arrested in a gun incident at the fledgling Panther chapter in Halifax, NovaScotia, and he was soon extradited to the United States for trial, where he turned state’s evidence. Within days, the Justice Department created a special unit with the “purpose of federal prosecutionagainst the [Black Panther Party].” 15 On August 19, on the basis ofSams’s testimony, Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party,was arrested in Berkeley, California, on capital charges of conspiracyto commit murder for allegedly ordering the killing of Alex Rackley.The state made a deal with Kimbro, offering him a light sentence in exchange for turning state’s evidence and pinning the murder on Panther higher-ups. Kimbro and Sams each served four years and were released. Lonnie McLucas maintained theinnocence of the Party leaders and was slated to face trial.

Panther field marshal Landon Williams was also in New Haven during Alex Rackley’s torture and murder, and Sams testified that he had been taking orders from Williams and that Williams in turn was takin gorders from Black Panther national headquarters. It is clear that Sams directed the gruesome events, and in the end, the state found insufficientevidence to support Sams’s claim that he was following orders from Williams. Williams pled guilty on lesser charges of conspiracy to murder and received a suspended sentence in November 1971. Hoping to pin the murder on national Panther leaders Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, the state prosecuted a long and costly trial in anattempt to convict them. But its efforts failed, and all charges against Seale and Huggins were dismissed.

During the early 1970s, the BPP, was weakened by exturnal attacks, legal problems, and internal issues, and rapidly declined as a political force. The most devastating cause of the BPP’s demise was programs ran by the Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at breaking up the party. So in epsidoe 3 of the black panther party we discuss the delince

On May 15, 1967 following the Sacramento incident the Panthers released their The Ten-Point program in the second issue of BPP weekly newspaper. The document was created in 1966 by the founders of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, championing solutions to the pressing needs of the black community: decent housing, employment, education, and freedom.. Each one of the statements were put in place for all of the Black Panther Party members to live by and actively practice every day. All succeeding 537 issues of the BPP newspaper would contain the ten point program, titled "What We Want Now!." which emphasized the Party’s commitment to advancing a revolution that addressed the needs and interests of the black community

The Ten-Point Program is a set of guidelines to the Black Panther Party and states their ideals and ways of operation, a "combination of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. The Party want to not just be about armed action; they wanted to be a legitimate voice of black people, and as such, The program intended to take care a broad range of the community’s needs. The platform drew heavily from the ten-point platform that Malcolm X crafted for Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, published in August 1963. , The plan emulated Malcolm X’s nationalism but without the Islamic aspect. 

We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
We want full employment for our people.
We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
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.
We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

Intro

While the The Black Panthers were charged with a Felony of conspiracy to invade assembly chambers, the group would pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of disrupting a legislative session but the The Panthers’s actions had other consquenses, beacuse of their armed presence the Mulford’s bill was swifty approved. Mulford act even added a new clause barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the Capitol. Worse yet the demonstration in sacramento had drew the attention of the FBI. head J. Edgar Hoover, and he wanted to be sure “black nationalist hate groups” were further scrutinized. 

In 1956, the FBI formalized and consolidated its intelligence-gathering and disruptive activities into the first counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO, orginally it was designed to specifically targeting the Communist Party USA, during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, the FBI did monitored the activities of civil rights activists but did little to actively and directly repress the Civil Rights Movement. However, by the end of 1963, as the movement gained international coverage and support, the FBI started undertaken extensive efforts to hound and discredit Martin Luther King Jr, and it continued these activities until his death. 

In the summer of 1967, the FBI dramatically shifted the direction and intensity of its repression of black political organizations. the summer of 1966, Stokely Carmichael first called for Black Power, and the Black Liberation Struggle entered a new phase. Organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Revolutionary Action Movement declared common cause with the Vietnamese in opposion to American. By the following year, the movement had become more nationalist and more confrontational. Urban rebellions raged in black areas throughout the country. Black nationalist orgs called for armed resistance against the state. Thousands of young blacks rebelled and rioted. On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. joined the younger generation of black movement leaders in publicly denouncing U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam.

Meanwhile in 1967, Richard Nixon was running for President and he positioning himself to capture the conservatives in the Democratic Party who were deeply troubled by social unrest and wanting to attract as much of the white vote as he could, Nixon conflated crime, rebellion, civil rights, and student protest. The gamble worked. On November, Nixon was elected the 37th president of the United States. From the first days of his presidency, Nixon took a personal interest in the Black Panther Party. 

In March 4, 1968, J. Edgar Hoover expanded the COINTELPRO against black nationalists and other dissident groups, In 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Black Panthers as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and By 1969, the Black Panthers and their allies had become primary COINTELPRO targets. 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 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would even support of efforts to repress “ideological organizations,” the IRS established the Activist Organizations Committee in July 1969 to “collect basic intelligence data” on members of the Black Panther Party, organizations that did business with the Black Panther Party, and other “radical” political organizations. The FBI supplied the IRS with the names of individuals and organizations. The IRS, in return, supplied detailed personal financial information and also targeted these individuals for special enforcement of tax regulations. As assistant FBI Director William Sullivan later testified, the Bureau "did not differentiate" between Soviet spies and suspected Communists in black nationalist movements when deploying surveillance and neutralization tactics.

The Black Panthers wouldnt initially realize the depths of the actions of the FBI against them but they also have other issues to deal with, On October 28, 1967, John Frey of the Oakland police force sat alone in his patrol car on Willow Avenue at the corner of Seventh Street. Officer Frey had developed quite a reputation. Frey is not what could be categorized as a good cop. Frey had been implicated in numerous incidents of racism. Frey had been called to a dispute between a black grocery clerk named Daniel King and a white man without pants on who claimed King had stolen his pants. According to King, Frey called him a nigger and held his arms so the white man could beat him. Several hours after Frey had released King, Newton and Gene McKinney drove by his parked patrol car. Frey had a list of twenty cars that the Oakland police had identified as Black Panther vehicles. One of the cars on that list was “Volkswagen, 1958, sedan, tan, AZM489.” Frey called for backup and pulled out after the Volkswagen and turned his lights on to make the stop.

Now there are conflicting accounts of what happened near the corner of Seventh and Campbell Streets in Oakland that morning. Officer Herbert Heanes testified that upon responding to the request for backup, states he asked Newton to step outside of the vehicle while Officer Frey informed Newton of his arrest. Officer Heanes stated that he heard a gunshot, which struck his arm, as Officer Frey accompanied Newton to the patrol car. During an ensuing physical altercation between Officer Frey and Newton, Officer Heanes shot Newton in the midsection. Officer Heanes further testified that he heard additional shots fired, though there was some discrepancy as to the order of the gunshots in the altercation. A nearby bus driver, however, witnessed the shooting. The bus driver testified that Newton produced a concealed firearm that "went off," striking Officer Heanes and that Newton also used this firearm to fire several more shots into Officer Frey, who ultimately was pronounced dead on arrival at Merritt Hospital.  

What is clear is that at some point during the early hours of the day, Newton and Gene McKinney arrived at David Hilliard’s house. Newton had a gunshot wound in his abdomen, so David and his brother June Hilliard rushed Newton to the Kaiser Hospital emergency room. Newton was later arrested that morning in the emergency room at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland.

At his murder trial, Newton testified in his own defense that Officer Frey hurled racial epithets at him and struck him in the face. Newton further testified that after Officer Frey allegedly brandished his firearm, he experienced a "sensation like boiling hot soup had been spilled on my stomach. Newton testified that after hearing a "volley of shots," he remembered nothing else until he arrived at Kaiser Hospital. Newton "expressly testified that he was 'unconscious or semiconscious' during this interval." In order to corroborate that testimony, the defense called Dr. Bernard Diamond, who stated that Newton's recollection is consistent with a gunshot wound to the abdominal cavity, which is likely to produce a "profound reflex shock reaction" that can lead to a loss of consciousness.

Soon the story was all over the news: Officer Frey was dead, and Huey P. Newton, minister of defense for the Black Panther Party, had been arrested as the prime suspect in his murder.

From the start, Newton and the Black Panther Party viewed the trial as a political contest rather than merely a legal proceeding. The Party put an issue of its newspaper with the picture of Huey in his wicker throne on the front page and the bold headline, “Huey Must Be Set Free!” After explaining that Huey had been shot and arrested and that Officer Frey had been shot and killed, the editorial discussed the case in terms of racial politics:

The shooting occurred in the heart of Oakland’s black ghetto. Huey is a black man, a resident of Oakland’s black ghetto, and the two cops were white and lived in the white suburbs. On the night that the shooting occurred, there were 400 years of oppression of black people by white people manifested in the incident. We are at that crossroads in history where black people are determined to bring down the final curtain on the drama of their struggle to free themselves from the boot of the white man that is on their collective neck. . . . Through murder, brutality, and the terror of their image, the police of America have kept black people intimidated, locked in a mortal fear, and paralyzed in their bid for freedom. . . . They are brutal beasts who have been gunning down black people and getting away with it. . . . Huey Newton’s case is the showdown case. . . . We say that we have had enough of black men and women being shot down like dogs in the street. We say that black people in America have the right to self defense. Huey Newton has laid his life on the line so that 20,000,000 black people can find out just where they are at and so that we can find out just where America is at.6The Panthers argued that Newton was resisting the long-perpetrated oppression of blacks by police when he was shot and imprisoned. The Party turned the state’s accusations against Newton around, using the case to mobilize support and put America on trial.

In the weeks leading up to Newton’s arrest, the Bay Area antiwar movement had experienced its own conflict with the Oakland police. As resistance to the Vietnam War intensified, white antiwar activists began getting experinsing police repression which deepened their alliances with the Panthers. By October, the draft resistance movement was gathering steam. No longer were the students and the antiwar activists simply Americans expressing their view within established channels. Inspired by Black Power, emboldened by the rebellions, many saw themselves as subjects of empire, much like the Vietnamese. They rejected the legitimacy of the war, the draft, and the government more generally, seeking to resist by any means

Following Newtons Arrest, Eldridge Cleaver's role became “increasingly important, especially in the Party’s collaboration with the white groups in the Free Huey movement. the "Free Huey" campaign developed alliances with numerous students and anti-war activistst. “Free Huey!” bumper stickers appeared all over the Bay Area, this movement helped receive invaluable support for the "Free Huey" campaign and help advance their anti-imperialist political ideology that linked the oppression of antiwar protestors to the oppression of blacks and Vietnamese.

One of those groups was the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), founded by Ramparts editor Robert Scheer and other leaders of the Community for New Politics. The Peace and Freedom Party sought to promote a strong antiwar and antiracist politics. At the time the party was exclusively white and began approaching black organizations for support. SNCC and other black group and all of them had rebuffed them. So working with the The Black Panther Party offered much needed legitimacy to the Peace and Freedom Party’s racial politics. The Panthers also keenly understood the isolation of the black radical movement and that the Struggle needed nonblack allies, particularly progressive white allies.

Later in 1968, Newton was convicted of manslaughter in the killing of Officer Frey and sentenced to two to fifteen years in prison. He was acquitted of wounding the other officer. Many Panthers and their supporters were disappointed that their efforts had not saved Huey. Newton’s lawyer, Charles Garry, promised to appeal the decision. Many police saw the sentence very differently and wanted Newton executed for the killing of Frey.

Eldridge Cleaver's used his new fame to be the candidiate for the Peace and Freedom Party nomination for president of the united states in 1968, The Black Panthers saw the presidential campaign as an opportunity to build influence and broaden their support within the Left, they had no plans on actually winning the presidenteny 

Eldridge Cleaver’s run for president represented disaffection with both the Democratic and Republican Parties and was, The idea was to use the traditional election process to win an audience and to organize for the radical movement. ”As Eldridge explained the Panthers sought to “focus attention on a revolutionary leader with a revolutionary program within the conventional political context. In practical terms, this kind of campaign becomes another tool for political organization for black power.  We want to pull people out of the Democratic Party, out of the Republican Party, and swell the ranks of the Black Panther Party and the Peace and Freedom Party.”  Cleaver and his running mate Judith Mage received 36,571 votes (0.05%)

April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m., Martin Luther King Jr. stepped onto the balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee and was shot and killed by James Earl Ray. Two days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr with riots raging across cities in the United States, On the evening of April 6, three carloads of armed Black Panthers pulled over by police on Union and 28th Streets in west Oakland. Eldridge Cleaver was driving the lead car, an old white Ford with a Florida license plate that a member of the Peace and Freedom Party had donated to the Panthers. The entourage included David Hilliard, seventeen-yearold Lil’ Bobby Hutton, and six other rank-and-file Panthers. Cleaver opened the door and walked around to the passenger side of the Ford, reportedly to urinate. A moment later, several police cars pulled up and shined a spotlight on Cleaver. Words were exchanged, then gunfire. The Panthers ran for cover, the police quickly cordoned off a two-block area, and neighbors gathered in the streets. An hour and a half later, Cleaver, having been shot in the foot and rear, his lungs burning from tear gas and firebomb smoke, emerged stark naked from a burning basement, surrendered, and was taken into custody. But Bobby, 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. 

Although intialy 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, in an attempt to provoke a shoot-out. 

At the funeral for Hutton, two thousand people packed into the Church in Berkeley, with a hundred uniformed Black Panthers forming the honor guard. The Reverend E. E. Cleveland called down “shame” on the powerful for failing to improve the lot of blacks. After the service, the Panthers held an outdoor rally and proclaimed that Bobby Hutton had been assassinated because of his Panther politics. The Black Panther leadership charged that Hutton had posed a challenge to racism and that the police had killed him to repress this challenge.

Following the incident, Eldridge Cleaver was changed with charged with attempted murder and jumped bail to flee to Cuba in late 1968. Initially treated with luxury by the Cuban government, the hospitality ended upon reports Fidel Castro had received information of the CIA infiltrating the Black Panther Party. Cleaver then decided to head to Algeria where he stayed till 1975

In early 1968, the Oakland-based Black Panther Party began organizing a chapter in Los Angeles and  Eldridge Cleaver recruited Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter to organize a chapter of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, after the Watts riots, the Black Power movement in Los Angeles centered on the Black Congress. After the Watts rebellion in 1965, Black Power organizations had proliferated and one of those groups was the Black Congress. the dynamics in the Black Congress quickly changed with the rise of the black panthers. The politics developed by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver resonated with young blacks in Los Angeles, providing new conduits for change. the Black Panthers had a compelling ideas about of black people’s suffering, a vision for advancing black dignity and power, and they had created a organization to advance that vision.

But by early April of 1968, the Black Panther Party was essentially a local organization based in Oakland, with a satellite chapter beginning to organize in Los Angeles. Although the Black Power movement was brewing in most major U.S. cities, the Panthers had not yet achieved national influence. This would quickly changed in 1968. The murder of King changed the whole dynamic of this country. That one event changed how the Panthers were perceived by the black community. Seeking effective ways to advance the black communities’ interests, young blacks flocked to the Black Panther Party and its politics of armed self-defense. The Panther did very little recruiting. Instead, young activists from around the country contacted the Panthers asking how they could join, and the Party responded by opening new Black Panther offices. These office were in 25 major cities like Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia,  and Washington, D.C. Peak membership was near 5,000 by 1969. Young blacks were drawn by the Panthers’ strategy of armed self defense against the police because it gave them a powerful means to resist and avoid repression. Facing the resistance of organized and armed young blacks, police departments could no longer maintain brutal policing practices with competely impunity. By arming and organizing, and advocating revolution, Black Panthers challenged the legitimacy of the state and By framing this practice of armed self-defense as part of a global anti-imperialist struggle, the Panthers were able to draw broad support both from other black political organizations and from many non blacks. These allies provided crucial financial, political, and legal support that enabled the Panthers to mount top-notch, unprecedented legal defenses against the many charges they faced, and they often wontheir cases in court. Without allied support, the Party would have quickly dissolved. Instead, the Black Panther Party rapidly expanded to become the most influential black movement organization in the United States by the late 60s

As Party membership and influence grew, so did push back by the state. The Panthers sought meaningful activities for members that would serve the community, strengthen the Party, and improve its public image. So they deployed community programs and they quickly became a cornerstone of Party's activities nationwide.The Black Panther community programs began in early 1969 under Bobby Seale’s leadership, marking an important transformation in the Party’s political practice. The idea were 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. In the fall of 1968, Eldridge Cleaver went into exile to avoid returning to prison when his parole was revoked. With Huey Newton in prison, Seale, a staunch advocate of community programs since his days working in the government poverty program in Oakland, became primarily responsible for setting Party policy. 

The Panthers launched its first Breakfast for Children Program at Father Earl A. Neil’s St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in west Oakland. Parishioner Ruth Beckford-Smith coordinated the program. When the Party decided to organize a breakfast for children at St. Augustine’s, Beckford-Smith volunteered to coordinate the program and helped organize it. The first day the program opened it served 11 children. By the end of the week, the program was serving 135 children daily at St. Augustine’s. 

When Bobby Seale went to prison that 1969, David Hilliard, chief of staffof the Party, took the reins of the national Party organization. Hilliard continued to give priority to development of the Free Breakfast for Children Program, and during his tenure, the program spread like wildfire, becoming the most important Panther activity

The breakfast program was an important public face of the Party but it was also matched the Panthers politically and ideologically. The Party claimed to have fed twenty thousand children in the 1968–69 school year and said it hoped to feed one hundred thousand in 1969–70  these breakfast services enjoyed widespread support within black neighborhoods. The Free Breakfast for Children Programs adopted a rigorous routine. Members had to be at the sites early in the morning, in time to prepare the food and be ready for the arriving children before they ate and then headed off to school. Transporting some of the children from home to the site and then to school was another vital yet often trying logistical job. While the children ate their meal, members taught them black liberation lessons consisting of Party messages and black history. 

Businesses donated food and supplies to the local breakfast programs mostly due to altruism and the promotion of positive community relations but Businesses that chose not to help out faced theParty’s wrath. At times the Panthers’ persuation blended into harassment and sometimes strong-arming. Far more common were boycotts and pickets of businesses that refused to assist the programs. Equally common was the tactic of calling out, or publicly shaming, those who refused to help. Also Churches and other community-based organizations that refused to sponsor or allow breakfast programs on their premises, faced similar treatment.

Politically,the breakfasts shed light on the government’s failure to address childhood poverty and hunger. The U.S. government spent only $600,000 on breakfast programs in all of 1967 but Government-sponsored breakfast programs grew rapidly as the Panthers pioneered their free breakfast program. By 1972, government-sponsored breakfast programs were feeding 1.18million children out of the approximately 5 million who qualified for such help

The success of the Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children Program led the Party to initiate free health clinics and a range of other commuity programs. Many blacks were poorly served by the health care system, some had never seen a doctor. Once again Despite the health care initiatives within the federal government in the urban communitiy residents received only limited, if any, health care attention.

The Panther run free medical clinics relied on the volunteer services of local doctors, medical students, interns, residents, nurses, and community folk as well as donated or low-rent clinic space. These public Panther-run clinics, offered services to all who came, black and nonblack alike. In some cities, like Baltimore, the Party formed coalitions with like-minded individuals and groups to run free clinics in the community. For the Party, the focus was plain and urgent: to address within its limited resources the pressing health care concerns of poor black communities that sorely lacked adequate medical facilities and professionals.

Clinic services “included first aid care, physical examinations, prenatalcare, and testing for lead poisoning, high blood pressure, and sickle cell anemia.” If necessary, clinician referred patients to specialistsfor follow-up care. There were at least eleven such clinics, Chicago Free Medical Care Center was one of the best-run and most-respected Panther health clinics, serving over two thousand people in its initial two months. Medical teams from the clinic went door-to-door assisting people with their health problems, and The clinic’s staff included obstetricians, gynecologists, pediatricians, and general practitioners.

Despite these successes, COINTELPRO still aimed to dismantle the Black Panther Party by targeting their social/community programs, No aspect of the Black Panther program was of greater concern to the FBI than the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which fostered widespread support for the Panthers’ revolutionary politics. Hoover explained that one of the FBIs primary aims for in counter intelligence for the Panthers is to keep the group isolated from the moderate black and white community that supported it. the FBI denounced their efforts as a means of indoctrination and took extensive measures to undermine support for the Panthers’ breakfast program. For example, agents sent forged letters and incendiary propaganda to supermarkets to dissuade them from providing food, impersonated concerned parishioners to dissuade churches from providing space for the program and regularly harassed and intimidated program participants, supporters, and Party workers

By Late 1968, the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party was no longer a saterall office, The Party had consolidated its status as a leading black nationalist organization in the LA, rivaled only by Ron Karenga’s US organization

the FBI would take note ofthe growing tensions between the Black Panther Party and the US organization in Southern California, the FBI sought to escalate the conflict preparing an anonymous letter for which would be sent to the Los Angeles Black Panther Party supposedly from a member of the ‘US’ organization in which it will be stated that the youth group of the ‘US’ organization is aware of the [Black Panther Party] ‘contract’ to kill RON KARENGA, leader of ‘US,’ and they, ‘US’ members, in retaliation, have made plans to ambush leaders of the [Party] in Los Angeles. 

Tensions between Ron Karenga’s US organization and the Panthers came to a head over the leadership of the Black Student Union on the UCLA campus and the direction of the new Black Studies Program. Karenga, was a formal community adviser appointed by the university administration, supported one candidate for director of the new program; the Black Panthers wanted a role in the decision-making process and opposed Karenga’s candidate

The university administration planned to announce the new director of the Black Studies Program on January 21. At two large and confrontational meetings of the Black Student Union on January 15 and January 17, afterward no resolution was achieved. Most of the black students appeared to support the Black Panther position. Elaine Brown and John Huggins would be elected to an ad hoc committee to represent Black Student Union concerns, and John Huggins and Bunchy Carter emerged as leading contenders in the upcoming election for the Black Student Union presidency.

At about 2:40 p.m. on January 17, as the Black Student Union adjourned and about 150 students poured out of the meeting at Campbell Hall, the conflict became violent. Ranking members of the US organization fired guns at Los Angeles Black Panther leaders; they shot John Huggins in the back and Bunchy Carter in the chest, killing them both. Fleeing campus, Panthers gathered at the home of John and Ericka Huggins, Soon about 150 police officers surrounded the house and kicked down the door. Police arrested all seventeen Panthers in the house.

Initially, no members of US were arrested. the National Lawyers Guild, and other Panther allies quickly mobilized to raise bail and activate a legal defense. Within a few days, all charges against the Panthers were dropped, and the Panthers were released. Funeral services for Bunchy Carter took place at the Trinit yBaptist Church in Los Angeles on Friday, January 24. At Bunchy Carter’s funeral,Bobby Seale denounced Ron Karenga as a “reactionary” and a “tool ofthe power structure.” The Panther leadership believed from the start that the attack was part of a government plot and the Panthers were correct in surmising that the killings were not part of the normal course of conflict between the Partyand a rival black nationalist organization. Evidence would emerge later showing that the state had a hand in stirring up the conflict that contributedto the killings of John Huggins and Bunchy Carter. Yet  we still do not know today, to what extent US members were working directly with the FBI orpolice and whether the killings were planned and implemented underdirection of the government.

Later the Police would issued warrants for the arrest ofthe Stiner brothers, George and Larry, members of US, who had been present at the time of the killing. The Stiner brothers turned themselves in to police and received life sentences for conspiracy to commit murder.

In Chicago Fredrick Hampton would come to prominence in chicago as the chairman of the illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party

Hampton grew up in Maywood, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago. In September 1967, he became the president of the youth council for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where he would demonstrated his natural leadership abilities

around the same time Bobby Rush who had grown up with the Chicago Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and began seeking partners to build aPanther chapter in Chicago. When Rush heard Hampton speak at a black leadership conference at the headquarters of the Chicago gang Black P. Stone Nation, he knew Hampton was his key to success; Rush recruited him to join the Panthers. Rush and Hampton, along with Bob Brown — Rush’s SNCC director — organized what would soon become illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party

The FBI believed that Hampton's leadership and talent for communication made him a major threat among Black Panther leaders. It began keeping close tabs on his activities. Investigations have shown that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was determined to prevent the formation of a cohesive Black movement in the United States. Hoover believed the Panthers, Young Patriots, Young Lords, and similar radical coalitions that Hampton forged in Chicago were a stepping stone to the rise of a revolution that could cause a radical change in the U.S. government.

The FBI opened a file on Hampton in 1967. It tapped Hampton's mother's phone in February 1968 and placed Hampton on the bureau's "Agitator Index" as a "key militant leader".[30] In late 1968, the Racial Matters squad of the FBI's Chicago field office recruited William O'Neal to work with them; he had recently been arrested twice for interstate car theft and impersonating a federal officer. In exchange for having his felony charges dropped and receiving a monthly stipend, O'Neal agreed to infiltrate the BPP as a counterintelligence operative.

O'Neal would join the party and quickly rose in the organization, becoming Director of Chapter Security and Hampton's bodyguard

In Chicago in the late 1960s, gangs were an important political forcein black neighborhoods none more so than the Blackstone Rangers. From their start in the early 1960s, the Rangers had focused on community building as an adjunct to their illegal activities, which included drugtrafficking and extortion. As a result, they constituted a sort of parallel government on the South Side, protecting members of their neighborhood from other gangs and the police and providing some community services. By the late 1960s, they had swallowed up most of the smaller gangs in the area as part of the “P. Stone Nation” 

In December 1968, having quickly built a powerful Panther base in Chicago, Fred Hampton entered discussions with Jeff Fort, leader of the Rangers, about merging the Panthers and the Rangers. The merger promised to boost the Panthers’ membership and street presence. Hampton suggested to Fort that by joining forces,  Fort was interested in a merger, The FBI saw the potential merger as a political threat and sought to foster conflict between the two groups. The Chicago FBI felt that spreadingfalse rumors that the Black Panther Party leadership was disparagingFort “might result in Fort having active steps taken to exact some formof retribution towards the leadership of the Panthers. As discussions deteriorated, and the Chicagooffice of the FBI suggested to headquarters that the time was right toprovoke the Rangers to take violent action by sending a forged letterto Fort. The FBI field office suggested sending the letter to Fort rather than Hampton because Fort was more likely to respond with violence. The FBI’s effort may have helped prevent a merger between the Panthers and the Rangers, but it did not precipitate widespread violence between the groups. Hampton and Fort figured out that the government was attempting to create a deadly conflict between them and decided not to take the bait

In 1968, Hampton was accused of assaulting an ice cream truck driver, apparently Hampton had “appropriated” an ice cream truck, passing out more than four hundred ice cream bars—worth a total of seventyone dollars—to neighborhood children. 

In the weeks that followed, Hampton and the Chicago Panthers organized their Free Breakfast for Children Program, which opened on April 1, 1969. Within two weeks, the Panthershad fed more than 1100 children, drawing community support and also making it hard to ignore the political dimensions of Hampton’s case. During his trial that April, Hampton appeared on a local television show publicizing the free breakfast program,and appealing for public support for the Panthers. In April 9, 1969, Hampton was convicted of robbery and assault but released on bonding the per sentencing hearing,  Hampton planed to appeal the conviction on the grounds that newspaper articles about the Panthers during the trial had prejudiced the jury.

Following the ice cream trial and the attention it brought, Hampton called the Chicago Panthers’ first press conference, Hampton announced that the Chicago Panthers intended to establish a community patrolof police, open liberation schools throughout the city, and set up free health clinics.

The Chicago Panthers sought to mobilize a broad New Left alliance in support of Hampton. While Hampton was out on bail,

On Monday May 26, with Illinois state attorney Edward V. Hanrahanpublicly pressuring the judge, Fred Hampton was sentenced to two to five years in prison for robbery and assault

By the end of May, advancing their community programs and alliancepolitics in the face of overt repression, the Panthers were buildinga strong organization in Chicago. 
As the Chicago Panthers grew in number and political strength, state efforts to repress them escalated.

The Chicago FBI worked closely with local law enforcement, That June, as the FBI began coordinating raids on the Chicago Panther office. special squad of nine Chicago police officers was assigned to report directly to the Special Prosecutions Unit, which in turn was working closely with the FBI Racial Matters Squad.
June 4, the FBI raided the Chicago Black Panther headquarterson Without presenting search warrants, theyproceeded to sack the office and arrest the eight Panthers present. TheFBI agents told the press they had found several guns and ammunition

Rush said the FBI agents left the office in completedisarray, creating more than $20,000 in property damage, includingconfiscatinga safe containing $3,000, which the Panthers planned to use to equipa health clinic they hoped to open in July. Rush described the raid as partof a concerted national effort by the FBI to crush the Panthers, citingsimilar raids in Detroit, New York, Connecticut, San Francisco,Indianapolis, Des Moines, and Denver. Michael Klonsky, area leaderof the Students for a Democratic Society.

On Tuesday June 10, 1969, a Cook County grand jury indicted Fred Hampton, his bodyguard William O’Neal, and fourteen otherleading members of the Illinois Black Panther Party on charges thatincluded kidnapping and unlawful use of a weapon. The state’s attorney,Edward V. Hanrahan, said that the charges stemmed from the kidnapping and torture of a woman who had stored guns for the Panthersand then hidden them. Bail was originally set at $100,000 for most ofthe accused but only $10,000 for O’Neal. Hampton was never convicted onthe charges, but William O’Neal was later exposed as a provocateur working secretly for the FBI.

On the morning of July 14, 1969, Larry Roberson and fellow PantherGrady Moore were selling the Black Panther newspaper whenthey saw two police officers questioning black patrons about a suspectedtheft of two baskets of produce from a nearby market. Accordingto the Panthers, the police had lined up more than a dozen people —mostly older black men — against the wall and were harassing them.The police maintained that they were simply investigating a reportof stolen produce when Roberson and Moore approached and askedthem what they were doing. The officers said that when they told Robersonand Moore to leave, they became belligerent, calling themselves “protectors of the community.” The Panther reported that Moore and Roberson were not armed, but police told the press thatRoberson drew a gun and started shooting at them. Roberson was shot three times by police and taken by ambulance to the county hospital,where he was admitted in good condition. Both Moore and Roberson were arrested on charges of attempted murder. No police officers were wounded.

Two weeks later, Chicago police raided the Black Panther office a second time. Twenty-four police cars shut down Madison Street in front ofthe Panther office, and the officers attempted to storm the building. Hampton was in jail on the ice cream charges, and no Panther leaderswere in the office at the time, but three rank-and-file Panthers held off police for thirty-five minutes until they ran out of ammunition. Eventually, police shot through the steel door and madetheir way upstairs, beating the Panthers with rifle butts, knocking one of the memebers unconscious and breaking his jaw, badly injuring the others,and arresting them on charges of attempted murder. Then, the police used gasoline to burn down the upper half of the Panther office.

On Saturday October 4, police raided the Chicago Panther headquarters a third time. The raid was in many respects a repeat of the July 31 police raid. Officers’ bullets riddled the front door and walls of the office. The police set the office on fire, smashed equipment, and destroyed stores of food designated for the free breakfast programs. After Panther resistance abated, police arrested six Party members on charges of attempted murder, alleging that theyhad tried to snipe at police from the headquarters rooftop. Again, Panthers
alleged that the police intentionally set the fire. Neighbors carried water up to the office in buckets to help extinguish the flames. Hampton,from jail, maintained that again police took money intended forthe breakfast program. With the repeated raids and arrests of local Panthers that fall, manyblack organizations lined up in support of the Panthers. Many believedthat such repression posed a threat to all black people: what could bedone to the Panthers could be done to them as well.

December 4, dozen police officers executed a search warrant for illegal weapons and raided Fred Hampton's apartment. William O’Neal provided a map out the exact layout of Fred Hampton’s apartment Armed with this information They did not bring the standard raiding equipment they had used in previous Chicago Panther raids, such as tear gas or sound equipment; instead, they carried a Thompson submachine gun, shotguns, a carbine, several pistols. The assault was quick and decisive. Within fifteen minutes, Fred Hampton was dead, shot twice through the head while he lay in bed. Peoria, Illinois, Panther leader Mark Clark, in Chicago attending a statewide meeting of Party leaders, was also dead. The seven other Panthers in the apartment—four with bullet wounds—were arrested on charges of attempted murder, aggravated battery, and unlawful use of weapons. 

Friday December 5, the morning after Hamptonand Clark were killed, police raided Bobby Rush’s South Side apartment, but Rush was not there. 

Bobby Rush would give tours of the apartment where Hampton and Clark had been killed. He told thereporters and community residents who lined up to see the apartment, The New York Times reported, “Most ofthe rooms and walls appeared to be free of scars, pockmarks and bulletholes. There were clusters of bullet holes and the gouges of shotgunblasts in the places wherethe Panthers said the two men had been killed and four others had been wounded. . . . There were no bulletmarks in the area of the two doors through which the police said they
entered.

On January 6, Bobby Rush informed the press that results of a blood test of Fred Hampton in the independent autopsy revealed a heavy dose of Seconal, a drug that induces sleep. Rush charged that the killing ofHampton was a government conspiracy and that Hampton had been drugged by an FBI infiltrator to facilitate his murder. Hampton’s fiancée, Deborah Johnson (Akua Njeri), who was eight months pregnantat the time of his killing and was arrested in the raid, later recounted Hampton’s strange behavior the night of the raid. She said that Hampton never got up from bed during the raid and remained silent. He woke up and slightly lifted his head as guns were being fired but barelymoved and never said anything. After the first wave of shooting, police arrested Johnson and pulled her out of the bedroom and into thekitchen. She said she heard a police officer say, “He’s barely alive, he will barely make it.” Then the police started shooting again. Then a police officer said, “He is good and dead now.” 

There was an immediate outpouring of support for Hampton, The Panthers used the public attention to organize support through popular education, offering more tours of the apartment where Fred Hampton and Mark Clark had been murdered. The National Black Panther Party understood and sought to portraythe killing of Hampton and Clark as political assassination and as partof a national government conspiracy to repress the Party

Early in 1969 Connecticut Panther chapter opened and was led by Ericka Huggins They offered political education classes, tried to start a breakfast program, regularlymade public speeches, and started attracting attention. The FBI paid close attention to the New Haven Panthers, tappingtheir phones and infiltrating their ranks with several undercover informants.In March, FBI Director Hoover fiercely reprimanded the NewHaven field office for not producing hard-hitting counterintelligencemeasures for dealing with the Panthers there

In early May, New Haven Police Department wiretaps revealed that Bobby Seale would be speaking at Yale University later that month to raise funds for legal fees. The police passed on this information to the FBI. On Saturday May 17, New York Panther George Sams showed upat the New Haven Panther office with Alex Rackley in tow. Rackleywas nineteen years old, homeless, desperate, and eager to please. Hehad joined the Panthers in New York looking for a place to fit in. Samswas a bully who had been expelled from theParty for stabbing another Panther in Oakland, Sams was reinstatedat the request of Stokely Carmichael, whom he had once served as a bodyguard.

Sams had shown up in New York earlier that spring as police began arresting most of the Party leadership there in multiple raids. He called himself “Crazy George” and claimed that he was sent “to straightenout” unreliable Party chapters. When Sams arrived in New Haven, he claimed that he had been sen tby the national headquarters to weed out spies. he immediately took control of the fledgling New Havenchapter. He charged Rackley with being a spy and set up a kangaroo court to interrogate him. With the help of Warren Kimbro and young new Panther recruit Lonnie McLucas, Sams tied Rackley to a chair and tortured him. The two beat Rackley with a club, twisted coat hangers around his neck, and poured boiling water over him. On the evening of May 20, three days after Sams had brought Rackley to New Haven, Sams announced that he would drive Rackley to the bus station and let him go. With Kimbro and McLucas, Sams took Rackley to a wooded swamp in the suburbs. Sams handed Kimbro his .45 and Kimbro shot Rackley in the back of the head, killing him. Sams then took the gun back and handed it to McLucas, telling him to finish Rackley off. McLucas shotRackley in the chest.

The police and FBI had gathered extensive information on the New Haven Panther headquarters through paid informants and wiretapping. The night of May 20, Kelly Moye, a police informant, called Nick Pastore, the head of the information division of the New Haven police, and warned him that Sams and others were about to transport something important in Sams’s green Buick Riviera. New Haven policechief James Ahern later said that he suspected that the Panthers had kidnapped someone and that the hostage was in transit. however, did nothing to stop Rackley’s torture or murder, later claiming that they did not know he was being tortured and that they had tried to follow the car that carried Rackley to his death, but it had eluded them.The next day, police recovered Rackley’s body, and late that night,they conducted raids to arrest Ericka Huggins, Warren Kimbro, LonnieMcLucas, Francis Carter, and four other young female Panthers onmurder charges

When police arrested the Black Panther suspects in New Haven theday after Rackley was murdered, Sams had already left town. But he left behind the tape recording he had made of Rackley’s torture, and policehad no trouble locating and confiscating the tape when they arrestedthe New Haven Panthers. After those arrests, Sams traipsed in and out of various Panther offices nationally, with police and FBI raids following close behind. 

In early August of 69, Sams was arrested in a gun incident at the fledgling Panther chapter in Halifax, NovaScotia, and he was soon extradited to the United States for trial, where he turned state’s evidence. Within days, the Justice Department created a special unit with the “purpose of federal prosecutionagainst the [Black Panther Party].” 15 On August 19, on the basis ofSams’s testimony, Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party,was arrested in Berkeley, California, on capital charges of conspiracyto commit murder for allegedly ordering the killing of Alex Rackley.The state made a deal with Kimbro, offering him a light sentence in exchange for turning state’s evidence and pinning the murder on Panther higher-ups. Kimbro and Sams each served four years and were released. Lonnie McLucas maintained theinnocence of the Party leaders and was slated to face trial.

Panther field marshal Landon Williams was also in New Haven during Alex Rackley’s torture and murder, and Sams testified that he had been taking orders from Williams and that Williams in turn was takin gorders from Black Panther national headquarters. It is clear that Sams directed the gruesome events, and in the end, the state found insufficientevidence to support Sams’s claim that he was following orders from Williams. Williams pled guilty on lesser charges of conspiracy to murder and received a suspended sentence in November 1971. Hoping to pin the murder on national Panther leaders Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, the state prosecuted a long and costly trial in anattempt to convict them. But its efforts failed, and all charges against Seale and Huggins were dismissed.

During the early 1970s, the BPP, was weakened by exturnal attacks, legal problems, and internal issues, and rapidly declined as a political force. The most devastating cause of the BPP’s demise was programs ran by the Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at breaking up the party. So in epsidoe 3 of the black panther party we discuss the delince

On May 15, 1967 following the Sacramento incident the Panthers released their The Ten-Point program in the second issue of BPP weekly newspaper. The document was created in 1966 by the founders of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, championing solutions to the pressing needs of the black community: decent housing, employment, education, and freedom.. Each one of the statements were put in place for all of the Black Panther Party members to live by and actively practice every day. All succeeding 537 issues of the BPP newspaper would contain the ten point program, titled "What We Want Now!." which emphasized the Party’s commitment to advancing a revolution that addressed the needs and interests of the black community

The Ten-Point Program is a set of guidelines to the Black Panther Party and states their ideals and ways of operation, a "combination of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. The Party want to not just be about armed action; they wanted to be a legitimate voice of black people, and as such, The program intended to take care a broad range of the community’s needs. The platform drew heavily from the ten-point platform that Malcolm X crafted for Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, published in August 1963. , The plan emulated Malcolm X’s nationalism but without the Islamic aspect. 

We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
We want full employment for our people.
We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
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.
We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

Intro

While the The Black Panthers were charged with a Felony of conspiracy to invade assembly chambers, the group would pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of disrupting a legislative session but the The Panthers’s actions had other consquenses, beacuse of their armed presence the Mulford’s bill was swifty approved. Mulford act even added a new clause barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the Capitol. Worse yet the demonstration in sacramento had drew the attention of the FBI. head J. Edgar Hoover, and he wanted to be sure “black nationalist hate groups” were further scrutinized. 

In 1956, the FBI formalized and consolidated its intelligence-gathering and disruptive activities into the first counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO, orginally it was designed to specifically targeting the Communist Party USA, during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, the FBI did monitored the activities of civil rights activists but did little to actively and directly repress the Civil Rights Movement. However, by the end of 1963, as the movement gained international coverage and support, the FBI started undertaken extensive efforts to hound and discredit Martin Luther King Jr, and it continued these activities until his death. 

In the summer of 1967, the FBI dramatically shifted the direction and intensity of its repression of black political organizations. the summer of 1966, Stokely Carmichael first called for Black Power, and the Black Liberation Struggle entered a new phase. Organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Revolutionary Action Movement declared common cause with the Vietnamese in opposion to American. By the following year, the movement had become more nationalist and more confrontational. Urban rebellions raged in black areas throughout the country. Black nationalist orgs called for armed resistance against the state. Thousands of young blacks rebelled and rioted. On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. joined the younger generation of black movement leaders in publicly denouncing U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam.

Meanwhile in 1967, Richard Nixon was running for President and he positioning himself to capture the conservatives in the Democratic Party who were deeply troubled by social unrest and wanting to attract as much of the white vote as he could, Nixon conflated crime, rebellion, civil rights, and student protest. The gamble worked. On November, Nixon was elected the 37th president of the United States. From the first days of his presidency, Nixon took a personal interest in the Black Panther Party. 

In March 4, 1968, J. Edgar Hoover expanded the COINTELPRO against black nationalists and other dissident groups, In 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Black Panthers as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and By 1969, the Black Panthers and their allies had become primary COINTELPRO targets. 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 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would even support of efforts to repress “ideological organizations,” the IRS established the Activist Organizations Committee in July 1969 to “collect basic intelligence data” on members of the Black Panther Party, organizations that did business with the Black Panther Party, and other “radical” political organizations. The FBI supplied the IRS with the names of individuals and organizations. The IRS, in return, supplied detailed personal financial information and also targeted these individuals for special enforcement of tax regulations. As assistant FBI Director William Sullivan later testified, the Bureau "did not differentiate" between Soviet spies and suspected Communists in black nationalist movements when deploying surveillance and neutralization tactics.

The Black Panthers wouldnt initially realize the depths of the actions of the FBI against them but they also have other issues to deal with, On October 28, 1967, John Frey of the Oakland police force sat alone in his patrol car on Willow Avenue at the corner of Seventh Street. Officer Frey had developed quite a reputation. Frey is not what could be categorized as a good cop. Frey had been implicated in numerous incidents of racism. Frey had been called to a dispute between a black grocery clerk named Daniel King and a white man without pants on who claimed King had stolen his pants. According to King, Frey called him a nigger and held his arms so the white man could beat him. Several hours after Frey had released King, Newton and Gene McKinney drove by his parked patrol car. Frey had a list of twenty cars that the Oakland police had identified as Black Panther vehicles. One of the cars on that list was “Volkswagen, 1958, sedan, tan, AZM489.” Frey called for backup and pulled out after the Volkswagen and turned his lights on to make the stop.

Now there are conflicting accounts of what happened near the corner of Seventh and Campbell Streets in Oakland that morning. Officer Herbert Heanes testified that upon responding to the request for backup, states he asked Newton to step outside of the vehicle while Officer Frey informed Newton of his arrest. Officer Heanes stated that he heard a gunshot, which struck his arm, as Officer Frey accompanied Newton to the patrol car. During an ensuing physical altercation between Officer Frey and Newton, Officer Heanes shot Newton in the midsection. Officer Heanes further testified that he heard additional shots fired, though there was some discrepancy as to the order of the gunshots in the altercation. A nearby bus driver, however, witnessed the shooting. The bus driver testified that Newton produced a concealed firearm that "went off," striking Officer Heanes and that Newton also used this firearm to fire several more shots into Officer Frey, who ultimately was pronounced dead on arrival at Merritt Hospital.  

What is clear is that at some point during the early hours of the day, Newton and Gene McKinney arrived at David Hilliard’s house. Newton had a gunshot wound in his abdomen, so David and his brother June Hilliard rushed Newton to the Kaiser Hospital emergency room. Newton was later arrested that morning in the emergency room at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland.

At his murder trial, Newton testified in his own defense that Officer Frey hurled racial epithets at him and struck him in the face. Newton further testified that after Officer Frey allegedly brandished his firearm, he experienced a "sensation like boiling hot soup had been spilled on my stomach. Newton testified that after hearing a "volley of shots," he remembered nothing else until he arrived at Kaiser Hospital. Newton "expressly testified that he was 'unconscious or semiconscious' during this interval." In order to corroborate that testimony, the defense called Dr. Bernard Diamond, who stated that Newton's recollection is consistent with a gunshot wound to the abdominal cavity, which is likely to produce a "profound reflex shock reaction" that can lead to a loss of consciousness.

Soon the story was all over the news: Officer Frey was dead, and Huey P. Newton, minister of defense for the Black Panther Party, had been arrested as the prime suspect in his murder.

From the start, Newton and the Black Panther Party viewed the trial as a political contest rather than merely a legal proceeding. The Party put an issue of its newspaper with the picture of Huey in his wicker throne on the front page and the bold headline, “Huey Must Be Set Free!” After explaining that Huey had been shot and arrested and that Officer Frey had been shot and killed, the editorial discussed the case in terms of racial politics:

The shooting occurred in the heart of Oakland’s black ghetto. Huey is a black man, a resident of Oakland’s black ghetto, and the two cops were white and lived in the white suburbs. On the night that the shooting occurred, there were 400 years of oppression of black people by white people manifested in the incident. We are at that crossroads in history where black people are determined to bring down the final curtain on the drama of their struggle to free themselves from the boot of the white man that is on their collective neck. . . . Through murder, brutality, and the terror of their image, the police of America have kept black people intimidated, locked in a mortal fear, and paralyzed in their bid for freedom. . . . They are brutal beasts who have been gunning down black people and getting away with it. . . . Huey Newton’s case is the showdown case. . . . We say that we have had enough of black men and women being shot down like dogs in the street. We say that black people in America have the right to self defense. Huey Newton has laid his life on the line so that 20,000,000 black people can find out just where they are at and so that we can find out just where America is at.6The Panthers argued that Newton was resisting the long-perpetrated oppression of blacks by police when he was shot and imprisoned. The Party turned the state’s accusations against Newton around, using the case to mobilize support and put America on trial.

In the weeks leading up to Newton’s arrest, the Bay Area antiwar movement had experienced its own conflict with the Oakland police. As resistance to the Vietnam War intensified, white antiwar activists began getting experinsing police repression which deepened their alliances with the Panthers. By October, the draft resistance movement was gathering steam. No longer were the students and the antiwar activists simply Americans expressing their view within established channels. Inspired by Black Power, emboldened by the rebellions, many saw themselves as subjects of empire, much like the Vietnamese. They rejected the legitimacy of the war, the draft, and the government more generally, seeking to resist by any means

Following Newtons Arrest, Eldridge Cleaver's role became “increasingly important, especially in the Party’s collaboration with the white groups in the Free Huey movement. the "Free Huey" campaign developed alliances with numerous students and anti-war activistst. “Free Huey!” bumper stickers appeared all over the Bay Area, this movement helped receive invaluable support for the "Free Huey" campaign and help advance their anti-imperialist political ideology that linked the oppression of antiwar protestors to the oppression of blacks and Vietnamese.

One of those groups was the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), founded by Ramparts editor Robert Scheer and other leaders of the Community for New Politics. The Peace and Freedom Party sought to promote a strong antiwar and antiracist politics. At the time the party was exclusively white and began approaching black organizations for support. SNCC and other black group and all of them had rebuffed them. So working with the The Black Panther Party offered much needed legitimacy to the Peace and Freedom Party’s racial politics. The Panthers also keenly understood the isolation of the black radical movement and that the Struggle needed nonblack allies, particularly progressive white allies.

Later in 1968, Newton was convicted of manslaughter in the killing of Officer Frey and sentenced to two to fifteen years in prison. He was acquitted of wounding the other officer. Many Panthers and their supporters were disappointed that their efforts had not saved Huey. Newton’s lawyer, Charles Garry, promised to appeal the decision. Many police saw the sentence very differently and wanted Newton executed for the killing of Frey.

Eldridge Cleaver's used his new fame to be the candidiate for the Peace and Freedom Party nomination for president of the united states in 1968, The Black Panthers saw the presidential campaign as an opportunity to build influence and broaden their support within the Left, they had no plans on actually winning the presidenteny 

Eldridge Cleaver’s run for president represented disaffection with both the Democratic and Republican Parties and was, The idea was to use the traditional election process to win an audience and to organize for the radical movement. ”As Eldridge explained the Panthers sought to “focus attention on a revolutionary leader with a revolutionary program within the conventional political context. In practical terms, this kind of campaign becomes another tool for political organization for black power.  We want to pull people out of the Democratic Party, out of the Republican Party, and swell the ranks of the Black Panther Party and the Peace and Freedom Party.”  Cleaver and his running mate Judith Mage received 36,571 votes (0.05%)

April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m., Martin Luther King Jr. stepped onto the balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee and was shot and killed by James Earl Ray. Two days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr with riots raging across cities in the United States, On the evening of April 6, three carloads of armed Black Panthers pulled over by police on Union and 28th Streets in west Oakland. Eldridge Cleaver was driving the lead car, an old white Ford with a Florida license plate that a member of the Peace and Freedom Party had donated to the Panthers. The entourage included David Hilliard, seventeen-yearold Lil’ Bobby Hutton, and six other rank-and-file Panthers. Cleaver opened the door and walked around to the passenger side of the Ford, reportedly to urinate. A moment later, several police cars pulled up and shined a spotlight on Cleaver. Words were exchanged, then gunfire. The Panthers ran for cover, the police quickly cordoned off a two-block area, and neighbors gathered in the streets. An hour and a half later, Cleaver, having been shot in the foot and rear, his lungs burning from tear gas and firebomb smoke, emerged stark naked from a burning basement, surrendered, and was taken into custody. But Bobby, 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. 

Although intialy 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, in an attempt to provoke a shoot-out. 

At the funeral for Hutton, two thousand people packed into the Church in Berkeley, with a hundred uniformed Black Panthers forming the honor guard. The Reverend E. E. Cleveland called down “shame” on the powerful for failing to improve the lot of blacks. After the service, the Panthers held an outdoor rally and proclaimed that Bobby Hutton had been assassinated because of his Panther politics. The Black Panther leadership charged that Hutton had posed a challenge to racism and that the police had killed him to repress this challenge.

Following the incident, Eldridge Cleaver was changed with charged with attempted murder and jumped bail to flee to Cuba in late 1968. Initially treated with luxury by the Cuban government, the hospitality ended upon reports Fidel Castro had received information of the CIA infiltrating the Black Panther Party. Cleaver then decided to head to Algeria where he stayed till 1975

In early 1968, the Oakland-based Black Panther Party began organizing a chapter in Los Angeles and  Eldridge Cleaver recruited Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter to organize a chapter of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, after the Watts riots, the Black Power movement in Los Angeles centered on the Black Congress. After the Watts rebellion in 1965, Black Power organizations had proliferated and one of those groups was the Black Congress. the dynamics in the Black Congress quickly changed with the rise of the black panthers. The politics developed by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver resonated with young blacks in Los Angeles, providing new conduits for change. the Black Panthers had a compelling ideas about of black people’s suffering, a vision for advancing black dignity and power, and they had created a organization to advance that vision.

But by early April of 1968, the Black Panther Party was essentially a local organization based in Oakland, with a satellite chapter beginning to organize in Los Angeles. Although the Black Power movement was brewing in most major U.S. cities, the Panthers had not yet achieved national influence. This would quickly changed in 1968. The murder of King changed the whole dynamic of this country. That one event changed how the Panthers were perceived by the black community. Seeking effective ways to advance the black communities’ interests, young blacks flocked to the Black Panther Party and its politics of armed self-defense. The Panther did very little recruiting. Instead, young activists from around the country contacted the Panthers asking how they could join, and the Party responded by opening new Black Panther offices. These office were in 25 major cities like Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia,  and Washington, D.C. Peak membership was near 5,000 by 1969. Young blacks were drawn by the Panthers’ strategy of armed self defense against the police because it gave them a powerful means to resist and avoid repression. Facing the resistance of organized and armed young blacks, police departments could no longer maintain brutal policing practices with competely impunity. By arming and organizing, and advocating revolution, Black Panthers challenged the legitimacy of the state and By framing this practice of armed self-defense as part of a global anti-imperialist struggle, the Panthers were able to draw broad support both from other black political organizations and from many non blacks. These allies provided crucial financial, political, and legal support that enabled the Panthers to mount top-notch, unprecedented legal defenses against the many charges they faced, and they often wontheir cases in court. Without allied support, the Party would have quickly dissolved. Instead, the Black Panther Party rapidly expanded to become the most influential black movement organization in the United States by the late 60s

As Party membership and influence grew, so did push back by the state. The Panthers sought meaningful activities for members that would serve the community, strengthen the Party, and improve its public image. So they deployed community programs and they quickly became a cornerstone of Party's activities nationwide.The Black Panther community programs began in early 1969 under Bobby Seale’s leadership, marking an important transformation in the Party’s political practice. The idea were 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. In the fall of 1968, Eldridge Cleaver went into exile to avoid returning to prison when his parole was revoked. With Huey Newton in prison, Seale, a staunch advocate of community programs since his days working in the government poverty program in Oakland, became primarily responsible for setting Party policy. 

The Panthers launched its first Breakfast for Children Program at Father Earl A. Neil’s St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in west Oakland. Parishioner Ruth Beckford-Smith coordinated the program. When the Party decided to organize a breakfast for children at St. Augustine’s, Beckford-Smith volunteered to coordinate the program and helped organize it. The first day the program opened it served 11 children. By the end of the week, the program was serving 135 children daily at St. Augustine’s. 

When Bobby Seale went to prison that 1969, David Hilliard, chief of staffof the Party, took the reins of the national Party organization. Hilliard continued to give priority to development of the Free Breakfast for Children Program, and during his tenure, the program spread like wildfire, becoming the most important Panther activity

The breakfast program was an important public face of the Party but it was also matched the Panthers politically and ideologically. The Party claimed to have fed twenty thousand children in the 1968–69 school year and said it hoped to feed one hundred thousand in 1969–70  these breakfast services enjoyed widespread support within black neighborhoods. The Free Breakfast for Children Programs adopted a rigorous routine. Members had to be at the sites early in the morning, in time to prepare the food and be ready for the arriving children before they ate and then headed off to school. Transporting some of the children from home to the site and then to school was another vital yet often trying logistical job. While the children ate their meal, members taught them black liberation lessons consisting of Party messages and black history. 

Businesses donated food and supplies to the local breakfast programs mostly due to altruism and the promotion of positive community relations but Businesses that chose not to help out faced theParty’s wrath. At times the Panthers’ persuation blended into harassment and sometimes strong-arming. Far more common were boycotts and pickets of businesses that refused to assist the programs. Equally common was the tactic of calling out, or publicly shaming, those who refused to help. Also Churches and other community-based organizations that refused to sponsor or allow breakfast programs on their premises, faced similar treatment.

Politically,the breakfasts shed light on the government’s failure to address childhood poverty and hunger. The U.S. government spent only $600,000 on breakfast programs in all of 1967 but Government-sponsored breakfast programs grew rapidly as the Panthers pioneered their free breakfast program. By 1972, government-sponsored breakfast programs were feeding 1.18million children out of the approximately 5 million who qualified for such help

The success of the Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children Program led the Party to initiate free health clinics and a range of other commuity programs. Many blacks were poorly served by the health care system, some had never seen a doctor. Once again Despite the health care initiatives within the federal government in the urban communitiy residents received only limited, if any, health care attention.

The Panther run free medical clinics relied on the volunteer services of local doctors, medical students, interns, residents, nurses, and community folk as well as donated or low-rent clinic space. These public Panther-run clinics, offered services to all who came, black and nonblack alike. In some cities, like Baltimore, the Party formed coalitions with like-minded individuals and groups to run free clinics in the community. For the Party, the focus was plain and urgent: to address within its limited resources the pressing health care concerns of poor black communities that sorely lacked adequate medical facilities and professionals.

Clinic services “included first aid care, physical examinations, prenatalcare, and testing for lead poisoning, high blood pressure, and sickle cell anemia.” If necessary, clinician referred patients to specialistsfor follow-up care. There were at least eleven such clinics, Chicago Free Medical Care Center was one of the best-run and most-respected Panther health clinics, serving over two thousand people in its initial two months. Medical teams from the clinic went door-to-door assisting people with their health problems, and The clinic’s staff included obstetricians, gynecologists, pediatricians, and general practitioners.

Despite these successes, COINTELPRO still aimed to dismantle the Black Panther Party by targeting their social/community programs, No aspect of the Black Panther program was of greater concern to the FBI than the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which fostered widespread support for the Panthers’ revolutionary politics. Hoover explained that one of the FBIs primary aims for in counter intelligence for the Panthers is to keep the group isolated from the moderate black and white community that supported it. the FBI denounced their efforts as a means of indoctrination and took extensive measures to undermine support for the Panthers’ breakfast program. For example, agents sent forged letters and incendiary propaganda to supermarkets to dissuade them from providing food, impersonated concerned parishioners to dissuade churches from providing space for the program and regularly harassed and intimidated program participants, supporters, and Party workers

By Late 1968, the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party was no longer a saterall office, The Party had consolidated its status as a leading black nationalist organization in the LA, rivaled only by Ron Karenga’s US organization

the FBI would take note ofthe growing tensions between the Black Panther Party and the US organization in Southern California, the FBI sought to escalate the conflict preparing an anonymous letter for which would be sent to the Los Angeles Black Panther Party supposedly from a member of the ‘US’ organization in which it will be stated that the youth group of the ‘US’ organization is aware of the [Black Panther Party] ‘contract’ to kill RON KARENGA, leader of ‘US,’ and they, ‘US’ members, in retaliation, have made plans to ambush leaders of the [Party] in Los Angeles. 

Tensions between Ron Karenga’s US organization and the Panthers came to a head over the leadership of the Black Student Union on the UCLA campus and the direction of the new Black Studies Program. Karenga, was a formal community adviser appointed by the university administration, supported one candidate for director of the new program; the Black Panthers wanted a role in the decision-making process and opposed Karenga’s candidate

The university administration planned to announce the new director of the Black Studies Program on January 21. At two large and confrontational meetings of the Black Student Union on January 15 and January 17, afterward no resolution was achieved. Most of the black students appeared to support the Black Panther position. Elaine Brown and John Huggins would be elected to an ad hoc committee to represent Black Student Union concerns, and John Huggins and Bunchy Carter emerged as leading contenders in the upcoming election for the Black Student Union presidency.

At about 2:40 p.m. on January 17, as the Black Student Union adjourned and about 150 students poured out of the meeting at Campbell Hall, the conflict became violent. Ranking members of the US organization fired guns at Los Angeles Black Panther leaders; they shot John Huggins in the back and Bunchy Carter in the chest, killing them both. Fleeing campus, Panthers gathered at the home of John and Ericka Huggins, Soon about 150 police officers surrounded the house and kicked down the door. Police arrested all seventeen Panthers in the house.

Initially, no members of US were arrested. the National Lawyers Guild, and other Panther allies quickly mobilized to raise bail and activate a legal defense. Within a few days, all charges against the Panthers were dropped, and the Panthers were released. Funeral services for Bunchy Carter took place at the Trinit yBaptist Church in Los Angeles on Friday, January 24. At Bunchy Carter’s funeral,Bobby Seale denounced Ron Karenga as a “reactionary” and a “tool ofthe power structure.” The Panther leadership believed from the start that the attack was part of a government plot and the Panthers were correct in surmising that the killings were not part of the normal course of conflict between the Partyand a rival black nationalist organization. Evidence would emerge later showing that the state had a hand in stirring up the conflict that contributedto the killings of John Huggins and Bunchy Carter. Yet  we still do not know today, to what extent US members were working directly with the FBI orpolice and whether the killings were planned and implemented underdirection of the government.

Later the Police would issued warrants for the arrest ofthe Stiner brothers, George and Larry, members of US, who had been present at the time of the killing. The Stiner brothers turned themselves in to police and received life sentences for conspiracy to commit murder.

In Chicago Fredrick Hampton would come to prominence in chicago as the chairman of the illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party

Hampton grew up in Maywood, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago. In September 1967, he became the president of the youth council for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where he would demonstrated his natural leadership abilities

around the same time Bobby Rush who had grown up with the Chicago Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and began seeking partners to build aPanther chapter in Chicago. When Rush heard Hampton speak at a black leadership conference at the headquarters of the Chicago gang Black P. Stone Nation, he knew Hampton was his key to success; Rush recruited him to join the Panthers. Rush and Hampton, along with Bob Brown — Rush’s SNCC director — organized what would soon become illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party

The FBI believed that Hampton's leadership and talent for communication made him a major threat among Black Panther leaders. It began keeping close tabs on his activities. Investigations have shown that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was determined to prevent the formation of a cohesive Black movement in the United States. Hoover believed the Panthers, Young Patriots, Young Lords, and similar radical coalitions that Hampton forged in Chicago were a stepping stone to the rise of a revolution that could cause a radical change in the U.S. government.

The FBI opened a file on Hampton in 1967. It tapped Hampton's mother's phone in February 1968 and placed Hampton on the bureau's "Agitator Index" as a "key militant leader".[30] In late 1968, the Racial Matters squad of the FBI's Chicago field office recruited William O'Neal to work with them; he had recently been arrested twice for interstate car theft and impersonating a federal officer. In exchange for having his felony charges dropped and receiving a monthly stipend, O'Neal agreed to infiltrate the BPP as a counterintelligence operative.

O'Neal would join the party and quickly rose in the organization, becoming Director of Chapter Security and Hampton's bodyguard

In Chicago in the late 1960s, gangs were an important political forcein black neighborhoods none more so than the Blackstone Rangers. From their start in the early 1960s, the Rangers had focused on community building as an adjunct to their illegal activities, which included drugtrafficking and extortion. As a result, they constituted a sort of parallel government on the South Side, protecting members of their neighborhood from other gangs and the police and providing some community services. By the late 1960s, they had swallowed up most of the smaller gangs in the area as part of the “P. Stone Nation” 

In December 1968, having quickly built a powerful Panther base in Chicago, Fred Hampton entered discussions with Jeff Fort, leader of the Rangers, about merging the Panthers and the Rangers. The merger promised to boost the Panthers’ membership and street presence. Hampton suggested to Fort that by joining forces,  Fort was interested in a merger, The FBI saw the potential merger as a political threat and sought to foster conflict between the two groups. The Chicago FBI felt that spreadingfalse rumors that the Black Panther Party leadership was disparagingFort “might result in Fort having active steps taken to exact some formof retribution towards the leadership of the Panthers. As discussions deteriorated, and the Chicagooffice of the FBI suggested to headquarters that the time was right toprovoke the Rangers to take violent action by sending a forged letterto Fort. The FBI field office suggested sending the letter to Fort rather than Hampton because Fort was more likely to respond with violence. The FBI’s effort may have helped prevent a merger between the Panthers and the Rangers, but it did not precipitate widespread violence between the groups. Hampton and Fort figured out that the government was attempting to create a deadly conflict between them and decided not to take the bait

In 1968, Hampton was accused of assaulting an ice cream truck driver, apparently Hampton had “appropriated” an ice cream truck, passing out more than four hundred ice cream bars—worth a total of seventyone dollars—to neighborhood children. 

In the weeks that followed, Hampton and the Chicago Panthers organized their Free Breakfast for Children Program, which opened on April 1, 1969. Within two weeks, the Panthershad fed more than 1100 children, drawing community support and also making it hard to ignore the political dimensions of Hampton’s case. During his trial that April, Hampton appeared on a local television show publicizing the free breakfast program,and appealing for public support for the Panthers. In April 9, 1969, Hampton was convicted of robbery and assault but released on bonding the per sentencing hearing,  Hampton planed to appeal the conviction on the grounds that newspaper articles about the Panthers during the trial had prejudiced the jury.

Following the ice cream trial and the attention it brought, Hampton called the Chicago Panthers’ first press conference, Hampton announced that the Chicago Panthers intended to establish a community patrolof police, open liberation schools throughout the city, and set up free health clinics.

The Chicago Panthers sought to mobilize a broad New Left alliance in support of Hampton. While Hampton was out on bail,

On Monday May 26, with Illinois state attorney Edward V. Hanrahanpublicly pressuring the judge, Fred Hampton was sentenced to two to five years in prison for robbery and assault

By the end of May, advancing their community programs and alliancepolitics in the face of overt repression, the Panthers were buildinga strong organization in Chicago. 
As the Chicago Panthers grew in number and political strength, state efforts to repress them escalated.

The Chicago FBI worked closely with local law enforcement, That June, as the FBI began coordinating raids on the Chicago Panther office. special squad of nine Chicago police officers was assigned to report directly to the Special Prosecutions Unit, which in turn was working closely with the FBI Racial Matters Squad.
June 4, the FBI raided the Chicago Black Panther headquarterson Without presenting search warrants, theyproceeded to sack the office and arrest the eight Panthers present. TheFBI agents told the press they had found several guns and ammunition

Rush said the FBI agents left the office in completedisarray, creating more than $20,000 in property damage, includingconfiscatinga safe containing $3,000, which the Panthers planned to use to equipa health clinic they hoped to open in July. Rush described the raid as partof a concerted national effort by the FBI to crush the Panthers, citingsimilar raids in Detroit, New York, Connecticut, San Francisco,Indianapolis, Des Moines, and Denver. Michael Klonsky, area leaderof the Students for a Democratic Society.

On Tuesday June 10, 1969, a Cook County grand jury indicted Fred Hampton, his bodyguard William O’Neal, and fourteen otherleading members of the Illinois Black Panther Party on charges thatincluded kidnapping and unlawful use of a weapon. The state’s attorney,Edward V. Hanrahan, said that the charges stemmed from the kidnapping and torture of a woman who had stored guns for the Panthersand then hidden them. Bail was originally set at $100,000 for most ofthe accused but only $10,000 for O’Neal. Hampton was never convicted onthe charges, but William O’Neal was later exposed as a provocateur working secretly for the FBI.

On the morning of July 14, 1969, Larry Roberson and fellow PantherGrady Moore were selling the Black Panther newspaper whenthey saw two police officers questioning black patrons about a suspectedtheft of two baskets of produce from a nearby market. Accordingto the Panthers, the police had lined up more than a dozen people —mostly older black men — against the wall and were harassing them.The police maintained that they were simply investigating a reportof stolen produce when Roberson and Moore approached and askedthem what they were doing. The officers said that when they told Robersonand Moore to leave, they became belligerent, calling themselves “protectors of the community.” The Panther reported that Moore and Roberson were not armed, but police told the press thatRoberson drew a gun and started shooting at them. Roberson was shot three times by police and taken by ambulance to the county hospital,where he was admitted in good condition. Both Moore and Roberson were arrested on charges of attempted murder. No police officers were wounded.

Two weeks later, Chicago police raided the Black Panther office a second time. Twenty-four police cars shut down Madison Street in front ofthe Panther office, and the officers attempted to storm the building. Hampton was in jail on the ice cream charges, and no Panther leaderswere in the office at the time, but three rank-and-file Panthers held off police for thirty-five minutes until they ran out of ammunition. Eventually, police shot through the steel door and madetheir way upstairs, beating the Panthers with rifle butts, knocking one of the memebers unconscious and breaking his jaw, badly injuring the others,and arresting them on charges of attempted murder. Then, the police used gasoline to burn down the upper half of the Panther office.

On Saturday October 4, police raided the Chicago Panther headquarters a third time. The raid was in many respects a repeat of the July 31 police raid. Officers’ bullets riddled the front door and walls of the office. The police set the office on fire, smashed equipment, and destroyed stores of food designated for the free breakfast programs. After Panther resistance abated, police arrested six Party members on charges of attempted murder, alleging that theyhad tried to snipe at police from the headquarters rooftop. Again, Panthers
alleged that the police intentionally set the fire. Neighbors carried water up to the office in buckets to help extinguish the flames. Hampton,from jail, maintained that again police took money intended forthe breakfast program. With the repeated raids and arrests of local Panthers that fall, manyblack organizations lined up in support of the Panthers. Many believedthat such repression posed a threat to all black people: what could bedone to the Panthers could be done to them as well.

December 4, dozen police officers executed a search warrant for illegal weapons and raided Fred Hampton's apartment. William O’Neal provided a map out the exact layout of Fred Hampton’s apartment Armed with this information They did not bring the standard raiding equipment they had used in previous Chicago Panther raids, such as tear gas or sound equipment; instead, they carried a Thompson submachine gun, shotguns, a carbine, several pistols. The assault was quick and decisive. Within fifteen minutes, Fred Hampton was dead, shot twice through the head while he lay in bed. Peoria, Illinois, Panther leader Mark Clark, in Chicago attending a statewide meeting of Party leaders, was also dead. The seven other Panthers in the apartment—four with bullet wounds—were arrested on charges of attempted murder, aggravated battery, and unlawful use of weapons. 

Friday December 5, the morning after Hamptonand Clark were killed, police raided Bobby Rush’s South Side apartment, but Rush was not there. 

Bobby Rush would give tours of the apartment where Hampton and Clark had been killed. He told thereporters and community residents who lined up to see the apartment, The New York Times reported, “Most ofthe rooms and walls appeared to be free of scars, pockmarks and bulletholes. There were clusters of bullet holes and the gouges of shotgunblasts in the places wherethe Panthers said the two men had been killed and four others had been wounded. . . . There were no bulletmarks in the area of the two doors through which the police said they
entered.

On January 6, Bobby Rush informed the press that results of a blood test of Fred Hampton in the independent autopsy revealed a heavy dose of Seconal, a drug that induces sleep. Rush charged that the killing ofHampton was a government conspiracy and that Hampton had been drugged by an FBI infiltrator to facilitate his murder. Hampton’s fiancée, Deborah Johnson (Akua Njeri), who was eight months pregnantat the time of his killing and was arrested in the raid, later recounted Hampton’s strange behavior the night of the raid. She said that Hampton never got up from bed during the raid and remained silent. He woke up and slightly lifted his head as guns were being fired but barelymoved and never said anything. After the first wave of shooting, police arrested Johnson and pulled her out of the bedroom and into thekitchen. She said she heard a police officer say, “He’s barely alive, he will barely make it.” Then the police started shooting again. Then a police officer said, “He is good and dead now.” 

There was an immediate outpouring of support for Hampton, The Panthers used the public attention to organize support through popular education, offering more tours of the apartment where Fred Hampton and Mark Clark had been murdered. The National Black Panther Party understood and sought to portraythe killing of Hampton and Clark as political assassination and as partof a national government conspiracy to repress the Party

Early in 1969 Connecticut Panther chapter opened and was led by Ericka Huggins They offered political education classes, tried to start a breakfast program, regularlymade public speeches, and started attracting attention. The FBI paid close attention to the New Haven Panthers, tappingtheir phones and infiltrating their ranks with several undercover informants.In March, FBI Director Hoover fiercely reprimanded the NewHaven field office for not producing hard-hitting counterintelligencemeasures for dealing with the Panthers there

In early May, New Haven Police Department wiretaps revealed that Bobby Seale would be speaking at Yale University later that month to raise funds for legal fees. The police passed on this information to the FBI. On Saturday May 17, New York Panther George Sams showed upat the New Haven Panther office with Alex Rackley in tow. Rackleywas nineteen years old, homeless, desperate, and eager to please. Hehad joined the Panthers in New York looking for a place to fit in. Samswas a bully who had been expelled from theParty for stabbing another Panther in Oakland, Sams was reinstatedat the request of Stokely Carmichael, whom he had once served as a bodyguard.

Sams had shown up in New York earlier that spring as police began arresting most of the Party leadership there in multiple raids. He called himself “Crazy George” and claimed that he was sent “to straightenout” unreliable Party chapters. When Sams arrived in New Haven, he claimed that he had been sen tby the national headquarters to weed out spies. he immediately took control of the fledgling New Havenchapter. He charged Rackley with being a spy and set up a kangaroo court to interrogate him. With the help of Warren Kimbro and young new Panther recruit Lonnie McLucas, Sams tied Rackley to a chair and tortured him. The two beat Rackley with a club, twisted coat hangers around his neck, and poured boiling water over him. On the evening of May 20, three days after Sams had brought Rackley to New Haven, Sams announced that he would drive Rackley to the bus station and let him go. With Kimbro and McLucas, Sams took Rackley to a wooded swamp in the suburbs. Sams handed Kimbro his .45 and Kimbro shot Rackley in the back of the head, killing him. Sams then took the gun back and handed it to McLucas, telling him to finish Rackley off. McLucas shotRackley in the chest.

The police and FBI had gathered extensive information on the New Haven Panther headquarters through paid informants and wiretapping. The night of May 20, Kelly Moye, a police informant, called Nick Pastore, the head of the information division of the New Haven police, and warned him that Sams and others were about to transport something important in Sams’s green Buick Riviera. New Haven policechief James Ahern later said that he suspected that the Panthers had kidnapped someone and that the hostage was in transit. however, did nothing to stop Rackley’s torture or murder, later claiming that they did not know he was being tortured and that they had tried to follow the car that carried Rackley to his death, but it had eluded them.The next day, police recovered Rackley’s body, and late that night,they conducted raids to arrest Ericka Huggins, Warren Kimbro, LonnieMcLucas, Francis Carter, and four other young female Panthers onmurder charges

When police arrested the Black Panther suspects in New Haven theday after Rackley was murdered, Sams had already left town. But he left behind the tape recording he had made of Rackley’s torture, and policehad no trouble locating and confiscating the tape when they arrestedthe New Haven Panthers. After those arrests, Sams traipsed in and out of various Panther offices nationally, with police and FBI raids following close behind. 

In early August of 69, Sams was arrested in a gun incident at the fledgling Panther chapter in Halifax, NovaScotia, and he was soon extradited to the United States for trial, where he turned state’s evidence. Within days, the Justice Department created a special unit with the “purpose of federal prosecutionagainst the [Black Panther Party].” 15 On August 19, on the basis ofSams’s testimony, Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party,was arrested in Berkeley, California, on capital charges of conspiracyto commit murder for allegedly ordering the killing of Alex Rackley.The state made a deal with Kimbro, offering him a light sentence in exchange for turning state’s evidence and pinning the murder on Panther higher-ups. Kimbro and Sams each served four years and were released. Lonnie McLucas maintained theinnocence of the Party leaders and was slated to face trial.

Panther field marshal Landon Williams was also in New Haven during Alex Rackley’s torture and murder, and Sams testified that he had been taking orders from Williams and that Williams in turn was takin gorders from Black Panther national headquarters. It is clear that Sams directed the gruesome events, and in the end, the state found insufficientevidence to support Sams’s claim that he was following orders from Williams. Williams pled guilty on lesser charges of conspiracy to murder and received a suspended sentence in November 1971. Hoping to pin the murder on national Panther leaders Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, the state prosecuted a long and costly trial in anattempt to convict them. But its efforts failed, and all charges against Seale and Huggins were dismissed.

During the early 1970s, the BPP, was weakened by exturnal attacks, legal problems, and internal issues, and rapidly declined as a political force. The most devastating cause of the BPP’s demise was programs ran by the Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at breaking up the party. So in epsidoe 3 of the black panther party we discuss the delince