Founding, not a single meeting
The Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The title’s reference to a “first meeting” is hard to pin down. There is no widely agreed account of a single founding gathering with a precise date, and later retellings differ in detail, so this article describes the founding as a process in the autumn of 1966 rather than naming a day. The original name was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
Newton and Seale were young men who had met around Merritt College in Oakland and had been active in local Black student and community politics. They were influenced by the ideas of Malcolm X, by the rising demand for Black Power, and by frustration over how the police treated Black residents of Oakland. They also borrowed a symbol: a black panther emblem had been used in Alabama by the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which had links to SNCC organisers, and it provided a name and an image for the new group.
The Ten-Point Program
Soon after founding the party, Newton and Seale wrote a statement of aims known as the Ten-Point Program, titled “What We Want, What We Believe.” It was a practical list of demands, written in plain language. In summary, it called for:
- freedom and the power to determine the destiny of the Black community;
- full employment, decent housing and education that taught the real history of Black people in America;
- an end to police brutality;
- exemption of Black men from military service;
- freedom for Black men held in prisons and jails, and trial by juries of their peers;
- in its final point, land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.
The programme drew on the language of the Declaration of Independence, and it linked demands about daily life with a belief that Black communities needed to be able to defend themselves. Its point about military service matters in the context of the Selective Service draft and the war in Vietnam, and the same spring saw the Ali draft refusal. Whether a person agreed with the party or not, the document was a clear statement of what it was trying to do.
Armed patrols
The party’s first public activity was a form of patrol. Members followed police cars in Oakland, carrying firearms openly, which was legal in California at the time, and they were taught the law so that they could cite it to officers during stops. The aim, as the party described it, was to monitor arrests and discourage abuse. Supporters saw this as a bold assertion of rights. Police and many officials saw it as a threat, and newspaper coverage quickly turned the group into a national story.
The party was small in 1967, and it was not at that point the large organisation it later claimed to be. It grew in the next two years, helped by a newspaper that began publication in the spring of 1967 and by the recruitment of writers such as Eldridge Cleaver. The social programmes for which it later became known, such as free breakfasts for children, came later in the decade.
Sacramento, May 1967
The best known event of the party’s first year took place on 2 May 1967. A California legislator had introduced a bill to restrict the carrying of loaded firearms in public, a measure widely understood to be aimed at the Panthers. A group of about thirty party members, many of them armed, went to the state capitol in Sacramento, where Seale read a statement protesting the bill. Several were arrested after entering the legislative chamber.
The image of armed Black men at the capitol appeared across the United States and made the party famous. The bill, known as the Mulford Act, passed and was signed into law by Governor Reagan, who had taken office that January, in the summer of 1967. The result was the opposite of the party’s intention: it was weakened as a form of street activity and strengthened as a symbol.
Newton’s arrest, October 1967
On 28 October 1967 Newton was stopped by police in Oakland, and a shooting followed in which an Oakland police officer, John Frey, was killed, another officer was wounded and Newton himself was wounded. Newton was arrested and charged. Accounts of what happened that night differ sharply between the prosecution and the party, and the matter is not settled by a short summary. He was tried in 1968, convicted of voluntary manslaughter, and the conviction was later overturned on appeal.
The arrest led to the “Free Huey” campaign, which became the party’s main cause and its main tool for growth. Rallies were held in California and elsewhere, and the slogan spread beyond the Bay Area. The campaign also drew support from some white radical groups, at a time when the broader movement was divided over the role of white activists.
The wider context
The party emerged in the middle of what many called the long hot summer of violent disturbances in American cities, including the Newark riot and the Detroit uprising, which took place during the months between the Sacramento protest and Newton’s arrest. These events strengthened the view among many Black residents of northern cities that nonviolent protest was not enough, though the party’s relationship to the riots themselves was complicated, and it did not organise them.
Law enforcement response was severe. The FBI had begun a counterintelligence programme against Black nationalist groups in August 1967, and the Panthers later became a prime target of it. Several members were killed in confrontations with police in the following years, and others were jailed. The history is contested, and the facts of individual incidents are still argued over by historians and participants.
The Panthers’ emergence in 1966 and 1967 is best understood as one part of a larger turn in the civil rights movement, from legal and nonviolent campaigns toward demands for power and self-determination. How it should be assessed is still debated, but its place in the history of that period is secure.