The Black Panther Party: Community Service or Street Gang?

By Matt Murdock, Esq.

Justice has a sound. It is the click of a hot plate in a church basement at daybreak when a child’s stomach stops growling. It is the rattle of a clip snapped into a rifle while a patrol car slows at the curb. It is the crinkle of onionskin legal paper as a judge reads instructions that will decide whether a man’s life turns on a comma. In the late 1960's, all three sounds carried the same name in whisper and in shout, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. If you ask the state, the Panthers were a gang. If you ask the block, they were breakfast, blood pressure cuffs, and a ride to the prison gate. If you ask me, a blind Black American lawyer who has spent too many nights listening to sirens and affidavits, they were a paradox because America made them one. The state starved neighborhoods, then called the cooks dangerous. The state battered neighborhoods, then called the bandages subversion. This review does not choose between caricatures. It evaluates the law, the speeches, the facts, and the fallout, with the same care I give to a jury instruction that could flip a verdict.

I. Introduction, a dichotomy manufactured, a duality embraced

The Panthers were born in a very specific geography and temperature, Oakland, California, October 1966, in the heat of industrial decline and the cold of police impunity. The Great Migration had filled shipyards and rail lines. Deindustrialization took the jobs back, but the police stayed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were monumental shields against Southern statutes, but they did not stop a Northern nightstick. For a generation raised on the promise of constitutional equality and the practice of street level humiliation, nonviolence felt like an unreciprocated handshake. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale read the situation plainly. If the state will not feed us or protect us, we will do both, and we will read the Constitution out loud while we do it. Their survival programs and their armed self-defense were not opposites, they were paired lungs. The state taught the Panthers bilingual law, one dialect for the courtroom, the other for the curb.

II. Origins, the Oakland crucible and the Panthers’ first language of law

Oakland was not an abstraction to the founders. Huey P. Newton, born in Monroe, Louisiana, raised by parents who carried the discipline of Southern survival into Western streets, learned to read the world before he learned to read a page. He later taught himself to read, starting with Plato, then moving through Hegel and Marx and California’s Penal Code. Bobby Seale, born in Liberty, Texas, learned order in the Air Force and organizing at Merritt College, where he and Newton pushed for Black studies at a time when universities thought Blackness was an extracurricular activity. The first cadre included Elbert Big Man Howard, an Air Force veteran whose voice carried through newsprint when leaders were jailed. Sherman and Reggie Forte, whose family history included active resistance to the Ku Klux Klan, brought memory to the Party’s doctrine of self-defense. Bobby Hutton, sixteen, the first recruit, the first treasurer, and soon the first martyr, brought the cost.

What the founders wrote on October 15, 1966, the Ten Point Platform and Program, was not a flyer. It was a legal and philosophical indictment and a plan of governance. They demanded freedom, full employment, decent housing, education that tells the truth, an end to police brutality, fair trials by juries drawn from the community, and peace. They justified those demands by quoting the Declaration of Independence and by invoking the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms. They framed Black neighborhoods as internal colonies, a Fanonian diagnosis that explained the police as an occupying force, not as neutral mediators. They fused Malcolm X’s insistence on self determination, Robert F. Williams’s practice of disciplined self-defense, and Marxist analysis of exploitation. The program’s last clause, land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace, read like a closing argument delivered to a constitutional jury, we do not ask for charity, we assert rights.

The legal context mattered. California law then permitted the open carrying of loaded firearms under specified conditions. The Panthers read that statute like a permission slip. When Assemblyman Don Mulford moved to revoke the permission with a bill that would become chapter 960, Statutes of 1967, codifying restrictions on loaded open carry, the Panthers did not write a letter to the editor. They walked into the legislature.

III. Speeches as architecture, the Panthers build with words

The Party spoke before it fired and it fed. Bobby Seale’s Executive Mandate No. 1, read on the Capitol steps in Sacramento on May 2nd, 1967, framed the Mulford bill as a racial disarmament plan while the state failed to disarm terror in uniform. He told the cameras that the time had come for Black Americans to arm themselves legally for self defense, that the Second Amendment belonged to Oakland as much as it belonged to Orange County. The point was not bravado. The point was a constitutional argument delivered in a theater that forced the nation to look.

Huey Newton’s speeches, In Defense of Self-Defense and The Correct Handling of a Revolution, taught members and the public that a gun without theory is a souvenir and theory without programs is a sermon. Newton insisted that survival pending revolution required building clinics, schools, and breakfast lines alongside deterrent patrols. He did what good trial lawyers do, he explained the intent element. The rifle is not aggression, it is a shield that changes the calculus of a police stop and asserts citizenship in a language the state respects.

Fred Hampton’s words vibrate even if you never saw his face. He told Chicago that peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the presence of justice. He told the city that you can jail a revolutionary, but you cannot jail a revolution. He stitched together the Rainbow Coalition, aligning the Panthers with Puerto Rican Young Lords and white southern migrant Young Patriots, and he did it by speaking class out loud without abandoning race. That coalition, multiracial and working class, was the speech that frightened power more than a magazine of .30 caliber rounds.

Elaine Brown’s addresses, particularly as Chairwoman in the mid 1970's, added a second corrective voice. She told the Party and the public that revolution without women is a counterrevolution, that the school is not a seamstress for the state but a loom for freedom, and that sexism is not a side issue but a fracture that will break the movement at the first turn. Kathleen Cleaver’s public remarks as Communications Secretary refined the Party’s constitutional arguments, insisting that due process, equal protection, and the right to assemble were not abstractions but floorboards under specific homes on specific corners.

Speeches mattered because they made the Party legible to juries the Panthers would never meet. They set expectations. They defined what an unlawful search looked like in a living room on West Monroe Street. They told police that the neighborhood understood Terry stops and the difference between reasonable suspicion and an officer’s hunch, Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 1968, and that a warrantless rummage after a pretextual stop would not go unchallenged in front of a federal judge who owned a robe and a conscience in equal measure, Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 1967. The Panthers did not win every case, but they taught the block to recognize one.

IV. Copwatching, the statute book in the streets

The Panthers’ earliest practice was patrol. Two or three members in black jackets and berets, sometimes more, would follow police cruisers through Black neighborhoods, stop at lawful distance when officers made contact, and narrate rights. You do not have to consent to a search. You have the right to remain silent. You are entitled to counsel. Members carried law books, a practical prop and a promise. The rifles and shotguns were visible because visibility was the point. California’s then existing law permitted loaded open carry in public in several contexts. The Panthers exploited that legality not as an invitation to firefights but as a deterrent against beatings that never made the evening news.

Sacramento changed the script. When the Panthers entered the Capitol with lawfully carried firearms and a statement for the record, the picture traveled farther than any brief ever does. The state responded by passing the Mulford Act, narrowing lawful open carry of loaded firearms in cities. The Party had expected the restriction. They banked the publicity and used it to recruit. Meanwhile, they kept reading the Constitution to the block.

V. The Newton case, a homicide, a movement, and the appellate voice that mattered

On October 28th, 1967, Huey Newton’s car was stopped by Oakland police. Officer John Frey died from gunshot wounds, Officer Herbert Heanes was wounded, and Newton was shot in the abdomen. The details of those moments remain contested in the historical record, which is another way of saying that blood makes paperwork slippery. The law, however, is not allowed to be vague. Newton was charged and tried. In 1968, a jury convicted him not of murder but of voluntary manslaughter. The conviction energized a movement, Free Huey was a chant, a button, and a syllabus. Then the appellate court did what trial courts sometimes fail to do. In People v. Newton, 8 Cal. App. 3d 359, 1970, the Court of Appeal reversed because the jury had not been properly instructed on Newton’s unconsciousness theory as it intersected with self defense. An appellate court is not a poet, but every so often it writes a sentence that keeps a man out of a cell. Two retrials ended with hung juries, and in 1971 the state dismissed. Lesson one, instructions matter because juries obey them. Lesson two, when a defendant’s theory of defense is supported by evidence, a judge must instruct on it, or the conviction stands on procedural sand.

The Newton litigation intersected with the First Amendment’s protection of movement speech. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444, 1969, advocacy of force is protected unless it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to do so. The Panthers’ rhetoric around armed self defense lived near that line, but the courts did not bless dragnet prosecutions as punishment for speech. When prosecutors framed Panthers as conspirators for printing words and carrying guns that were then lawful, juries and appellate panels resisted.

VI. Expansion and the politics of survival, how syrup and gauze rewrote budgets

By 1969, the Panthers had more than two thousand members across dozens of chapters. The most powerful weapon in that arsenal was not a long gun, it was breakfast. The Free Breakfast for Children program began in Oakland church basements, then spread to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia, and beyond. At its peak, Panthers fed tens of thousands of children daily. Teachers noticed that hungry children who ate became students. Principals noticed that late arrivals began to show up on time if a plate was waiting. Parents noticed that a movement that filled a stomach was easier to trust than one that only filled a slogan. Washington noticed too. The federal School Breakfast Program, first piloted in 1966, evolved into a permanent, scaled national program in the 1970's partly because it is hard to tell voters you oppose feeding children who cannot learn on an empty stomach. The Panthers made refusal look cruel in daylight.

The clinics followed. People’s Free Medical Clinics opened in multiple cities, staffed by volunteer physicians, nurses, and medical students who believed medicine belongs to the people who need it. Sickle cell anemia, long neglected by a medical establishment that barely taught it, received the kind of attention that results when a community tests itself. The National Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act of 1972, Pub. L. No. 92-294, 86 Stat. 136, authorized federal research and screening funding. You can argue about causal chains, but if you were there on a folding chair in a storefront where a Panther took your blood and explained what the results meant for your children, the statute reads like a receipt.

Transportation to distant prisons became policy. The Free Busing to Prisons program stitched families to incarcerated loved ones, which is another way of saying it stitched communities to themselves. The Oakland Community School, developed under Elaine Brown’s leadership and recognized by the state, modeled education that taught Black American history, political analysis, and math without asking anyone to choose between them. The SAFE program, Seniors Against a Fearful Environment, paired Panthers with elders for walks, shopping, and a kind of civil escort that turned city blocks into safe corridors. None of these programs were charity. They were dual power experiments, parallel institutions that made the state look lethargic and indifferent. The Panthers understood a simple legal strategy. Make the government compete against its own promises.

VII. Women as the spine of the Party, leadership, labor, and the law inside the law

If you only looked at photographs, you might assume the Panthers were a male story. If you stood in a kitchen at five in the morning or a clinic at two in the afternoon or a school at three, you learned otherwise. Women ran much of the Party’s daily machinery. They authored curriculum, cooked, tested, counseled, and organized. They also led. Kathleen Cleaver served on the Central Committee as Communications Secretary. Ericka Huggins organized in Los Angeles and New Haven and later directed the Oakland Community School. Elaine Brown chaired the Party from 1974 to 1977, managed coalitions that helped elect Lionel Wilson as Oakland’s first Black American mayor, and kept program work alive while others chased gun smoke.

The law inside the law is the set of norms a movement uses to decide its own disputes. Here, the record is mixed. Women challenged sexism and won space, but they also endured violence, including the notorious beating of Panther administrator Regina Davis at Huey Newton’s direction, an event that catalyzed Brown’s resignation. A movement that teaches the state to respect communities must teach itself to respect women. When it fails, it sabotages the very legitimacy it fights to build in front of juries public and private.

VIII. Chicago, coalition as threat, assassination as policy

By late 1969, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program had defined the Panthers as the greatest threat to internal security. Director J. Edgar Hoover’s words were not rhetorical. COINTELPRO’s explicit goals included preventing the rise of a Black messiah who could unify and electrify militant nationalism. The number of approved actions against Black organizations ran into the hundreds, and the Panthers became the primary target. The most infamous case was in Chicago. Fred Hampton, twenty one, deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter, had organized robust survival programs and a Rainbow Coalition that united Black, Latino, and white working class radicals under a common class analysis without erasing racial realities. That kind of coalition terrifies mayors, police chiefs, and federal field offices whose careers depend on dividing the poor.

The Bureau’s informant, William O’Neal, rose within the chapter to become Hampton’s trusted security chief. He delivered a detailed floor plan of Hampton’s apartment and, according to later testimony and contemporaneous evidence described in litigation, administered a barbiturate that left Hampton deeply sedated on the night of the raid. In the early hours of December 4th 1969, a tactical team from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office, with Chicago police and federal involvement, stormed the apartment. Mark Clark, standing guard in the living room, was shot and killed. A single round discharged from his shotgun as his body collapsed, the only Panther shot fired that night. The police fired between eighty two and ninety nine rounds, depending on the count, many focused on the bedroom where Hampton lay next to his eight and a half months pregnant fiancée, Deborah Johnson, now Akua Njeri. Survivors heard an officer ask whether Hampton was still alive, then two more shots, then a declaration, he is good and dead now.

The official story was a shootout. The walls said otherwise. When the Panthers opened the apartment to the press, the directionality of the bullet holes told a one way story. A federal grand jury later confirmed the asymmetry, and the ensuing Section 1983 suit, Hampton v. Hanrahan, 600 F.2d 600, 7th Cir. 1979, alleged a conspiracy under color of law between local and federal actors to violate constitutional rights. The Supreme Court’s decision in Hanrahan v. Hampton, 446 U.S. 754, 1980, narrowed procedural avenues but did not absolve the facts. After thirteen punishing years, the city, county, and federal government settled for 1,850,000. Money cannot resurrect. It can signal that discovery pried open a vault the government preferred to keep closed.

Legally, the Hampton litigation intersects with doctrines that matured in the same era. Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, 403 U.S. 388, 1971, recognized a direct action for damages against federal agents for constitutional violations. United States v. United States District Court, the Keith case, 407 U.S. 297, 1972, held that domestic national security surveillance still requires a warrant, rejecting a blank check theory that executive branch agents had scribbled out for themselves. Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1, 1972, refused to open the courthouse door for claims of a chilling effect based on Army intelligence surveillance of civilians, but the dissent mapped a caution we ignore at our peril. The Church Committee report, S. Rep. No. 94-755, 1976, finally aired the Bureau’s dirty laundry, detailing COINTELPRO tactics that fit better in a manual for colonial policing than in a constitutional democracy. The Hampton case sits at that crossroads, showing how federal power can be deputized into local violence and how civil discovery and public record can stitch together truths that criminal courts never fully map.

IX. Los Angeles and New Haven, lawfare and spectacle

Los Angeles saw two crucibles in 1969. In January, Panthers Alprentice Bunchy Carter and John Huggins were murdered on the UCLA campus by members of the US Organization in a conflict knowingly stoked by FBI disinformation. That was not simply inter group rivalry. That was a federal agency pouring fuel onto a fire it had set with forged letters and cartoons to turn a movement inward. In December, the newly formed LAPD SWAT unit laid siege to the Panthers’ office on Central Avenue for hours. The raid was a field test of paramilitary tactics that would soon be normalized in American policing. The legal residue included prosecutions that often fizzled once the smoke cleared and jurors returned to the elements of charged offenses rather than the elements of fear introduced by local news.

In New York, the Panther 21 case began in April 1969 with an arrest sweep and a pageant of conspiracy counts. For two years, defendants sat in cages and the press wrote the story prosecutors pitched. In May 1971, a jury deliberated for only a few hours and acquitted every defendant on every count. The acquittals underscored a structural reality. Bail and pretrial detention can punish the acquitted. They also foreshadowed later disclosures that Dhoruba bin Wahad’s conviction was tainted by the state’s failure to disclose exculpatory material, a Brady violation that led to his release in 1990. The law moves slowly, which is a polite way of saying that some men age while the state looks for documents it misplaced on purpose.

New Haven produced the ugliest kind of internal wound. The torture and murder of Alex Rackley, a suspected informant, became a proof text for prosecutors and a moral indictment that the Party could not outrun. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins were charged in connection with the killing. The first trial ended with a hung jury for both, and charges were eventually dropped. The case drained resources, stained reputations, and became a fulcrum for COINTELPRO narratives that conflated one crime with a movement wide character. Here the law’s neutrality is not neutral. One act becomes the lens through which juries view every defendant who shares a beret, while the state’s systematic lawlessness remains processed as an exception.

X. Internal fractures, the slow bleed from within

The Panthers were not demolished only by raids and indictments. They were also eroded by paranoia, drugs, and the gravitational pull of violent men who mistook discipline for domination. The Newton and Eldridge Cleaver split in 1971 codified two paths. Newton, newly freed, argued that open gunfights had become both strategically foolish and a gift to prosecutors. He urged investment in survival programs and Oakland electoral politics. Cleaver, from exile in Algiers, denounced that pivot as surrender and called for urban guerrilla war in alignment with international revolutionary movements. The FBI forged letters to each, telling Newton that Cleaver planned to have him killed and telling Cleaver the mirror story. Words became fists and bullets between factions. The Party’s internal security turned inward with a vengeance, and informant rumors became pretexts for torture. The murder of bookkeeper Betty Van Patter in 1974 remains a wound and an allegation that refuses to scab. Even without a charge, the perception of financial crimes and witness silencing curdled public support.

Elaine Brown’s tenure as chair from 1974 to 1977 represented a high wire act above a canyon. She professionalized the Oakland Community School, built city hall coalitions that delivered tangible gains, and tried to purge criminality without collapsing the organism. Her resignation after Newton authorized the beating of Regina Davis was a final verdict that the Party could not reorder itself from within while retaining legitimacy without. In 1982, the Party dissolved in everything but memory. In 1989, Huey P. Newton was shot and killed in West Oakland by a member of the Black Guerilla Family during a drug dispute, a tragic, human end for a man who had tried to turn theory into breakfast.

XI. From The Cotton Club to Justice Hall, the closing argument

The state called the Panthers a gang because it is easier to prosecute a category than to defend a policy. A gang does not write a platform that quotes the Declaration of Independence, build a school the state accredits, run clinics that pioneer sickle cell testing, and then sue the government that kills its leaders and win a settlement after thirteen years of trench litigation. The community social protection label alone fails too because it sanitizes the rifle. The rifle mattered. It changed calculations. It drew cameras. It made the Constitution audible in a precinct that preferred static. The Panthers were a revolutionary organization that provided immediate care while asserting the right to defend that care. The state responded with legislation, loaded charges, informants, raids, and a domestic counterinsurgency blueprint later cataloged by Congress itself. In doing so, the state proved the Panthers’ central claim about who holds the monopoly on violence and how communities can narrow that monopoly with law and solidarity.

If you want doctrines, here they are in a sentence. Speech is protected unless it directs and is likely to cause imminent lawless action, Brandenburg. Stops require reasonable suspicion tethered to specific, articulable facts, Terry. Searches for evidence require warrants absent limited exceptions, Katz and its progeny. Municipalities can be liable when policies and customs cause violations, Monell. Federal agents can be sued for constitutional wrongs, Bivens. Domestic security surveillance still obeys the Fourth Amendment, Keith. Prosecutors must disclose exculpatory evidence, Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 1963. And the law of lethal force and protest policing in democratic societies must be planned and controlled by necessity and proportionality, say Strasbourg, Pretoria, Ottawa, and common sense.

If you want a prescription, here is mine, written in the cadence of the block because that is where law lives when it is not in a book. Feed people because hungry children cannot wait for perfect politics. Staff clinics because triage is not a metaphor. Escort elders because safety is a civil right. Train neighborhoods to record police and to recite rights because memory fades when fear rises. Build coalitions across race and class because a demand in one voice is a complaint, a demand in many voices is a negotiation. Audit budgets because a city’s morals are line items, not press conferences. Use courts when they are honest, organize when they are not, and remember that written law is a promise that people make real or leave to rot.

XII. Postscript in the hallway outside Justice Hall

I measure a movement not only by what it destroys, but by what it builds and what it makes the state admit it should have been building all along. The Panthers built habits the government later adopted. The breakfast line became policy. The clinic became a funding stream. The copwatch became a smartphone held steady by a teenager who has learned to speak calmly while the red light blinks. The Party is gone as an organization. Its vocabulary, its case law, and its simple moral math are not. Even now I can hear a pot banging on a church stove at six in the morning, a patrol car idling across the street, and a judge’s voice rolling through a jury instruction corrected on appeal. It is the sound of a country deciding whether its promises are marketing copy or enforceable contracts. The Panthers, with speeches and pancakes and rifles, made that decision unavoidable.

By Matt Murdock Esq.