The Civil Rights Movement: The Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party was formed on October of 1966 in Oakland, California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The Panthers had a very important part in the Civil Rights Movement. The Black Panthers favored aggressive, violent self defense of minority communities against the U.S government. The Panthers saw that Martin Luther King’s non-violence was not successful. The party fought to engage in a political revolution for socialism by organized and community-based programs. The party’s agenda was to promote political equality across gender and color. They were active in the United States from 1966 until 1982. The Black Panther Party would patrol black neighborhoods to keep track of police activities and protect the residents from police brutality.

Leading this march was Bobby Seale. The Panthers were protesting because the state was trying to outlaw carrying weapons in public. While Bobby Seale was reading a statement of protest, the police immediately arrested Bobby Seale along with thirty other Panthers. This act sparked the Panthers and later they started to spread outside of the state of California. On October 1967, the police arrested Huey Newton for killing an Oakland cop. As a result, Eldridge Cleaver started a movement called “Free Huey.” The Panthers really devoted themselves to this movement. While this was happening, the Black Panther Party was trying to be involved in political spectrum. The party formed alliances with various revolutionaries. Stokely Carmichael, the former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, was recruited and he later became the party’s prime minister in February 1968. Stokely Carmichael was not in favor of letting whites into the black liberation movement. Carmichael believed that whites did not understand what the Panthers were doing and did not have the same effect in the movement. Stokely Carmichael said, "Whites who come into the black community with ideas of change seem to want to absolve the power structure of its responsibility for what it is doing, and say that change can only come through black unity, which is the worst kind of paternalism..... If we are to proceed

One of the reasons for this was that the SNCC was allowing whites in the effort of the minority liberation. The argument led to a gunfight at UCLA, causing the death of two Panthers. Huey Newton is then convicted in September. The government courthouse sentenced Newton to two to fifteen years in prison for voluntary manslaughter.
In 1969 Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, is formally accused of a serious crime in Chicago for protesting in the Democratic National Convention. The court does not allow Bobby Seale to choose a lawyer. Seale repeatedly says that he is being denied his constitutional right to counsel. He was simply ignored. He was sentenced to four years in prison. While in jail, Seale was charged again for killing a cop before. The trial ended in 1971 with a hung jury, meaning he was not guilty. There was many more charges made against the Black Panther Party.
On August 22, 1989 Newton is shot over a drug dispute in the streets of Oakland. Bobby Seale resigns from the party. Elaine Brown takes over the Party’s community