Huey Newton

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, in October 1966, drafting a Ten-Point Program that demanded full employment, decent housing, an immediate end to police brutality, and the release of all Black men from federal and state prisons. The party's most visible early tactic was sending armed members to patrol Oakland's streets — legally carrying shotguns and law books — to monitor police interactions with Black residents. J. Edgar Hoover declared the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and directed the FBI's COINTELPRO program to destroy them by any means available.

Newton was arrested in October 1967 after a confrontation with Oakland police in which an officer was killed. His trial became an international cause — "Free Huey" rallies drew crowds from California to London — and his manslaughter conviction was eventually overturned on appeal. But by then, COINTELPRO had done much of its work: Panther leaders across the country had been killed, imprisoned, or driven into exile. Fred Hampton, the party's gifted 21-year-old Chicago chairman, had been shot dead in his bed in a pre-dawn police raid in December 1969 — a raid later determined in federal court to have been an assassination.

The Panthers' legacy is larger than either their admirers or detractors have generally acknowledged. Their community survival programs — free breakfast for children, health clinics, legal aid, liberation schools — served tens of thousands of people in cities the government had written off, and influenced the architecture of American social programs in ways rarely credited. Newton himself descended into addiction in his later years, was shot and killed in Oakland in 1989 in what was reported as a drug dispute, at 47. The movement he helped build outlasted him in ways he did not live to fully see.