If you were living in a majority-Black urban center in the mid-to-late 1960s, it wouldn’t be unlikely for you to cross paths with members of the Black Panther Party. By now, we know the images: leather jackets and black berets, gun in one hand, the other raised in a fist. But caught between utter condemnation and over-romanticization, the Black Panthers are difficult to situate. It can be challenging to discern what they actually believed and what to make of their teachings today, in an era fraught with just as much political polarization as the 1960s.
Originally called The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the organization was formed in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Newton and Seale first met as students at Merritt College and connected in shared grief over the assassination of Malcolm X and feelings of disappointment and disillusionment in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. They believed that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolence had been ineffective in bettering conditions for African Americans outside the South. The pair envisioned a different solution—rather than better integrating African Americans into collective American culture, they were determined to change the country’s culture altogether.
The Panthers were not shy with their beliefs. Among other things, the Party’s Ten Point Program called for the removal of all Black men from jails and prisons, universal healthcare, jobs for all, affordable housing, and an end to all wars. If you registered as a member, you’d likely be given a reading list to get you up to speed. To better understand the Panthers’ politics, we’re unpacking a few of the titles on that list:
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
“I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”
Newton and Seale were devoted followers of Malcolm X and believed that armed self-defense and international solidarity were central to Black liberation. Malcolm X’s belief in Pan-Africanism—the shared solidarity of colonial resistance movements across the African continent—closely mirrored the international resistance movements that Newton and Seale admired, particularly guerilla warfare in Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. Malcolm X’s autobiography chronicles the activist’s intellectual journey from childhood to involvement in organized crime and subsequent time in jail, to his political and spiritual awakening. His story inspired Newton and Seale—they used his teachings to lay the groundwork for the Panther movement. Despite their college educations, Newton and Seale didn’t believe higher education was key to Black self-improvement. Instead, they strove to educate, give opportunities to, and provide moral and spiritual purpose to the uneducated, unemployed, and poor, a noble goal Malcolm X no doubt would have approved of.
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
“In the colonial context, the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values.”
Frantz Fanon’s groundbreaking work provides a psychiatric and psychological exploration of the dehumanizing effects of colonialism, explaining how colonial violence manifests in one’s internal prejudices and sense of self. If you’re wondering why an American political party was reading the work of a French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, your confusion is understandable. The Panthers not only admired and stood in solidarity with anti-colonial movements around the world but saw Black Americans themselves as part of an “internal colony” within the larger “mother country” of the United States. The Panthers saw the relationship between African Americans and the U.S. as a natural parallel to that of a colonized people and their colonizer: forced to endure the same systems of exploitation, imprisonment, and dehumanization. Their hope was likely that new recruits would read Fanon and find themselves relating to the experiences of people a world away.
The Lost Cities of Africa by Basil Davidson
“If there has been a change of emphasis during the 1960s, it has been mainly toward righting a balance of appreciation of the so-called ‘stateless societies’—of all those many polities which preferred to get along without political chiefs or kings or central governments…”
Basil Davidson’s book aimed to bring awareness to the often ignored and forgotten achievements of African life and civilization during the pre-colonial period. For the Panthers, a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of African life, culture, and achievements was crucial to undermining the negative stereotypes and identities American education instilled in young Black people. Members of the Panther Party and the larger Black Power movement often donned dashikis and renamed themselves with traditional African names to reclaim a feeling of pride, self-confidence, and personal history they were denied. Seeing themselves not through the negative and often criminalizing lens of white culture, but as proud descendants of a rich, diverse, and ancient people was not only personally empowering but deeply transformative for thousands of Black people across the country.
Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion by Herbert Aptheker
“The Turner Revolt was the extra drop of water that overflows a cup, it was the precipitated pebble that causes ripples in a pond. And just as the effect of that one drop or that pebble would be nil, or almost indiscernible were there an empty cup or a dried-up pond, so the significance of the Revolt would have been very slight if it had not been true that it came at about the end of a decade of depression and some five or six years of intensive agitation among the slaves in this hemisphere.”
In the summer of 1831, a band of more than 40 enslaved people led by carpenter and preacher Nat Turner killed more than 60 slave-owning residents of Southampton County, Virginia. Herbert Aptheker’s account of one of the largest and most violent revolts in the nation’s history was the first full-length study of its kind. While the Black Panther Party grew more militant and aggressive in its later years, its initial stance was one of community protection and self-defense. They publicly bore arms out of a desire to protect Black communities from rampant police violence.
This fear was not unfounded; local law enforcement in collaboration with the FBI’s COINTELPRO counterintelligence program has been proven to have systematically targeted the Black Panther Party. In October 1967, Huey P. Newton was shot in the stomach by Oakland Police officers and jailed for the alleged murder of Officer John Fry. Newton himself stated that the Oakland police had pulled him over more than 50 times from 1966–1967. By 1969, 26 members of the Black Panther Party had been killed by law enforcement, and 750 Party members had been jailed, effectively ending the organization.
Despite the Panthers’ relatively short existence, their impact on American culture cannot be overstated. They embodied a sophisticated political framework that saw global struggles as profoundly interconnected, yet they were also highly visible in their local communities. The Party sponsored legal aid offices, clothing distribution, local transportation, and health clinics and sickle-cell testing centers in cities across the country. They operated nine “Freedom Schools” with their own distinct curriculum and pedagogical approach. Most popularly, their free breakfast program fed 20,000 children a day at its height and would go on to directly inspire the free breakfast program found in public schools today.
If you want to explore the full Black Panther Party Reading List, you can do so here, and for more information, check out…
“The Black Panther Party: Crash Course Black American History #39,” Crash Course, May 24, 2022.
“The Black Panther Party's 1968 Recommended Reading List,” Radical Reads, June 10 2022.
