Alabama, Newton and Seale founded the Black Panthersfor Self-Defense in
October 1966 to demand a better life by resisting the ‘racist-capitalist police
state’ [Doc. 18, p. 155]. They were joined by an ex-convict named Eldridge
Cleaver, who characterized rape as an insurrectionary act against white soci-
ety. These street toughs openly carried loaded Remington rifles and wore
black commando garb while patrolling neighborhoods for police miscon-
duct. Simultaneously, women Panthers ran popular bootstrap operations
such as community schools, and provided free shoes, legal clinics, ambu-
lance service, breakfasts for ghetto children, testing for sickle cell anemia,
and trips to visit imprisoned relatives. These programs were in line with the
Panther slogan, ‘Power to the People.’ In two years, the party attracted a few
thousand members in twenty cities.
Whites were horrified by these revolutionary cells, which also engaged
in killings, robbery, prostitution, and drug-trafficking. Accordingly, J. Edgar
Hoover expanded his war on black America by declaring that the Panthers
were ‘the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,’ an exagger-
ated claim given the group’s small size and amateurish methods. To destabil-
ize the Black Panther party, the FBI and police infiltrated the group, arrested
750 Panthers, and killed 28 members in shootouts and ambushes. Newton
was in and out of jail on fraud and murder charges until 1989, when he
was killed in a drug deal. Hoover’s war cut Panthers membership by half.
Likewise, RAM dissolved after the FBI arrested members for conspiring to
poison police officers and assassinate NAACP leaders.
Civil rights leaders despaired of this new separatist ideology, which com-
manded considerable press coverage but fed a strong white backlash. Roy
Wilkins of the NAACP called Black Power ‘the father of hatred and the
mother of violence’ and compared it to Hitlerism. A. Philip Randolph termed
it ‘a menace to racial peace and prosperity. No Negro who is fighting for civil
rights can support black power, which is opposed to civil rights and integra-
tion.’ Bayard Rustin declared that ‘Black power was born in bitterness and
frustration. It has left us with a legacy of polarization, division and political
nonsense.’ While King understood the motivation for it, the slogan was
impractical in his view, if not dangerous. With blacks comprising only 10 per
cent of Americans, ‘the American Negro has no alternative to nonviolence,’
King concluded. Such criticism notwithstanding, the radicals made civil
rights reformers more palatable to white politicians, as Malcolm X had
contended.
At the same time, King adopted a leftist critique of American society for
leaving so many people of all colors behind. Having defeated legal segrega-
tion, he decided that capitalism itself was the enemy. King saw racism and
poverty as two branches of the same problem – the exploitation of people
to maximize profits. The Vietnam war, he argued, showed how skewed132 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Black Panthers: A radical
group founded in 1966
by Huey Newton and
Bobby Seale that armed
itself against the police
and demanded decent
housing and education.