On October 15, 1966, two young Black men in Oakland, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, sat down and drafted a 10-Point political program for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (later the Black Panther Party). It opened with a centuries-long demand that still hasn’t been met: “We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black community.” Within three years, the organization they built had chapters in dozens of cities, thousands of members (most of them teenagers and young adults), and the full attention of the most powerful capitalist state on earth.

Sixty years later, the Black Panther Party is remembered mostly through images: the berets, leather jackets, rifles on the steps of the California Capitol. Celebrations of their aesthetic, of their form, and not their content abound. Even though those images are real and they remain inspiring; they do not tell the whole story. To honor the Panthers properly, we have to understand what they actually built, the political reasons for their formation, why the U.S. government moved to destroy it, and what it means for those of us organizing now in the same class struggle they led. Assata taught us… what exactly?

Sons and daughters of Malcolm X: From civil rights to human rights

The Panthers didn’t emerge out of thin air. Earlier that year, on June 16, 1966, Stokely Carmichael, a Black radical activist born in the Caribbean, had graduated from Howard University and was the newly-appointed Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), said it was time for “Black Power” to a surprising effect. It’s unlikely Carmichael knew that this particular vocalization of Black Power as a rallying cry would almost immediately become a central feature, inspiration, and site of contestation in the Black community and the Black liberation struggle in the U.S., provoke terror in the white power structure, and traverse the globe to guide the struggles of the oppressed for self-determination and socialism worldwide. As it reverberated globally, it would even transcend racial categories, let alone outlast Carmichael’s life, well after he took the name Kwame Ture. This wasn’t the first time these two words were put together in this order. Richard Wright wrote a book with the title the previous decade, and fellow SNCC member Willie Ricks “had begun testing out the phrase ‘Black Power’ in the community” [1]. Why was it time for Black Power?

Malcolm X was assassinated in February the year before. The Civil Rights Movement forced the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965 respectively. Starting in the 1940s, the ranks of the Nation of Islam swelled and its members engaged in prison resistance and litigation and combatted white supremacy in and out of prisons. Months after Malcolm formally split from the NOI, he identified the “Black Muslim movement” as the force “that pushed the civil rights movement” [2]. Across the world, from Vietnam and Cuba to the liberation movements of Africa, colonized peoples were rising up and overthrowing their oppressors. Meanwhile, Black workers in Northern and Western cities found new legislation changed little about daily life and the slum housing, joblessness, and police who operated like an occupying army that defined it.

A new generation of Black youth looked at that picture and concluded, like Black revolutionaries before them, that asking the system for equality was not enough. The founding members of the Panthers saw the organization as building on the legacy of the late Malcolm X, elevating the struggle from a fight for civil rights within the framework of American capitalism to a human rights struggle internationally connected across the Third World (Africa, Asia, Latin America).

The Party’s first public work was armed patrols that followed police through Oakland’s neighborhoods, legally observing arrests and informing residents of their rights. Their first recruit was Bobby Hutton, who was there for their first public display of armed Black Power. Huey, Bobby, and Hutton were driving around North Oakland on police patrol when they started tailing a police car. All three men were armed with weapons and a law book. The guns were clearly visible, and they got pulled over into a heated exchange with the officers. People rushed out of their homes to watch three young Black men wield the white man’s law in their favor. The cops eventually left, but not without writing Seale a ticket for improperly securing his license plate [3].

For several months, their armed patrols continued and attracted a small but dedicated cohort of recruits. New recruits procured weapons and they sold Mao’s Little Red Book to fundraise for them. When California lawmakers moved to ban the open carry that made those patrols possible, the Panthers marched into the state Capitol in Sacramento in May 1967. The nation took notice and the Party was no longer confined to Oakland or the West Coast.

At its peak the Party had roughly 40 branches and chapters, from Winston-Salem to Milwaukee, Houston to Seattle, Baltimore to Omaha. Historian Judson L. Jeffries argues that popular memory has shrunk the Panthers down to the Bay Area and a few famous personalities [4]. What gets lost is the unglamorous daily work local members did in their own cities, often at great personal cost.

Defining Black Power: Revolutionary socialism and internationalism

The Panthers described their ideology as the historical experience of Black people understood through Marxism-Leninism. They saw racism in the United States not as a matter of bad attitudes but as a structure rooted in capitalism. They argued that Black liberation could not be won by swapping white bosses for Black ones, or by building up “Black capital” to compete inside the same system.

The Panthers studied Marx, Lenin, Mao, Fanon, and Malcolm, and required their members to study too. They organized on the principle of democratic centralism: open debate, then unity in action, with members held to  rules of discipline that were codified not long after their formation [5].

While Carmichael, who joined the Panthers for a brief period, never presented a clear articulation of what Black Power was, how to get it, or for what purposes to wield it, the Panthers did. In an interview with the Movement, Newton said:

Black Power is really people’s power. The Black Panther Program, Panther Power as we call it, will implement this people’s power… Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny. We advocate and we aid any people who are struggling to determine their destiny. This is regardless of color. The Vietnamese say Vietnam should be able to determine its own destiny. Power to the Vietnamese People [6].

Newton could give a clear articulation because he had a clear worldview, although as a whole the Panthers–for various factors–weren’t able to develop a consistent ideological outlook throughout their various chapters. In general, however, as their chief ideologue argued early on, “the ideology of the Black Panther Party is the historical experiences of Black people in America translated through Marxism-Leninism” [7]. For most of the Party’s existence, this was the world outlook adopted by its leading members. This was the basis of their solidarity, which reached across every line the ruling class uses to divide working people. They opposed the war in Vietnam, backed Palestinian liberation when few in the U.S. would, and in 1970, a year after Stonewall, publicly supported the gay liberation movement.

Survival pending revolution

The Panther’s survival programs were born out of a crisis of discipline, not charity. Paul Alkebulan’s history traces the breakfast program to late 1968. Newton was in prison, rallies had dried up, and the Party’s community advisers were complaining about members drinking in public, attacking hippies, and committing robberies. At a meeting on the problem, member Wendell Wade noted the hungry children who passed his house every morning. Bobby Seale turned the remark into a plan. In January 1969 the Central Committee halted recruitment, stepped up political education, and expelled members who broke discipline. On January 20, 1969, the first Free Breakfast for Children Program opened at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, and the programs soon became mandatory for every branch [8].

The programs grew to nearly two dozen. By one estimate the breakfast program alone fed around 50,000 children in some 45 cities. Each branch built programs around its own city’s conditions:

Survival programs, not mutual aid

The Panthers did not call their programs mutual aid, and the label obscures what made them powerful. Since the pandemic wave of community fridges and aid networks in 2020, the breakfast program has often been held up as the ancestor of today’s mutual aid. The admiration is sincere  but the comparison flattens a revolutionary strategy into a service model. “Mutual aid” comes from Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 book of that name and the anarchist tradition that followed [9]. As usually practiced, it stresses horizontal, reciprocal exchange among equals, decentralized networks without leadership or party line, and building structures outside the state that model a society without one. The Panthers stood on different ground.

Three features set them apart from charity or social services [10].

1. They were run by the Party under Party discipline. Members staffed them as political assignments. In Chicago, Wanda Ross spent her days soliciting food and money from residents, businesses, and Black professionals in corporations, raising around $600 a week. The programs answered to the Party, not to donors, foundations, or the state [11].
2. They carried a political argument. The Party’s manual for the programs, reissued by the Huey P. Newton Foundation, specified requirements not just for staffing and equipment but for how it would raise the community’s consciousness [12].
3. They were a means of organizing the people and building a base.

In a polemic against the Revolutionary Action Movement, Newton stated the simple truth that you can’t go underground without first learning from, educating, working with, and earning the trust of the people:

“Many would-be revolutionaries work under the fallacious illusion that the vanguard party is to be a secret organization that the power structure knows nothing about, and the masses know nothing about, except for occasional letters that come to their homes by night. Underground parties cannot distribute leaflets announcing an underground meeting. These are contradictions and inconsistencies of the so-called revolutionaries [13].”

Newton described such programs as a “tactic and strategy by which we organized the people.” They built trust, recruited members, moved the newspaper, and mobilized communities for rallies, legal defense, and later elections.

“A lot of people think it’s charity what we do,” Fred Hampton said, adding that each program moved people from one stage to the next until they are not just receiving socialism but supporting and building it. David Hilliard recalls one representative instance:

“He tells a story. An old lady comes into the People’s Church. Fred asks her if she likes socialism. She hates socialism. But she loves the Free Breakfast Program. This is what happens, he says. First you have free breakfasts, then you have free medical care, then you have free bus rides, and soon you have—FREEDOM! [14]”

The programs were built to indict the state, not replace it. Illinois Central Staff member Yvonne King explained that the Party never believed it could meet all of Black people’s needs. The point was to heighten the contradiction: when Panthers fed thousands of children every morning, parents started asking why the government, with all its resources, wasn’t. That is a demand on power, not a withdrawal from it. The Ten-Point Program demanded that society guarantee housing, education, health care, and employment.

The programs were not reciprocal exchanges. They were a party serving the people, a concept the Panthers took from the Chinese revolution. Members gave their labor as revolutionary duty for a political return: trust, consciousness, and new cadre.

The Panthers knew the programs could be seen as reformist. What made the difference was was who ran them and toward what end. A breakfast program run by the capitalist state and one run by the revolutionary camp in a capitalist state are qualitatively different things.

Cooptation and a harsher critique

The state understood the stakes. In a May 1969 memo, J. Edgar Hoover called the breakfast program “the best and most influential activity going for the BPP.” Police raided breakfast sites in Los Angeles and destroyed food collected for Chicago’s program. At the same time, the government moved to take the programs over. Jakobi Williams documents that Mayor Daley, embarrassed by the Panthers’ success, ordered city officials to launch their own breakfast program, and Chicago soon began using federal funds to serve hot breakfasts in poor neighborhoods. David Hilliard notes that the federal government took over both free breakfast and sickle-cell testing. Scholars credit the Panther program with helping drive expansion of the federal Child Nutrition Act [15].

That is a real victory: children still eat breakfast in public schools because the Panthers proved it could be done. But, it is also a warning. Once the state delivers the service, a program with no organization and no political line behind it has nothing left to offer.

Alkebulan pushes this critique further. He argues the programs were limited because they dealt only with distribution, not production. A capitalist government can distribute goods through social agencies; that is not socialism. The programs were vulnerable when the government, with far greater resources, stepped up its own outreach. After 1971, as the programs became the Party’s main reason for existing, he argues they should have been built on a firmer economic base, through cooperatives, community-owned clinics, and nonprofit schools with paid staff.

In Marx’s 1864 address to the International Workingmen’s Association, he praised cooperatives but argued they could never free working people on their own; conquering political power was the decisive task. The Panthers had no realistic path to building enough productive capacity to create a socialist sphere inside the most powerful capitalist state in the world. Newton did talk about opening clothing and shoe factories, but as more survival programs, not as an economic foundation for socialism.

The programs were survival pending revolution: a way to keep people alive, win their trust, raise their consciousness, and build the Party’s base as part of a strategy for revolution, one that would take power and transform production itself. Judged on those terms, the question isn’t whether the programs built a socialist economy within the imperial core; it’s whether they built a mass base and a revolutionary organization. Between 1969 and 1971, they did that remarkably well.

Where Alkebulan’s critique bites is after 1971. Once the split and repression pushed revolution off the horizon and the programs became the Party’s main reason for existing, they were no longer survival pending anything. They became social services run on donations and volunteer labor, competing with a state that had far more resources. At that point an economic base, through cooperatives, community-owned clinics, or nonprofit structures, might have helped them survive for a little longer, although even if that were possible the determining factor is, once again, the primacy of the political program.

The honest conclusion is not that one model wins. Feeding people is necessary but never sufficient. The programs mattered because they were tied to an organization, a political line, a mass base, and a strategy for power, and they weakened as those ties frayed.

None of this is a knock on people running aid networks today. Both traditions reject the condescension of charity and trust the oppressed to organize themselves, and some former Panthers use “mutual aid” loosely for exactly that reason. The point is precision. If we want the Panthers’ results, we need their method.

For the Panthers, the programs were a form of Black Power.

Chicago’s Panthers

Black Power, as we saw above, was people power; it was unity. Nowhere was the Panthers’ commitment to unity sharper than in Chicago. The Illinois chapter, led by a 20-year-old from Maywood named Fred Hampton, opened its first breakfast site in 1969 at the Better Boys Foundation on South Pulaski Road. By May there were sites on the North and South Sides too, and five on the West Side alone, in community centers, Black churches, and white ethnic Catholic parishes. The chapter fed more than 400 children every morning, ran the Jake Winters free clinic in North Lawndale where officials claimed there was no need for one, and forced landlords to fix furnaces through its emergency heat program.

In 1969 Hampton built the original Rainbow Coalition, uniting the Panthers with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the Young Patriots, poor white Southern migrants in Uptown. The Young Lords launched a breakfast program, and the Panthers trained the Young Patriots to run one of their own. Hampton’s line was simple: you don’t answer racism with racism, you answer it with solidarity.

That is exactly what made him dangerous. Williams shows that Chicago saw an unusually close partnership between the FBI and the police Red Squad, sharing informants and files. The chapter was raided four times in 1969; one raid trashed the food collected for the breakfast program. Its members were arrested 111 times that summer, mostly on minor charges meant to drain money from the programs into bail. On December 4, 1969, police working from a floor plan supplied by FBI informant William O’Neal raided the West Monroe Street apartment where Hampton slept. They killed him and Peoria Panther leader Mark Clark. Hampton was 21.

The work outlived him. After the 1971 split, the Illinois chapter sided with the national office’s turn toward survival programs, coalition building, and electoral politics. Former members kept clinics and breakfast programs running after the chapter disbanded in 1974. Williams argues the coalition politics the Rainbow Coalition pioneered were a major reason Chicago elected Harold Washington in 1983, a debt few politicians have acknowledged.

Why the state destroyed them

In 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the Panthers the greatest threat to the internal security of the country. The threat wasn’t breakfast. It was an organization that could win the loyalty of the most oppressed, give them a political education, and unite them with other oppressed peoples under a socialist program.

Through COINTELPRO, the FBI and local police infiltrated chapters, forged letters to inflame internal disputes, set the Panthers against other organizations, raided offices, and killed members. The FBI’s roster of informants in Black communities grew from about 3,300 in 1968 to more than 7,500 by 1971. Leaders were tied up in trials on trumped-up charges for years; others, like Marshall “Eddie” Conway, spent most of their lives wrongfully incarcerated and still others, like Mumia Abu-Jamal, still remain behind enemy lines.

The programs themselves were a target. Hoover singled out the breakfast program as the Party’s most dangerous activity. In Winston-Salem, the FBI pressured a community college not to let Panthers enroll in the EMT training they needed to run their free ambulance. Pretext arrests drained program money into bail.

The government fought with two hands. With one, it was repressed. With the other, it co-opted, taking over the Panthers’ breakfast and health initiatives and funding agencies to deliver a depoliticized version of what the Panthers built from below.

When revolutionaries serve the people that service must be politicized. A food program without a political line becomes another nonprofit compounding into the already existing non-profit industrial complex; a political line without meeting needs stays abstract. The Panthers fused the two. They were above all popular educators. Their various community and survival programs were educational tactics. Fred Hampton is explicit about this:

“Our Breakfast for Children program is feeding a lot of children. We sayin’ something like this—we saying that theory’s cool, but theory with no practice ain’t shit. You got to have both of them… We have a theory about feeding kids free. What’d we do? We put it into practice. That’s how people learn. A lot of people don’t know how serious the thing is. The Breakfast for Children program is run in a socialistic manner. People came and took our program, saw it in a socialistic fashion not even knowing it was socialism” [16].

We need to tie every program to an organization and a demand. The question for any program is not only “who did we feed?” but “who did we organize, and what did we demand of those in power?”

Elections can be a school for organizing, if the base is built first. In 1973 Bobby Seale ran for mayor of Oakland and Elaine Brown for city council on a program to rebuild the city. The Party broke Oakland into nine sections, then subsections, then precincts, each with a coordinator and workers responsible for 60 to 100 voters by name. Seale finished second and forced a runoff; Brown drew more votes than he did. Neither won, but the campaign’s stated purpose was twofold: educate residents about the issues and win power. In Chicago, the Rainbow Coalition’s coalition politics carried forward into Harold Washington’s victory a decade later.

Study and political education is not optional. Panther recruits went through political education and were expected to read daily. A movement that doesn’t understand the system it’s fighting will be outmaneuvered by it.

Unity is a strategy, not a slogan. Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition shows the working class can be organized across national lines when the basis of unity is shared struggle.

Take repression seriously before it arrives. The Panthers were hit before they could build strong internal structures across a fast-growing, very young membership spread across a vast territory. Informants exploited every weakness. Accountable and collective leadership, discipline, and genuine security are not paranoia but survival. Unlike some contemporary manifestations of “security culture” that are lay down abstract and ahistorical “rules” that are often the exact opposite of what genuine security requires. The latter has to do with the internal dynamics and unity of the group. As Safiya Bukhari reflected in The Long War Before, security

The best security depends upon the internal strength of the organization and the internal principles of the people who make up the organization… The root word of ‘security’ is ‘secure.’ Inherent in this is feeling protected, safe, and guarded. This is all based on the trust we have in the entity or organization with which we are working or the people we have around us. If we trust them, we feel secure” [17].

Our movement faces increasing repression and as the power of the people’s organizations grows so too will the state’s response [18].

Be honest about mistakes. Repression was decisive, but it worked partly by widening real fractures: the 1971 split between the Newton and Cleaver factions, overreliance on a few charismatic leaders, and at times a gap between militant rhetoric and the slower work of building a real base.

Build organizations to last. The survival programs ran on donations, volunteer labor, and the endurance of very young members. In Seattle, the work demanded full days of service and study, communal living, and early mornings, a rigor that garnered the respect of the community but shrank branch membership to single digits. Unless the pace of and sacrifice required for routine organizational participation is based on a realistic assessment of the conjuncture and membership, the organization’s days are numbered.

The system was not invincible then, nor is it now. The ruling class spent enormous resources to destroy a party of teenagers because it understood what they could become if their organization was allowed to flourish. That fear is the clearest measure of what the Panthers achieved.

Sixty years on, the Panthers’ demands for housing, education, bread, justice, an end to police terror remain unmet. The best tribute we can pay isn’t just trying to mimic them in a 1:1 sense; their time is not our time. The contradictions we face are more acute and dynamic—or at the very least different—than those they faced. To learn from the Panthers means seriously grappling with their complex history and the real politics they put forth so we can advance the struggle for socialism and for the right to self-determination of the Black community.

All power to the people! Peace to you if you’re willing to fight for it!

References

[1] Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2015), 128.
[2] Cited in Garrett Felber, Those who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 8.
[3] Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 61.
[4] Judson L. Jeffries, ed., Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
[5] This explains Angela Davis’ short stint as a member of the Party. She joined after returning from her studies in East Germany and then in Frankfurt but shortly afterwards the Party banned dual membership and Davis chose to remain a friend of the Party but a member of the Communist Party.
[6] Huey P. Newton, “Huey P. Newton Talks to The Movement about the Black Panther Party, Cultural Nationalism, SNCC, Liberals, and White Revolutionaries,” The Movement 4, no. 7 (1968): 11.
[7] Cited in The Black Panthers Speak, ed. P.S. Foner (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1970/2014), 122.
[8] Paul Alkebulan, Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).
[9] Peter Kroptkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: William Heinenmann, 1902/1910).
[10] See Judson L. Jeffries, ed., On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities across America (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi Press, 2010).
[11] Jakobi Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
[12] Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs, ed. David Hilliard (University of New Mexico Press, 2008).
[13] Huey P. Newton, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution,” The Black Panther 2, no. 3 (1968): 21.
[14] David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1993), 227.
[15] Cited in Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot, 193.
[16] Fred Hampton, “Speech by Fred Hampton,” The Movement 5, no. 12 (1970): 12.
[17] Safiya Bukhari, The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison & Fighting for those Left Behind (New York: The Feminist Press, 2010), 37,39.
[18] See, for example, Liberation Staff, “One Year of NSPM-7: The Trump Administration’s Strategy to Disrupt Progressive and Left-Wing Voices,” Liberation News, 25 September 2026. Available here.

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