Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall

outlook of groups like the Nation of Islam, which exerted a powerful influence in the northern cities. By the mid-1960s, CORE’s attachment to the principles of Gandhian nonviolence was fading, and in July 1967 the term “multi-racial” was expunged from the organization’s constitution.¹⁰⁷

      New Black Power groups also emerged. The most (in)famous was the Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in Oakland, California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in October 1966. Inspired by the SNCC-organized Black Panther party in Lowndes County, Alabama, the Panthers opposed police brutality, called for black economic and political power, and advocated the formation of black self-help organizations to take control of ghetto neighborhoods. Imbued with the ideas of Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, the sociologist whose writings on the “cleansing” power of revolutionary violence exerted great influence on black militants, they also embraced armed self-defense. On 2 May 1967, thirty guncarrying Panthers marched into the California state capitol in Sacramento to protest a bill barring the carrying of firearms in public. The Panthers, with their anti-capitalist rhetoric and fierce opposition to the war in Vietnam, quickly became folk heroes to a generation of white radicals. But while the BPP did engage in serious community organizing, it also had a sinister, criminal side.¹⁰⁸