West Oakland was a tinderbox long before the Black Panther Party came into being — a ghetto suffering from two decades of high unemployment, overcrowded housing and heavy-handed policing. The black community considered patrolmen an occupying army. In their view, whenever a crime was committed, the police seemed too eager to blame it on a black man. Although “shoot to kill” was not official policy of the Oakland Police Department (“OPD”), in practice patrolmen could kill fleeing burglary suspects with impunity. Black and other minority residents feared officers imposing their own death penalty on the streets with no trial, no judge and no jury. Even in the courts a “jury of one’s peers” for black defendants still too often resembled the 12 Angry [white] Men in the 1957 classic Henry Fonda film.
By the late 1960s, the Vietnam War had created yet another societal fault line in America, splitting the country between war hawks and doves. The division fell largely along generational lines, with college students among the most vociferous opponents of the war. Eighteen-year-olds could be drafted and killed in war, but could not vote. “Never trust anyone over 30” became a popular slogan. The tense political situation in Oakland mirrored the nation as a whole. Older white men maintained a lock on the power structure, including the courts. The established press remained almost exclusively white male. Black and Latino youths disproportionately faced shipment overseas for an unpopular war from which they might easily come home disabled or in coffins.
In the midst of increasing unrest, in October 1966 Huey Newton and Bobby Seale launched the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense with a 10-point program that included demands for decent jobs, education and housing, exemption from the draft, trial for those accused of crimes by a jury of true peers, and an end to police brutality. Huey Newton welcomed to the Panther Party other street toughs who, like him, had criminal records and a reckless streak. Despite sympathy among liberals for many of the Panthers’ demands, the Panthers’ hostile rhetoric and ostentatious display of guns alienated and threatened far more Americans than they attracted to their cause. Older residents of Oakland’s flatlands found the Panthers too confrontational. The Panthers scared them with their open display of weapons. Even sympathizers worried the Panthers would precipitate nothing but their own deaths at the hands of the police. Yet many young blacks welcomed the brashness of the Panther Party and wholeheartedly embraced its call for armed self-defense.
In August 1965 devastating riots had raged for days in the Watts area of Los Angeles. In their aftermath, the anxious Johnson administration sent experts from Washington to tour ghettos across the country. They concluded that Oakland was “one of the most likely to be the next Watts.”14 “Some believe[d] . . . any incident [could] spark an explosion.”15 Oakland surprised observers by remaining quiet during the long, hot summer of 1967, even while race riots erupted in Detroit, Newark and other cities across the country. Following those riots, FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover ordered agents in his Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to step up operations against black nationalist “hate groups.”
COINTELPRO was a top-secret coalition put in place in 1956 during the Cold War and officially disbanded in 1971 when exposure of its unconstitutional, Gestapo-like tactics appeared imminent. It used against Hoover’s domestic targets, no-holds-barred techniques that had originally been developed for wartime use against foreign enemies. The FBI director first used COINTELPRO to disrupt and neutralize suspected American Communists. In the 1960s, Hoover employed COINTELPRO with similar zeal to go after other targets labeled subversive, including the New Left and broadly defined “black hate groups.” The shocking details later came to light through a 1970s Senate investigation — illegal wiretaps, agents provocateurs, blackmail, physical coercion of informants, and smear campaigns through FBI-friendly media. It also included murder plots and suicides goaded by threats of exposure of defamatory private information.16
Hoover did not consider anyone he labeled “subversive” to have constitutional rights deserving respect. In fact, he kept secret dossiers on politicians and celebrities of all stripes in case he felt the need to destroy their careers, too. In the mid-1960s, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were targets, as were Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed as an offshoot of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council.17 Equal rights for blacks threatened the status quo; Hoover spread word though sympathetic newspaper, radio and television reporters that these were all Communist fronts. Communists had, indeed, lent their support to civil rights movements for decades because they saw racism as America’s Achilles’ heel; but very few of Hoover’s targets in the civil rights movement fit that description.
By the early 1960s, civil rights champions focused on suppression of voting rights in the South as a major rallying cry; it was SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael who first used the black panther logo for an Alabama voting rights group he headed. In June 1966, Carmichael sent shock waves across country when he publicly split with Dr. King and disavowed civil disobedience in favor of championing “black power.” In her book Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African-American Freedom Struggle, U.C. Berkeley African-American Studies Associate Professor Leigh Raiford notes that inner city militants quickly adopted “black power” as “both a rallying cry and a declaration of war.”18 Allying themselves with the growing anti-war movement sweeping across college campuses, they linked racism at home with allegations of a racist foreign policy exemplified by the war in Vietnam.
In the summer of 1967, Oakland’s Black Panther Party had only just begun to attract Hoover’s attention as an upstart organization. The FBI was then still primarily focused on Dr. Martin Luther King and SNCC leaders like Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. Brown faced federal prosecution for inciting a Baltimore crowd to riot that July by announcing: “If America don’t come around, we’re gonna burn it down.”19 Rioters then set fire to local stores and began a looting rampage. Unrepentant following his arrest, Brown electrified the press by announcing that America was “on the eve of a black revolution.”20 From his parents’ living room in Oakland, Huey Newton observed television coverage of police brutally responding to rioters. Newton saw “spontaneous rebellions” by frustrated and angry youths “throwing rocks, sticks, empty wine bottles and beer cans at racist cops” as futile acts of desperation bound to result in “terrible casualties.” He published an essay in a newly-launched Black Panther Party newspaper in June 1967, arguing, “There is a world of difference between 30 million unarmed, submissive black people and 30 million black people armed with freedom and defense guns and the strategic methods of liberation.”21 At the time, the paper had barely begun to circulate locally.
It was in May of that year that the tiny new Black Panther Party for Self-Defense shocked the world by making an armed debut at the California State Capitol, protesting a proposed law to prohibit most citizens from carrying loaded weapons within city limits anywhere in the state. In early August 1967 the New York Times magazine profiled Oaklander Huey Newton as an alarming new radical leader who promoted violence against the establishment, including the execution of policemen as an act of preemptive self-defense.22
The response among many in power to both the escalating protests against the war and more urgent demands for civil rights was to become increasingly heavy-handed in attempts to crush them. In reaction, more mainstream supporters emerged in support of the constitutional rights of those the government sought to suppress and for policy changes to address the underlying issues that fueled the dissidents’ anger. Amid the heightened tension in cities across the country following the summer riots of 1967, it was all but inevitable that a spark would trigger another major clash over police brutality.