The organization originally named The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP-SD) was founded in October 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, undergraduate students at Merritt College in Oakland, California. They borrowed the Panther name from two predecessor Black Power groups: The Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an Alabama group that used the black panther as its symbol, and the Black Panther Party of Harlem, New York, which focused on educational empowerment. Seale and Newton wrote the Party’s Ten Point Program, which demanded “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice and Peace,” along with other Black self-determination goals. The key issue for the Panthers in many local struggles was the wave of police killings, assaults, and harassment of everyday working-class and poor Black people. The Party became popular for organizing armed community patrols to observe police conduct and respond to abusive police incidents.

The BPP-SD’s original ideology was inspired by Malcolm X’s Pan-Africanism and Franz Fanon’s anti-colonial book The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Also in the zeitgeist was the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, a gathering of Global South national liberation movements and leftist parties. Over time, the Panthers came to embrace Marxism-Leninism and the principles of Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book (bilingual edition, 1966). Another important influence was the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed self-defense organization of Black veterans that protected civil rights activists in several southern states.^[1] Meanwhile, according to Mumia Abu-Jamal—a teenage party leader in Philadelphia, incarcerated since 1981 as a political prisoner, and author of We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party (2016)—the party’s overall philosophy evolved from Black nationalism (defining the Black community as a colony and advocating armed revolution for liberation) through revolutionary internationalism (pursuing solidarity with Third World liberation movements) to what cofounder Newton dubbed “revolutionary intercommunalism” (promoting the self-determination of oppressed communities, inside and outside the United States, based on nationality, race, gender, and sexuality).

In 1968, the national Party shortened its name to “The Black Panther Party” (BPP). It also began directing the establishment of local “Community Survival Programs,” run primarily by women.^[2] These included most famously Free Breakfast for Children (serving 50,000 children daily in forty-five cities),^[3] as well as free health clinics, sickle-cell anemia programs, transportation to visit prisoners, senior assistance programs, and free clothing and shoes. More than social service programs, these were tied to the BPP’s political education efforts so participants could understand the origins of their problems in Black people’s colonial status and the importance of community organizing for liberation.

At its height, the BPP had forty-five chapters in the United States and several others in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania, totaling 5,000 official members.^[4] Its weekly newspaper, The Black Panther, had a national circulation of up to 300,000 (the top-selling Black newspaper from 1968 to 1971).^[5] Articles in the paper featured news of anti-Black violence, the movement’s self-defense campaigns nationwide, and national liberation struggles worldwide. Mainstream polls showed broad support in the Black community; for instance, a 1969 Wall Street Journal poll in four large cities showed 62% admiration for the Panthers; a 1970 national survey found that 25%—and 43% of those under twenty-one—said that the BPP “represent[s] my personal views.”^[6]

In addition, the BPP formed alliances with a wide range of “Third World” (people of color) liberation and white radical groups. In Chicago, this was formalized as a Panther-led “Rainbow Coalition,” which in the 1980s inspired Rev. Jesse Jackson’s multiracial, progressive Rainbow Coalition. Many 1970s radical groups—including lesbian/gay and trans ones—based their programs and organizing tactics on BPP models.

^[1] The Real Brown Channel, “Deacons for Defense: The Blueprint for the Black Panther Party,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuWh5wEzmE0; “Meet ‘The Deacons’: Armed Black Christians Who Protected MLK During the Civil Rights Era,” The Mississippi Link (Mar. 4, 2026), https://themississippilink.com/national/meet-the-deacons-armed-black-christians-who-protected-mlk-during-the-civil-rights-era/; Akinyele Umoja, “The Ballot and the Bullet: A Comparative Analysis of Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Black Studies, 29 (4): (1999): 558. 

^[2] Angela Davis, “Foreword,” in Stephen Shames and Ericka Huggins, Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party (London: ACC Art, 2022), 21.

^[3] Ward Churchill, “‘To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy,’ The FBI’s Secret War Against the Black Panther Party,” in Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (ed.), Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 87.

^[4] See Jakobi Williams, “‘Don’t No Woman Have to Do Nothing She Don’t Want to Do’: Gender, Activism, and the Illinois Black Panther Party,” Black Women, Gender + Families 6.2 (Fall 2012): 29, https://doi.org/10.5406/blacwomegendfami.6.2.0029; Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2013), 344; Ollie A. Johnson, III, “Explaining the Demise of The Black Panther Party: The Role of Internal Factors,” in Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic, 2005), 391, https://files.libcom.org/files/ollie-johnson-role-internal-factors.pdf.

^[5] Billy X. Jennings, "Remembering the Black Panther Party Newspaper: The True Voice of the People, April 25, 1967- September 1980,” California Historical Society, 2017, https://californiahistoricalsociety.org/blog/remembering-the-black-panther-party-newspaper/.

^[6] Churchill, “‘To Disrupt,” 84; "A Time-Louis Harris Poll: The Black Mood: More Militant, More Hopeful, More Determined," TIME, April 6, 1970, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,943953-2,00.html; see also Phillip Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak (Chicago: Haymarket, 1970), xxv, https://dialecticalartist.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/black-panthers-speak-by-philip-s.-foner.pdf.