The FBI tactics included sending anonymous letters designed to either destroy marriages, implicate black members as police informers or trigger tax investigations.
BLACK PATHER PARTY FREE
Edgar Hoover was convinced the Communists had influenced him.Īlthough Hoover’s goal was to infiltrate and discredit groups he deemed a threat to US security, a US Senate select committee decided the FBI had acted illegally and reprehensibly: “Whatever opinion one holds about the policies of the targeted groups, many of the tactics employed by the FBI were indisputably degrading to a free society,” the senators said in their damning 1976 report. Even Martin Luther King was an FBI target when King was involved in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott over racial segregation.
The FBI’s illegal, covert Counterintelligence Program began spying on suspected Communists in 1956 and expanded to the Black Panthers and beyond. A year before the 1968 Chicago riots that landed Seale – bound and gagged – in court, the intelligence agencies were already paying informants and bugging the Panthers. Not surprisingly, the CIA and the FBI were paying close attention. At its height, the Panthers had more than 5,000 members and 60 percent of them were women. The Panthers grew quickly into a revolutionary group that called for the arming of all black and African Americans. In 1967, the Panthers made national headlines when they entered California’s State Assembly with guns to demand the right to carry loaded weapons in public. At night they patrolled neighborhoods with weapons looking for police brutality, a routine known as ‘cop watching’. Īt its height, the Black Panthers had more than 5,000 membersīy day the Panthers ran childrens’ breakfast clubs, opened clinics and taught black history. The Panthers would soon become one of the most influential groups to tackle racism and inequality in America’s history. Tom Wolfe described them as ‘radical chic’. Their uniform consisted of black leather jackets, berets, sunglasses and loaded shotguns. The Panthers were urban, West Coast-savvy and armed. Much of the early US civil rights movement was Southern – church-going men in suits who believed in peaceful resistance – but this new movement was very different. Race riots were spreading across the US, eventually making their way west to Los Angeles. Seale and Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966, a year after Malcolm X’s assassination. They formed the Soul Students Advisory Committee to end the draft of black men to fight in Vietnam. They shared the same political ideology and both had spent time in prison (Newton for stabbing a man with a steak knife). Seale enrolled at Merritt Community College in Oakland, California and joined the Revolutionary Action Movement, a Marxist-Leninist group that believed violence was the way to free black people.
Seale (left) with Black Panthers co-founder Huey Newton Malcolm X urged black Americans to gain freedom, equality and justice ' by any means necessary'. Martin Luther King Jr delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech in 1963, but King’s peaceful approach was at odds with other community leaders. It was the early 1960s, a time of Vietnam protests, tension over the Cuban Missile Crisis, and race riots in Alabama and New York. I was out with the government then and I had become very hip.” "I quit that job 15 months later because the war was going on and I felt I was aiding the government's operations,” Seale said in his autobiography, Seize the Time. Seale found jobs as a mechanic and even worked on the Gemini missile project in California but nothing stuck. He dropped out of high school and joined the US Air Force only to be court-martialed and convicted of fighting with a commanding officer at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, resulting in a bad conduct discharge. Robert ‘Bobby’ Seale was born in 1936 to a poor family that drifted from Texas to California. Bobby Seale co-founder of the Black Panthers Court-martial
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