Instead of the mythic, individualist founding story, in which young Bobby and Huey suckled from a mother panther’s teats, we have a multifarious account. There was SNCC and the southern movement, with its successes, failures, and concluding splits between liberals and radicals, black organizers and white supporters; there were the community colleges and the OEO; there were the anticolonial struggles around the world, from China to South Africa; there were the street riots and police violence and unemployment and criminal gangs and discrimination and assassinations; there were the revolutionary black student associations, with their heterodox Marxisms and passionate guest speakers; there were the cultural nationalists, with their Swahili classes and new names. And there was the black American tradition of armed self-defense, the one they had used to free themselves once before. The BPP came to a synthesis of these influences the same way SNCC found itself with its pockets full of pistols: Once they were determined to intervene in history, it was a practical necessity. That determination was the one thing that wasn’t predetermined, the imaginative wriggling of butterflies that threatens to bring history’s glass display case to the ground in pieces. Pound for pound, no American political group had nearly as big an impact during the period, and it’s worth going through a brief but detailed history of the Oakland BPP to frame the next section, when we will return to Palo Alto proper.