Tensions between Watts residents and the police ran high. While the vast majority of Watts residents in 1965 were black, only 4 percent of the sworn personnel of the Los Angeles Police Department and 6 percent of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were black. Police Chief William Parker used analyses of crime data to develop and justify a policy that explicitly targeted Watts and other black neighborhoods for heavy police coverage, including intrusive techniques such as routine frisking of people on the street. “I don’t think you can throw the genes out of the question when you discuss the behavior patterns of people,” Parker wrote in 1957. [...]

Watts exploded. On August 12, at 9:30 P.M., a group identifying itself as “followers of Malcolm X” arrived on Avalon Boulevard shouting “Let’s burn . . . baby, burn!” The next day, at 3:30 P.M., the Emergency Control Center journal recorded “6 male Negroes firing rifles at helicopter from vehicle, 109th & Avalon.” Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown cut short an aerial tour of South Los Angeles because of “sniper fire.” Delta Airlines rerouted flights over the city because rebels were “shooting at planes.”

The rebellion spread out over 46.5 square miles. All told, 34 people—almost all black—were killed, many by police, and more than 1,032 were wounded; 3,952 people were arrested. The rebellion caused more than $40 million in property damage to over six hundred buildings, completely destroying two hundred of them.

The conference program featured the symbol of a black panther from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) that Carmichael was publicizing. The LCFO was part of a new effort by local blacks and SNCC to build an independent political party outside of the exclusive white Democratic Party, marking a departure from its strategy of mobilizing civil disobedience against Jim Crow segregation in the early 1960s. Lowndes County was 80 percent black, yet in early 1966, despite the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act, there was still not a single black person registered to vote in Lowndes County. So on May 3, 1966, with SNCC’s help, the LCFO convened and nominated candidates for sheriff, tax assessor, coroner, and school board and encouraged blacks to register to vote. As blacks registered, white resistance intensified. At one SNCC rally, a deputy sheriff fired into the crowd, shooting two civil rights workers and killing one, Carmichael’s friend Jonathan Daniels, a white ministerial student.

Because so many whites in Lowndes were illiterate, the ballot featured a drawing of a party mascot. The all-white Democratic Party featured a white rooster and the slogan White Supremacy/For the Right. The LCFO selected the black panther as its symbol to signify a fierce black political challenge. In a June 1966 interview, John Hulett, the chairman of the LCFO, explained the symbol of the panther: “The black panther is an animal that when it is pressured it moves back until it is cornered, then it comes out fighting for life or death. We felt we had been pushed back long enough and that it was time for Negroes to come out and take over.”

The city of Richmond, a few miles north of Oakland, had been the site of several major shipyards during World War II. Many blacks migrated to the area for wartime jobs but found themselves unemployed and underemployed during the postwar demobilization and deindustrialization. Much of the postwar black community lived in ghettos consisting of public housing units built by the federal government during the war. North Richmond, a town of six thousand people stuck between a garbage dump and the toxic-fume-producing Chevron Oil refinery, was almost entirely black. As an unincorporated area, the community received no public services from the city. Instead, North Richmond came under the jurisdiction of Contra Costa County, including the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department. Extremely isolated, the area had only three streets on which to enter or exit. On occasion, county police blocked those streets, sealing off the entire area.

When the lunch bell rang, the mothers entered the school and proceeded to patrol the hallways. The Panthers remained outside in case any problems arose. The mothers informed the principal that they were there to ensure their children’s safety and protect them from brutal treatment by school officials. “We’re concerned citizens,” they told him, “and we’ll whip your ass and anyone else’s that we hear of slapping our children around.”

School officials called the police, and an officer soon arrived. Upon hearing about the angry parents inside, he demanded to know what was going on. Five of the Panthers sitting in their car outside the school were openly armed, four with shotguns and one with an M-1. According to Seale, when the officer saw the guns, he began to stutter. He asked what all the guns were for, and Newton told him that he and his companions were members of the Black Panther Party and that the guns belonged to them. The officer asked for his driver’s license, and Newton obliged. When he saw Newton’s name, he went to his car and radioed for reinforcements. Another police car soon arrived, but there was nothing the police could do. The Panthers were acting within the law, and apparently the police did not want to inflame the situation further. The mothers patrolled the hallways until the end of the lunch period.

The Panthers’ first confrontation with police in North Richmond was unplanned. Newton observed, “Policemen were constantly coming to Mrs. Dowell’s house and treating her like dirt. They would knock on the door, walk in, and search the premises any time they wanted.” One Sunday in April 1967, Newton was at the house when they came. “When Mrs. Dowell answered the knock, a policeman pushed his way in, asking questions. I grabbed my shotgun and stepped in front of her, telling him either to produce a search warrant or leave. He stood for a minute, shocked, then ran out to his car and drove off.” Given recent events, many locals felt vulnerable to police attack, and word about the Panthers spread rapidly throughout North Richmond.

Newton, Seale, and Cleaver all spoke, proclaiming that the community would not get justice from the government, nor from its arm, the police. In outlining the Party’s program, they emphasized that black people would never be safe and secure if they depended on the police to protect them. The police were part of the problem, extensions of the oppressive power structure. Black people would be safe only if they took the situation into their own hands and defended themselves. At one point, Newton explained what kinds of guns people should buy. He pointed to Panther John Sloan stationed on a rooftop. Sloan did a weapons demonstration, and people cheered wildly.

That day, something startling occurred that had never happened at any other Panther event. Neighbors showed up with their own guns. Some of these people had seen the armed Panthers at the previous rally and decided to bring their guns this time as a gesture of support and solidarity. Others, seeing the Panthers for the first time, went home to get their guns and returned. One young woman who had been sitting in her car got out and held up her M-1 for everyone to see. The Panthers passed out applications to join their party, and over three hundred people filled them out. According to FBI informant Earl Anthony, he “had never seen Black men command the respect of the people the way that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale did that day.”

The Panthers graphically introduced the public to a new vision of black politics. Like the leaders of the earlier Civil Rights Movement, the Panthers continued to focus on black liberation. Yet, rather than appeal for a fair share of the American pie, the Panthers portrayed the black community as a colony within America and the police as an “army of occupation” from which blacks sought liberation. In their view, the racist power structure was the common enemy of all those engaged in freedom struggles.

When black people send a representative, he is somewhat absurd because he represents no political power. He does not represent land power because we do not own any land. He does not represent economic or industrial power because black people do not own the means of production. The only way he can become political is to represent what is commonly called a military power—which the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls Self-Defense Power. Black People can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community, throughout the nation. Then we will choose a political representative and he will state to the power structure the desires of the black masses. If the desires are not met, the power structure will receive a political consequence. We will make it economically nonprofitable for the power structure to go on with its oppressive ways. We will then negotiate as equals. There will be a balance between the people who are economically powerful and the people who are potentially economically destructive.