Newton’s conception of the vanguard party was important because of the way he envisioned the party’s relationship to the people. He did not simply want to educate the people but also saw the importance of winning their respect.6 While approvingly citing Mao Zedong’s dictum that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” Newton understood that the respect and loyalty of the community were about much more than that. He knew that the black community would look to and respect the Black Panther Party only if the people believed that the Party’s main concern was their needs and interests.

The Panthers also reached out to students on college campuses. As soon as Bobby Seale was released on bail from the arrest in Sacramento, Peter Camejo of the Young Socialist Alliance at the University of California, Berkeley, scheduled an event on campus to set the record straight about the Black Panther Party’s political positions. Twelve Panthers came to campus on May 10, 1967, and Bobby Seale was the featured speaker. Seale asked, “Why don’t cops who patrol our community live in our community? I don’t think there would be so much police brutality if they had to go and sleep there.” The audience of several thousand, composed mostly of white students, clapped loudly. Seale emphasized that the Black Panther Party was not racist. “You’ve been told that the Black Panthers . . . make no bones about hating whites,” said Seale. “That’s a bare-faced lie. We don’t hate nobody because of color. We hate oppression.”

In 1967, the black community in Newark, New Jersey, was emblematic of the ghetto isolation and containment from which rebellions grew. At that time, Newark was the thirtieth largest city in the United States, with a population of four hundred thousand. As blacks migrated to Newark in the late 1950s and early 1960s, whites deserted the city; in 1960, Newark was still 65 percent white, but by 1967, it was more than 52 percent black and 10 percent Cuban and Puerto Rican. Yet whites maintained near-total political control. From Mayor Hugh Addonizio to seven of nine city council representatives and seven of nine board of education members, the city leadership was almost entirely white. Whites also dominated the city commissions. The police were almost all Italian American. Almost all of those the police arrested, though, were black. [...]

Very few black families, fewer than 13 percent, owned their own homes. Black residents had minimal access to education. Newark’s per capita expenditures on education were significantly lower than those in the surrounding areas, and 70 percent of the children in the Newark public school system were black. Almost half of Newark’s black children did not finish high school. In 1960, more than half of the city’s adult blacks had less than an eighth-grade education, and 12 percent were unemployed. Newark had the highest rates of crime, venereal disease, substandard housing, maternal mortality, and tuberculosis in the country. Organized crime was rampant. Most people convicted of crimes were black, and the majority of the victims were also black. Like the city government, organized crime—the operation, the money and power—was run by Italian Americans.

In the Detroit uprising, rebels not only looted but also turned to more serious insurrectionary tactics, such as arson and sniping. Unlike looting—which offers rebels instant material benefit—these activities subjected rebels to significant risk while offering no instant material benefit, thus suggesting a challenge to the social order. According to police, 552 buildings were destroyed or damaged by fires started by the rebels. Some 7,231 rebels were arrested, more than twice as many as in the Watts uprising and four times more than in Newark. By the end of the Detroit rebellion, 43 people had been killed, 33 of them black. Ten whites were also killed, a number of them government officials.

Following the conference, the Black Panther began to critique not only the police and white political leaders but also black political leaders and organizations that it viewed as counterrevolutionary. On July 20, the Black Panthers introduced their “Bootlicker” column. The idea was to identify “bootlicking,” or counterrevolutionary, black leaders who were subservient to the “White power structure.” The column was replete with photos, derogatory graphics, and articles critical of black leaders and organizations they saw as accommodationist—not only Ussery and CORE, but also California Assemblyman Willie Brown and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Building on the political strategy they had developed in facing legal challenges after the Sacramento action, Newton and the Panthers insisted on a political approach to the trial. They would follow the law to the letter and strive to exonerate Huey through legal channels, to “exhaust all legal means,” but the principle behind the case would be political. They would use Huey’s trial as a forum to put America on trial, to expose its inherent racism and injustice. If confronted with a strategic choice about whether to advance the political project or Newton’s personal interests, the Panthers would give priority to the political path. This decision reflected their belief that the political system was inherently unjust and that Huey would be put to death. They designed their legal approach to call attention to state repression and to advance the Panthers’ cause. Further, the Panthers believed that only a powerful mass political campaign could save Huey’s life.

When the Man walks up and says we are anti-white, I scratch my head, I say, “. . . what does he mean by that?” He says, “Well, I mean, you hate white people.” I say, “Me? Hate a white person?” I say, “Wait a minute, man, let’s back up a little bit. That’s your game. That’s the Ku Klux Klan’s game.” I say, “That is the Ku Klux Klan’s game to hate me and murder me because of the color of my skin.” I say, “I wouldn’t murder a person or brutalize him because of the color of his skin.” I say, “Yeah, we hate something, alright! We hate the oppression that we live in! We hate cops beating black people over the heads and murdering them. That’s what we hate!” If you’ve got enough energy to sit down and hate a white person just because of the color of his skin, you’re wasting a lot of energy. You’d better take that same energy and put it in some motion out there, and start dealing with those oppressive conditions, and you’re going to find out just what you hate, and what you’re going to stop.

But by 1968, even in “Bloody Lowndes,” the political dynamic had changed.26 As the Civil Rights Movement dismantled Jim Crow through the mid-1960s, it ironically undercut its own viability as an insurgent movement. Whereas activists could sit in at lunch counters or sit black and white together on a bus or insist on registering to vote where they had traditionally been excluded, they were often uncertain how to nonviolently disrupt black unemployment, substandard housing, poor medical care, or police brutality. And when activists did succeed in disrupting these social processes nonviolently, they often found themselves facing very different enemies and lacking the broad allied support that civil rights activists had attained when challenging formal segregation. By 1968, the civil rights practice of nonviolent civil disobedience against racial exclusion had few obvious targets and could no longer generate massive and widespread participation.

Polly Graham knew about hardship and struggle. In the 1940s, she had been part of a failed attempt to organize low-wage black workers in the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Factory in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. But virulent anti-unionism, magnified by racism and anti-Communist hysteria, had beaten that noble and long-forgotten effort. Almost thirty years later, on March 4, 1970, she opened the door of her rented home to find police handing her an eviction notice. Because the property had already been condemned in a legal hearing, she understood that she owed no rent until the landlord made the necessary repairs. The landlord believed and acted differently. Confronted with the seemingly impregnable power of the police, Polly Graham went to the local office of the Black Panther Party for help.

The local Panthers immediately sprang into action, sending a contingent to Ms. Graham’s home, where, with two armed Panthers standing guard, they replaced belongings that had been removed from the home by eviction police. In addition to resecuring Ms. Graham in her home, armed Panthers stood guard over the nearby homes of Pauline Greer and Minnie Bellamy to prevent similar evictions of these two elderly women.

[...] the free breakfast programs highlighted the fact that hunger impeded a child’s ability to learn. Politically, the breakfasts shed light on the government’s failure to address childhood poverty and hunger—pointing to the limits of the nation’s War on Poverty. The U.S. government spent only $600,000 on breakfast programs in all of 1967. Government-sponsored breakfast programs grew rapidly as the Panthers pioneered their free breakfast program. By 1972, government-sponsored breakfast programs were feeding 1.18 million children out of the approximately 5 million who qualified for such help.

Attacking the serious problem of childhood hunger was a way to win people’s hearts and minds. “While we might not need their direct assistance in waging armed revolution,” acknowledged Forbes, “we were hedging our bets that if we did, they would respond more favorably to a group of people looking out for their children’s welfare.” The FBI and police agreed. In Baltimore, as in other places, they castigated these programs “as a front for indoctrinating children with Panther propaganda.” As a result, the national repression apparatus went into overdrive to destroy the free breakfast programs. Police and federal agents regularly harassed and intimidated program participants, supporters, and Party workers and sought to scare away donors and organizations that housed the programs, like churches and community centers. Safiya A. Bukhari discovered that participation in one of the Harlem free breakfast programs fell off after the police spread a false rumor among black parents that the children were being fed “poisoned food.” A police disinformation campaign in Richmond, California, suggested that the Party used the Free Breakfast for Children Program to spread racism and to foment school riots. Student participation began to decline, forcing local Panther leaders to combat the official disinformation.