Field offices quickly responded to Hoover with plans for escalating the conflict, and the Los Angeles office reported back to Hoover, “The Los Angeles Office is currently preparing an anonymous letter for Bureau approval which will be sent to the Los Angeles Black Panther Party supposedly from a member of the ‘US’ organization in which it will be stated that the youth group of the ‘US’ organization is aware of the [Black Panther Party] ‘contract’ to kill RON KARENGA, leader of ‘US,’ and they, ‘US’ members, in retaliation, have made plans to ambush leaders of the [Party] in Los Angeles. It is hoped this counterintelligence measure will result in an ‘US’ and [Black Panther Party] vendetta.”

The FBI field office suggested sending the letter to Fort rather than Hampton because Fort was more likely to respond with violence: “It is believed the above may intensify the degree of animosity between the two groups and occasion Fort to take retaliatory action which could disrupt the [Black Panther Party] or lead to reprisals against its leadership. Consideration has been given to a similar letter to the [Party] alleging a Ranger plot against the [Black Panther Party] leadership; however, it is not felt this would be productive principally because the [Party] at present is not believed as violence prone as the Rangers to whom violent type activity—shooting and the like—is second nature.” J. Edgar Hoover approved the proposal, and the field office sent the letter to Fort.

The FBI’s effort may have helped prevent a merger between the Panthers and the Rangers, but it did not precipitate widespread violence between the groups. Hampton and Fort figured out that the government was attempting to create a deadly conflict between them and decided not to take the bait.

On the night of November 13, FBI Special Agent Mitchell met with informant William O’Neal and showed him photos of the two dead police officers killed earlier that day by Spurgeon Winters. In a series of meetings in the following days, Mitchell had O’Neal help map out the exact layout of Fred Hampton’s apartment, including the specific location of his bed and nightstand. He also asked O’Neal to keep tabs on who was coming and going from the apartment and to determine what weapons were kept there.

Armed with this information, a raiding party of fourteen SPU officers arrived outside Hampton’s apartment at 4:30 A.M. on December 4. They did not bring the standard raiding equipment they had used in previous Chicago Panther raids, such as tear gas or sound equipment; instead, they carried a Thompson submachine gun, five shotguns, a carbine, nineteen .38 caliber pistols, and one .357 caliber pistol. The assault was quick and decisive. Within fifteen minutes, Fred Hampton was dead, shot twice through the head while he lay in bed. Peoria, Illinois, Panther leader Mark Clark, in Chicago attending a statewide meeting of Party leaders, was also dead. The seven other Panthers in the apartment—four with bullet wounds—were arrested on charges of attempted murder, aggravated battery, and unlawful use of weapons. One SPU officer was shot in the leg.

That evening, about forty-five hundred people—mostly white Yale students—gathered at Yale’s Ingalls Rink to decide whether to call a strike. Kenneth Mills, a black assistant professor at the university, told the crowd that the plight of Bobby Seale and the accused Black Panthers symbolized the plight of blacks generally in “Racist America,” and he called for action: “In recognition of the critical emergency, in recognition of the reality of oppression, in recognition of exploitation,” he said, it was time to “close down” the university. “This is the time to say ‘classroom space is not where it’s happening.’ The struggle for justice is much more important.” The audience shouted and cheered, pumping clenched fists and chanting, “Strike, Strike, Strike!” Students organized meetings in all of Yale’s undergraduate colleges and some of the graduate schools to mobilize support for the strike.54

The following morning, April 22, 1970, Yale students went on strike for the first time in the university’s history. They set up picket lines surrounding classroom buildings and carried signs reading, “Don’t go to class” and “Skip classes, talk politics.” They handed out leaflets saying, “All academic commitments must be suspended so that we all may devote our full time and attention to the situation, educate ourselves, and act accordingly.” The university canceled all intercollegiate sports events for the week. Students in Yale’s undergraduate colleges passed referenda supporting the strike, and the undergraduate residence halls also voted to provide food, shelter, and first aid to Panther supporters who rallied on May 1. A university spokesperson estimated that between 50 and 75 percent of students were participating in the strike.

In a survey of U.S. college students for the John D. Rockefeller Foundation at the time, 79 percent of respondents strongly or partially agreed that “the war in Vietnam is pure imperialism,” and a full 71 percent of college students surveyed said they “Definitively believe” that Black Panthers “cannot be assured a fair trial.”72 With students across the country feeling betrayed and angered by Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and by his insults, and excited by the successful mobilizations at Yale, the call for a national student strike quickly spread. The Yale students, by targeting their own liberal university and making it take sides on the Panthers, had influenced national political debate. Others students sought to emulate their model. On May 3, editors from the student newspapers at eleven major eastern colleges—including six of the eight Ivy League universities—adopted the demands of the Panther allies in New Haven. Meeting at Columbia University in New York, the editors agreed to run a common editorial the following day calling for “the entire academic community of this country to engage in a nationwide university strike.”

Columbia University administrators attempted to undercut student support for the national strike by declaring a one-day moratorium on classes for Monday, May 4, and by holding a convocation to discuss possible responses to the invasion of Cambodia. At the convocation, Rich Reed, a black leader of the campus’s Third World Coalition, accompanied by a Black Panther member, seized the microphone and declared that talk of peace in Vietnam would be meaningless unless people moved “to build a mass movement against the source of imperialism and racism which is closest to us—Columbia University.”74 Reed criticized the School of International Affairs for assisting in the development of oppressive foreign policy strategies and denounced the consignment of black and Latino workers to the lowest-paying and dirtiest jobs on campus. That afternoon, about three thousand students gathered in Wollman Auditorium and voted overwhelmingly to strike, taking up the three demands issued in New Haven. The following day, thirty-five hundred students and campus workers rallied. Featured speaker William Kunstler—a high-profile lawyer for the Panthers and the Chicago Seven—called for all charges against the New York Panther 21 to be dropped. Protestors marched from Columbia to the City College of New York behind a banner declaring, “No more racist attacks on third world people. US out of Southeast Asia; Free all political prisoners now.” [...]

When campus reopened on January 6, more than three thousand people joined a massive picket line that surrounded the campus. Fewer than one in five classes were held. Reagan and Hayakawa denounced the protestors and obtained an injunction against the American Federation of Teachers to prohibit picketing. But the faculty defied the injunction, and the statewide California Federation of Teachers declared that all California State College campuses would be shut down if even one striking faculty member was punished. With labor solidarity, the strike became comprehensive, as Teamsters refused to make deliveries to campus and custodial workers refused to pick up trash. The Third World Liberation Front even signed a mutual-aid pact with striking oil refinery workers in nearby Richmond and Martinez. The students continued to use occasional disruptive tactics such as “book-ins” at the library, during which a group of students would check out as many books as they could, then return them all, backing up the system and shutting down library circulation. But the combined student-faculty picket with broad support from both the black community and organized labor was extremely effective at shutting down campus, so the TWLF mostly supported the picketing at the perimeter of the university.

The standoff lasted for several weeks, with largely peaceful pickets effectively closing the campus. Then, on January 23, the TWLF called a massive on-campus rally, the first since early December. More than 1,000 students, faculty, and community members participated. The police responded with military precision. As the protestors chanted “All Power to the People!” the police drove a wedge through the crowd, splitting it in two; they surrounded one large group and proceeded to arrest every person in it, one by one. In all, 435 people were arrested, the largest mass arrest to date in San Francisco’s history. The administration canceled final exams (which had been scheduled for later that month) and offered students a credit/no credit option for the fall semester.

[...] Like the North Koreans, the North Vietnamese saw the Black Panther Party and its allies in the United States as freedom fighters waging a liberation struggle against a shared enemy—U.S. imperialism. The North Vietnamese government published an editorial in its official newspaper titled “An Inevitably Victorious Cause” celebrating the Black Liberation Struggle in the United States as a common cause:

The Vietnamese people, who are now opposing the American imperialist aggressors with arms, consider the black people of the United States in the struggle for their emancipation as their natural companions in arms and allies. The more the Nixon group develops its aggression in Indochina, the more it develops its repression and terror against the black people and the forces of peace and progress in America. It sheds the blood of young blacks in Indochina while their compatriots have need of their arms and their brains to engage the struggle in the U.S.A. We follow with deep sympathy the progress realized by the black people in the United States on the difficult path of resistance and courage, similar to our own struggle against aggression.

The Black Panther Party derived its power largely from the insurgent threat it posed to the established order—its ability to attract members who were prepared to physically challenge the authority of the state. But this power also depended on the capacity to organize and discipline these members. When Panthers defied the authority of the Party, acted against its ideological position, or engaged in apolitical criminal activity, their actions undermined the Party, not least in the eyes of potential allies. The Panthers could not raise funds, garner legal aid, mobilize political support, or even sell newspapers to many of their allies if they were perceived as criminals, separatists, or aggressive and undisciplined incompetents. The survival of the Party depended on its political coherence and organizational discipline.

As the Party grew nationally and increasingly came into conflict with the state in 1969, maintaining discipline and a coherent political image became more challenging. The tension between the anti-authoritarianism of members in disparate chapters and the need for the Party to advance a coherent political vision grew. One of the principal tools for maintaining discipline—both of individual members and of local chapters expected to conform to directives from the Central Committee—was the threat of expulsion.

Perhaps even more important, Nixon sharply reduced the military draft that had motivated many young people to embrace revolutionary anti-imperialism. Vietnam War draft inductions peaked in the late 1960s, with more than 225,000 soldiers inducted every year from 1965 through 1969. The Nixon administration inducted fewer than 165,000 new soldiers in 1970 and fewer than 95,000 new soldiers in 1971. By then, the majority of Americans embraced arguments against the war. Yet as long as Nixon followed through on his de-escalation of the war, people had less reason to embrace the anti-imperialist politics that had generated the antiwar movement—contributing to the moderation of the antiwar movement even as it grew. Once it appeared the war would be ended through institutionalized political means, those principally committed to ending the draft and war no longer shared a personal stake in radically transforming political institutions. Many now increasingly saw the Panthers’ call for revolution as unnecessary.

The hard-core right wing was not the main threat to the Party. Rather concessions to blacks and opponents of the war reestablished the credibility of liberalism to key constituencies.4 It was much easier for the parents of young adults to find Tom Wolfe’s parody of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Panther fund-raiser funny when they believed their children would not be drafted to die in Vietnam. When the government had pursued the war irrespective of the public will, killing countless young Americans, the Panthers’ concerns were not so far afield. But when the Democratic Party began fighting to end the war, the Nixon administration rolled back the draft and created affirmative action programs, the United States normalized relations with revolutionary governments abroad, and black electoral representation ballooned, the Party had to work harder to maintain allied support. Eventually, the politics of armed self-defense became impossible to sustain.