Black Panther Party: 7 Notable Figures

Huey P. Newton became involved in activism as a teenager, which was perhaps unsurprising given that his namesake was Huey Long, a populist Louisiana governor who was known for his social reforms. Newton taught himself to read, and he went on to attend college and law school in California. During this time, he met Bobby Seale, and in 1966 the two founded the organization that was to become the Black Panther Party—originally known as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. While Black equality was the goal, much of their initial focus was on ending police brutality. They also advocated militarism, with Newton serving as the party’s minister of defense. In 1967 he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after a traffic stop ended with the death of a police officer. His imprisonment sparked protests—and the popular rallying cry “Free Huey”—and the conviction was later overturned on appeal in 1970. Once freed, Newton concentrated on the Panthers’ community-based initiatives, which included free meals for children and health clinics. This change in focus created a split within the party that some blamed for the group’s eventual disbanding. In addition, Newton’s legal troubles continued. Notably, in 1974 he was accused of murder. He fled the country, though he later returned, and the case ended in hung juries. In 1989 Newton was fatally shot during a drug dispute in Oakland, California.

Bobby Seale reportedly became politically involved after hearing Malcolm X speak at a rally in 1962. Four years later he and Newton established the Black Panthers, adopting Malcolm X’s slogan “Freedom by any means necessary.” Seale became the new party’s chairman. In 1969 he was tried as one of a group of activists who were accused of inciting riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the previous year. He was acquitted of those charges but was held in contempt of court after arguing with the judge over legal representation; at one point, the judge had Seale bound and gagged. Following his release from prison, Seale continued to have legal difficulties. He was later charged with the 1969 murder of a Black Panther suspected of being a police informant, but the trial ended with a hung jury in 1971. Seale subsequently renounced violence and declared his intent to work within the political process. In 1973 he ran for mayor of Oakland but lost. The following year Seale left the Panthers, though he remained engaged in activism, notably working to improve social services in Black neighborhoods.

While there is some ambiguity about whether Angela Davis was ever an official member of the Panthers, she was undeniably closely associated with the group. A philosophy lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, she taught political education classes for the party and supported its militarism. In the 1960s she became an advocate for Black prisoners, which led her to become involved in the case of three African American inmates at Soledad Prison who had been accused of murdering a guard. She was particularly close to one of the prisoners, George Jackson, whose younger brother Jonathan attempted to free him. On August 7, 1970, Jonathan took hostages in the Marin county courthouse, and four deaths resulted, including his own. Davis was accused of being complicit in the failed escape, and she went underground, entering the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and becoming a cause célèbre for the radical left. Some eight weeks later Davis was captured, though she was ultimately acquitted of all the charges. She later returned to teaching and also wrote a number of books.

Much of Eldridge Cleaver’s early life was spent in California reform schools and prisons on charges ranging from theft and marijuana possession to assault and rape. He later admitted to committing numerous rapes, which he called “an insurrectionary act” that made him feel like he “was getting revenge.” He was imprisoned in 1958, and during this time he came to express remorse for his crimes. He chronicled such misgivings along with his views on Black alienation in a series of essays that would later be published in the memoir Soul on Ice (1968). The influential work included the famous slogan “You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.” Paroled from prison in 1966, he soon joined the Black Panthers, becoming their minister of information. With his vocal support of armed rebellion, Cleaver drew condemnation from various public figures, including California Gov. Ronald Reagan. Cleaver responded by calling him a pig and a clown. In 1968 Cleaver ran for president, receiving some 30,000 votes. Later that year, however, he fled the country after facing a parole violation following a shoot-out between the Black Panthers and police. He remained in contact with the Black Panthers, but his push for a more militant approach led to his expulsion from the group in 1971. While visiting various foreign countries, Cleaver came to believe that “the American political system is the freest and most democratic in the world.” In 1975 he returned to the United States as a born-again Christian, and he later became a Republican. In 1984 he supported Reagan’s reelection as U.S. president.

By her late teens, the Pennsylvania-born Elaine Brown was living in Los Angeles. An accomplished pianist, she began giving piano lessons in the Watts district in 1967. Working in this predominantly Black area reportedly sparked her activism, and in 1968 she attended her first Black Panther meeting. Brown quickly gained prominence within the party. She helped found its free legal-aid program and served as editor of The Black Panther newspaper. In 1971 she was elected to the Panther Central Committee, becoming its first female member. After Seale’s departure and Newton’s exile, Brown was made chairman of the Black Panthers in 1974, the only woman to hold the position. However, opposition to her leadership within the largely male party led her to leave the Black Panthers in 1977. She continued to be involved in various causes, and her memoir, A Taste of Power, was published in 1992. In 2008 she unsuccessfully ran for president as the Green Party candidate.

In the 1960s Stokely Carmichael was considered a leader of Black nationalism in the United States, and he notably coined its rallying slogan “Black Power.” Carmichael initially favored nonviolence, and he was a prominent figure in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1964 he helped found a political party in Alabama, choosing a black panther as its emblem. This image was later adopted by the Black Panther Party, which made Carmichael its honorary prime minister in 1968. By this time he had adopted more militant views, and he became increasingly provocative. During one speech he referenced urban guerrillas who were going to “fight to the death.” In 1969 he moved to Guinea and resigned from the Panthers, opposed to their attempt to build “alliances with white radicals.” Carmichael later changed his name to Kwame Ture to honor two earlier proponents of Pan-Africanism, Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah and Guinean Sékou Touré.

While the charismatic Fred Hampton seemed destined to play a key role in the Panthers, it was his death that attracted the most attention. The Illinois native was involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) before joining the Black Panthers in 1968. He soon became head of the party’s Chicago chapter, developing a reputation for unifying diverse groups. In the early morning hours of December 4, 1969, however, the 21-year-old Hampton was shot and killed during a police raid; another Panther, Mark Clark, was also killed. While law enforcement claimed that they had come under attack while serving a search warrant, it was later revealed that the Black Panthers had fired only one shot compared with almost 100 shots from the Chicago police. Hampton’s death caused public outrage, and the ensuing investigations brought greater scrutiny on J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI’s attempts to dismantle the Panthers as well as other African American organizations. These measures, most of which were conducted through the counterintelligence program COINTELPRO, were so extreme that, years later when they were revealed, the director of the FBI publicly apologized for “wrongful uses of power.”