Black Panther Party: The Rise And Fall Of The Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party was created in October of 1966 in the grass root community of Oakland, California by Huey Newton and Bobby Scales. Prior to founding the Black Panther Party founders, were a part of the Afro-American Association and the Revolutionary Action Movement, however they were disenchanted by the “arm-chair intellectualizing” of those Black Nationalist groups. They organized the Black Panther Party as a political party, with hopes of running for political office in the future. In the meantime, the Black Panther Party provided support to the community and attempted to end the institutionalized racism across America. From 1966 to 1971 the Black Panther Party established a variety of social programs in the areas of human sustenance,

Also during April of 1967, Denzil Dowell whom police stated he was caught burglarizing a liquor store and subsequently killed after they asked him to halt and did not comply. The Black Panther Party quickly begun investigating in to the death of Denzil Dowell, which led to meeting between police officer and the Black Panther Party. Several days after Dowell’s death, alarmed by the Panthers’ growing prominence, California legislator Donald Mulford introduced a bill to ban the carrying of loaded weapons in public. The Party showed up to the state capitol as the bill was debated and attempted to gain access to the capitol building, where they meet police officers that confiscated their guns for a short period. California passed the Mulford Act and Black Panther Party armed foray were splashed across the nation’s newspapers and shown on television. During the late 1960s members of the Black Panther Party became involved in a series of violent confrontations with the police and subjects in a series of court cases, with some being the results from direct shoot-outs with the police. One of the most notable trail was of founder Huey Newton, in the murder of a police officers in 1967, which he was later acquitted of after three mistrials. Following Newton’s 1971 release from prison, the party shifted in a more conventional programmatic direction “working with the