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Extent Was COINTELPRO Responsible For The Dismantling Of The Black Panther

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Identification and Evaluation of Sources:
During the era of the Civil Rights Movement, many organizations were created in hopes of bringing peace and equality for all African Americans. These organizations diverged into two categories, violent and nonviolent. This investigation will focus on the radical organization known as the Black Panther Party. In late 1966, college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton came together to create an organization that would fight against “imperialistic” America. With this vision, the two men founded the Black Panther Party. While many other parties and organizations tried to attain equality and integration, the Black Panther Party believed that black communities were similar to colonies. In a similar way, the …show more content…

COINTELPRO would create black propaganda to make the public believe that they were in fact a threat, they would use infiltrators within the party to commit crimes and blame the Black Panthers to ruin their image, and they would falsify letters written to jurors and other Black Panthers. It was the police who ultimately arrested hundreds of the party’s members, and killed almost 30 members including most of the party’s leaders by 1970. This year marked the dismantle of the Black Panther Party. Many sources will be used in this investigation from hidden files revealed about COINTELPRO to an actual work written by the party’s co-founder Bobby …show more content…

In this source the author follows the FBI’s counterintelligence program COINTELPRO as they attempt to dismantle the Black Panther Party. Published in 1990, the work deeply analyzes the actions of the FBI during this time period. It’s purpose was to inform the community of the wrongs that the FBI committed as they tried to take down the Black Panthers. The work called the FBI America's political police. The book examines the agency's harassment, surveillance, and disruption of black and Native American groups in the 1960s and 1970s, and shows how it sought to maintain the sociopolitical status quo within the country. One of the main black groups talked about in this book is the Black Panther Party. Its value is that it sheds light on all the secret action the FBI was taking in order to dismantle these groups. It makes readers beg the question, how free are we really? With this source however, there are some major limitations. The author is very biased against the FBI and seems to stand more in favor of the Black Panthers. With this bias, some of the claims made could be unreliable. It is written by a third person, someone not in the party or in the FBI, they still show bias against one

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Some in the government felt threatened by the BPP. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was especially concerned about groups like the Panthers because of their aggressiveness and potential for violence. He introduced the then-secret COINTELPRO to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence or civil disorder.” COINTELPRO activities included wiretaps, raids, anonymous letters, media infiltration, even murder. The main target was the BPP.

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