The Black panther party founded in October of 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. The main purpose of this group was to fight white oppression after seeing many people suffer from police brutality. THey had chosen the name Black panthers because the black panther doesn’t strike first, “but if the aggressor strikes first, then he’ll attack.” the black panthers had a 10 point plan that had everything they wanted to change in society. The 10-point plan had basic demands like decent housing, higher education, and an end to police brutality. The black panthers and the FBI didn't really like each other. a counterintelligence program to break up the spreading unity of that the Black Panther Movement had begun. COINTELPRO began in 1956 to disrupt …show more content…
Huey, like many members, becomes disillusioned. HUey became very addicted to drugs and he was It is not clear this was his own doing, and very probable the work of the FBI. On August 22, 1989, Newton is shot dead on the streets of Oakland in a drug dispute.
Bobby Seale resigns from the party; while Elaine Brown takes the lead in continuing the Panther community programs. In the fall of 1975, Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver return from exile as born-again Christians. In 1979, all charges against Cleaver are dropped after he bargains with the state and pleads guilty to assault in a 1968 shootout with the cops. He is put on five years probation. In the dimming years of his life, Cleaver assimilates a political outlook similar to Martin Luther King, engages in various business ventures, and becomes heavily addicted to cocaine.
By the beginning of the 1980s, attacks on the party and internal degradation and divisions, cause the party to fall apart. The leadership of the party had been absolutely smashed; its rank and file constantly terrorized by the police. Many remaining Panthers were hunted down and killed in the following years, imprisoned on trumped charges (Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, among many others), or forced to flee the United States (Assata Shakur, and