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• 1 2023-10-09T18:20:06-07:00 The Downfall of The Black Panther Party 13 image_header 1439985 2023-12-11T20:20:24-08:00

  On October 28th 1967, co-founder of the Black Panther Party Huey Newton was pulled over by police which resulted in an altercation that left him with a bullet in his stomach and one officer named John Frey was fatally wounded and another officer was injured. Before this accident Newton claimed that the Oakland police had pulled him over more than 50 times since 1966. The Party was starting to change during this time period because the two leaders were absent as Newton was charged as the shooter and awaited trial and  Bobby Seale was serving a six month sentence as a result of the Black Panthers protest in Sacramento. A member named Eldrigde Cleaver who had joined in 1966 took over as the new leader of the panthers. In 1968 Huey Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced 2-15 years in prison. The Black Panthers started to attract the nation’s attention. To maintain white supremacy in 1969 the FBI under its first director J. Edgar Hoover had declared the panthers a communist organization and an enemy of the US government. Because of this the Panthers became the target of the FBIs COINTELPRO, a secret counterintelligence program used to surveillance politically progressive groups. The FBI began COINTELPRO in the year of 1956 to disrupt any activities of the Communist Party of the United States. By the 1960s, the program had expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. All COINTELPRO operations ended in 1971, however it was not until recently this program finally was criticized by Congress and the American people for violating first amendment rights and for other reasons. Because the FBI targeted Panther men, open positions of leadership were available and women like Elaine Brown filled. In 1974 Elaine Brown gained leadership of the whole black panther Party after Newton fled prosecution to Cuba. She led the party for three years and established the black panther party’s liberation school. In 1982 the organization officially ended because of no leadership due to the FBI's tactics that included intense surveillance, organizational infiltration, anonymous mailings, and police harassment. FBI director Hoover authorized illegal break-ins, phone taps and fake letters to Panther supporters to discredit the Party. In August 1989, Newton was killed in a drug dispute after returning from Cuba, in West Oakland.