oct 15, 1966 - 1966: Black Panther Party founded

Description:

In the wake of the assassination of Malcolm X and urban uprisings, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, to protect African American neighborhoods from police brutality. The Black Panthers launched numerous community programs that offered such services as tuberculosis testing, legal aid, transportation assistance, and free shoes to poor people. The programs confronted the economic problems of African Americans, which the Party argued that the civil rights reforms did not do enough to address. The Black Panthers’ socialist viewpoint, however, made them a target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), who accused them of being a communist organization and an enemy of the U.S. government. A campaign to annihilate the group came to a head in December 1969 with a police shoot-out at the group’s Southern California headquarters and an Illinois state police raid. The Party’s operations, however, continued into the 1970s, albeit less actively.