From Jessica McElrath,
Your Guide to African-American History.
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In stark contrast to Martin Luther King’s advocacy of nonviolent resistance, the Black Panther Party believed in arming for self-defense against police brutality. While arming provided protection, it also led to incidents that ended in violent standoffs with the police.

Racial Tension in Oakland, California

At a time when blacks in the south had been working for years to end segregation, blacks in Oakland, California were engaged in a struggle of their own. For years, tension between the City of Oakland police and the black community was volatile. Adding to the friction, in Oakland in 1966, there were only 16 black police officers out of 661.

The relationship between the black community and the Oakland police was also strained by several incidents. In Harlem in 1964, a fifteen year old boy was shot by an off duty police officer and one year later in San Francisco another fifteen year old was shot in the back by a police officer. After years of feeling threatened by the police, the tension between the black community and the police was at its peak in the late 1960s.

Newton & Seale Form the Black Panther Party

It was under these circumstances that twenty-four year old Huey P. Newton and twenty-nine year old Bobby Seale began to take leadership roles in their community. Both worked together at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center and they also served on the advisory board. In an effort to deal with police brutality, the advisory board obtained five thousand signatures in support of the city council setting up a police review board to evaluate complaints of police brutality. The council ignored their request.

With little hope of solving police brutality with the cooperation of the City of Oakland, Newton and Seale decided to start a new organization. The group’s formation was influenced by several theories of thought. Both men had studied black history that included research on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. They also read the periodicals, The Liberator and Freedomways, and Frantz Fanon’s book Wretched of the Earth.

In October 1966, Newton and Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (Self-Defense was later dropped to prevent the classification of a paramilitary organization), which was partly inspired by the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. It was also strongly influenced by Malcolm X, and was structured after the Black Muslim program, but without the religious aspect.

Newton served as the party’s minister of defense and Seale was the chairman. After canvassing Oakland neighborhoods to determine what the black community wanted, Seale and Newton devised a Ten-Point Program. The 1966 platform set forth the following demands:

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

2. We want full employment for our people.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.