SYSK Selects: How The Black Panther Party Worked

people under normal circumstances. But these aren't normal circumstances, and right now is not a time to be distracted, and it's definitely not a time to be silent. And so I hope that you will listen to this episode about the history of the struggle for civil rights and human rights that black people in America have had to undertake, and then it helps you understand better the struggle that's going on in America right now. And I know that a lot of people who listen to stuff you should

Know don't necessar fairly agree with us politically. That's fine, we get that, that's wonderful too, But we don't have to agree politically to agree that human rights matter for everybody, and right now every single one of us, every single one of you listening to my voice right this moment, has a once in a lifetime opportunity to do something about it, to stand up and to use your voice to help other people be treated equally and make this

country a better place. You can't argue with that. More people having more human rights can only make America a better place. Just being a Stuff you Should Know listener means that you love to learn. Well, now is a really, really good time to learn about what life has been like all of these years for people of color in America. And I hope you will. I hope you'll open your hearts and your minds to all the people who are trying to teach us right now. Thanks for listening, and

thanks for listening. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant. It's just the two of us, no producer today. We're producer free, just the two of us. We can make it if we try, and let's try. Chuck. You and I right, I think we're both pretty excited about this one. Yeah, this, This is gonna be a

good one. I love my history, as do you sure, especially contemporary history, and especially history that I didn't get taught in high school. I don't remember learning much about the Black Panthers in high school. None. So Charles, Uh, you didn't know much about the Black Panthers. I didn't either a little bit. Yeah, I would guess we were probably in about the same the same boat, you know,

I went to college. Yeah, I don't recall learning much in college about them either, but I guess, I mean I knew a little bit here, there's some of the highlights.

But it was it was in researching that I realized, like just how much if you if you don't actually go research it, just how how completely wrong a lot of this stuff is, And not just in detail, but in like overall tone, you know, like you get the idea that, um, the Black Panthers were, um, nothing but like racist terrorists who basically wanted to kill all whites and take over the White House. No, no, not really.

And and after further digging, it turns out that a lot of that image that that most people have today who don't really know much about the Black Panthers, um that idea comes from a misinformation and smear campaign carried out very purposefully by the FBI back in the sixties and seventies. Yes, by boy, I mean, let's just call him divisive at at the risk of smearing someone. But has there ever been a more divisive individual in this country? Perhaps well, who knows now, but j Edgar Hoover. Yeah,

I mean, my god, FBI director for life. I don't. I mean, I want to say, we should do a podcast on him, but it would definitely be a two parter because he worked for a hundred and eighty seven years. Well that we I should say, that smear campaign. And there was a lot of other stuff to that campaign as well, beyond just smearing um. But it had a name coin tel Pro counter intelligence program and um that in and of itself deserves its own one or two

parter episode two. Yeah. I mean, at one point jed Ger Hoover came out in the news and said that the Black Panther Party was the single greatest threat to the United States of America. Uh right, And this was during the Vietnam War. Uh, I mean it for the uninformed, Uh, Like you said, people you know thought all right? Well, and it was not. Coincidentally, from that point forward is when the cops really were like, all right, we can

we truly don't have to even respect civil liberties. Liberties at this point, we can go in and shoot people in their sleep, right exactly. And what's crazy, Chuck is when he said that it was less than three years after the Black Panther Party was formed. Yeah, so let's go back to the beginning. Actually, we'll go back before even um, the founding of the Black Panthers, just to provide some context. Right, So this is the roughly the tail end of the Jim Crow era, right right before

right at the New Deal era. And um, if you were black in America, your experience, whether it was in the South where it was just even more openly in eartly hostile um, or in the cities of the North, you were probably um just statistically speaking, it was likely that you were poor, that you um probably had routine especially if you were a black man, especially a black man under a certain age, that you were routinely mistreated, harassed, beaten, or possibly murdered by police. Um. And there was a

tremendous amount of racial tension as a result. Right, Yeah, not just up north. I mean we're talking pretty much any major city, right, and but especially in the South and the South. Actually, there was a guy whose name was Robert Williams, and he was an n double a CP leader in North Carolina, and he wrote a book back in I think nineteen sixty five, and he called it Negroes with Guns and advocated blacks arming themselves and carrying out violence in self defense, uh, in the face

of this um racial mistreatment. Right. And he Williams actually kind of codified or enshrined into book form this idea that was pretty predominant among Southern blacks. It was like, look, this this is stuff is real, and we need to

defend ourselves. And that idea spread a little bit to the cities here there, and um, it germinated in the minds of a couple of guys, a couple of college kids in Oakland named Bobby Seal and um Hughey Newton, Yes, uh, and they officially formed it was called the Black Panther

Party for Self Defense. Initially it was eventually truncated, uh in Oakland in nine and there well, well you know, we'll go through there because they had like sort of a roller coaster ride of as far as what they did as a group and as a party, but um, initially kind of the whole whole thing was self defense. We need to defend ourselves against police brutality, right, And

this non violent civil rights movement is is great. We love Martin Luther King Jr. And what he's doing, but it's going too slowly and in the meantime, we're getting beaten and killed in the streets by law enforcement. So we need to do something. We need to be proactive

and do something about that, right exactly. Robert Williams may have written the book, but that the the the guys who formed the Black Panthers, Seal and Newton, they one of the first UM black rights group to advocate militancy, although again you have to point out like they advocated um violence and self defense, not aggression, right, yeah, which is why they specifically chose UM the Black Panther as their Uh, I guess you'd say mascot, but as their

name mascot makes it sound like a baseball game or something. But uh, there's a quote here from Bobby Seal, co founder, and he said that Hughey Newton said, you know, the nature or a panther. I looked it up. If you push it into a corner, that panther is going to try and move left or right to get you to get out of the way. But if you keep pushing back into that corner, sooner or later, that panther is going to come out of that corner and try and

wipe out who keeps oppressing in that corner. And that was sort of the idea, like, hey, listen, we're trying to sidestep, we're trying to do the right thing, but if you keep coming at us, then we're going to defend ourselves. Yeah, exactly. And and again they were the first people to come up with this, and they looked around and kind of surveyed the black rights movements that

were around. There were um and they kind of said, this one works a little bit, but um, that part of it doesn't work, or this this one we we don't agree with, but it's a nice sentiment. Like the MLK nonviolent UM civil rights movement, they like you said, they said, this isn't working. It's not happening fast enough

for it's not happening at all. UM. And some other groups and people like Stokely Car Michael and H. Ratt Brown, who were the heads of the Non Violent Student Coordinating Committee, were some of the first Black leaders to to publicly break with mlk's non violent theory and say, no, we need to meet violence with violence. Um. Malcolm X was another one, and Malcolm X probably had the biggest influence on the Black Panther ideology than anybody else. He advocated

black militancy that included violence. He advocated um black self sufficiency and dignity, but he didn't necessarily say, um, you you were only going to advance with the helps of other blacks. We need to exclude whites or other um races from our struggle. And the Black Panthers is specifically Huey Newton and Bobby Seal really identified with that, and that was actually that became one of the hallmarks of the Black Panthers that they were willing to work with

other like minded groups regardless of race. So that's a that was kind of a big one that I wasn't aware of that I learned from this um And then the other aspect of Malcolm X that really formed like one of the foundation keystones of the Black Panther ideology is that it wasn't race that was the problem, It

was um class. They were basically avowed Marxists right that the central, the the central issue that created the struggle UM was was class was capitalism, and that the white establishment and the police and the government were keepers of the capitalist structure, and that same capitalist structure was keeping the black pants, the black people in America down, and so to get to to rise up, to become self sufficient, to get that chance that they needed to grow and

advance themselves, they had to get rid of the capitalist structure itself. Yeah, they were very much into the socialist ideal, and um one of the first things they did was they realized they needed sort of a foundation on which to build upon, something easily adjustable, that people could could look at and could read and understand what they're all about.

So very smartly, early on they came up with a very specific what they call their tin point program, what we want and what we believe, and uh, they wrote this out. We're going to read them in a second, but they wrote them out and then immediately printed them on a thousand sheets of paper, and uh set up an office and started passing these things around. This office was in Oakland, which is where you know, I think we already said where they founded and um, you know,

they basically quit their jobs. Every member of the Black Panther Party was a full time I guess you could say employee, but full time worker. Yeah. Remember, And um they gathered their paychecks, the few guys at the very beginning and rented an old shop storefront base and started handing out this ten point program. Yeah they did. And um, you want to go over the program first, Yeah, we might as well just go ahead and read all ten Uh,

so everybody knows what we're talking about, right. Uh. Number one, we want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black community. We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny. Yep. Number two, we want full employment for our people. We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to

give every man employment or guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the business men and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give it a high standard of living. Uh number three, we want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black community. We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we

are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres. In two mules. Number four, we want decent housing fit for shelter of human beings. We believe that if white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives of their community with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people. Yeah, and this that was a big one.

And as you'll see, a lot of what they were after was just like the ability to live in a neighborhood where you could have a decent school and a decent place to live and a chance at work. Like it wasn't some radical thing that they were after, you know, they just wanted the same opportunities basically. Yeah. And I mean I said earlier that if if you were living and you were black and living in America in the sixties,

the chances are you were poor. Of all black people, all black people in the United States were living below the poverty line in nineteen sixty six of the poor living in metropolitan areas were black, and in nineteen sixty eight, two thirds of the black population lived in ghettos. So yeah, like, of course, it makes sense that their agenda is we wanted to just get to get to basic normal and

then we'll go from air alright. Number five, 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 present day society. H Uh. Number six, we want all black men to be exempt from military service. This is a big one. We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government

that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white, racist government of America. Yeah, and you know later on in there, during the Vietnam War, they actually, uh, some of them travel to Vietnam and um kind of found a common ground with the North Vietnamese. Right, It's very interesting. Uh, is it my turn? It is? Number seven. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.

Pretty much speaks for itself. Yeah, but part of that was that they they they point out that the Second Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed the right to bear arms, and that's gonna be a big, big part of the Black Panther Party. They were they're credited historically as being basically the ones who pointed to the Second Amendment and said, hey, we were advocates of gun rights. Yeah, well, we'll get

to all that. It gets pretty juicy. Number eight, we want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails. They it says that they believe that all black people should be released from prison because they have not received a fair and impartial trial. Number nine, 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. Number ten, we want land, bred, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace. And as our major political objective a United Nations. You provised 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. They're basically saying, we believe that black should have the power to separate from the United States from the white establishment and form their own self sufficient and um respected, self governing body basically right. So they took these uh tin this tin Point program. They founded a newspaper called The Black Panther and they sold that for cents. Uh. It got to be a very

popular newspaper. Um had a really wide circulation, and it wasn't just uh, you know, black communities that there were. There were all kinds of people reading this a newspaper and it kind of aside from donations and stuff from various groups, it really kind of funded the organization was to sale this paper and every single issue I believe featured this tin Point program on the inside I'd cover

and uh quick shout out to the artwork of Emery Douglas. Uh, if you've ever I saw this great documentary called The Black Panthers Vanguard of a Revolution. Yeah, I watched that too. And this artwork from this you know, artist and graphic designer Emery Douglas that was kind of the hallmark of the paper was just gorgeous stuff. And um, I think he's one of those has sort of not been lost to history. But you know, I had never heard of

him before. I think he did it cover for one of the editions of Native Sun because I was looking at I was like, that looks really familiar. That's where I saw it before. It's really good stuff. Yeah, So, Chuck, they we've got the ten Point Plan, uh, and the original headquarters in Oakland, and all of a sudden, the Panthers starts spreading like wildfire, like their ideas because the experience was so similar as far as poverty and being harassed and brutalized by police and just Joe really being

held down by the white establishment. Since that experience was so similar throughout all the all the major cities and even smaller cities in the United States, the Black Panther Party spread pretty quick and eventually they had something like

five thousand members. And remember that doesn't sound that much like that many people, but like you said, to be a member, you were committed to the Black Panther Party seven you had to quit your job, you had to quit school, and your your life was the Black Panther Party. So the fact that they had five thousand people doing that around the country is pretty nuts. But they had many, many more supporters, and the Black Panther newspaper eventually grew

to a circulation of about two fifty thousand. It's amazing, it really is. And UM, well, I guess we'll we'll get back to their history after this. Sorry, alright, So, uh, if you want to start, if you want to start anything that you want to grow and be noticed, then it sounds kind of silly to talk about, but you need to be good at branding. And uh, I don't know that they specifically thought about it as branding initially, but they quickly realized that the media really ate this

stuff up. When these black men in in leather, black leather car coats and black turtlenecks and black berets donning shotguns, uh with the you know, the ammunition draped around their shoulder. Uh, the press ate it up. It was it was a cool look, and young black men wanted to look like this. Um.

Black women started growing out their afros. It was all kind of sort of tied into the Black is Beautiful movement um, which was sort of just the notion of embrace your blackness, don't try to fit in and look you know, don't straighten your hair, don't try and look like white people like where you're hiki uh, grow your afro out, be proud of who you are as a black person. Embrace your roots. And the Black Panther Party was really tied into this and it became a really

big part of their branding and recruitment. Yeah, if you were hip at this time, like you were definitely hip to the Black Panther look, even if you hadn't adopted it yourself, you were like, there's a cool cat walking down the street with a bandalier bullets in the shock. Right. So, Um, the Panthers they had the look, they had the offices, now,

they had the newspaper. And one of the first things they started doing even before they really started to but those first Panther members Um Hueie Newton, Bobby Seal, and then a guy named Um Bobby Hutton was their first recruit. Um. One of the first things they started doing was patrolling the neighborhoods of Oakland and looking for police who had stopped um black motorists. Right, it's almost like a a guardian angels that protected citizens from cops, right exactly. That's

a really good way to put it right. So they would stand there, um at a reasonable distance and just openly and obviously observe the traffic stop, and they would shout, you know, at the cop anytime he started to violate the civil rights of the black driver. UM. And they were armed. They were holding shotguns, oftentimes not necessarily pointed

at the cops. But in that UM in that documentary we mentioned, they would talk about how like the they would kind of bring it is, move it from side to side, kind of shifting position, and as it did it slowly was aimed for a moment at the cop, and the cops got the point like, yeah, I get it. You have a loaded shotgun and it's right there and you could shoot me. And some of the first um, some of the first traffic stop monitoring that happened just scared the Bejesus out of the cops. They had never

experienced anything like this before. All of a sudden, there were a group of young black men standing there in black berets and shades at night, holding shotguns trained on them from time to time, and UM, the cops actually responded and exactly the way the black panthers did. They were much more hesitant to um brutalize or violate the civil rights of the drivers, and a lot of times they just get in their cars and leave, especially if

they were on patrol alone. So that was one of the huge early foundational hallmarks of of UM the Black Panther Party, that they were, oh the leap and armoredly protecting their UM fellow blacks from police brutality. That was that was one of their major roles. Yeah. And uh, the reason that they were allowed to have these guns is because one of their one of their leaders, Eldridge Cleaver, UM found in the California law books that I mean, they call it a loophole, but it wasn't really a loophole.

It's kind of right there in black and White as you are allowed to carry a gun in public, on public property as long as it's not concealed open car. And so they were like, all right, well we have these guns. It says right here we're allowed to. They would carry a gun in one hand a lot of times, and then this California legal handbook in the other and

they knew it by heart. They could quote exactly the code. Uh. And then you know, obviously the cops caught on the word got around what was going on, and it developed

all the way to the California in General Assembly. And when you see this documentary, it's it's amazing, man, these these black the Black Panther party marches through the building onto the floor of the California General is simply wielding shotguns, loaded shotguns, and you know you see all the all the obviously the white legislature just sitting there like what

in the world is going on, including Ronald Reagan. Well, yeah, he was the governor, right, And so Ronald Reagan was the governor at the time, and he is in that documentary quoted as saying, like anybody who thinks, you know, carrying open loaded guns in public is okay is out of his mind, and ultimately signed a anti open carry law that closed that loophole, the Mulford Act. Right, So Reagan signed some um gun control legislation, big gun control legislation,

in an effort occurb those patrols by the black panthers. Yeah, and not so obviously you hear, all right, Ronald Reagan does this? You think, where's the n r A. And so I looked up, I was like, all right, what was just the climate at the time. Apparently in the late sixties n r A. It wasn't until the late seventies, nineteen seventies seven, when a guy named Harlan Carter took over the n r A is when they really stepped it up with the Second Amendment rights. It was really

more strict version of the Second Amendment. And uh so the n r A was silent, and obviously Reagan being very tough on guns, he had a I guess you could call it a conversion in the nineteen eighties as well. Uh and then he and the n r A teamed up together and started saying things like, well, no, it's it's okay, you can totally have guns. Right. This also happened to coincide with the breakup of the Black Panther Party. Yeah, when the when the n r A and Reagan changed

their stance on gun rights. Um one thing you said was that it was Eldridge Cleaver who noticed loophole. It was Hughey Newton. He was the one who who like really had that mind for law. Eldridge Clever was much more the militant revolutionary and he was already a bit of a darling in the intellectual circles for a book of essays he'd written in prison called Soul on Ice. And so he joined the Black Panther Party pretty early on as their Minister of Information, in large part their

official spokesman um. And he brought an air of real credibility and legitimacy and got a lot of um, left leaning intellectuals and um, you know, entertainment types like Brando was a big one who was in favor of the party and supporter. But they they really started to pay attention to the Black Panthers when Eldridge Clever joined. Yeah, and his wife, Kathleen Cleaver was also one of the Uh, well we might as well go ahead and talk about

women in the Black Panther Party. Uh, you know, like most organizations at the time, that it was, um it was sort of from the top down down, a male driven organization. And uh they did have Kathleen Cleaver, and they had Elaine Brown who was also sort of one of the higher ups. But it was still and even they admitted it was still somewhat of a chauvinistic organization and most of the women were uh didn't make it pass.

What they called the rank and file um sort of operating the nuts and bolts, secretary or secretarial work and UM just kind of making the thing go. So it was you know, on one hand, they did give women some positions of power, but never kind of at the top. Well, now there were I mean, like you said, you name

two of the big, big exceptions that rule. But they were big exceptions, like UM Kathleen Cleaver was the first woman who was a member of the decision making body, and Elaine Brown took over as chair party chair like the the top official after Hughey Newton UM split for Cuba in nineteen three. But like you said, most of the women in the Black Panther Party we were ranked

and file. But it doesn't mean that gender roles were totally rigid in the party, Like for example, you would just as often or frequently see women out armed doing UM patrols of the neighborhood, while men were the ones responsible for some of the survival programs, the community programs that we'll talk about. Yeah. Well Brown said they tried that and had minor successes, was right, Yeah, And the documentary she said that was sort of what she tried

to do is reverse some of the roles. And she said there was still kind of largely a sexist attitude, and which was a problem within the organization, because you can't be that true community organization if you have that oppression going on within your own group in a gender sense. Yeah, and especially if you know women are the ones who are doing a lot of the actual work, Like something like fifty of Panther membership was female at one point.

So yeah, you gotta respect that people who are actually doing the work, or else you got an arrogance problem at the top. Yeah. And we should mention too that Kathleen Cleaver is a professor right here in Atlanta at our own Emory University. Uh what law professor? Yeah, yeah, she wanted to get a law degree from Yale and uh after years of living in exile, which we'll get to. All right, So you mentioned the survival programs, and um, if you don't know what that is, you might be saying, like,

what in the world is Josh talking about. They had their police brutality program, so that's kind of what made the news, was patrolling the streets with these guns, keeping the cops in check. And by the way, we should mention that they're the ones who came up with the term pigs as a dragatory term for police officers. Yeah from there. It first appeared in their newspaper and it caught him pretty quick. Yeah, so that was that was kind of what they made the news for it first.

But um, I think especially Huey Newton realized early on that they can make a real difference in the community if they get these social programs going that you know, they're not being taken care of. Their schools are bad. These kids don't have access to like good food even and they they read that, you know, science scientifically speaking, that a good breakfast is has a big impact on

how a child learned throughout the day. So they started this breakfast program where they would give I mean, I think at one point they were feeding like twenty thousand children free breakfasts around the country every day, every day, every morning, twenty thousand children around the country who otherwise would have gone to school hungry and stayed hungry the whole day eight breakfast because the Black Panther Party fed them every day, every school day around the country. That's insane. Yeah.

They started medical clinics, free clinics called the People's Free Medical Center. Uh. They offered vaccines, testing for diseases, UH, treated, basic illnesses, cancer screenings, basically the social services that white America fully enjoyed, or i should say wide a man of a certain class fully enjoyed. And UM started offering up these programs which kind of became one of the hallmarks of the party. Yeah, they weren't just this militant

group trying to you know, keep cops in check any longer. No. No, then that was a huge huge UM. I mean, that was as big, if not bigger than their their militant objectives is serving the community through these survival programs to right. And they funded these programs largely through donations UM, which they would go out and solicit from the community around

the city's right. And apparently if you at least didn't give something, if you were like, no, I'm not giving you a dime, the Panthers would UM would out you in their newspaper and call for a boycott of your business that, you know, saying like you're these guys care so little that they won't even chip in a dollar

for kids to have a free breakfast. UM. So they had like a real they had a pretty serious organization going by this time that was directed again not just that patrolling police and fighting police brutality, but also at serving the community. Yeah. One of the cool things they did was they started the Oakland Community School. Yeah. That

was Elaine Brown. Yeah, and it was kind of her passion project, and it was it was pretty much free to students and they had UM they had small classes, They taught poetry, they taught foreign language, uh, in current events, they taught yoga like all these things that the black community had never you know, had access to. Black history is obviously a big part of it. They had my Angelou and Rosa Parks and other civil rights leaders come in and speak at the school and it operated for

nine nine years from seventy to eighty two. And uh, Kathyne Cleaver has this one great story that she told on CNN about one young man who came to join the party because you know, he wanted to get a gun and be on the patrol. They handed him a stack of books and he looked at him and said, I thought you were going to army and they said back to him, I just did pretty good. Yeah. She dropped the mic right after that. But that, I mean

that directly relates to UM. I think point number five on the ten point Agenda, where it says that they want education for people that um, that teaches them about themselves, that gives them a knowledge of self. It said that, um, if a man doesn't have knowledge of himself in his position in society in the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else, which is exceptionally true.

So you've got all these programs. I think they had like sixty five programs what they called survival programs in in place. Um. And it wasn't until apparently these programs, uh, we're starting to really roll and get the attention of and support of a lot of people outside of the communities. Even that the FBI, led by Jager Hoover, gave its full attention to the Black Panthers and they set about

trying to destroy the Black Panther Party. Well yeah, I mean Hoover, ironically, these social programs are what scared him the most because he knew that that's how you're going to get white liberals on board on this cause, which is exactly what happened. I mean, like you said, they weren't. They didn't shun the help of the white man by any means. They like went arm in arm with these

uh white lefties. Uh basically watch the documentaries. It looks like today they're you know, these college dudes with beards. They look like modern hipsters and uh worked arm in arm and at one point they even got together who

was the Appalachian group, the Young Patriots. Yeah, it's just like you see this video of these black militants like giving handshakes and hugs to these Appalachian white Appalachian i mean rural white people who all seemed like they were like, we have the same problems and we can just get together. And it was just just crazy. It's specially in today's climate,

all these years later to see that happening back then. Yeah, they, I mean they they were in favor of anybody regardless as long as they shared, you know, kind of the same sentiments or the same struggle. Um. In nineteen seventy, Hugh Newton became the first black leader to ever publicly support gays and lesbians. Yeah that was a huge deal too, Yeah, absolutely, Yeah. Well, I mean the point was, like, you know, the problem

wasn't race, The problem was this class struggle. And you know, everybody of a certain socioeconomic status or who was a worker was being held back. You know. So, Um, you

were saying Hoover was worried about those social programs. Um. There's a quote from a letter that he wrote to an FBI agent who objected to targeting the survival programs as part of cointel pro Hoover said, you state, the Bureau should not interfere in programs such as the Breakfast for Children because many prominent humanitarians, both why and black, are interested in the program, as well as churches which are actively supporting it. You obviously have missed the point.

And his point was that you don't leave those programs alone because they have support outside of the community. You target them because they have support outside of the community. That that was the real threat, way more than black men patrolling the streets with shotguns. That was a problem for local law enforcement, and the FBI was worried about it.

But more of the point, they saw that as such a uh flash point, a potential flashpoint that they could get the police to shoot and kill armed black men on the street with with impunity. They that they could deal with. That is what they understood was meeting violence with violence. What they didn't know how to deal with, aside from completely subverting it and sabotaging it. Was generating

goodwill throughout the community through these social programs. So that was the real threat to Hoover and his eyes amazing. So at this point, um, the party at the top had gotten a little uh, the foundation had gotten a little loose, um due to a couple of things going back in time a little bit. A few years before um, Huey Newton was arrested and convicted of killing a police officer, which, um it. On one hand, it's sort of um removed one of the one of the pieces of the foundation,

which made a little bit weaker at the top. On the other hand, it really got people around this free Huey Newton campaign. Yeah that's phrase, Yeah, free Huey. And again the white liberals got on board and it kind of swept the nation that basically Huey Newton was involved in a shootout with the cops and was they thought wrongfully imprisoned and kind of railroaded through the system. And um so in one since it sort of galvanized the movement.

And another, anytime one of the leaders is is operating out of jail, then that's that's not good. And he wasn't the only one. Um. Actually, I think all three of the original Bobby Seal was in and out of jail a couple of times, and I think by this point to Clever had fled the country to avoid jail and ended up in Algeria. He did so back in Um as part of a patrol. Clever and Bobby Hutton, who was the first recruit of the Black Panthers and by this time was the treasurer of the Oakland Chapter. UM.

They were part of a patrol that ended up. Um was pulled over by two cops and those two cops ended up dead, and everybody in the car fled, and Um, Hutton and Clever fled to a basement where they got in a shootout for ninety minutes with police, and the police threw in tear gas and Um the tear gas,

I guess exploded and caught the basement on fire. So Um Eldridge, Clever, and Bobby Hutton decided that they were going to surrender, so they came out with their hands up, Um unarmed, and the cops surrounded him and shot Hutton in the head, just executed him right there on the sidewalk, and Clever Um was taken to jail. He made bail, and right when he made bail, he's like, see you split. He went to Cuba because Fidel Castro was a long time and big supporter of the Black Panther Party. There's

apparently still one of them. Um A Mada Shakur I believe who is living still in exile in Cuba today. Um who's a Black Panther? Uh? But Eldridge Clever, I guess didn't like the climate, ended up with Kathleen Clever in Algeria and formed the UH the International Chapter of the Black Panther Party, and that's where they would receive dignitaries from like the North Vietnamese government or from Cuba or any kind of left leaning revolutionary group would come

meet them there. And that was enormous because all like basically no other black liberation or black rights movement group had genuine, legitimate international support. The Black Panthers did, and in the eyes of the world, that boosted their credibility

just through the roof. Oh yeah, alright, So there's a bit of a UH I don't want to say power vacuum, but slight leadership vacuum because of the various UH top original founders being away from Oakland, either in jail or Algeria or in and out of jail, and uh, it could have potentially been filled by a young man out of Chicago named Fred Hampton. And we will get back

to Fred's story right after this. All right, So Fred Hampton, um, by all accounts from this documentary in my research, seemed like he could have been the Bobby Kennedy of the Black Panther Party. He was vivacious, he was a great speaker. He was you know, he would he would give these

speeches and uh, just galvanized people. He had a great personality and um, he was really getting kind of the movement back on track again in a big, big way when he was pretty much I'm not gonna say pretty much when he was uh politically assassinated by the FBI in Chicago Police department. Yeah, he was executed for sure. Um, so what was thee Yeah, December four is when the raid went down. So it's something like four am sometime

in the wee hours. The cops kicked in the door Fred Hampton's house or the house where he was staying, and um, ninety bullets. I think I saw ninety also saw a hundred ninety bullets were shot fired from the Chicago Police Department and one bullet was shot by the Black Panthers, and that bullet was shot when the bodyguard to Fred Hampton, his name was Mark Clark, was shot and killed and dropped the shotgun he was holding in it went off. Yeah. Um, and we should mention too.

This was one of many, many what they called raids. Um after hoover Is issued that edict that they were the the largest uh. And I'm sure there was an internal memo as well, which we don't know about. But when he issued that edict that they were the most threatening group to the United States eights democracy, it was pretty much open season and they carried out these raids all over the country where essentially cops would just kick indoors,

guns blazing, shoot first, asked, don't even ask questions. Yeah, but this one was a little more, even even worse. It was even more pronounced because this was targeted this, yes, exactly, and it was targeted specifically for Fred Hampton. And it kind of falls in line with this part of cointel Pro or coin tel pro. This one of the foundations of coin tel pro was that it sought to prevent the rise of a black messiah that could um consolidate the masses. And that was Fred Hampton, right, Well, he

definitely fell in that. So was MLK, so was Malcolm X. Basically any black leader that was assassinated definitely fell within that. So and Fred Hampton did as well, for sure. So he was assassinated, Um, not by the FBI, but by the Chicago p D. But the Chicago p D were able to carry out a targeted raid because the FBI had supplied them with a map drawn by one of

their informants of the apartment fred Hampton was staying. And yeah, and it was under the guise of they have a stash of guns in there, which they did have a stash of guns and ammunition in there, and that was the excuse they used to go in and shoot him in bed while he slept. Yeah. And if you are questioning whether this was actually an attempt on Fred Fred Hampton's life, those ninety bullets that were fired, most of

them went into Fred Hampton. Uh, and three people who were sleeping in the same bed as Hampton where he was shot and killed. Um, we're not hit by bullets at all. Yeah, including his eight and a half month pregnant girlfriend. Yeah, who they grabbed by the hair and threw into the other room, tore her robe open, and um. You know, the story of the cops was was they knocked on the door, were denied entry. Uh, then they opened the door and there was a woman aiming a

shotgun at them. Um. Later on ballistics tests, they did everything and basically figured out that was sham. All the bullets were found ballistically to have gone into the apartment, none going out of the apartment through the walls. And you know, in this documentary they interview a few of the people who are in there and they were just like it was mass murder. They basically just came in and shot the place up. Uh. They examined the angle of the wound that showed that Hampton was lying on

his back in bed from somebody standing above him. And in nineteen seventy a coroner's jury ruled the deaths justifiable. Everyone got away with it, but the city eventually and the federal judge approved at one point eight five million dollars settlement, but that wasn't until the nineties. Yeah, oh yeah,

thirteen years later. But the FBI apparently the agent who was handling the informant who produced the map, was so pleased with the results that after the after the raid that resulted in Hampton's ex acution, Um, he I guess male jager Hoover with the request for an extra three dollars because he wanted to give the informant a bonus. One of the bigger black eyes on American history, for sure.

One of the other black eyes on the Chicago PD at this time was the one of these raids was on the Breakfast for Children program where the supplies for breakfast were burned, like the place was set on fire by the cops. So, I mean the Black Panthers are at like open war with with the FBI and with the police department. To the late sixties were crazy, you know, Yeah, in large part because of this. Yeah, I mean for sure, Uh, there was another big shootout and this is all sort

of coming to a head. If it feels that way, that's exactly what's going on. Um. In nine nine there was another big shootout and this was major and I think it was in Los Angeles, wasn't it. Yeah? Was It was the first time a swat team was ever used. Yeah, they employed the swat team, which was invented by the l A p D and two hundred l A Police uh.

And I think it was like six or eight Black Panther Party members were involved in a full on, you know, hour long gun battle just right there in the streets. So things are coming to a head. The sort of the secret plan here by Hoover is working, which is he wants to fracture the party from within and so

seeds of discontent and discord. So they had been through the years planting informants in the Black Panther Party, uh, in the party, and they knew it, the Black Panthers did so a lot of distrust, you know, when you know, like who can you trust? A lot of this this distrust happens even among you know, the higher ups that were formerly like a pretty strong union, right, And that happened for sure with the case of Eldridge Clever and

Huey Newton. When Healey Newton got out of jail, he was eventually freed, and it was a big deal, and they thought this was going to be sort of the the rebirth of the Black Panther Party, uh, in the wake of the death of Fred Hampton. But he came out of jail, and he and Clever sort of had different Uh, they always sort of had different priorities, but they managed to come together. But they were truly fractured

at this point. Yeah, they were. Um. Newton and Clever were like openly criticizing one another, with Clever still in exile, but Clever had the entire New York chapter dedicated to him. Uh. And years prior, the Black Panthers had formed what was called the Black Liberation Army, but it was a army of defense until nine UM, when I believe he was

still in absentia. But uh, Eldridge Clever said, Hey, we're gonna take this from defensive to offensive and basically create a new terrorist group out of the Black Liberation Army. And they started a campaign of violence against UM cops where they would ambush cops and just kill them. There wasn't any retaliation for police brutality. Um, it wasn't self defense, like they were ambushing and killing cops. And it happened

in cities around the country. And the fracture between the Black Panthers itself was so deep that Cleaver's faction and Newton's faction were assassinating one another. They were taking out each other's people. Um so it was a big deal. And the Black Liberation Army officially split from the Black Panthers in nineteen seventy one. And of course, at this point, Herbert Hoover sitting back in his chair like choking on his cigar from laughter, because this is exactly what he wanted. Yeah,

was this in fighting? And um So Newton gets out of jail, he's, uh, he's trying to get the social programs going again, but he also is, uh, becomes addicted to drugs and by all accounts is sort of losing his mind and has become power hungry and um his sort of lost the original calling that he had and has gotten sort of drunk with power and was not functioning mentally like he should have been due to the drugs. Right, So it was it was his big sort of the

big beginning of the flame out for himself and the party. Yeah, for sure, his his downfall. Definitely, it didn't exactly mirror the party, but you know it was it was a herald of one. You know, one of the founders was totally losing his his marbles because he was addicted to heroin and cocaine, you know. And he actually had a very sad end. Uh. He died during a drug deal on the street in n in Oakland. Um, but he said that he was committing revolutionary suicide by being addicted

to drugs and basically killing himself that way. UM. Some of the other ones had not quite as tragic but strange ends, like Elder Clever. Right when he returned from Algeria with Kathleen Cleaver, um he became I think both of them might have become born again Christians, and um Aldrich Clever eventually became a registered Republican. I did not see that coming. I did not either, and I'm sure

a lot of people didn't. Right. And then, you know, I mentioned that internal violence with one another, Right, there was a big turning point, um as far as public sympathy went. Um in nineteen sixty nine, I think maybe Yeah, nineteen sixty nine, there was a guy named Alex Rackley who was a member of the New York Chapter, and he was suspected to be an FBI informant. And it's still after all these years, never come to light whether

he was or not. But the Panthers had the idea that he was so they took him to the New Haven chapter where he was tortured. They tied him up to a bed, poured boiling water on his body for days, and then eventually I guess he confessed, although if you ever listened to a torture episode, torture, Yeah, you can get a false confession pretty easy if you torture somebody. Um. They took him out to the woods and shot him

in the head and chest and and left him. And when he when his body was discovered, Bobby Seal had been in New Haven speaking at Yale like just hours before the guy was killed. So he got charged with the murder. And this is one of the founders of the Black Panther Party on trial for murder. And during this trial, um, which he was acquitted, but he the a lot of the in fighting came out and the Panthers had managed to keep it out of the public eye and under wraps for for you know, up to

this point. Now it came out in the trial, so people realize that there was a lot of m schisms and fractures within the leadership itself. They lost a lot of public sympathy when they found out that they would carry out you know, extra judicial justice on their own members. Yeah. Um, and it just it was. It was a big thing. It was a big turning point for the party as far as the public was concerned. Yeah. And and like I said, they were sort of the two factions with

with Clever in Newton. Some people went with Clever, some people went with Newton. A lot of people left the Black Panther Party period at this point because they either didn't know who to give their allegiance to or they just felt betrayed by this fracture and the party wasn't what they thought it was. So the numbers are declining, it's it's definitely in sort of free fall at this point. And uh, Bobby Seal decides, here's what we need to do.

We need to close down as many chapters as we can and and pull the resources in the money and bring everyone out here to Oakland because I'm gonna run from mayor and we to go all in on this legit push for political candidacy because I think I can win.

So they literally called up people on the East coast and the Baltimore office and New York offices and said shut him down, come out here to California and we need to go all in on not only running for mayor, but on a massive voter registration campaign to register, you know, people in in urban communities to vote. So I think in the end they got like fifty new people registered to vote, and out of eight or nine candidates, he

finished close enough in second to get a runoff. He got like the vote, yeah, but ultimately lost in a runoff in a narrow runoff and did not win UM, which sort of was one of the final nails in the coffin for the party because they had committed so many resources to try and get behind Bobby Seal's run for mayor. And he incidentally still lives in the Bay Area and is very much still an activist. Yeah, Bobby

Seal is. Yeah, he was. Also did you ever see that UM documentary on the Chicago Eight It was like animated, No, it was really It's very good. But he was one of the Chicago eight and steal. He actually went to prison. This is before mayoral run. UM, but he did like four years or at least was sentenced to four years strictly for um contempt of court because he rejected that

he was getting a fair trial. Because I don't think there was a single black person on the jury, Um, and he rejected that he was being tried by a jury of his peers. And he kept protesting in the middle of court, and eventually at one point the judge had him gagged, but he got like four years for that. Yeah, gagged as in literally chained to his seat with tape over his mouth. Yes, and uh, you know that that set off all sorts of protests in the streets. People

wanted that judge removed. I thought that was that not during the Panther twenty one trial. Was that the other one in Chicago? Know? That was the Chicago eight trial? Um? And that was that was a different trial. Also where Um, did you ever hear the urban legend that Hillary Clinton got Bobby Seal out of off of murder charges? That was that came out of that Alex Rackley trial where he was on trial for murder and he was acquitted. UM, and Hillary Rodham Clinton was nowhere near the actual trial

as his attorney. She apparently um was a law student at Yale still and was coordinating with the a c l U to monitor of the trial. So she she was there but apparently had nothing to do with the defense but it was a an urban legend that came out of the two thousand senatorial campaign. Well, the Panther twenty one I mentioned, um just quickly. That was in New York, the New York Chapter twenty one. Leaders of the Black Panther Party were rounded up and arrested on

conspiracy charges. And this is a really big deal because the New York Chapter was one of the biggest ones in the country after Oakland, and people got involved and tried to raise money, like celebrities got involved and donated money, and at one point, I don't know if it still is, but it was the longest criminal proceeding in New York state history. It was a thirteen month trial by jury and they're all found not guilty and released, so that all of them were found not guilty. Huh. Yeah, the

Panther twenty one. Uh, And that's you know, jumping back in time a little bit. I just wanted to mention that. So there's a distinct legacy beyond just the look or the image or black power and black power. We should also say, um, I think it was Stokely Carmichael who either coined that phrase or at least was the first really kind of pick it up and run with it um and Stokely Carmichael is non non violent student Coordinating Committee.

They got together with the Black Panthers early on. But if you I mean just in the popular culture, the Black Panthers live on. But there there's even more of a legacy as well. Um. Before he died, Dredge Clever gave an interview I think back in and he said that, Um, he basically blamed the gang violence that plagued inner cities in the eighties. He traced that directly to the death of the Black Panthers. He said that as it was the U. S. Government chopped off the head of the

Black liberation movement and left the body. They're armed. That's why all these young bloods are out there now. They've got the rhetoric but are without the political direction, and they've got the guns. So he basically traces that directly to the Black Panthers being taken down. Yeah, actually I do. So we were talking about how you know there there's

a legacy. There's not just a legacy the Black Panthers is a legacy of um uh, brutality against black people that apparently is at least as bad if not worse today than it has been, Chuck. So, the Tuskegee un Niversity in Alabama has records of all the lynchings that took place in the Jim Crow era eighteen ninety and nineteen sixty five and two thousand. Nine hundred and eleven Black Americans were lynched during those years, and the worst year of the Jim Crow era was eighteen ninety two,

and a hundred and sixty one people were lynched. In two thousand and fifteen, two hundred and fifty eight black people were killed by police in the United States. So not a lot has changed, and it's possible that it's gotten worse. But if you look to the Black Lives Matter movement, they have chosen the way of King uh and and preaching non violent rhetoric for social change rather than the Black Panther rhetoric of militancy and violent self defense. Yeah.

I think a bit of the Black Panther Party spirit that was alive in the Black Lives Matter movement for sure, Yeah, for sure. So uh yeah, that's all I've got. That's all I got. Good one. Yeah, I thought so too. Man. Um, do you ever see the movie O, the one with like Mario van Peebles. Yeah he made it. He did, he wouldn't in I don't think Okay, no, I didn't. I heard it was not good. Yeah, I want to see Malcolm X. I've never seen that one. Oh that's great,

is it? Yeah? Yeah, Spike Lea's movie. Sure, Yeah, really good. Okay, I'll check that out. Yeah. The Um the Panther movie was. I just read a few reviews today and apparently the setup is pretty good with some of the history, but then it kind of goes off the rails and like and not just goes off the rails like bad movie, but bad movie and not historically accurate or honoring like the subject matter. Dance scenes keep breaking out. Uh, but I do think that. I was like, man, why hasn't

there been a movie made about Fred Hampton? Yeah, he sounds like he was a a pretty inspiring figure. Yeah, seeing some of those speeches like he he had it going on. He said his one big quote was, uh, We're not gonna fight fire with fire, We're gonna fight fire with water. I thought that was a good one. Yeah, that's a great one. That's black Messiah talk right there exactly. If you want to know more about the Black Panthers.

There's a bunch of stuff you can do. You can go on to the site at house stuff works dot com and search those terms. You can go watch Black Panthers Vanguard of Revolution. You can watch Black Power mixtape that has a lot to do with the Black Panthers. I haven't seen it yet though, of you know, you can go to Emory University, I bet and get in touch with Castl and Cleaver and maybe offered to buy her coffee. Yep, there's uh some just a lot of

really good articles out there. Uh that it just searched Black Panthers in it'll there's a lot of eye opening history that you didn't learn in school. And since I said you didn't learn in school, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this addendum to rubber trade from the elastics episode. Hey, guys, just listen to the one on elastics. It was fun and informative as usual, but I wanted to call attention to a small important omission.

You're discussing the rubber trade in Latin American you only mentioned Brazil, although it was indeed the largest exporter of rubber in the area. The Amazon Basin and the Putumayo River Valley region in Peru and Colombia were also important sites for the production of rubber trees. Sadly, when you combine global demand with a natural product, the result is

usually some form of exploitation. In the case of rubber, it came to a horrible extreme with the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company, or as it was known in Spanish, the Casa Arana, named for Julio cesar Arana, Peruvian businessman that set up shop in the region, enslaved, tortured, and mutilated indigenous populations to the brink of extinction in the pursuit of rubber. His crimes were documented and made public in nineteen thirteen, but his business and atrocities only stopped when

rubber production moved to Asia and he couldn't compete. UH. This whole rubber Bonanza's chronicled in the x went Colombian novel The Whirlwind by J. E. Rivera. Today, the offices of the company, the Kasa Adana or Arana House, are being converted into a historic site. Members of local tribes can gather and remember those atrocities in their own way, telling their own stories and their own words. UH. This is one of those poorly documented, poorly discussed examples of

genocide as a result of trade. At least in Columbia, every kind of economic bonanza is somehow tied to one massacre or another. So that's the downer I wanted to share. Nice Who is that best from Bogato? Santiago? Santiago is the person who wrote it in Yes, thanks a lot for writing that, Santiago. We appreciate it. Yep, that's a good one. And then this has been like an eye opening history lesson through and through. Huh. Absolutely, if you want to give us an eye opening history lesson, we

love those. So get in touch with us. You can tweet to us at josh um Clark and at s y s K podcast. You can hang out with us on Facebook at Charles be Chuck Bryant and Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot Com. Stuff you Should Know is a

production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, h