3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

"Blood to the Hone'a Beow": Sdt"Detetue Abuued,1967"1968
"8bodbIM bona's brow, and wa b Meow who can't swim!'
-Csplion, Tha Black Panlhar nwwdS11K,19f~
After the Watts riot of 1%S, local blacks formed a Community Action Patrol to
monitor police conduct during arrests . The following year, two students at Oakland City
College (now Merritt College) carried the idea slightly further by instituting armed patrols
in Oakland, California . Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale penned a ten-point program of
their beliefs in the fall of 1966 and began to police the police on an ad hoc basis . A few
months after Newton and Seale officially established the Black Panther Party for Self-
Defense in early 1%7, their organization gained national attention and notoriety by
protesting a proposed gun-control law at the California state capitol in Sacramento .
Dressed in black leatherjackets and berets, and carrying shotguns and pistols, they
purposefully strode into the capitol, where they accidentally entered the assembly floor
and caused a major uproar, stunning all who witnessed the event . Soon after, the
Panthers grew to become one of the most formidable, most terrifying, and most
misunderstood expressions of black political power in American history . If Martin
Luther King symbolized the hope and affirmation of civil rights agitation, then the
Panthers, to many white Americans, symbolized a darker side of black protest .
So long as the Panthers abided by the written and unwritten codes of self-defense,
they were successful . When they did not, crossing the line of self-protection into the
ethically questionable realm of violent aggression, their organization teetered and
collapsed. Because of this fact, the subtle name change of the Panthers, who dropped the
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