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

desolate but formidably urban strata of Oakland, California . The former represents the
birthplace not only of "Black Power" but also of the black panther symbol ; the latter
made the symbol famous worldwide. Co-opting the name and image of the GCFO's
political wing, Newton and Seale "founded" the Black Panther Party, but this connection
between Alabama's Black Belt and the San Francisco Bay Area was more than symbolic.
When Newton and Seale imported the name and symbol of the black panther to the West
Coast and popularized it, the civil rights movement became a national struggle ; indeed,
the symbolism of the black panther united the South with the rest of the country~ This
transplantation of tactics, ideas, and visual images to the West Coast made the rioting
outside of the South in 1964 and 1965 seem both more and less aberrant by comparison .
It was less so because now blacks and whites all over the nation could agree that the
nation's racial woes were not unique to the South; it was more so because the Panthers
represented direct action in the finest tradition of the southern freedom struggle, but with
a foreboding twist .
3While the Black Panther Party was born in Oakland in 1966, its ~yD],~41 was bom in
Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1965 . Clayborne Carson has noted that SNCC inspired
Newton and Seale who, after reading a pamphlet about "how the people in Lowndes
County chose to arm themselves," adopted the black panther symbol of the Lowndes
County Freedom Organization as their own. See Clayborne Carson, In Strug¢Ie~SNCC
and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1981),
278 .
4Im fact, a number of factors changed the civil rights movement from a regional
struggle to a national one . The Watts riot of 1965, Martin Luther King's campaign in
Chicago in 1966, and the formation of the Black Panther Party in 1967 all combined to
shift the locus of civil rights activity to a national scale.
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