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

The Deacons for Defense and Justice sailed betwan the Scylla of self-defense and
the Charybdis ofaggressive violence and emerged unscathed ; however, the Black
Panthers were not so lucky. The Panthers ultimately fell prey to the same brand of
offensive self-defense they lauded . Their concept of self-defense was "san by many as a
thinly disguised exhortation to take pot shots at cops :'~3 The local law enforcement
community, with abundant assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
responded to this personal threat from the Panthers with extreme prejudice. They cracked
down on the Black Panther Party with a vehemence reserved only for the most dangerous
enemies of the public : cop-killers.
After Newton allegedly shot and killed patrolman John Frcy of the Oakland Police
Department in 1967, local, state and federal law enforcement agencies marked the
Panthers for extinction ~4 Police arrested Newton on October 28, 1967, for Frcy's
murder, and Seale on February 25, 1968, after a raid on his home . Police killed Bobby
Button, teenage treasurer of the Black Panther Party, on April 6, 1968 ; Eldridge Cleaver
was wounded in the same firefight . Expressing her condolence, Betty Shabazz, widow of
Malcolm X, wrote in a Western Union telegn~m to Button's family, `"The question is not
Hold Billiard--`Threat to the President"' San Francisco Chronicle , December 4, 1969 ; see
also Billiard, This Side of Glorv, 264-65 .
~3Reginald Major, A Panther is a Black Cat , 61 .
"On June 15, 1969, J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director, declared, "the Black Panther
Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the
country." Hoover, quoted in Major, A Panther is a Black Cat, 300 . Kenneth O'Reilly has
observed : "Hoover's pursuit of the Black Panther Party was unique only in its total
disregard for human rights and life itself." O'Reilly, Racial Matters, 294 .
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