The Other Side of the Black Panther Revolution, in Pictures

Black Panthers line up at a rally on July 28, 1968, in DeFremery Park, Oakland, California. “We had guns because too many black people were getting shot during the civil rights movement,” said Bobby Seale. “We were a ragtag bunch at the beginning so I put them in a uniform to give them a sense of pride.” The movement was also associated with a revolutionary socialist agenda, which scared many. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” and launched an extensive counterintelligence program against the party.

Women handing out issues of The Black Panther newspaper. The Black Panther Party first publicized its famous ten-point program, “What We Want Now!” on May 15, 1967, in the second issue of the newspaper:

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 Capitalists 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.

Bobby Seale speaking at the Black Panther rally on July 28, 1968. “When I was younger I stopped going to church as I was tired of all of that hell and damnation,” Seale said at a presentation this February at the University of Texas at Austin to mark the opening of Shames's photo exhibition in the Briscoe Center for American History. “I’ve always been more interested in understanding what is connected to reality. I saw Dr. Martin Luther King talk at the Oakland Auditorium to 7,000 people about boycotting firms, which set the tone for me. So when the Civil Rights Act passed I left my government job and went to work for the community.”

Black Panther members registering voters in 1971 in Oakland, California. “The movement was about getting political seats to get political equity,” Seale said. “In 1965 there were only 52 blacks among the 500,000 public official jobs nationwide.” Government-backed killings and arrests of Panthers only increased its support among African Americans and those on the political left, both of whom valued the Panthers opposition to de facto segregation and the military draft. Party membership reached a peak in 1970, with offices in sixty-eight cities and thousands of members.

A cornerstone of the Black Panther movement was instituting a variety of community programs, most extensively the Free Breakfast for Children program. Initially run out of an Oakland church, the breakfast program served as a space for educating youth about the current condition of the black community and the actions that the party was taking to address that condition. The program eventually spread nationwide. Other free services sponsored by the movement included clothing distribution, classes on politics and economics, free medical clinics, lessons on self-defense and first aid, transportation to prisons for family members of inmates, an emergency-response ambulance program, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and testing for sickle-cell disease.

Through these types of outreach programs the party strengthened its ties to communities and gained more widespread support. “Its legacy is more to do with the example and model: providing the breakfasts, pushing for self-defence in the community and black autonomy—and that is important now,” Kevin Foster, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin said in an interview. “Are the majority of black folks still not doing well now—yes; and is that masked by a few black Americans doing well—again, yes. ”

A photo taken for Bobby Seale’s 1973 mayoral campaign in Oakland, which includes Elaine Brown (center of photo, standing on Seale's left), a prominent panther who became the party's first female chairperson, who was running for Council representative of Oakland at the same time. Although the party disbanded in 1982, the Black Panther model still has lessons for today, says Steven Shames. “On the left people think social media is everything. But the protest will peter out—you've got to be in the community; social media can't replace proper organizing, meetings in coffee shops and churches—what the political Right has been doing for the last 40 years, and very successfully.”

A contact sheet of Shames’s photos show Black Panther attorney Charles R. Gary and writer James Baldwin visiting Bobby Seale in the San Francisco County Jail in 1969. Bobby Seale was one of the original "Chicago Eight" defendants charged with conspiracy and inciting a riot in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Although the evidence against Seale was slim, the judge sentenced him to four years in prison for sixteen counts of contempt because of his outbursts during the trial, each count constituting three months of his imprisonment. He was released in 1972.

Black Panther members, including co-founder Huey Newton (right), picketing a store. The Panthers were involved in numerous firefights with police. Newton went on trial for the killing of Officer John Frey in 1967. Although his conviction was eventually overturned, throughout the 1970s the movement became increasingly riven by infighting, government infiltration and controversy. This contributed to the mainstream press becoming increasingly hostile to it too, which further eroded public support.The legacy of the Black Panthers remains controversial; many herald it as the most influential black movement of the late 1960s, while others decry the group as more criminal than political. “What is criminality, if you can’t read, if an environment is created where you can’t earn—it’s more complicated than a criminal versus the good guy,” Foster says. “The movement represented marginalised people looking for alternative systems.”