The Men Who Founded the Panthers in a North Oakland Office
Near San Francisco, California
Someone turned on a typewriter in a North Oakland antipoverty office in October nineteen sixty-six, and the document that came out of it changed American political life. The two men typing were Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, both twenty-something, both products of Oakland's flatlands, both students who had watched police patrol their neighborhood with a specific kind of impunity.
The document they wrote was called the Ten-Point Program. Its demands were specific and practical: full employment, decent housing, adequate education, exemption from military service for Black men, an immediate end to police brutality. They named their organization the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The name came from a political-education group in Lowndes County, Alabama. The street-level strategy came from Oakland.
Within weeks, Party members were patrolling Oakland's streets in cars, following police stops, carrying loaded rifles and California law books. California law at the time permitted openly carried firearms in public. The patrols were legal. Sacramento's response was the Mulford Act of nineteen sixty-seven, which banned loaded public carry in California. The legislation was championed by the National Rifle Association. The guns are what history remembered about the Black Panther Party.
What the record also shows, through documentary evidence reported by KQED San Francisco and the California History journal, is the free-breakfast program. By nineteen sixty-nine, Party chapters were operating church-basement breakfast programs for children in cities across the country. The programs were running before school, every morning, in donated spaces. Director J. Edgar Hoover described the breakfast operation in FBI memos as a threat to internal security, and COINTELPRO agents worked to disrupt it through surveillance and infiltration.
The federal government eventually concluded that breakfast before school was a good idea. The National School Breakfast Program became law in nineteen seventy-five. The political organization it had tried to destroy had already demonstrated the model.
The office on what is now Martin Luther King Junior Way is gone. The argument those two men made on a typewriter in nineteen sixty-six has not been resolved.
