Assault on “Black Power"

On December 4, 1969, Chicago police working with the FBI raided the Black Panther Party’s local headquarters. When the smoke cleared, Party Chairman Fred Hampton, 21, and one other member were dead and four others were seriously wounded. William O’Neal, Hampton’s personal bodyguard, was an FBI informant who provided authorities a floor plan before the ambush.

Black leaders committed to racial justice represented a threat to white supremacy and became targets of law enforcement harassment and attack whether or not they advocated nonviolence. Beginning in late 1963, Dr. King “was the target of an intensive campaign by the FBI to ‘neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader” and destroy his image as a “potential messiah” to unify Black activists.

When younger Black activists took over leadership of the movement, law enforcement repression intensified. “It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks,” Malcolm X said in a March 1964 press conference. A subject of law enforcement surveillance, he was assassinated in Harlem the next year.

In July 1966, 25-year-old Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Chairman Stokely Carmichael gave a speech invoking Malcolm X’s memory and advocating a self-determination policy of “Black Power.” A few months later, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California. Rejecting marches, sit-ins, and boycotts, the Panthers launched youth centers and free breakfast programs while legally arming themselves to patrol against police brutality.

President Lyndon B. Johnson publicly condemned the concept of “Black Power” and the FBI directed COINTELPRO to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” Black nationalist groups. In 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled the Black Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Federal agents and local police launched harassment campaigns, violent shoot-outs, and ambushes like the one that killed Fred Hampton, but in April 1970, only 10 percent of Americans believed the Panthers were victims of targeted violence.

From 1967 to 1971, FBI headquarters approved 379 proposals for COINTELPRO actions against Black nationalists, using dangerous and unsavory techniques that often disregarded the personal rights and dignity of their targets. In 1976, five years after COINTELPRO ended, a Senate committee report concluded that “many of the tactics employed by the FBI were indisputably degrading to a free society.”