"They were the Bad Niggers of white America's nightmares come chillingly to life - a black-bereted, black-jacketed cadre of street bloods risen up in arms against the established order."With that sentence, Newsweek Magazine opened it's February 23, 1970 cover story about the Black Panther Party. Note the past tense used by the writers because it was no accident. At the beginning of 1970, the Panthers were struggling just to survive. Nixon's Justice Department had declared them to be a menace to national security, and Hoover's FBI had successfully executed a counter-intelligence operation against the Panthers, one that had turned it's members against one another. On top of that, law enforcement officials at the local level had been waging war against the Panthers, almost since the Party's inception in 1966.
As of the publication date of the magazine, the Party's top leadership had been effectively neutralized: Huey Newton was in prison charged with killing a cop; Eldridge Cleaver was a fugitive in Algiers along with his wife, Kathleen; Bobby Seale was in jail in San Francisco, awaiting extradition to Connecticut. Meanwhile, local chapters across the country were being decimated by police raids and resultant gun battles. Police viewed the Black Panthers as mortal enemies and proceed accordingly. The Panther's fiery rhetoric, which frequently referred to cops as "pigs" and "motherfuckers", did little to ease tensions between the two groups.
In a remarkable echo of today's headlines, 22 Panthers were charged with conspiring to dynamite Macy's and four other stores, the New York Botanical Garden, the New Haven Railroad tracks and four New York City police stations. It appears that there was some coordination between the Panthers and the Weather Underground during this time. Today, 40 years later, we know just how thoroughly the ranks of the Panthers had been infiltrated by law enforcement. In fact, one wonders if the push to desegregate police departments, during the 1960's, might not have had a less then noble purpose. Meaning that black cops were needed to infiltrate the Party, and there were precious few to be found at first.
One can't help but wonder how many lives might have been spared if the collective power of American law enforcement had been similarly mobilized against the KKK. Conservatives are constantly invoking the heinous deeds committed by the likes of Bill Ayers and other leftist groups, including the Black Panthers, but are strangely silent when it comes to the Klan. It is almost as if "Bombingham" never existed. Blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and his ilk thunder on about the New Black Panther Party and alleged intimidation of voters at the polling places, but you hear not a word about the systematic disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters because of felony convictions. That those state laws, unevenly and inconsistently applied, disproportionately effect African-American voters is beyond dispute.
