The Black Panther Party was formed in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California. They organized neighborhood patrols to watch the police who were terrorizing Black neighborhoods and started a free breakfast program long before any school had one. The Panthers developed a Ten-Point Platform outlining their ideals.
We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
We want full employment for our people.
We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
We want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings.
We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want an education that teaches us our true history and our role in society.
We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails.
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.
We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.
It was the Black Panther Party’s ideology of Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense, particularly against police brutality, that scared the white power structure. When they showed up at the California state capital with legally possessed guns on May 2, 1967. Forces that had never worked together previously: Democrats, Republicans, Ronald Reagan, the FBI, and the California legislature; got together to pass the Mulford Act to take guns off the street. This act was only ever utilized against Black people.
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COINTELPRO, one of the FBI’s counterintelligence programs, preceded the Black Panthers by ten years, but the Panthers were just the type of organization the FBI was looking for. The FBI conducted secret and illegal operations to infiltrate and disrupt radical organizations and leaders. The FBI’s definition of those needing infiltration included the NAACP, Martin Luther King, Jr and the SCLC, the Nation of Islam, and most significantly, the Black Panther Party. J. Edgar Hoover said in 1968 that the Black Panther Party was “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”
As the Black Panther Party grew, the FBI got in on the ground floor with informants providing information on Panther activities and passing along information and misinformation to Black Panther leaders. Informant Earl Anthony pushed the national organization to form the Los Angeles chapter of the Party. The FBI also infiltrated another Black nationalist group in Los Angeles, Ron Karenga’s US Organization.
The FBI would fake letters from one organization to the other to escalate the conflict between the groups, including shootings. There came a time when an FBI informant within the Panthers shot and killed an FBI informant within the US group. Two Black Panthers were killed in a shootout with US on the UCLA campus. An FBI memo dated May 26, 1970, proved the FBI instigated the ongoing violence.
“It is intended that US, Inc. will be discreetly and appropriately advised of the time and locations of BPP activities in order that the two organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her due course.”
After Black Panthers showed up with guns at the California capital and were initially unchallenged, unofficial chapters started forming across the country. The Panthers tried to take back control of the expansion, officially chartering 13 other chapters in major cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Los Angeles. There were plans to start an official chapter in Bridgeport, CT, with Los Angeles members John Higgins and his wife, Ericka Huggins, commissioned to start the chapter. John was one of the Panthers killed on the UCLA campus. When Ericka took John’s body to his home in New Haven, CT, she helped set up the chapter there instead. As the New Haven Chapter grew, the FBI and the New Haven police force helped their ranks to swell.
The Black Panthers were aware of FBI and local police attempts to infiltrate them. The FBI encouraged suspicion and helped spread rumors that chapter leaders were informants. By COINTELPRO design, everyone inside the Black Panthers was looked on with suspicion. One such person was 19-year-old Alex Rackley, who may or may not have been an informant. Rackley was visiting with members of the New York chapter while enforcers from the national office had been sent to “weed out rats” from the East Coast chapters.
The enforcers included George Sams, Lonnie McLucas, and Landon Williams. Suspicions about Rackley had followed him from New York after an April 1, 1969 raid led to the arrests of 21 New York chapter members for allegedly planning to blow up department stores and the Statue of Liberty. Even at trial, no evidence was produced that such a plan existed; it likely was an idea imagined by the FBI.
As soon as Sams and Williams arrived in New Haven, they pointed to Rackley as a potential “rat.” They told local leaders Warren Kimbro and Ericka Huggins that Rackley might be a spy. They induced 15-year-old Maude Francis to sleep with Rackley to find out if he was an informant. She didn’t get an admission.
There was a later incident where Huggins confronted Rackley, who said he “couldn’t read.” Kimbro and Sams descended the stairs during the altercation and decided to punish him with a paddle. Rackley, who held a black belt degree, resisted and kicked Kimbro and Huggins and attempted to hit Sams. Rackley was subdued and expelled from the Party. They sent him outside to wait while they got his bus fare together to send him back to New York.
To get his coat, Rackley reentered the two-story apartment building that served as the New Haven chapter headquarters. Sams accused Rackley of not wanting to leave because he was “a pig” and demanded further punishment. Rackley was taken to the basement and tied up and tortured. He was held there for three days, interrogated often, and tortured with boiling water until he “confessed.” When Rackley was being held, the Chairman of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale, visited New Haven and gave a speech at Yale University. Seale left New Haven during the day on May 20, 1969. That evening, four cars left the apartment, one of them containing Alex Rackley, who was driven to a remote area, shot in the head and chest, and left to die.
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There was at least one rat in the New Haven chapter. Kelly Moye wanted to be a police officer but was told he had to prove his worthiness by spying on the local chapter. He often contributed money and hung out with the chapter. It was his borrowed car used to transport Rackley to his murder site, though Moye allegedly didn’t know his vehicle was being used in that manner. Alerted to activity at the apartment, New Haven police followed the cars leaving the apartment but allegedly “lost them” before the murder took place. Rackley’s body was found the next day, and several Panthers were arrested. Most of those involved admitted to their roles in the killing. George Sams said that Bobby Seale gave the order for the execution; everyone else said Seale had no role in the death. Moye later became a police officer in New Haven, where he served for several years.
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Ericka Huggins and Seale were tried together for the murder of Rackley. Huggins was heard on tape participating in an interrogation of Rackley. Seale was not present. There were several trials in 1970–1971 involving nine members of the Party who came to be known as the New Haven Nine. Lonnie McLucas admitted to his involvement in the murder but chose to go to trial anyway; he was the first to be convicted, followed by Sams, Kimbro, and others. The government attempted to convict Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, which proved problematic.
The prosecution alleged that Seale stopped by the chapter headquarters after giving his Yale speech and ordered the murder of Rackley. Jury selection for McLucas took six weeks. For Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, jury selection took four months.
The only witness tying Seale to the crime was Sams, who’d earlier, along with Kimbro, testified against McLucas in exchange for a reduction in sentence. Sams was accused of being an FBI informant and indeed served a short sentence after his conviction.
Thousands of supporters of the Black Panthers came to New Haven for the trial; many were housed at Yale University. McLucas proved justified in going to trial; he was acquitted of the most severe charges and convicted only of conspiracy to commit murder. There were serious questions about the ability of Black Panthers to get a fair trial anywhere in the US. There was almost no evidence tying Seale and Huggins to the murder, but the government sought the death penalty.
“All of us conspired to bring on this tragedy by law enforcement agencies by their illegal acts against the Panthers, and the rest of us by our immoral silence in front of these acts,” — Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin
“I personally want to say that I’m appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of a Black revolutionary to receive a fair trial anywhere in the U.S.” —Kingman Brewster Jr. Yale President
A young law school student named Hillary Clinton monitored the trials for civil rights violations.
“J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI infiltrated dissident groups and, in some cases, broke the law in order to disrupt them. Law enforcement sometimes failed to distinguish between constitutionally protected, legitimate opposition and criminal behavior.” — Hillary Clinton
On May Day (May 1), 1970, over 15,000 Black Panthers gathered on the New Haven Green to protest the ongoing trial. The government prepared to take them down, gathering over 350 state troopers, National Guard troops, and 4,000 paratroopers and Marines to stomp out Black revolutionaries should violence occur. White militias were on the scene as well, but efforts, including those by Bobby Seale and Yale student groups, staved off any violence. At that time during the Nixon administration, it wasn’t a safe time to be a student activist on a college campus. On May 4, 1970, four students protesting the Vietnam War were shot by National Guard troops at Kent State, and on May 14, 1970, two Black students protesting police brutality were killed by local police at Jackson State.
Both Seale and Huggins received mistrials after jurors could not reach a verdict, though they leaned heavily in favor of acquittal. The judge directed them to be freed instead of facing a possible retrial. Erica Huggins was released, but Bobby Seale was immediately handcuffed and extradited to Chicago, where he became one of the Chicago Eight. Seale later had his case severed, ending in a mistrial. He spent days during the trial bound and gagged in view of the jury for speaking out in response to witnesses. After the mistrial, Judge Julius Hoffman convicted Seale on 16 contempt charges and sentenced Seale to three months in prison on each count — a total of four years. Seale spent two years in jail while the contempt charges were appealed. Those charges were ultimately dropped.
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As a footnote to the New Haven trials, on March 8, 1971, a group called the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, broke into a small FBI office in Media, PA, and stole over 1,000 classified documents, which they turned over to the media. Most outlets wouldn’t report the information, but the Washington Post did after independently verifying the data. The documents exposed the COINTELPRO operation and led to the Church Committee and the cessation of this operation by the FBI.
Among the documents revealed was an FBI memo concerning the goals of COINTELPRO in disrupting political groups in the United States. A separate goal was to prevent the rise of a “Black Messiah.” They identified several possible Messiah, including Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton, all of whom ended up assassinated. COINTELPRO was publicly ended in theory after its exposure. It was replaced by a policy targeting “Black Identity Extremists,” which did/does many of the same things. The New Haven Nine highlighted government attempts to destroy Black activism. It’s hard to conclude that those efforts have ever ceased.