Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Fascination and Fear: Covering the Black Panthers

A front-page article from 1971.

The Black Panther Party was founded 50 years ago in Oakland, Calif., on Oct. 15, 1966. Within two years, it had chapters across the country. The Times is marking the occasion by exploring the Black Panthers’ legacy through their iconography and how they were covered in our own pages.

Fifty years later, images from the Black Panther Party’s heyday still flicker in our national memory. With their leather jackets, black berets and lock step formations, these youthful revolutionaries were ready-made for media coverage — and for posterity.

With the heroic era of the civil rights movement glimmering to a close in 1966, the Black Panthers showed that a more radical struggle for racial justice could be photogenic, even if it was less palatable to the mainstream.

An ironic tension emerged in the way the press treated the Black Panthers: Journalists were at once fascinated and frightened by them. And The New York Times was no exception.

“At the same time the newspaper was dubious and skeptical of them, it also gave them a tremendous amount of coverage,” said Jane Rhodes, a professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the author of “Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon.”

“The media, like most of white America, was deeply frightened by their aggressive and assertive style of protest,” Professor Rhodes said. “And they were offended by it.”

When Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party, their first goal was to confront what they saw as an epidemic of police brutality. They took to the streets with rifles, standing guard over policemen on patrol. The California Assembly responded quickly, proposing a law to ban the open carrying of firearms.

So the Panthers, fully armed, marched into the California state Capitol to protest the bill. The national news media took notice.

The Times’s first article on the Panthers was a wire report, “Armed Negroes Protest Gun Bill,” published on May 3, 1967. The piece began, “With loaded rifles and shotguns in their hands, members of the antiwhite Black Panther party marched into the state Capitol today.”

Image
“Armed Negroes Protest Gun Bill,” May 3, 1967.
The Times’s first article on the Black Panthers. [Click to read on desktop]

What the article did not explicitly say, though it was reported later by others, was that the Panthers had read a statement that afternoon calling “upon the American people in general” — not just African-Americans — to help them in their push for rights.

The Times sent its own reporter a few days later to write a profile of Mr. Newton, the party’s young co-founder. That article was no more measured than the first. It barely mentioned police brutality, instead lavishing attention on the fact that the Panthers had weapons. “Political power comes through the barrel of a gun,” Newton was quoted as saying.

To some degree, the Panthers were responsible for presenting themselves as a battle-ready legion. “This is how the Black Panther Party wanted to be seen,” said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. “The Panthers and The Times were taking part in a coproduction.”

And in subsequent articles, The Times did investigate the Panthers’ broader goals a bit more closely. A Times Magazine article by Sol Stern argued that “to write off the Panthers as a fringe group of little influence is to miss the point. The group’s roots are in the desperation and anger that no civil-right legislation or poverty program has touched in the ghetto.”

But as tensions with law enforcement escalated into increasingly violent clashes, the press focused with increasing intensity on violence between the Panthers and the police — especially Newton’s violent run-in with a police officer in October 1967, which led to a murder trial the next year. There was far less attention paid to the party’s critique of law enforcement.


What went largely unreported was the fact that these conflicts stemmed not just from the Panthers, but also from the federal government.

With chapters springing up in dozens of cities, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, mounted a covert operation to discredit the group and create strife within it. He declared the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

It was not until years later that the Senate’s Church Committee would show how pervasively the F.B.I. worked against the Panthers and how much it influenced press coverage. It encouraged urban police forces to confront Black Panthers; planted informants and agents provocateurs; and intimidated local community members who were sympathetic to the group.

The Panther-police conflict that inevitably followed played directly into the narrative that had been established: that the party was a provocative, dangerous organization.

This was never more apparent than in 1969, when the F.B.I.’s campaign to undermine the party reached its peak. Twenty-one Black Panthers in New York, known as the Panther 21, were charged with plotting to set off bombs throughout New York City. A surge of media coverage followed, with The Times among those outlets leading the way.

Almost two years later, all the defendants were cleared, after it became clear that the charges stemmed almost entirely from the provocations of three three long-term undercover operatives with the New York City Police Department who had embedded themselves within the organization.

Internal documents made public during a lawsuit brought by Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad, one of the defendants, show that the F.B.I. had used the press — particularly the New York news media — to create strife within the party and to convey the impression that it was a volatile group.

Agents wrote of “an effort to obtain news media publicity highlighting friction between east and west coast BPP leadership personnel,” according to one F.B.I. memo procured in the 1980s by Mr. Wahad’s legal team. Another discusses “distributing copies of a critical article on the BPP which appeared in the ‘New York Times.’”

As The Times focused on the trial and other conflicts between the Panthers and the police, the party was organizing a slate of service programs for African-Americans in New York. But they went relatively unnoticed.

“We didn’t get covered by any of the media when we were doing these types of things, really — only when some of us would get arrested,” Mr. Wahad said in an interview.

Beginning in late 1968, fatigued by constant conflict and what they saw as sensational coverage, the Panthers refocused their efforts away from policing the police and toward providing health care and other services to the urban poor. They began in California’s Bay Area with a breakfast program for school children, and eventually developed initiatives around education and housing advocacy.

The Times did eventually report on some of these programs, but often with a tone of skepticism. An article on Dec. 7, 1968, mentioned the party’s free breakfast program, but only to suggest that it was part of a ploy to indoctrinate African-Americans. The article, “Black Panthers Growing, but Their Troubles Rise,” suggested that as the party grew, it was intimidating residents and struggling to formulate a coherent direction. When it did mention the breakfast program, the article called it merely “a means of improving its image.”

The Times painted a slightly different picture the following June, when it ran a full feature on the breakfast program, nearly nine months after the party’s official newspaper, The Black Panther, announced the initiative.

But mostly, the programs were treated as publicity stunts, or worse.

The fact that The Times did respond, to some degree, to the organization’s change of focus was largely because of a growing cadre of African-American reporters. In July 1969, Earl Caldwell, who is black, wrote an article, “Panthers’ Meeting Shifts Aims From Racial Confrontation to Class Struggle,” and followed it with a piece for the Week in Review section, “Panthers: They Are Not the Same Organization.”

“One thing The Times figured out was that the Panthers were selling newspapers,” Professor Rhodes said. “The coverage of the Panthers was attracting a younger audience, maybe more of a black audience.”

“Black reporters were able to do much better reporting because they had greater credibility and greater access,” she said.

But that was becoming a moot point: By 1969, the party was being torn asunder, its East and West Coast factions rived by distrust, largely because of the F.B.I. And in the court of public opinion, the Panthers had already lost.

A Harris Survey showed that in April 1970, just 10 percent of Americans thought that “a fairly sizable number of Black Panthers have been shot and killed by law enforcement officers” because law enforcement officers were trying to wipe out the Panthers — exactly what Hoover privately said his mission was. Three-quarters of the country said that police shootings of Panthers were due to violence started by the Panthers themselves.

Just 16 percent perceived the Panthers as doing good work for disadvantaged youth.

Looking at contemporary news coverage, Professor Rhodes said progress has been made when it comes to covering race and activism. “I see organizations like The Times making a much more sustained effort at deeper coverage,” she said. But articles still tend to emphasize the conflict between the police and protesters, she said, without addressing the core principles guiding social movements such as Black Lives Matter: greater investment in public education, community control of law enforcement and economic justice.

“There’s a lot of examples to be learned from the example of the Black Panthers, in terms of taking a look at not just rhetoric and styles of protest, but also looking for some understanding of what protest means and what it intends,” she said.

A correction was made on 
Oct. 19, 2016

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to charges brought against the so-called Panther 21. The charges resulted from the work of three long-term undercover operatives with the New York City Police Department who were embedded within the party; the three were not agents with the F.B.I.

How we handle corrections

Art direction by Antonio De Luca.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT