Black Panthers in L.A.

By January 1968, Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter had organized and consolidated power as head of the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party, the party's first chapter outside Oakland, California, and its headquarters at 4115 South Central Avenue became a center for political education classes, meetings, and other official activities. Other local leaders included Geronimo Pratt, Elaine Brown, Raymond "Masai" Hewitt, and Ericka and John Huggins, while Elaine Brown and Ericka Huggins later became party leaders in Oakland and New Haven, Connecticut. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had secured major legal gains, many young African Americans still doubted that U.S. society would end social and economic inequality and turned to revolutionary nationalism. Founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense combined black nationalism, multiracial coalition-building, militant self-defense, and community-based organizing, becoming the most popular expression of black power in the late 1960s and 70s. In late 1968, the FBI's counterintelligence program, working with police departments nationwide, began a campaign of brutal repression against the Panthers. On December 8, 1969, police attacked three Panther buildings in Los Angeles, including the headquarters on Central Avenue, where hundreds of heavily armed officers, including the city's first Special Weapons and Tactics team, exchanged fire with Panthers, fired 5,000 rounds, and failed to break through the roof with dynamite dropped from a helicopter. After a five-hour confrontation, Renee "Peaches" Moore emerged waving a white cloth and surrendered, and police arrested her and other members there, while a total of 18 people were arrested across the three sites, including Geronimo and Saundra Pratt; three Panthers and three officers were wounded. Heavy-handed enforcement briefly broadened support for the Panthers, but as the United States wound down the Vietnam War, affirmative action opened new opportunities, and internal divisions deepened, the party's revolutionary black liberation politics lost ground by the early 1970s even as the grievances it had mobilized around endured.

Los Angeles, California · United States