The Black Panther Party’s Franklin Lynch Peoples’ Free Health Center in Boston, ca. 1970

Men with guns. Armed community self-defense. Confrontations with predatory police departments. For many people, until you know differently, these are the dominant ideas associated with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Founded in Oakland, California, in October of 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Party existed in more than 13 official chapters across the country and abroad until 1982.

Less known is the targeting of the BBP by the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) operations to “discredit, disrupt, and destroy” the organization. COINTELPRO targeted every progressive organization in the United States at one time or another. Since J. Edgar Hoover was placed in charge of domestic surveillance since 1924, the infiltration, sabotage, and surveillance operations against progressive movements continued across the better part of the century.

Less well known are the Black Panther Party “survival programs,” community-based social justice programs to respond to the organized abandonment by civic leaders of Black and Brown neighborhoods. Organized and run primarily by women, the projects included free breakfast programs for children, grocery cooperatives, free ambulance services, neighborhood escorts for the elderly, education initiatives, and the People’s Free Medical Clinics. The Great Society’s social programs were inadequate, so communities…