The most systematic and effective repressive US government campaign [of this era] was that against the Black Panther Party. Unlike the white student New Left, the Panthers, an explicitly revolutionary Marxist-Leninist organization, were, in the late 1960s, in the process of acquiring a mass base among working- and lower-class groups within the Black community. The FBI reported that in the spring of 1970, 25% of Blacks and 43% of Blacks under 21, had 'great respect' for the Black Panther Party. The FBI, in a special top secret report to the President, in June of 1970, described the Party as 'the most active and dangerous Black extremist group in the United States'.
A systematic national campaign organized by the US federal government in co-ordination with state and local police and intelligence units in order to destroy the party, included sowing dissidence, mass arrests, political trials for conspiracy, and assassinations of Panther leaders. Such techniques succeeded in suppressing the Panthers everywhere except in its original home - the Oakland area.
In 1968 and 1969 Black Panther offices were raided 18 times by the police, three Panthers were deported from the US, and 21 cases of police harassment of individuals were documented.
During this period 768 members of the Black Panthers were arrested on a total of 1,003 charges, including 178 charges of possession of weapons, 96 of disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace, 92 of attempted murder, or conspiracy to murder, 38 of conspiracy to bomb, 16 of rioting or conspiring to riot, 36 of illegally selling newspapers, 11 of unlawful assembly and one charge of setting up an unlawful table. A high proportion of the charges were eventually dropped, which suggests that many arrests were for purposes of harassment. In those cases where data exists, there was a conviction rate of 80%.
Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton was charged with the murder of a policeman and spent 22 months in jail before being released. The other most prominent Panther, Bobby Seale, was tried as one of the 'Chicago Eight, for conspiracy to cross state-lines with the intent to riot (although he had participated in the events only at the 1968 Democratic convention as a substitute speaker at a rally). Seale was also arrested and jailed for alleged involvement in the murder of a New Haven Black Panther. Twenty-one leading New York City Panthers were arrested in 1969 for ‘conspiracy to bomb department stores and murder policemen’ and were held in jail for over two years before being acquitted. The climax of the nationally coordinated police suppression of the Panthers occurred in December 1969 when Chicago police raided the apartment of Fred Hampton, head of the Panthers’ Chicago section, and killed him in his bed. A Grand Jury investigation of this incident found that 83 to 99 shots were fired, all but one of which were from police weapons.
In summary, the US state in the late 1960s responded as it had in any comparable period when there was a growing threat to the dominant system of property and privilege. Repressive measures grew in harshness parallel with the growth in numbers and the radicalism of the left. Repressive measures were focused on what was seen as the most important danger threatening the Black movement and the possibility of Black Nationalist-white Marxist unity. Repressive measures were cancelled and even publicly repudiated in the mid-1970s after both the Black nationalist and New Left movements had been decimated.
Between 1974 and 1980, there was no challenge of any consequence to the dominant system of property and privilege and no effective movement opposed to US foreign policy, and thus it was one of the most tolerant and least politically repressive periods in US history. When there is no need for repression, there is no repression. In the early 1980s, at the beginning of the Reagan administration and with the imminent probability of a revival of US imperial intervention overseas, cutbacks in social programmes at home, and the consequent probability of a rebirth of the anti-war, student, and national minority movements, it can be expected that the state will once again resort to the appropriate measures to ensure ‘law and order’ (privilege and property).
Albert Szymanski, Human Rights In The Soviet Union: With Comparison To The USA Pgs. 269-270
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