SHORTLY before the UCLA Campbell Hall shootings, Eldridge Cleaver left the US amid the rising Panther killings and arrests.
He left with his wife on November 24 1968 and would eventually settle in Algeria.
In 1969, efforts by the FBI to oust the Black Panther leaders by killing and arresting them escalated.
After the assassination of Carter and Huggins, leaders of the South Carolina chapter, the Corporal Intelligence Programme (COINTEL) programme would focus on the Chicago chapter which was also very influential.
The leader of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party was 21-year-old Fred Hampton.
Hampton was outspoken and expressed the views of blacks in clarity through speeches.
He even scored sympathisers among the white community because through programmes like community courts, his listeners would be enlightened on the righteousness of the movement’s ideology.
Hampton popularised terms like, equal rights, justice, freedom and revolution to the youth of Chicago.
He was also instrumental in creating a free medical centre and a door-to-door programme to test blacks for sickle cell anaemia; a disease common among African-Americans.
One night on December 4 1969, the FBI and Chicago police raided Hampton’s residence at 4am.
An informant had sold out the Panther Chicago apartment and sketched where Hampton would be located.
Hampton was shot dead twice in the head and once in the arm while he was sleeping.
His pregnant wife was shot and injured.
A 17-year-old Mark Clark who was sleeping on a sofa was also shot while sleeping. In total, 90 bullets were fired into the apartment and three survivors were arrested and charged with attempted murder of the police.
Only one bullet came from Mark’s gun because he slept with a loaded shotgun that went off by reflex when he was shot.
The FBI, having been informed on the accurate positions of Hampton and Clark, opened fire on them as soon as they charged into their residence.
No one was ever charged for these assassinations.
Only four days after, the FBI made a move on Geronimo Pratt who used to run the South Carolina chapter along with Bunchy Carter.
Pratt was a renowned war veteran who had fought in Vietnam.
His military experience had been instrumental in Black Panther self-defence courses which also taught martial arts besides weapons’ use.
The FBI sent the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) militarised police to raid Pratt’s Los Angeles residence with the goal of killing him.
The SWAT team came with 400 officers, helicopters, tanks, trucks, battering rams and so on.
They were ordered to shoot Pratt in the head and had calculated that he would be sleeping on his bed.
That night, Pratt was sleeping on the floor and when the SWAT burst in, he was not on target.
Pratt fired back and held the SWAT outside for five hours until he finally surrendered after they agreed not to kill him.
Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale was indicted that same year for a protest in Chicago.
During his court hearing, he was denied a lawyer and when he tried repeatedly to state that he was being deprived of his right to be represented by a lawyer of his choice, Seale was tied up and gagged by order of the judge.
The footage of this repression caused outrage among the parties which led to more arrests being made.
Seale was sentenced to four years in prison.
With the FBI having murdered and/or imprisoned most of the Black Panther leaders by 1970, they began to crackdown on the social programmes they had started and to harass their members.
Feeding programmes were raided and stopped.
On November 4, the police raided a Black Panther child care centre and beat up all the adults while holding guns pointed at the children.
This was outright terrorism aimed at scaring the Black Panther stakeholders from continuing association with the movement.
Meanwhile, the Black Panther newspaper was circulating 100 000 copies per issue and in March 1970, Seale published a book from prison called The Panthers and Huey Newton.
In this period, the COINTEL programme began forging letters, beginning rumors and accelerating tensions among the remaining leaders and members of the party.
Edgar Hoover, leader of the FBI had, for racist reasons, not recruited black agents into his organisation except a few like Agent ‘800’ who had been used to infiltrate Marcus Garvey’s organisation in the 1920s.
When relying on informants was not enough to infiltrate the Panthers, Hoover along with Richard Held began a crash programme to recruit blacks.
These blacks would join an already very elaborate network of government and police agencies that watched the Panthers closely.
Within a year, the party was full of provocateurs who caused internal disputes.
An example is the case of singer Jean Seberg, who was a Panther.
Happily married, Seberg was accused of being unfaithful to her husband with another Panther.
This untrue rumour would end with her being divorced, suffering a stress-triggered miscarriage and finally committing suicide.
Held claimed responsibility for this crafty move.
In 1971, the Black Panther newspaper was circulating
250 000 copies per issue. That same year, Black Panther Party co-founder Newton was freed from prison.
Newton immediately began rejuvenating the social programmes of the party.
Hoover hated the social services of the Panthers because they were effective and painted the Panthers in a good light.
The breakfast programme for example, was so effective that black children were looking healthier and willing to go to school because they had full stomachs.
This progress cancelled out the stereotype portrayal of Panthers as black extremists.
The FBI used its black agents to forge letters which they sent to Cleaver in Algeria, in the name of other members, urging him to replace Newton as head of the party.
During this period of tension, Pratt who aligned himself to Cleaver, lost his eight-month pregnant wife Saundra tragically.
She was murdered and left in a ditch and as Pratt would later find out, FBI agents lied that it was Newton’s faction behind the murder in order to cause and worsen tensions.
Eventually Cleaver was removed from the Panther committee in 1972 and began his own group called the Black Liberation Army.
The tactic of ‘divide and rule’ greatly weakened the party.
After Bobby Seale’s release from prison in 1973, he did not help Newton in running the Panther social programmes, but decided to run for the office of Mayor in Oakland.
Seale got 40 percent votes, but lost to another candidate.
It is believed an agent may have coerced him to retire from the revolution and take up politics; a route the Panthers originally never took.
In 1975, Cleaver and his wife returned to the US as born-again Christians.
He dissolved his faction called the Black Liberation Army as part of a deal that would lead to all charges against him being dropped in 1979.
Newton became disillusioned and disheartened by the negative developments in the party and Elaine Brown took up a leading role in the Panther social programmes.