The Black Panther: Black Community News Service — Vol. 1 No. 1 (April 25, 1967, founding issue)

About this record

The founding issue of The Black Panther: Black Community News Service, the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Published April 25, 1967 from the Party's Bay Area headquarters, less than six months after Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the BPP in Oakland in October 1966. The four-page launch number carried the editorial that became the prototype for the paper's signature voice — radical Black self-defense reportage, community-survival programs, photographs and graphics by Emory Douglas (whose visual identity would define the paper for the next decade), and direct dispatches from Black communities under police occupation. The Black Panther would go on to become the largest-circulation U.S. Black radical publication of the twentieth century, peaking in 1970 at a claimed national/international circulation of more than 150,000. This is where it started.