By the late 1970s the Black Panther Party's national organization was collapsing under the combined weight of years of state repression, the FBI's COINTELPRO operations, costly criminal prosecutions, the imprisonment and exile of key leaders, internal splits, and violence. The 1971 rupture between Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver had already broken the party into rival factions.
As chapters closed and resources dwindled, the party contracted to its Oakland base and its surviving community programs. The Oakland Community School finally closed in 1982, a date often taken to mark the end of the organization. Yet the party's legacy endured — its survival programs, its confrontation with police power, and the long imprisonment of many members, a number of whom remain among the longest-held political prisoners in the United States.