The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, two young activists who had met at Merritt College. Drawing on the Black Power politics of Malcolm X, the writings of Frantz Fanon and Mao Zedong, and the daily reality of police violence in Black communities, they wrote a Ten-Point Program demanding freedom, full employment, decent housing, education, and an end to police brutality.
The party fused three elements that would define it: armed self-defense against the police, a revolutionary Black nationalist and later socialist politics, and grassroots "survival programs" serving the community. Within a few years it had grown from a small Oakland group into a national organization with chapters in dozens of cities — and had become the target FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country."