The Black Panther Party for Self Defense Pt. 1

Origins
On February 17, 1942, in Monroe, Louisiana, Huey P. Newton was born, the seventh and youngest child of Walter and Armelia Newton.
Walter Newton was a paragon of responsibility. He held down two jobs at any given time, working in the gravel pit, the carbon plant, sugarcane mills, sawmills, and eventually as a brakeman for the Union Saw Mill Company. Armelia Johnson liked to say that she married young and finished growing up with her children. She was only seventeen when she gave
birth to her first child. The others soon followed. Unlike most black women in the South in the 1930s and 1940s, Armelia stayed at home, raising her children

The Newtons moved to Oakland in 1945, The Newtons followed the path of many black families migrating from the South to the cities of the North
and West to fill the jobs. During World War II, tens of thousands of blacks left the Southern states during the Second Great Migration, moving to Oakland and other cities in the Bay Area to find work in the war industries such as Kaiser Shipyards. The sweeping migration transformed the Bay Area as well as cities throughout the West and North, altering the once white-dominated demographics. When the war ended, many blacks were laid off as wartime industry waned, and soldiers returning from the war created a labor surplus. Both new and expanded black communities in cities across the country rapidly sank into poverty. A new generation of young blacks growing up in these cities faced new forms of poverty and racism unfamiliar to their parents, and they sought to develop new forms of politics to address them.  

in 1959, enrolled in Merritt College, In 1962, at a rally at Merritt College opposing the U.S. blockade of Cuba, Newton’s political life took a leap forward: there, he met fellow
student Bobby Seale, with whom he would eventually found the Black Panther Party. 

More than five years older than Newton, Bobby Seale was born in Dallas, Texas, on October 22, 1936, the oldest of three siblings, and raised in Oakland.9 His father worked as a carpenter, and his mother also worked, sometimes as a caterer. Besides teaching Bobby how to build things and how to hunt and fish, Bobby’s father also taught him about injustice, often beating him badly for no apparent reason. The arbitrary beatings filled Bobby with a rage for which he had few outlets. They also meant he had little to fear from fights; he had already tasted the worst.

he joined the U.S. Air Force. While further developing his metalworking skills and mastering the use of firearms, he learned to contain and channel his rage, turning his explosive temper into cold calculation. When three soldiers refused to pay back a debt and threatened to beat Bobby if he mentioned the matter again, he suppressed his instinct to fight and bade his time. Later that week, Bobby attacked the main perpetrator when his defenses were down, nearly killing him with a pipe.

Huey and Bobby both had their first serious political experiences with Donald Warden in the Afro-American Association. Warden had founded the all-black study group while he was a student at Boalt Law School at the University of California, Berkeley. Warden creating a space for indepth discussion of books by black authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois, 
Ralph Ellison, Booker T. Washington, and James Baldwin. Warden asserted a black nationalist perspective inspired by Malcolm X, emphasizing racial pride and embracing a transcontinental black identity rooted in Africa. Warden believed in the virtues of black capitalism, arguing that black people “must develop our own planned businesses where efficiency, thrift and sacrifice are stressed.

The Afro-American Association produced local radio shows debating the concerns of Black America, regularly mobilized street-corner rallies preaching racial consciousness to unemployed blacks, and sponsored conferences entitled Mind of the Ghetto. At a September 1963 conference at McClymonds High School in Oakland, Cassius Clay, the future heavyweight boxing champion who would change his name to Muhammad Ali and have his title stripped for resisting the draft, was the featured speaker.16 But Newton was a man of action, and he grew dissatisfied with Warden’s teaching. Newton felt that Warden was heavy on the talk but ultimately could not be counted on. In Newton’s view, Warden “offered the community solutions that solved nothing,” and he also doubted that much could be accomplished through black capitalism. Soon he split from Warden in search of a new path.

in August 1965, six months after Malcolm X died, the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles exploded in one of the largest urban rebellions in U.S. history. Black migrants had begun moving into Watts in the 1920s, creating a black island in a sea of white towns such as South Gate, Lynwood, Compton, and Bell (Compton did have one black resident in 1930). Home-lending regulations excluded blacks from obtaining mortgages to buy houses in white neighborhoods. By 1945, Watts was 80 percent black.27 Through the 1950s, the black migration continued, and more blacks migrated to California than to any other state. During this decade, the black population of New York City increased almost two and a half times, and Detroit’s black population tripled—while Black L.A. grew eightfold. Meanwhile, white residents fled in droves for the suburbs, taking capital and employment opportunities with them.
Tensions between Watts residents and the police ran high. While the vast majority of Watts residents in 1965 were black, only 4 percent of the sworn personnel of the Los Angeles Police Department and 6 percent of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were black.29 Police Chief William Parker used analyses of crime data to develop and justify a policy that explicitly targeted Watts and other black neighborhoods for heavy police coverage, including intrusive techniques such as routine frisking of people on the street. “I don’t think you can throw the genes out of the question when you discuss the behavior patterns of people,” Parker wrote in 1957.30 Officers on the force called their nightsticks “nigger-knockers.” Residents of one of the most highly patrolled precincts called their area “little Mississippi.” The local NAACP reported, “Negroes in Los Angeles never know where or at what hour may come blows from the guardians of the law who are supposed to protect them.” One activist recalled, “You just had to be black and moving to be shot 
by the police.” 

the incident that sparked the Watts rebellion was a traffic stop. Twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye was driving his 1955 Buick along 116th Street near his family’s house at 6 p.m. on August 11, 1965, when he was pulled over by a California Highway Patrol officer. His younger brother Ronald Frye, the only passenger, had just been discharged from the U.S. Air Force. A crowd gathered, including Marquette’s mother, Rena. More police arrived. Soon a crowd of more than two hundred had gathered, and the onlookers became agitated as the police reportedly slapped Rena Frye, beat her with a blackjack, and twisted her arm behind her back. Watts exploded. On August 12, at 9:30 p.m., a group identifying itself as “followers of Malcolm X” arrived on Avalon Boulevard shouting “Let’s burn . . . baby, burn!” The next day, at 3:30 p.m., the Emergency Control Center journal recorded “6 male Negroes firing rifles at helicopter from vehicle.

By the second day of the rebellion, according to the Los Angeles Times, more than seven thousand people were looting stores, in particular stealing guns, machetes, and other weapons. Rebels were filling glass bottles with gasoline and hurling Molotov cocktails at cars and stores, setting them on fire. Many were also firing shots at police. Fire trucks 
and ambulances that attempted to enter the area were also attacked.

The rebellion spread out over 46.5 square miles. All told, 34 people—almost all black—were killed, many by police, and more than 1,032 were wounded; 3,952 people were arrested. The rebellion caused more than $40 million in property damage to over six hundred buildings, completely destroying two hundred of them.38Full of rage at ghetto conditions, chafing against police repression, and frustrated with a civil rights politics unable to redress their situation, the Watts rebels sought to take matters into their own hands, forcefully rejecting the old-guard civil rights leadership. Following the rebellion, Martin Luther King Jr. went to Watts to bring his vision of an integrated society and the tactics of nonviolence. On August 18, he spoke to a meeting of five hundred people at the Westminster 

Neighborhood Association. He began his appeal in rolling cadence: “All over America . . . the Negroes must join hands . . . ” “And burn!” shouted a member of the audience. Throughout the evening, the audience repeatedly challenged and ridiculed King’s appeal. Nonviolent activist and comedian Dick Gregory fared even worse in Watts. While 
the rebellion still flared, he borrowed a bullhorn from the police so that he could speak to the rebels. He attempted to calm them and pleaded home!” The crowd did not respond kindly. A gunman in the crowd shot Gregory in the leg. The politics of nonviolence were failing.39Commenting on the wave of urban rebellions and the rejection of civil rights strategies by disenchanted and dispossessed blacks, Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau observed, “The masses of poor Negroes remain an unorganized minority in swelling urban ghettos, and neither SNCC nor any other group has found a form of political organization that can convert the energy of the slums into political power.” 

Between January 1962 and July 1965, Los Angeles law enforcement officers (mostly police but also sheriff’s deputies, highway patrol personnel, and others) killed at least sixty-five people. Of the sixty-five homicides by police that the Los Angeles coroner’s office investigated during this period, sixty-four were ruled justifiable homicides. These included twenty-seven cases in which the victim was shot in the back by law officers, twenty-five in which the victim was unarmed, twentythree in which the victim was suspected of a nonviolent crime, and four Huey and Bobby | 29in which the victim was not suspected of any crime at the time of the shooting. The only case that the coroner’s inquest ruled to be unjustified homicide was one in which “two officers, ‘playing cops and robbers’ in a Long Beach Police Station shot a newspaperman

Heuy Newton would soon reconnected with Seale, and the two joined the Soul Students Advisory Council (SSAC), founded by Ernie Allen. The council was a front group for the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), an anti-imperialist and Marxist black nationalist organization based in Philadelphia. Allen had collaborated with Newton and Seale in Afro-American Association when he was a student at Merritt College. Working with RAM exposed Newton and Seale to a new ideas. Both had been strongly influenced by the thinking of Malcolm X and the readings in the Afro-American Association. But unlike the AAA, RAM was a revolutionary black nationalist organization with a strong socialist and anti-imperialist bent.

The politics of RAM connected the struggles of black Americans with liberation struggles abroad. Whereas black soldiers returning from World War II helped catalyze the Civil Rights Movement by arguing that if they could die fighting for their country, then they should be considered full citizens upon their return, RAM insisted that blacks were not full citizens in the United States. RAM viewed Black America as an independent nation that had been colonized at home. Because black Americans were colonial subjects rather than citizens, RAM argued, they owed no allegiance to the U.S. government and thus should not fight in the Vietnam War. The Revolutionary Action Movement advanced a pivotal idea that would become central to the politics of the Black Panther Party. 

The Revolutionary Action Movement led the way in developing black nationalist thought, but the group’s practical application of these ideas was limited. They rarely emphasized practical action, and when they did, they oriented their efforts toward students. Newton would soon became dissatisfied with the group’s inability to appeal to the “brothers on the block". Huey and Bobby wanted to challenge police brutality directly. They wanted to mobilize the ghetto the way that the Civil Rights Movement had mobilized blacks in the South. They dreamt of creating an unstoppable force that would transform the urban landscape forever. The problem was now clear to Huey and Bobby, but they did not yet have a solution

But that was about to change Following the September 27 killing of Matthew Johnson, the UC Berkeley chapter of Students for a Democratic Society decided to hold a conference on Black Power and invited Stokely Carmichael, SNCC chairperson and the leading national proponent of Black Power, to be the keynote speaker.

The conference program featured the symbol of a black panther from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) that Carmichael was publicizing. The LCFO was part of a new effort by local blacks and SNCC to build an independent political party outside of the exclusive white Democratic Party, marking a departure from its strategy of mobilizing civil disobedience against Jim Crow segregation in the early 1960s.

In September 1966, Carmichael wrote that organizing had begun under the black panther symbol across the country, “A man needs a black panther on his side when he and his family must endure—as hundreds of Alabamans have endured—loss of job, eviction, starvation and sometimes death for political activity,” Carmichael explained. “He may also need a gun and SNCC reaffirms the right of black men everywhere to defend themselves when threatened or attacked.”

October 1966 Berkeley Black Power conference feature the black panther logo of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in recognition of Carmichael’s work there, but two days before the conference, activists distributed a pamphlet and fliers about the Lowndes County Black Panther Party on the Berkeley campus.93

Huey Newton was among those to take notice of the bold logo and courageous organizing. Writing several years later, Newton recalled, "I had read a pamphlet about voter registration in [Alabama], how the people in Lowndes County had armed themselves against Establishment violence. Their political group, called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, had a black panther for its symbol. A few days later, while Bobby and I were rapping, I suggested that we use the panther as our symbol.” Newton and Seale decided to form a chapter of the Black Panther Party(originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) The BPP was Dissatisfied with the failure of these organizations to directly challenge police brutality and appeal to the "brothers on the block", So Huey and Bobby took matters into their own hands. After the police killed Matthew Johnson, Newton observed the violent insurrection that followed. He had an epiphany that would distinguish the Black Panther Party from the multitude of Black Power organizations. Newton saw the explosive rebellious anger of the ghetto as a social force and believed that if he could stand up to the police, he felt he could organize that force into political power. Inspired by Robert F. Williams' armed resistance to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and Williams' book Negroes with Guns, Newton studied gun laws in California extensively. Like the Community Alert Patrol in Los Angeles after the Watts Rebellion, he decided to organize patrols to follow the police around to monitor for incidents of brutality. But with a crucial difference: his patrols would carry loaded guns. Huey and Bobby raised enough money to buy two shotguns by buying bulk quantities of the recently publicized Little Red Book and reselling them to leftists and liberals on the Berkeley campus at three times the price. According to Bobby Seale, they would "sell the books, make the money, buy the guns, and go on the streets with the guns. We'll protect a mother, protect a brother, and protect the community from the racist cops."

By January 1967, the BPP opened its first official headquarters in an Oakland storefront, and published the first issue of The Black Panther: Black Community News Service. The Black Panther Party's focus on militancy was often construed as open hostility, feeding a reputation of violence even though early efforts by the Panthers focused primarily on promoting social issues and the exercise of their legal right to carry arms. The Panthers employed a California law that permitted carrying a loaded rifle or shotgun as long as it was publicly displayed and pointed at no one. Generally this was done while monitoring and observing police behavior in their neighborhoods, with the Panthers arguing that this emphasis on active militancy and openly carrying their weapons was necessary to protect individuals from police violence. For example, chants like "The Revolution has come, it's time to pick up the gun. Off the pigs!",helped create the Panthers' reputation as a violent organization.

One night in early 1967, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Little Bobby Hutton, their first recruit, put these ideas in to action, They were cruising around north Oakland in Seale’s 1954 Chevy. Newton was at the wheel. They saw a police car patrolling the area and decided to monitor it. As Bobby Seale later recounted the incident, Newton sped up to within a short residential block behind the car and kept that distance. When the officer turned right, Newton turned right. When the officer turned left, Newton turned left. Newton was 
armed with a shotgun, Seale with a .45 caliber handgun, and Hutton with an M-1 rifle. A law book sat on the back seat. After they had followed the police car for a while, the officer pulled 
the patrol car to the curb and stopped at the corner. There was a stop sign at the corner, so Newton pulled up to the intersection and stopped next to the police car. The three men looked over at the officer. Seale held Newton’s shotgun while he drove, and both the shotgun and Hutton’s M-1 were plainly visible through the window. The officer looked back. After a pause, Newton stepped gently on the gas and rounded the corner to the right in front of the officer. As Newton completed the turn, the officer flashed his high beams. Newton kept driving 
without changing speed. The officer stepped on the gas and pulled out after him. Seale could see the flashing red lights, but Newton kept moving. He told Seale, “I’m not going to stop ‘till he puts his damn siren on because a flashing red light really don’t mean nothin’, anything could be a flashing red light.” At this point, the car headed north on Dover 

Street behind Merritt College. Newton took a left on 58th Street and headed down the block, passing Merritt’s track field. The officer turned on his siren, and Newton pulled over, coming to a stop across the street from the back door of the college. As soon as Newton pulled over, the officer stopped and burst out of his car, hollering, “What the goddam hell you niggers doing with them goddam guns? Who in the goddam hell you niggers think you are? Get out of that goddam car. Get out of that goddam car with them goddam guns.” At this point, students who had just finished their evening classes at the predominantly black school began filing out the back door, and they stopped to watch. Many residents of the homes along 
the street looked out their windows.

The officer approached the car, screaming, “Get out of that car!” Newton said, “You ain’t putting anybody under arrest. Who the hell you think you are?” At this point, the officer pulled open the car door and shouted, “I said get out of the goddam car and bring them goddam guns out of there.” The officer stuck his head in the car, reached across Newton, and grabbed the barrel of the shotgun Seale was holding. Seale pulled back on the shotgun. Newton grabbed the officer by the collar and slammed his head up into the roof of the car. He then swiveled in his seat, kicked the officer in the stomach, and pushed him out of the car.

Newton took the shotgun from Seale, leapt out of the car, and jacked a round of ammunition into the chamber. He shouted, “Now, who in the hell do you think you are, you big rednecked bastard, you rotten fascist swine, you bigoted racist? You come into my car, trying to brutalize me and take my property away from me. Go for your gun and you’re a dead pig.” The officer lifted his hands away from his gun while Seale and Hutton jumped out of the passenger side of the car. Seale pulled back the hammer on his .45. The officer backed away from Newton toward his car, where he radioed for backup.People streamed out of their houses; more students streamed out of Merritt. Seale and Newton beckoned people to come out and observe the police. A sizable crowd soon coalesced. Seale called the police “racist dogs, pigs.” He explained to the crowd that police were “occupying our community like a foreign troop that occupies territory” and that “Black people are tired of it.” Several more police cars arrived, and an officer walked up to Newton and demanded, “Let me see that weapon!”

Newton said, “Let you see my weapon? You haven’t placed me under arrest.”The officer insisted: “Well, you just let me see the weapon, I have a right to see the weapon.”Newton refused. “Ain’t you ever heard of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States? Don’t you know you don’t remove nobody’s property without due process of law? What’s the matterwith you? You’re supposed to be people enforcing the law, and here you are, ready to violate my constitutional rights. You can’t see my gun. You can’t have my gun. The only way you’regonna get it from me is to try to take it.”Another officer walked up to Seale and shouted, “Come over here by the car.”Seale said: “I ain’t going no goddam place. Who the hell you think you are? You ain’t placed me under arrest.”“But I have a right to take you over to the car,” the officer replied loudly.

Seale responded, “You don’t have no right to move me from one spot to another. You just got through telling me I wasn’t under arrest, so I’m not moving nowhere, I’m staying right here.”The officer then demanded that Seale hand over his gun, and Seale refused. Newton, Seale, and Hutton would not submit to the police. Citing local ordinances as well as the Second Amendment to the Constitution, they asserted their right to bear arms as long as the guns were not concealed. The standoff threatened to escalate. But after tense deliberations, the police lieutenant told the other officers he did not see sufficient grounds for arrest. After looking around, one of the officers noticed that the license plate on Seale’s Chevy was attached with a coat hanger. He then wrote Seale a ticket for not having the license plate securely fastened to his vehicle.

The police soon left, and the excited crowd gathered around Newton and Seale to hear what had happened. The men described their organization, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The next day, several community members who had witnessed the event joined the Party.Bobby Seale provided the first guns for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense from his personalcollection: a .30–30 Winchester rifle and a shotgun. Even before his time in the military, Seale had been around guns, mostly when hunting with his father. Once new recruits began joining the Party, obtaining more firearms became a priority. Newton and Seale approached Richard Aoki, a Japanese American radical who they knew had an impressive collection of guns and a generous sense of humor, Aoki was a dedicated revolutionary committed to Third World liberation. He was pleased to help the Black Panthers get started and donated two guns to the Party in support of their revolutionary cause, an M-1 Garand rifle and a 9mm pistol.

Newton and Seale needed to raise money to purchase more guns for their Party. Newton got the idea to sell Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book on the Berkeley campus to raise money—a small but influential book of quotations by the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party that was receiving a lot of news coverage. They went to Chinatown in San Francisco and bought the books at thirty cents apiece and then sold them on the Berkeley campus for a dollar. Soon they raised enough money to buy a .357 Magnum from Aoki and a High Standard shotgun at the local department store. Over the course of several months patrolling the police, Newton and Seale gained a small following. Bobby got Huey a job at the War on Poverty youth program where he worked, and the two used a portion of their paychecks to rent an office on Grove Street and 56th in north Oakland near Merritt College. In early 1967, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense had only a handful of members. The organization had received no coverage in the press and was known only by those with whom the Party had direct contact, or through word of mouth. By February, this began to change

The Panthers’ patrols of police sparked interest in the community, but still Huey and Bobby’s following remained small. Newton was very conscious that black people were excluded from power and that the government did not represent their interests. He knew that many blacks in Oakland saw the police as oppressive. Newton hoped that by standing up to the police, he would beable to organize blacks to build political power. But even though his actions won respect, not many people were ready to join the Black Panther Party

In April 1 1967 the Contra Costa sheriff’s office reported that deputy sheriffs Mel Brunkhorst and Kenneth Gibson had arrived at a scene about a burglary in progress. They claimed that when they arrived, Denzil Dowell and another man ran from the back of a liquor store and refused to stop when ordered to halt. Brunkhorst fired one blast from a shotgun, striking Dowell and killing him. The other man escaped.

For the Dowells, the official explanation did not add up, and community members helped the family investigate. The Dowells knew Mel Brunkhorst. He had issued citations to Denzil in the past, and on occasion, Brunkhorst had threatened to kill Dowell. The more they probed, the more contradictory the facts appeared. There was no sign of entry, forced or otherwise, at Bill’s Liquors, the store Dowell had allegedly been robbing. Further, the police had reported that Dowell had not only run but also jumped two fences to get away before being shot down. But Dowell had a bad hip, a limp, and the family claimed that he could not run, let alone jump fences. When the coroner released his report, community skepticism only grew. The report stated that Dowell had bled to death, yet there had been no pool of blood where Dowell was found. There was a pool of blood, however, twenty yards away from the site where police claimed Dowell died. The report also listed six bullet holes, apparently confirming neighbors’ reports of hearing multiple shot

The next day the BPP began their own investigation into the killing of Denzil Dowell. Newton, Seale, and a few Party members started to spend time in North Richmond, talking with George Dowell and the younger generation on the street, and sitting with Mrs. Dowell in her home. They spoke with the neighbors and other community members, sought out witnesses, talked with the coroner’s office, and spoke to forensic experts. They decided to do whatever they could to find justice for Denzil Dowell

The Family spoke to Sheriff Walter Young was cordial and polite, but he remained unyielding. Young maintained that because Dowell had been in the act of committing a felony when Brunkhorst shot him, the killing was legally justified. While claiming he had the best interests of the North Richmond community at heart, Young insisted he would neither suspend Brunkhorst nor modify the department’s policy on when to shoot and when not to shoot potential suspects. The Dowells had held out hope that local political officials would eventually help them find justice, but the meeting with officals left no doubt that they would have to find another approach. Seale and Newton quickly organized a street-corner rally to talk with community members about Denzil Dowell’s case and explain their program, especially their position on community self-defense. They had organized street-corner rallies in the past in both Oakland and San Francisco, and the sight of armed and uniformed Black Panthers had always caught people’s attention, often getting them to listen to the Panther political program.

Newton and Seale planned a rally on Third and Chesley in Richmond for Saturday April 22. At 5 p.m. that day, fifteen Panthers showed up in uniform, most of them armed and lined up on each corner, north, south, east, and west. In this way, they effectively claimed the corner and unofficially declared it a Panther Zone A small crowd started to gather. Seale began talking about the Dowell case. The Panthers had always attracted attention when they organized street discussions, but the response this day reached another level. If Denzil Dowell could be killed by police with impunity, so could any young person in the neighborhood. The crowd soon swelled. While the police scared many in the community, here was a group of young black men, organized and disciplined, openly displaying guns and speaking their minds. Cars stopped, and traffic began backing up. Soon over 150 
people had gathered.

The rally was a tremendous success. Community members had been searching for ways of doing something about Denzil Dowell’s killing, and the Panthers had shown them a way. This was indeed what Newton and Seale had been looking for: a way to mobilize the black community by showing people they could take issues into their own hands. The Panthers called a second rally for April 29, the following Saturday. This time, they planned to shut off a whole section of the street.

Newton and Seale had captured the community’s imagination, and others began chipping in to help organize the next rally. Eldridge Cleaver, who had been impressed with Newton during the confrontations with police helped Newton and Seale publicize the rally, in the process creating the Party’s first newspaper. Emory Douglas, a student at San Francisco City College and a new Panther member, contributed his graphic arts expertise. The paper immediately became a key Party tool, running for over a decade with an international distribution and, at its height, a circulation in the hundreds of thousands.

Awareness of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense grew rapidly, On May 2, 1967, the California State Assembly Committee on Criminal Procedure was scheduled to convene to discuss what was known as the "Mulford Act", which would make the public carrying of loaded firearms illegal. Newton, with Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver, put together a plan to send a group of 26 armed Panthers led by Seale from Oakland to Sacramento to protest the bill. 

on the morning May 2, 26 Black Panthers put on their uniforms, picked up their guns, and headed to Sacramento. Seale led the delegation of twenty-four men and six women, Eldridge Cleaver also went to Sacramento that day, but not as part of the delegation. Ramparts magazine (American political) had assigned him to cover the Panther action with the understanding that he would not take part. Consistent with their Oakland patrols, the Panthers planned to remain firmly within the laws restricting gun use. They would take care, for example, to keep their guns 
aimed only up or down, not to point them at anyone, an action that could be construed as displaying a weapon in a threatening manner. Newton instructed the group not to shoot unless fired upon. When the Panthers arrived at the capitol building in Sacramento, they got out of their cars heavily armed, and Seale began asking bystanders how to find the assembly chambers. Right away, several TV cameramen took notice and ran up to the delegation to begin filming.

By the time the delegation arrived outside the California State Assembly chambers on the second floor, a swarm of reporters had gathered around them, taking pictures and asking questions. Assembly sessions are open to the public, but the public is not allowed on the assembly floor. When the Panthers reached the door to the assembly floor, several of the reporters barged into the assembly to get a better picture of the Panthers as they entered. Seale and about twelve of the Panthers followed.  According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Assembly 
Speaker Pro-Tem Carlos Bee (Dem-Hayward) who was facing the door saw only a gaggle of news and television cameramen in what seemed to be a stampede. Angrily he shouted for the sergeant-at-arms, Tony Beard, to remove the intruding photographers.” One of the guards said to the Panthers, “This is not where you’re supposed to be. This is not where you’re supposed to be.” While they were trying to decide whether to stay on the assembly floor or go upstairs, a police officer came up behind Bobby Hutton and grabbed the gun out of his hand. Hutton started shouting at the officer and chasing him to try to get his gun back, and the Panthers followed him out into the hallway. Assemblyman Mulford wasted no time in lobbying for his legislation. He quickly rose to inform his colleagues that reporters were not the only ones who had been on the assembly floor. “A serious incident has just occurred,” he explained, “People with weapons forced their way into this chamber and were ejected.” 

When the Panthers entered the hallway, the state police surrounded them and then grabbed them and took their weapons. Seale started to shout, “Wait a minute, now wait a minute! Am I under arrest? Am I under arrest?! Take your hands off me if I am not under arrest! If I am under arrest, I will come. If I am not, don’t put your hands on me.” Seale demanded the guns back and a chance to publicly read the Party's statement. As the police pushed the Panthers into an elevator, Seale shouted, “Is this the way the racist government works, won’t let a man exercise his constitutional rights?” Once downstairs, the police reviewed the situation, decided the Panthers had broken no laws, and returned their guns.Having now captured the attention of many reporters, Seale read the Panther statement in front of the press. With much of California and the country watching, 

he read Black Panther Executive Mandate #1:The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general and the Black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California Legislature which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the Black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of Black people. . . . The enslavement of Black people from the very beginning of this country, the genocide practiced on the American Indians and the confining of the survivors on reservations, the savage lynching of thousands of Black men and women, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now the cowardly massacre in Vietnam, all testify to the fact that toward people of color the racist power structure of America has but one policy: repression, genocide, terror, and the big stick. . . . The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense believes that the time has come for Black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late. The pending Mulford Act brings the hour of doom one step nearer. A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society, must draw the line somewhere. We believe that 
the Black communities of America must rise up as one man to halt the progression of a trend that leads inevitably to their total destruction. With the group now released and his companions again with their guns again in tow, Seale read the statement to the press several times. The members of the Party delegation then walked down the capitol steps, across the lawn, and back to their cars. But as they walked across the lawn, they passed a picnicking group of thirty youngsters from the Valley View Intermediate School in Pleasant Hill who were receiving 
a visit from Governor Ronald Reagan. News of the Panthers had not reached Reagan yet, and the sight of these armed black men ambling by the picnic unnerved him. He hastily deserted the youngsters from Valley View and hightailed it to the security of his offices. Shortly after the Panthers got in their cars and headed back toward Oakland, a contingent of police armed with riot guns and pistols appeared on their tail, accompanied by reporters.39

As soon as the Panthers pulled into a service station, the police surrounded them. A couple of officers came up behind Panther Sherman Forte and grabbed his hands, forcing them behind his back. When Seale asked if Forte was under arrest, the officers answered that he was, and Seale told Forte to take the arrest. With cameramen capturing the scene for national TV, the police then searched and arrested the remainder of the group on what appeared to be makeshift charges. Seale was originally arrested for carrying a concealed pistol, when in fact he openly displayed the pistol in a holster on his hip. Television footage caught officers looking for illegal weapons and comparing the length of Panther shotguns to their own. To one officer’s charge, a Panther explained, “That ain’t no sawed off, that’s a riot gun, just like yours.” Officers booked several of the Panthers on an obscure Fish and Game Code violation that prohibited loaded guns in a vehicle. Nineteen young adults and five juveniles were arrested. But this group included not only armed Panthers but also Eldridge Cleaver, covering the event for Ramparts and carrying only a camera, as well as an anonymous black woman from Sacramento, unknown to the Panthers, who happened to be buying gas at the time. At the police station, officials changed the charges to conspiracy to invade the assembly chambers, a felony.