Atlas / Organisations / Black Panther Party
Black Panther Party
1966–1982 · United States · Revolutionary Socialist · Electoral party · coding confidence medium
Each axis runs from −10 to +10, with zero a genuine mixed or balanced position rather than an absence of opinion. A score describes a stated position and a governing record; it is not a judgement of merit. What each score means →
Core principles
Armed self-defence, community survival programmes, and revolutionary socialism against racialised policing and poverty.
Economic model
Community control of institutions, free breakfast and clinic programmes, socialisation of major industry.
Organisation of powers
Community control of police and services; a centralised party structure over a decentralised base.
Reading note
Combined a universalist class analysis with a particularist organising base, which pulls its exclusion score toward the middle.
Check a claim about Black Panther Party. The interactive atlas measures the distance between any two organisations across all six axes and shows which ones carry the disagreement.
Open in the atlasThe evidence for every score
All six cells are sourced. A rationale explains what the score is measuring and each artefact is something a third party can check without taking anyone's word for it.
EC · Economic organisation · scored −08
Coded −8: the Ten-Point Program demanded full employment and community control of the means of production.
- Programme textPoint three demanded an end to the robbery of the black community by capitalists.
CU · Social and cultural order · scored −07
Coded −7: free breakfast, clinics and schools alongside armed self-defence.
- Documented act or statuteThe Free Breakfast for Children programme fed tens of thousands of children daily by 1969.
AU · Organisation of power · scored −01
Coded −1: community control of police alongside a centralised party structure.
- Programme textThe Ten-Point Program demanded community control of police through neighbourhood decision.
SC · Scale of decision · scored −06
Coded −6: community control of institutions as the organising demand.
- Programme textThe Ten-Point Program demands community control of police, education and housing.
ID · Rule of membership · scored +02
Coded +2: a universalist class analysis organised on a particularist base.
- Documented act or statuteThe party formed the Rainbow Coalition with poor white and Puerto Rican organisations in 1969.
CH · Method and tempo · scored +07
Coded +7: armed self-defence as the founding practice.
- Documented act or statuteArmed patrols monitoring police were the party's original activity; COINTELPRO surveillance and raids followed.
Where it came from, and what came after
- split fromCivil Rights Movement
The party was founded in 1966 on an explicit rejection of the non-violent strategy.
Nearest organisations by measured distance
Straight-line separation across all six axes, out of a maximum of 49.0. Proximity means similarity of stated position, not endorsement and not resemblance in outcome.
- Négritude and Fanonism5.6
- Sans-culottes6.2
- Democratic Confederalism6.6
- Zapatistas7.7
- Socialist Revolutionaries7.9
- Catalan Independence Movement8.7
Countries
Cite this page
Scores are revised on evidence, so a citation should carry the version it refers to. Version 4.3.1 is current; the revision log records every change.
Free to quote and reproduce with attribution. This is a synthesis rather than a peer-reviewed dataset — where an authoritative figure is needed, cite the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, the Manifesto Project or V-Dem.