Opposition
Public opinion was largely not of the side of the Black Panther Party. Even today some see them as criminals masquerading as activists. An article written in the late 90s titled “Jerry Brown’s No-Nonsense New Age for Oakland" sees the Panthers as representative of what is wrong with the city of Oakland. The author calls them a “violent black-power group” and claims that the “Panthers glorified black criminality.” It expresses the mainly conservative point of view that praised strong policing and condemned the radical views of the Black Power movement.
The government was one of the main enemies of the Black Panther Party and the Black Power Movement as a whole. The group was the target of a secret FBI counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO. Its mandate was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" this radical fight for Black rights in our country. According to a Senate report the same tactics used against enemy foreign agents were used against the Civil Rights Movement: "We have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents. They have used [them] against us . . . [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business." To the government the Black Panthers and other groups like them were even worse than just Black, they were also communist. In this time that word was thrown around to attack almost anyone who the government sought to marginalize but in this case it was also true. The Black Panther Party had chosen communist principles in an effort to radically take over their own communities by force and determine their own destiny.