In March, 1970, the FBI began to try their best to infiltrate the Panthers by forging letters to members. Eldridge Cleaver was one of their main targets, who at this time was living in exile in Algiers, they gradually convinced him with a steady stream of misinformation that the Black Panther Party leadership was trying to remove him form power. Cleaver received stakes of forgered FBI letters from supposed party members, citing Newton’s leadership, and asking for Cleaver to take control. These letters would also tell how things were poorly organizing in the party, and how the party deeply need Cleaver to resume some order. Cleaver was upset by what he was reading in the letters, and on the phone from Algiers with Newton who was a T.V. talk show interview, Cleaver expressed his absolute disdain for what had happened to the party, and demanded that David Hilliard (Chief of Staff) be removed. Because of this Cleaver was removed from the Central Committee, and he started up his own Black Liberation Army. With the FBI constantly attacking the Panther Party and creating so much struggle for its members it became very hard to keep it together. Seeing the party being ripped apart by factions and internal hatred, Huey, like other members, became disillusioned. He no longer wanted to lead the party, even though so many expected and demanded him to, he began to doubt himself and depend heavily on drugs. On August 22, 1989, Newton was shot dead on the streets of Oakland in a drug dispute. By the beginning of the 1980s, attacks on the party, internal degradation and divisions, caused the party to fall apart. The leadership of the party had been absolutely smashed by the FBI. Many remaining Panthers were hunted down and killed in the following years, imprisoned on trumped charges, or forced to flee the United States. Cleaver would later state in a interview, AS it was (the U.S. government) chopped off the head (of the Black liberation movement) and left the body there armed. That’s why all these young bloods are out there now, they’ve got the rhetoric but are without the political direction and they’ve got the guns.-M |
