Can White People Join The Black Panther Party? History Says You’re Asking The Wrong Question

As videos of armed members of the new Black Panther Party re-emerging in public circulate on social media, a familiar question has begun to float online, especially in white progressive spaces: “Can white people join the Black Panther Party for Self Defense?”

It’s a question that immediately raises a deeper historical one. Not just whether white participation ever existed, but what it actually meant, and what people imagine it would mean now.

The short answer is yes. White people were involved with the Black Panthers, but not in the way that question usually means, and not in the way it is being imagined now.

The Black Panther Party was not a diversity initiative or an identity club. Nor was it a multicultural consciousness-raising circle. It was a revolutionary Black organization born in 1966 in Oakland, California, in direct response to police occupation, economic abandonment, and state surveillance and violence against Black communities. Its founders, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, did not create the Party to be “inclusive.” They created it to help Black folks survive.

The Panthers understood themselves as an internal colony fighting an occupying force. Their Ten-Point Program was not aspirational rhetoric. It was a material demand list aimed at housing, employment, healthcare, education, political power, and armed self-defense against police terror. Their breakfast programs, health clinics, liberation schools, and patrols were infrastructure built in the shadow of constant surveillance and assassinations.

So we can’t project contemporary liberal ideas of coalition and inclusion onto a formation that operated under conditions of war. That said, white people were involved with the Black Panthers but in very specific ways and under very specific political conditions.

The most well-known example is the Rainbow Coalition in Chicago, organized by Fred Hampton. Hampton brought together the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican revolutionary group), and the Young Patriots, a group of poor white Appalachian migrants living in Chicago. The Young Patriots wore Confederate flag patches not as a celebration of the Confederacy, but as a defiant, class-based reclamation meant to confront the racism within their own communities while organizing against police brutality and economic exploitation.

What made this coalition radical was not that it was “diverse.” It was that each group organized its own people while aligning around a shared enemy: capitalism, imperialism, and the state. No one was pretending that race did not matter. No one was pretending history did not exist. But Black leadership was central.

White allies in and around the Panthers were not seeking Panther identity or auditioning for Blackness. They were not asking to wear the uniform or become the face of the movement. They were organizing white communities, raising bail funds, printing newspapers, providing legal support, securing safe houses, driving cars, delivering food, and sometimes going underground. Some were in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Some were in antiwar organizations, and some were radicalized by witnessing police terror firsthand.

They understood something often missing from today’s conversations: solidarity is not about belonging. It is about risk and position. It is about what you are willing to lose, not what you are allowed to claim.

The state made no distinction between Panthers and their white allies when it came to repression. COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program designed to infiltrate, disrupt, discredit, and destroy radical movements, targeted everybody. Phones were tapped. Homes were raided. Leaders were jailed, framed, and murdered. Fred Hampton was assassinated in his bed. Mark Clark was killed beside him. White organizers who worked closely with the Panthers were surveilled, harassed, and sometimes imprisoned. They were not protected by proximity. They were marked as traitors to their racial caste.

Keep in mind also that COINTELPRO absolutely targeted white members and allies of the Black Panther Party, and in some cases, exploited, flipped, or weaponized them against the Panthers.

The FBI’s whole strategy was infiltration, psychological warfare, and turning people inside movements into informants, provocateurs, or destabilizers. White members and associates were often seen as especially “useful” for this because they could move more freely, draw less police suspicion, and sometimes had weaker political or community grounding than Black cadre says who were rooted in survival, not ideology.

Some were coerced. Some were paid. Some were manipulated through fear of prison, immigration status, drug charges, or personal scandal. Some were ideologically soft and cracked under pressure. Others were encouraged to sow internal conflict, spread rumors, misrepresent leadership, or push reckless actions that would justify repression.

This wasn’t unique to the Panthers. The SDS, the antiwar movement, AIM, SNCC, and others were similarly penetrated, but the Panthers were hit with exceptional intensity because the state viewed them as an existential threat. The FBI explicitly aimed to “prevent the rise of a Black messiah” and to fracture coalitions, especially multiracial ones like Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition.

But even under those conditions, the Panthers never blurred the political line between Black self-determination and multiracial coalition. They worked with white radicals, but they did not dissolve themselves into a colorblind left. They insisted that anti-Black racism was foundational to American capitalism, not a side issue. They understood that white people had a different relationship to the state, even when they opposed it. They insisted that Black communities must retain political autonomy, not be absorbed into a universal “working class” abstraction that erased racial domination.

This is where today’s “Can white people join the Black Panthers?” question reveals its deeper misunderstanding.

In the 1960s and ’70s, white radicals did not approach the Panthers asking for inclusion. They approached with discipline, and they did not ask to be centered. They asked how to be useful. They did not expect emotional affirmation. They expected surveillance and danger. They did not seek moral validation, and they sought structural confrontation.

Many of today’s inquiries come from a different place. They are shaped by the language of identity, belonging, feelings, representation, and optics rather than the language of power, organization, and material struggle. They are driven by a desire to be on “the right side of history” rather than a willingness to be on the wrong side of one’s own community.

The historical white allies who worked with the Panthers did something most white liberals still struggle to do. They went back into white spaces and organized against whiteness itself. They challenged the police in white neighborhoods. They confronted racist unions and disrupted universities. They fought landlords and opposed the Vietnam War. They were willing to be alienated from family, jobs, churches, and social standing. They did not seek safety and applause in Black spaces. They carried conflict into white ones. And most importantly, they did not confuse coalition with co-optation.

The Panthers were clear that coalition did not mean dilution. It did not mean rewriting their program to make white people comfortable, or softening their critique of empire, capitalism, or white supremacy. It did not mean translating revolution into the language of diversity workshops. It meant parallel struggle with shared targets and different positionalities. That is a very different model from contemporary liberal multiculturalism, where inclusion often becomes a substitute for transformation, and representation becomes a stand-in for redistribution.

So yes, historically, white people worked with the Black Panther Party. Some were formal members in support roles. Many were part of allied organizations, and a few became deeply embedded in the movement and paid heavy prices for it. But they did not enter as consumers of Black radical identity. They entered as organizers committed to dismantling the system from the side of it that benefited them.

And that is why the question today cannot simply be answered with “yes” or “no.” It must be answered with history, context, and a reminder that the Black Panther Party was not a brand to be joined. It was a revolutionary formation rooted in Black political life, forged in the crucible of police terror, and guided by a theory of power that did not confuse solidarity with sameness.

They did not ask, “Can we be Black Panthers too?” They asked, “How do we help make Black Panthers unnecessary?”

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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