The Black Panther Party’s Under-Appreciated Legacy of Communal Love

Romantic love is not the only sort of love. There are alternative forms—including communal love, which is deeply rooted in collective care and well-being. These ideas of community-wide care and support receive far less attention in American society. They don’t have holidays and entire cultural genres built around them.

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Yet, communal love has made a deep impact on history. Take, for instance, the story of a group popularly known for militancy, not love: the Black Panther Party (BPP). The Panthers, in addition to their bold ideas about Black revolution and self-defense, made a significant (but often under-appreciated) contribution to society’s conceptualization of caring for one another. For them, love was not just an emotion but an action. The BPP saw communal love as a revolutionary ideal—one that demanded the creation of programs and institutions to serve a Black community that had been neglected in the U.S. This vision emerged as a powerful agent for change and empowerment in the Black Freedom Struggle, even if the Panthers themselves didn’t always live up to their visionary goals.

In 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, Calif. The group became widely known for the striking image its members cultivated: black leather jackets, berets, and openly carried loaded rifles. They made headlines for marching, armed, into the California State Capitol to protest proposed state gun control legislation. The legislation, they argued, aimed to stop the Panthers from monitoring police officers and Black people from defending themselves from law enforcement abuses.

The media gravitated toward the BPP’s bold aesthetics, often portraying the Panthers as dangerous radicals. Law enforcement officials including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, saw the group as a national security threat.

Read More: The Black Power Movement Is a Love Story

Yet, this image was a caricature of what the Panthers actually stood for. At the center of their mission was a vision of communal love. They saw themselves as actively invested in the liberation of oppressed people. The BPP believed in self-determination, collective care, nourishment, and education for Black and impoverished communities.

Their commitment and philosophy of empowerment spurred the BPP to launch numerous social service programs that are far less remembered by history than the group’s militancy. They especially focused on helping the population they saw as most vulnerable and unable to directly advocate for themselves—Black children. 

In 1969, the BPP launched the Free Breakfast for School Children program to combat hunger among school-aged kids. Each week, the BPP provided hundreds of students with home-cooked breakfasts. While the Panthers wanted to ensure that Black children didn’t go hungry, they had a secondary purpose for the program: demonstrating to those children that people outside of their immediate families were invested in their well-being and care. As Ericka Huggins, a BPP member and director of the Oakland community school, articulated, the meals made these children feel loved.

In 1971, the BPP built on this effort by establishing the Intercommunal Youth Institute in Oakland as a direct response to the systemic oppression of Black and poor youths in the public school system. The institute aimed to model a form of education for Black children that taught them to be“fully capable of analyzing the problems they will face” and affirmed their humanity. Beyond traditional subjects like math, science, and language arts, teachers emphasized analytical skills, political education, and fostering mutual love and respect among students and educators.

The school taught children media literacy, and lessons about community consciousness that focused on a shared history and collective struggle. This curriculum empowered students to challenge and reject racist misconceptions that devalued Black life and distorted their history. 

 For instance, in a Thanksgiving play, students reimagined an encounter between Pilgrims, Native peoples, and enslaved Africans. Introducing concepts of profit and greed, the Pilgrims attempted to trade enslaved Africans for Native land. Shocked by the proposal, the Native people refused their offer, rejecting the notion of enslaved humans, insisting that people could not be owned. By enacting this scene, students pushed back against racist and dehumanizing ideas that positioned Black people as mere property. In doing so, the students affirmed enslaved people’s humanity while simultaneously strengthening their own sense of self-worth. 

One element of this political education involved seeing the Panthers themselves and their mission accurately. Students learned that while politicians and police despised the BPP, the media also played a pivotal role in tainting the Panthers’ public image by portraying them as “hoodlums,” instead of servants of their community. Through their media literacy, students gained the ability to critically analyze multiple perspectives and recognize how misrepresentations of Black people and movements shaped public perception. These lessons also gave them awareness and knowledge of the media’s influence in shaping realities, the dangers of miseducation, and the ways misinformation could undermine Black self-determination. 

The lessons weren’t perfect; they largely emphasized the Panthers’ servant leadership and activism but omitted the group’s internal struggles, and its problems with sexism and misogyny. The inclusion of these topics would’ve complicated the claims that communal love and liberation drove the group, while exposing that it didn’t always practice what it preached. Even so, Black women played pivotal roles in the organization, reshaping its gender politics and actively challenging these inequalities, embodying lessons of collectivity and freedom for all exploited classes that would’ve benefitted the institute’s students.

Its transformative educational model shaped how students both experienced and understood schooling. When asked how the school was unique from their previous educational settings, students’ answers varied. Some noted that before attending, they did not know their alphabet or math. For instance, a student explained “I didn’t know how to do algebra, and I didn’t know how to do my division too good. At the institute, however, the student began to enjoy school more and started “doing my math,” which enabled them to advance through multiplication, division, fractions, and eventually algebra. The institute provided students like this with foundational academic skills and confidence in their capacity to learn.

Other students highlighted the institute’s rejection of corporal punishment and its commitment to teaching historical truths. For example, when asked about the school’s origins and why it was created, students answered “to teach us our true history, that’s related to society.” 

Students learned that love was not only an emotion but an action—one that required critical thought, communal responsibility, and a commitment to justice. As a result, students began to see their teachers as more than educators and figures of authority like in traditional American schooling. Instead of the traditional hierarchical student-teacher model, students saw themselves as part of the same close-knit familial community as their teachers, one that was rooted in solidarity, mutual care, and a shared struggle.

Read More: How The Black Panther Party Inspired a New Generation of Activists

As Newton explained, “Our aim is to provide the young of these communities with as much knowledge [as] possible and to provide them with the ability to interpret that knowledge with understanding.“ For the BPP, understanding was “the key to liberation of all.” The Panthers expressed love not just as an emotion, but displayed it through their active commitment to the well-being and empowerment of their community, especially its children.

The successful demonization of the BPP by the media and FBI diminished the group, which led to Americans overlooking the Panthers’ foundational love ethic and the significance of their community programs.

When one considers the BPP’s internal conflicts over sexism, misogyny, and violence, claims that they treated all people with respect and operated from a place of love ring hollow. However, individual people’s failings do not erase the group’s efforts to care for people through social service and education programs. Their revolutionary ideas about communal love were rooted in radically changing how people relate to one another and the programs inspired by these ideals demonstrated the profound capacity of collective care and solidarity. Newton reflected that he and Seale “wanted to build in the black community, the love, the sacredness, and the unity we need so desperately.” Their programs manifested this vision, and their emphasis on children reflected how the group saw communal love as a way to ultimately prepare the next generation to understand and resist systems of oppression.

The Panthers understood that liberation and empowerment could only come through communal love focused on helping one’s neighbors and building up one’s community, even though their inability to live up to their ideals ultimately limited some of the group’s potential.  

Currently, as states and the Trump administration attempt to “end radical indoctrination in K-12 education” by erasing histories of resistance, the Panthers offer a model that not only demonstrates the radical power of love in the continued fight for liberation, but the possibilities for a path moving forward.

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of Africana studies at Brown University.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

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