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In this paper we examine the national-local interface of United States governmental social control aimed at the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and early 1970s. Through document analysis of Federal Bureau of Investigation files maintained on the Winston-Salem, North Carolina branch of the organization, we identify the FBI's official frame of the Black Panther Party and its national goals for social control. Our findings indicate that the FBI's official frame of the Black Panther Party as a violent, extremist group and a threat to national security helped to shape intelligence reports submitted by the Charlotte field office to national FBI headquarters. We identify the key mechanisms through which local field offices adopted the FBI's official frame. Local intelligence documents reinforced the official frame through repeated reports of isolated violent incidents and through the use of language that characterized innocuous events as part of a revolutionary agenda.
Social movements have occupied an important place in the social fabric of the United States (Andrews 2002; Burns 1990; Eyerman and Jamison 1991; Tarrow 1998; Whittier 2002). They have contributed to revisions of governmental and business policies, the creation and/or repeal of laws, and even the overthrow of political systems. But these efforts to instigate change are often met with counteracting elite responses to repress movement activity and maintain the status quo.
We examine me social control response of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI or Bureau) to the Black Panther Party, one of the many organizations engaged in the struggle for civil rights during the 1960s and early 1970s. As the Black Panther Party emerged on the national scene, the FBI responded by declaring the Panthers a security threat, planning preemptive prosecutions of Panther members under firearm and sedition statutes, and attempting to create dissension both within the group and with other black activist groups (Churchill and Vander Wall 1990a; Burns 1990). These governmental social control tactics have been credited with ultimately destroying the Black Panther Party (Churchill and Vander Wall 1990a).
Through document analysis of Federal Bureau of Investigation files, we identify the key mechanisms through which the Charlotte field office adopted the FBI's official frame of the Black Panther Party as violent and extremist, thus reinforcing the Bureau's national campaign of harassment and repression...