Historic Conference and Gala Will Honor the 60th Anniversary of the Black Panther Party

Sixty years after the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California, the two foundations carrying the legacies of the Party's co-founders are joining forces for a landmark anniversary gathering.

The Black Panther Party 60th, a four-day conference and gala running October 15–18, 2026, in downtown Oakland, will bring together Party veterans from across the country alongside community members, scholars, activists, artists, and a new generation of leaders. The event marks six decades since Dr. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Party in Oakland in October 1966, when a local organization challenging police brutality grew into an international movement advocating for political empowerment, economic justice, education, healthcare, housing, and human rights.

At the center of the anniversary is the coming together of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation and the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, each carrying forward the legacy of one of the Party's two co-founders. The foundations share a commitment to preserving the Party's history, ensuring its story is told accurately, and connecting its lessons to the challenges facing new generations.

"The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation is proud to work with It's About Time BPP and other Panther veterans to bring this landmark event to Oakland on the 60th anniversary of the Party's founding," said Fredrika Newton, President and co-founder of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. "We see this conference as a kick off to a new generation of revolutionaries who will take the legacy and lessons of the Black Panther Party forward."

The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation was founded 31 years ago by Fredrika Newton, and the Party's Chief of Staff, David Hilliard. Since then, the Foundation has worked to preserve and promote the Party's history and legacy, including placing the first permanent sculpture in Oakland and opening the Black Panther Party Museum.

The collaboration between the foundations representing Newton and Seale carries particular significance during this anniversary year, for all the discord that COINTELPRO sowed, it was not lasting. Together, years later, these legacies are joining forces to assure that the Panther history is remembered, told and shared accurately, and with accessibility to younger generations of organizers.

"For 60 years, people have interpreted, debated, and too often distorted the history of the Black Panther Party," said Courtney S. Parker and Marcus King, co-founders of the Bobby Seale Legacy Foundation. "There is tremendous power in the foundations of the Party's two founders coming together around a shared responsibility: preserving this history and making sure future generations have the opportunity to learn directly from it."

That history cannot be understood without the federal campaign designed to erase it. Through the FBI's counterintelligence program, known as COINTELPRO, the government surveilled, infiltrated, disrupted, and sought to discredit the Party and its leadership. FBI documents later revealed efforts to exploit internal divisions, spread disinformation, undermine community support, and prevent the emergence of what the Bureau described as a unifying Black leader. Members were imprisoned, organizations were destabilized, and lives were lost.

Images of armed Panthers became some of the most recognizable representations of the organization, yet the Party also built an extensive network of community-based Survival Programs designed to meet people's immediate needs. These efforts included the Free Breakfast for Children Program, community health clinics, education programs, food distribution, transportation assistance and other initiatives rooted in the belief that communities could organize to address their own needs while working toward broader systemic change.

Six decades later, the work that was done to mobilize and activate the community continue to resonate and the conference gives attendees as chance to explore it through a slate of events at sites around Oakland, a series of workshops run by former Panthers, community organizers and other allies, culminating in a gala and a community day with Panthers at Lil' Bobby Hutton Park. Tickets can be purchased by visiting bpp60.org.

"The 60th anniversary is a moment to look to the future," said Dr. Xavier Buck, executive director of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation and founding director of the Black Panther Party Museum. "By bringing together Party veterans, scholars, organizers, and a new generation of revolutionaries, this conference will explore how the Party's legacy can continue to inspire action, strengthen communities, and shape the movements still to come. The history of the Black Panther Party is not simply something to preserve; it is a legacy to learn from, build upon, and carry forward into the next 60 years."

Black Panther Party 60th Anniversary
October 15-18, 2026, Downtown Oakland
Schedule – bpp60.org  **  Instagram - @bpp60th

The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation and Stanford University Libraries Receive Grant from Mellon Foundation to Digitize The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection

A selection of The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. collection, the largest Black Panther Party archive and one of the most researched collections at Stanford University Libraries, will be digitized and made accessible to people around the globe. Thanks to a generous $150,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, a selection of the collection will be digitized by Stanford University Libraries in this pilot project and made available online through SearchWorks, the Libraries's catalog, and in the community research room at the Black Panther Party Museum, recently established in downtown Oakland, CA. Stanford University Libraries has housed the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Collection since Huey's widow Fredrika entrusted it to them in 1996.

As one of the most frequently consulted and critically important archival collections housed at Stanford University Libraries, the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. collection includes Dr. Newton's private papers, letters, writings, videos, and photos as well as the Party's political campaign ephemera, documents on how they ran their Survival Programs, and drafts of the Ten Point Program, among many others. The collection also includes a series of FBI surveillance documents obtained by the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation via the Freedom of Information Act.

"In the very early days of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, we identified multiple pathways toward our goal of making the accurate history and legacy of the Black Panther Party as widely available as possible," said Fredrika Newton, co-founder of the Foundation. "An essential part of this was taking the voluminous amount of archives Huey left and placing them where they can be accessed, studied and utilized by as many people as possible. We are grateful for the care and partnership that Stanford University has provided to us and to this significant collection."

The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation and Stanford University Libraries's archivists are working together to identify and prioritize the works to be digitized during this initial pilot, with the hopes of possibly digitizing the entire collection, and ensuring the preservation of these critical historical documents for future generations. This digitization project aligns with Stanford University Libraries's ongoing commitment to making its archival resources more accessible and to supporting research that advances our understanding of social justice and civil rights.

Roberto Trujillo, Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at Stanford states, "It is critically important to broaden discoverability and access for a continued critical reception of the Black Panther Party history."

In an environment where the teaching and discussion of racial history is being discouraged if not forbidden in classrooms across America, Stanford University Libraries are seeing an even larger interest in The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. collection. Students and scholars across the country continue to use it for research, making it one of the most heavily consulted collections at Stanford.

The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation
The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation is dedicated to preserving and promoting the true legacy and ideals of the Black Panther Party. Since 1995, the Foundation has commissioned public art and created education tools to inspire and inform real social, economic and political change. The Foundation is the number one source for historical preservation and archival collections for people seeking the truth about the Black Panther Party. The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization, was co-founded by Fredrika Newton and is based in Oakland, CA, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. Follow on Instagram @hueypnewtonfoundation

Stanford University Libraries 
The Stanford University Libraries are a dynamic network of libraries, librarians, information technology specialists, and a vast collection of academic resources that are dedicated to supporting research, teaching, and learning at Stanford.  The Libraries hold over fifteen million items in various genres and formats, including e-resources, fifty subject specialists, twenty campus libraries, and a broad spectrum of services. The Libraries's archival collections include rare books as well as photographs and documents about the history of civil rights in the Mexican American,  African American and Asian American communities;  documentary photography of Bob Fitch and David Bacon; political papers of both local and state politicians from the recently acquired papers of the late Senator Dianne Feinstein to the Wilma Chan Papers; historical maps featured in the David Rumsey Map Collection; and the incredibly diverse history of Silicon Valley covered  in the  Silicon Valley Archives. These archival collections and more are available in the Libraries's Department of Special Collections and in the Stanford Digital Repository, which manages and makes available all scholarly resources to students, faculty and researchers.  Finding aids to the Libraries's archival collections are accessible in the Online Archive of California. The Libraries's physical and digital spaces are designed to promote freedom and discovery, making knowledge-seeking more meaningful, more personal, and more connected than ever.  The opportunities for contributing to and transforming scholarship are infinite at Stanford University Libraries.

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation's largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.