secession, urging the president to maintain a
strong Unionist stance.
In a shuffle of cabinet offices in December
1860, Black served for a short time as
SECRETARY
OF STATE
. During his brief tenure, South
Carolina became the first state to secede from
the Union, and Black was a key adviser to
Buchanan in handling the crisis.
In January 1861, with only a few weeks left
in his own term as president, Buchanan named
Black to a seat on the U.S. Supre me Court that
had been vacant for eight months. Republican
senators, anxious to give the incoming president,
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, his first appointment to the
Court, opposed Black. Furthermore, although
Black was a strong supporter of the Union, he
was not an abolitionist. As a result, his nomina-
tion was harshly criticized by the Northern
antislavery press and by Democrat
STEPHEN A.
DOUGLAS, who had just lost the election to
Lincoln. Also, Southern senators who might
have supported Blac k were resigning from the
Senate to join the Confederacy. Had Buchanan
acted earlier to fill the seat, Black could have
been easily confirmed. Instead, he was rejected
26–25.
Deeply disappointed at his narrow defeat,
Black returned to his home in York, Pennsylva-

also remained involved in the continuing
litigation over California land titles, and earned
high fees for his services.
Jeremiah Sullivan
Black.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
Jeremiah Sullivan Black 1810–1883
❖
❖
◆
◆
◆
◆
◆
1810 Born,
Stony Creek, Pa.
1830 Admitted to the
Pennsylvania bar
1844
Appointed president
judge of the Court
of Common Pleas
1851 Appointed
to Supreme Court
of Pennsylvania
1857 Appointed U.S.
attorney general under
President Buchanan
1861–64
Served as

with Johnson’s other lawyers arose. He also
served as counsel to
SAMUEL J. TILDEN,an
unsuccessful Demo cratic presidentia l candidate,
in an investigation of the disputed results of the
1876 presidential election.
Black continued to practice law and remain
active in civic affairs until 1883, when he died at
the age of seventy-three.
FURTHER READINGS
Black, Jeremiah S. Essays and Speeches of Jeremiah S. Black
(1885). Reprint, 2009. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ.
Library.
Congressional Quarterly. 2004. Guide to the U.S. Supreme
Court. 4th ed. Washington, D.C.: Congressional
Quarterly.
Elliott, Stephen P., ed. 1986. A Reference Guide to the United
States Supreme Court. New York: Facts on File.
BLACK LETTER LAW
A term used to describe basic principles of law that
are accepted by a majority of judg es in most states.
The term probably derives from the practice
of publishers of encyclopedias and legal treatises
to highlight principles of law by printing them
in boldface type.
BLACK MONDAY
See STOCK MARKET.
BLACK PANTHER PARTY
No group better dramatized the anger that
fueled the 1960s

Before the advent of the Panthers, the mid-
1960s saw gradual progress in the struggle for
CIVIL RIGHTS. This progress was too slow for many
African Americans. Traditional civil rights
groups such as
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.’s SOUTHERN
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE
(SCLC) were
focusing their efforts on ending segregation in
the South, but conditions in urban areas were
reaching a boiling point. Younger activists
increasingly turned away from these older groups
and toward leaders such as
STOKELY CARMICHAEL,
whose
STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMIT-
TEE
(SNCC) demanded not merely integration
but economic and social liberation for African
Americans. Black power was Carmichael’smes-
sage, and in Mississippi he had organized an all-
black political party that took as its symbol a
snarling black panther. The ethos of black power
spread quickly to urban areas in the North, East,
and West, where integration alone had not
soothed the problems of racism, poverty, and
violence.
Police violence against African Americans
was a common complaint in impoverished
Oakland, California. By 1966 two young men

visibility, the Panthers sprang to national
attention in 1967. Antagonism toward the party
by law enforcement officials had prompted
California lawmakers to consider
GUN CONTROL.
In May 1967 legislators met in Sacramento, the
state capital, to discuss a bill that would
criminalize the carrying of loaded weapons
within city limits. To Seale and Newton,
chairman and minister of defense of the BPP,
respectively, the proposed law was unjust.
Governor
RONALD REAGAN was on the lawn of
the state legislature as 30 armed Black Panthers
arrived and entered the building. TV cameras
followed the group’s progress to the legislative
chambers, where they were stopped by police
officers, Seale shouting, “Is this the way the
racist government works—[you] won’tleta
man exercise his constitutional rights?” He then
read a prepared statement:
The Black Panther Party calls upon American
people in general and black people in particular
to take full note of the racist California legis-
lature which is now considering legislation
aimed at keeping the black people disarmed
and powerless, at the very same time that racist
police agencies throughout the country are
intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and
repression of black people.

from prison. The group’s major political
objective was self-determination. It demanded
United Nations – supervised elections in the
black community, which it dubbed the bla ck
colony, for blacks only, so that “black colonials”
could determine their own natio nal destiny.
To advance its cause, the party published the
Black Panther newspaper. Its articles, cartoons,
and imagery reflected a hardening stance. The
police were caricatured as pigs—introducing a
term of condemnation that would enter the
national vernacular—and a recurring image was
that of a Black Panther holding a gun to the head
ofapiginapoliceuniform.Howeverextreme
such rhetoric may sound in the early 2000s, it
galvanized young African Americans coming of
age in the Vietnam era. BPP chapters sprang up
nationwide, and by 1968 as many as 5,000
members worked from BPP offices in 25 major
U.S. cities. Prominent activists, including Stokely
Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, joinedthe party.
Cleaver had achieved national prominence for
his 1967 essay collection Soul on Ice. As the BPP’s
minister of information, he had a voice that struck
exactly the tone the Panthers wanted, a blend of
determination, outrage, and threat. “These racist
Gestapo pigs,” Cleaver told reporters, “have to
stop brutalizing our community or we are going to
take up arms and we are going to drive them out.”
On another front, the Panthers proceeded

Wolfe coined the phrase radical chic to satirize it.
The successes achieved by the Panthers in
Oakland and beyond were soon overshadowed
by violence as tense confrontations between the
police and Panther members erupted in gunfire.
In October 1967, after a gun battle left one
officer wounded and another dead, Newton
was arrested. “Free Huey!” became a cry at
protests across the United States while Newton
remained in jail. From his cell, he told national
TV audiences that the plight of African Amer-
icans was similar to that of the Vietnamese.
“The police occupy our community,” he said,
“as a foreign troop occupies territory.” Con-
victed of murder, he remained in prison until
August 1970. An appeals court later threw out
the conviction.
The violence continued, as the police began
raiding BPP offices. In 1968 a confrontation
in West Oakland left three officers and two
Panther members wounded. A 17-year-old
Panther was killed. Seale announced on televi-
sion that black people should organize so that
they could retaliat e against racist police brutality
and attacks.
In 1969 Seale too was in court. The police
had arrested him at an antiwar demonstration
outside the 1968 Democratic National Con-
vention in Chicago. He was charged with
rioting. During the trial of Seale and other

gram widely used in the late 1960s against civil
rights, black power , and various leftist groups.
The FBI infiltrated the Panther membership
with informants, wiretapped telephones, mailed
fake letters to leaders, and spread innuendo
both inside and outside the party. Documenta-
tion of the counterintelligence campaign would
emerge in a report issued in 1976 by the U.S .
Senate Select Committee to Study Government
Operations, titled The FBI’s Covert Program to
Destroy the Black Panther Party. The report
revealed that the FBI had gone to great lengths,
some of them illegal, to pit the Panthers against
themselves and other groups.
The destabilization worked. The FBI man-
aged to exacerbate a bloody feud between the
Panthers and another California-based group,
United Slaves (US). It poured resources into
making leaders suspicious of each other, no tably
aggravating a rift between Newton and Cleaver.
Perhaps its most egregious involvement came
during a 1969 operation against Fred Hampton,
the Chicago-based chairman of the Illinois BPP.
In late 1967 the FBI launched a disinformation
campaign against the 19-year-old, and his file in
the FBI’s Racial Matters Squad soon swelled to
more than 4,000 pages. When Hampton fell
under suspicion in the murder of two Chicago
police officers, an FBI informant provided
authorities with a detailed floor plan of his

his Black Panther faction in exile until 1975.
Seale and Newton preferred nonviolent
solutions. After the Panthers disbanded, Seale
ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973, winning a
third of the vote. He later became a public
speaker and a community liaison on behalf of
Temple University’s African American studies
program. Newton earned a doctor’s degree from
the University of California, Santa Cruz, but his
legal problems continued. In March 1987 he
was convicted for being a felon in possession
of a firearm—despite the overturning of his
original murder conviction—and sentenced to
three years’ imprisonment. In 1989 he was again
in prison, serving time for a parole violation for
possessing cocaine. He died in August 1989,
after being shot during a drug deal in the
neighborhood where he began the Panthers.
Conversely, fellow Panther Kimbro was
accepted into a graduate program at Harvard
while still in prison, and was released after
serving little more than four years of his
sentence. He became an assistant dean at a
local university and later served as director of
Project More, a halfway house and prison-
alternative program in New Haven. He was
quoted in a 2000 issue of the Christian Science
Monitor as wanting to be known as “a guy who
made some mistakes, turned his life around,
and learned to help other people. ”

point program were the seeds of ideas that
eventually took root in the U.S. legal system:
By the 1990s, juries increasingly reflected the
racial composition of the communities in which
defendants lived. As the history of the
CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT
demonstrates, such change came
slowly, begrudgingly, and often at great personal
cost to the men and women who fought for it.
The original Black Panther Party for Self-
Defense is not to be confused with an entity that
emerged in the late 1990s, calling itself the New
Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and adopt-
ing the original
STALKING panther logo. The newer
group allegedly violated a 1997 Texas state court
order prohibiting them from “referring to
themselves by any name containing the words
Panther, Black Panthers, or Black Panther Party.”
In 2003, lawyers representing some of the
original Panthers, e.g., The Black Panther Party,
Inc. (which brought the Texas action) and the
Huey P. Newton Foundation, contemplated
filing a federal trademark infringement suit after
an August 2002 cease and desist letter apparently
went unheeded.
FURTHER READINGS
Alexandri, Maya. 2003. “Stalking the New Panthers.” IP Law
& Business (January). Available online at .

violent faction whose primary goal was to drive
a wedge between whites and blacks. In truth, the
Black Power movement was a complex event
that took place at a time when society and
culture was being transformed throughout the
United States, and its legacy reflects that
complexity.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, groups such as
the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (
NAACP) and the SOUTHERN
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE
(SCLC) worked
with blacks and whites to create a desegregated
society and eliminate racial discrimination.
Their efforts generated positive responses from
a broad spectrum of people across the country.
Rev.
MARTIN LUTHER KING Jr., who headed
the SCLC, made significant headway with his
adherence to nonviolent tactics. In 1964 Pre-
sident
LYNDON B. JOHNSON signed the CIVIL RIGHTS
Act and a year later he signed the Voting
Rights Act.
Civil rights legislation was an earnest and
effective step toward eliminating inequality
between blacks and whites. Even with the
obvious progress, however, the reality was that
prejudice could not be legislated away. Blacks

and Bobby Seale, formed the BLACK PANTHER
PARTY
for SELF-DEFENSE (BPP), initially as a group
to track inciden ts of police violence. Within a
short time groups such as SNCC and BPP
gained momentum, and by the late 1960s the
Black Power movement had made a definite
mark on American culture and soci ety.
The Black Power movement instilled a sense
of racial pride and self-esteem in blacks. Blacks
were told that it was up to them to improve
their lives. Black Power advocates encouraged
blacks to form or join all-black political parties
that could provide a formidable power base
and offer a foundation for real socioeco nomic
progress. For years, the movement’s leaders
said, blacks had been trying to aspire to white
ideals of what they should be. Now it was time
for blacks to set their own agenda, putting their
needs and aspirations first. An early step, in fact,
was the replacement of the word “Negro” (a
word associated with the years of
SLAVERY) with
“black.”
The movement generated a number of
positive developments. Probably the most
noteworthy of these was its influence on black
culture. For the first time, blacks in the United
States were encouraged to acknowledge their
African heritage.

violence at the hands of white racists. But the
solutions that some Black Power leaders
advocated seemed only to create new problems.
Some, for example, suggested that blacks receive
paramilitary training and carry guns to protect
themselves. Though these individuals insisted
this device was solely a means of self-defense
and not a call to violence, it was still unnerving
to think of armed civilians walking the streets.
Also, because the Black Power movement
was never a formally organized movement, it
had no central leadership, w hich meant that
different organizations with divergent agendas
often could not agree on the best course of
action. The more radical groups accused the
more mainstream groups of capitulating to
whites, and the more mainstream accused the
more radical of becoming too ready to use
violence. By the 1970s most of the formal
organizations that had come into prominence
with the Black Power movement, such as the
SNCC and the Black Panthers, had all but
disappeared.
The Black Power movement did not succeed
in getting blacks to break away from white
society and create a separate society. N or did
it help end discrimination or racism. It did,
however, help provide some of the elements
that were ultimately necessary for blacks and
whites to gain a fuller understanding of each

N.J.
◆
◆
◆
◆
◆
1806 Graduated
from Princeton
1817–53
Served on Indiana
Supreme Court
1811
Moved to
Indiana
territory
1813 Became clerk and recorder
of Washington County, Indiana
1816 Indiana became a state; Blackford
became speaker of Indiana legislature
1832 Served
as president
elector of the
Clay ticket
1855 Appointed U.S.
Court of Claims judge
1859 Died,
Washington,
D.C.
1861–65
U.S. Civil War

Blackford died on December 31, 1859, in
Washington, D.C., and was buried at Crown
Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.
BLACKLIST
A list of individuals or organizations designated
for special discrimination or boycott; also to put a
person or organization on such a list.
Blacklists have been used for centuries as
a means to identify and discriminate against
undesirable individuals or organizations. A
blacklist might consist, for example, of a list
of names developed by a company that refuses
to hire individuals who have been identified
as union organizers; a country that seeks to
boycott trade with other countries for political
reasons; a
LABOR UNION that identifies firms with
which it will not work; or a government that
wishes to specify who will not be allowed entry
into the country.
Many types of blacklists are legal. For
example, a store may maintain a list of
individuals who have not paid their bills and
deny them credit privileges. Similarly, credit
reports can effectively function as blacklists by
identifying individuals who are poor credit risks.
Because the purpose of blacklists is to
exclude and discriminate, they can also result
in unfair and illegal discrimination. In some
cases, blacklists have done great damage to

after
WORLD WAR II ended in 1945 and relations
with the Soviet Union subsequently deteriorated,
it focused largely on
COMMUNISM as a threat to
the internal stability of the United States. In
highly publicized hearings in 1947, 1951–52,
and 1953–55 the committee sought to ferret
out Communist sympathizers, conspiracies, and
propaganda in the entertainment industry.
The HUAC hearings produced lists of
individuals who either had been identified by
witnesses as Communists or had refused to
answer questions in appearances before the
committee on the grounds of the
FIRST AMEND-
MENT
, which protects f ree speech and free
association, or the
FIFTH AMENDMENT, which
protects against
SELF-INCRIMINATION. Entertain-
ment industry companies, fearing that they
would be perceived by the public as pro-
Communist if they employed people named in
the hearings, then used these lists as blacklists.
They refused to hire hundreds of actors, writers,
and other entertainment professionals named in
the HUAC hearings. Many promising careers
were thus ended and much potentially edifying

Subpoenaed witnesses in these hearings
faced a dilemma: On the one hand, they could
invoke constitutional protection such as the
Fifth Amendment, thereby implying current or
former membership in the Communist party,
putting themselves on the blacklist, and ending
their chances of ever working in the entertain-
ment industry again; on the other hand, they
could “name names,” or identify their friends as
Communists, thereby betraying those close to
them. In many cases, people were blacklisted for
past political affiliations that they had aban-
doned. During the anti-Communist hysteria
that gripped the nation in the 1950s, Congress’s
investigations into the Hollywood film industry
went unchecked and the resulting blacklists
destroyed numerous promising careers.
FURTHER READINGS
Bernstein, Walter. 2000. Inside Out: A Memoir of the
Blacklist. New York: Da Capo.
Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner. 2004. Hide in Plain Sight:
The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950–
2002. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vaughn, Robert. 1972. Only Lies: A Study of Show Business
Blacklisting. New York: Putnam.
The Hollywood Ten
were photographed in
January 1948, before
their arraignment on
charges of contempt