#BLACK PANTHER INFORMANT CODE#

Even so, Aoki never admitted to being an informant, and when asked if he was, his only reply to an interviewer was “Oh.” A step in this direction will probably come with the publication of “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power,” slated to hit the shelves in a few days. None of Aoki’s work with the FBI has, up to this time, been reported, and much of it needs to be fully substantiated.

“With weapons in our hands, we were no longer their subjects but their equals,” Newton wrote of the police.Īoki supplied the guns and the training of the Panthers that led to many of the deadly shootouts between the Panthers and the police in which the Panthers usually had the most casualties. There is no mention of Aoki in Newton’s memoir “Revolutionary Suicide” (1973-75), but there are long sections where he discusses the importance of maintaining thorough weapons care, possibly training received from Aoki and the success of the patrols. I took the pistol and Huey took the shotgun.”Īoki was a consistent source of weapons and the late Hugh Pearson in his book “The Shadow of the Panther” (1994) notes that Aoki gave the Panthers an M-1 rifle and a 9mm pistol “free of charge after they convinced him that this is what a ‘real revolutionary’ would do.” Later he would provide them with more guns, Pearson added, giving them a. “Huey discussed the situation very objectively with Richard, who finally gave us a shotgun and a. “We discovered Richard Ioke had some guns,” Seale continued, misspelling Aoki’s name. “It definitely had to be an armed situation, patrolling the police,” Seale wrote in his memoir “The Lonely Rage” (1978). When Bobby Seale and Huey Newton were formulating their blueprint for struggle that would become the BPP’s “ten point program,” three things were key in their design to patrol the police–a law book, a tape recorder and a gun.

#BLACK PANTHER INFORMANT CODE#

In FBI reports, Aoki was listed as an “informant” with “T-2” as his code number. “He was my informant,” Threadgill said in an interview. in the late 1950s when Aoki was graduating from Berkeley High School in California. Aoki was recruited by FBI agent Burney Threadgill Jr. A recent investigative report disclosed that Richard Aoki, a Japanese American noted for his fierce militancy in the BPP, was in fact an undercover FBI informant.Īccording to an article by Seth Rosenfeld on the Center for Investigative Reporting website, Aoki supplied the Panthers with arms at the same time he was informing on the group’s activities to the FBI. The latter warning should have been heeded by the Black Panther Party. There was also a largely unwritten law among radicals to be wary of the most militant of members. Old folks used to say beware of those who cry the longest and loudest at the funeral.

Black panther informant