“Extreme actions required extreme measures.” “The police would patrol our community, and almost every week somebody would get killed, and so a show of arms was a necessary move at the time,” Howard recalled in 2002. Members began openly carrying arms, as was allowed by Californian law, leading to several showdowns with authority, and the state’s governor, Ronald Reagan, tried to have the gun laws overturned.

The organisation’s central aim was to monitor police activity and to defend the black community against what was perceived as state-sponsored oppression. Elbert Howard, who has died aged 80, was an author and civil rights activist who was one of the founding members of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California in 1966.