When individuals picture the Black Panther Party they normally envision Black men wearing black berets and carrying guns. This picture is often closely related to the early years of the Black Panther Party from 1966 to 1972 or 1974 where the Black Panther Party focused the bulk of their activities on armed self-defense and patrol of police within Black communities.

In 1969 the then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, referred to the Black Panther Party as a "violence prone black extremist group" and viewed the Black Panther Party as an existential threat to national security. This led to the FBI covert counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), targeting suspected members of the Black Panther Party. This led to a shift in the Black Panther Party under the force of government suppression and the chaos it caused within the organization to move into more cultural, political, and community work until 1982.

The work from 1972 or 1974 to 1982 is often seen by scholars as a decline and less radical. Schalk argues however this work was nonetheless influential and radical as even BPP founder Huey Newton wrote about the survival programs carried out during this later era of the Black Panther Party as inherently revolutionary because they worked to provide the basic conditions needed for people to begin to organize. There is also significant value in the later years of the Black Panther Party for its lessons about how to organize for change after organizational splits, membership decline, and governmental suppression.