July 13, 1974: 49 years ago, July 12 1974, San Francisco police illegally raided a [...]

49 years ago, July 12 1974, San Francisco police illegally raided a Haight-Ashbury headquarters of the White Panther Party, a left-wing revolutionary counterculture group, leading to a shootout that ended with the building destroyed by fire

The White Panther party was founded in 1968 by white midwestern radicals allied with the Black Panthers. Like the Yippies, they attempted to combine revolutionary socialist politics with a countercultural ethos, promoting communal living, rock & roll, and psychedelic drugs

By 1974, the Bay Area branch of the WPP had become the leading organizing force in local “Food Conspiracies,” in which members pooled food stamps in order to buy goods in bulk, which were then freely distributed to a network of thousands
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In the days leading up to the raid, the Department of Agriculture had begun to crack down on the WPP’s Food Conspiracies, which they argued were illegal. On July 12th, SFPD arrived to raid the Page St house out of which the Panthers operated the Conspiracies

Police entered unannounced and without a warrant. The Panthers, who advocated armed self-defense, fired warning shots above their heads. Almost immediately, a full-scale firefight broke out, with snipers shooting into the WPP office from nearby houses

At some point in the shootout, several eyewitnesses said they saw the police fire a canister into the Page St house, after which a fire broke out. SFPD claimed the fire resulted from a molotov cocktail dropped by a Panther, but no evidence of one was ever recovered

Many residents of the Haight remarked on the raid’s similarity to the raid on the Symbionese Liberation Army in Los Angeles two months prior, during which a shootout also ended in fire after police shot gas canisters into the house, leaving six SLA members dead