An armed formation calling itself the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense showed up at Philadelphia’s City Hall last week, dressed in black bombers and berets, carrying military-style weapons—and the internet is losing its mind.
The group appeared at an anti-ICE protest following the killing of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7th.
Their message to federal agents? “F— around and find out.”
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WHAT’S GOING ON: The Philadelphia chapter, led by 39-year-old West Philly native Paul Birdsong, says it’s a resurgence of the original Black Panther Party founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland. The group has fewer than 100 members but has been running weekly free food programs in North Philadelphia for years—handing out produce, canned goods, hygiene products, and children’s clothes at pop-up pantries funded by member paychecks and community donations.
Now they’re making headlines for armed “cop-watching” at protests, explicitly positioning themselves as community defenders against ICE brutality.
Birdsong isn’t mincing words. “That wouldn’t have happened if we were there,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer about Good’s killing. “Not a single person would have gotten touched.”
In another interview, he was even more direct: “Won’t no ICE agent ever run up on me. I guarantee you.”
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THE HISTORY: The original Black Panther Party wasn’t just about armed patrols—though that’s what terrified J. Edgar Hoover. They ran free breakfast programs that fed thousands of children, opened health clinics, and created schools in communities the government abandoned.
In 1969, FBI Director Hoover called them “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” That same year, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program—a covert, illegal counterintelligence operation—singled out the Panthers in 233 of 295 authorized actions against “Black Nationalist” groups. The FBI infiltrated, surveilled, spread disinformation, and was directly involved in the assassination of Fred Hampton in Chicago.
They didn’t destroy the Panthers because they were violent.
They destroyed them because they were effective.
OF COURSE: The same FBI that crushed the Panthers for defending Black communities lets white supremacist militias operate freely today. The same government that called free breakfast programs “indoctrination” now deploys 2,000 ICE agents to terrorize Minneapolis neighborhoods where an unarmed woman was shot three times for blocking traffic with her SUV.
Trump’s administration defended her killer before the body was cold, with JD Vance claiming “absolute immunity” for the agent.
WHY IT MATTERS: Birdsong has been explicit that his group isn’t a Black nationalist organization—it’s internationalist, standing “as allies with oppressed people, no matter their background.” They’re not calling for race war.
They’re calling for ICE to be abolished and for communities to protect their immigrant neighbors.
“The community around them needs to take special care of them,” Birdsong urged. “Escort them to and from places.”
ZOOM OUT: Viral posts are framing this as “the return” of the Panthers. That’s not quite right—yet. This is a small, Philly-based formation, not a national movement.
But the conditions that created the original Panthers—state violence, abandoned communities, a government that treats Black and immigrant lives as expendable—haven’t gone anywhere.
In fact, under Trump’s second term, they’ve gotten worse.
BOTTOM LINE: The Black Panthers weren’t eliminated because they failed. They were attacked because they succeeded. They fed children, armed communities, and forced America to look at the violence it inflicts on its own people. Now, as ICE agents gun down mothers in Minneapolis streets while the federal government calls it “self-defense,” a new generation is picking up the mantle.
“All power to the people,” Birdsong says. “No power to the pigs.”