[1] The primary purpose of the BCA was to provide educational tutoring to inmates, which it did in conjunction with graduate college students from the nearby San Francisco Bay Area.
[2] Outsiders were allowed to attend meetings of the BCA, and tutors provided remedial and advanced courses in mathematics, reading, writing, art, history, political science, and sociology.
The Black Panther Party was created to watch the actions of police forces in Los Angeles making sure that they were protecting the public as a whole, not a specific race.
As well as Patricia Soltysik, Nancy Ling Perry, and Patty Hearst (who used a fake ID with the name Mary Alice Siem), according to Lake Headley, a private investigator.
Following his escape he teamed up with fellow BCA members Russell Little and William Wolfe, as well as Bill and Emily Harris and Angela Atwood, to create the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Willie Wolfe and Russ Little were two white volunteers that joined the small group DeFreeze set up, as well as ex-Black panther and inmate Thero Wheeler.
Because the BCA operated with major political overtones under the pretense of education,[2] many feared the group as a means to control the inmates and fuel the social unrest of the time.
[12] With inmates cut off from the outside world and their only information being fed to them by the radical tutors, it is believed by some that the group plotted revolution and other drastic means for social change.
Louis Nelson, warden at San Quentin stated in a memo: We are reading in the public press, and hearing via television and radio, that the best breeding and/or recruiting ground for neo-revolutionaries is in the prison system….