As a teenager growing up in Oakland in the 1950s, David Hilliard, the former chief of staff of the Black Panthers, was surrounded by the cornerstones of a self-reliant community.

The corner and grocery stores had black owners, just like the barbershops, beauty salons and gas stations. And like the teachers who taught in the black schools, the business owners lived in the neighborhood, including a doctor who treated only patients of color.

“We did have a sense of community,” Hilliard recently recalled. “But none of that stuff exists anymore.”

The 50th anniversary this month of the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense offers an opportunity to comb through history for a deeper understanding of the organization. While reporting on the movement’s resemblance to Black Lives Matter, and the commodification of the Panthers iconography, I realized the theatrical revolutionaries were more sophisticated than given credit for.

The Black Panthers fought for change while fighting against the destabilization of the black community.

Remembered for wearing black leather jackets and black berets while patrolling Oakland neighborhoods armed with rifles and pistols, the Black Panthers were established to combat police brutality. But after the brazenly confrontational early years, which led to violent clashes and the death of Oakland police Officer John Frey, the Panthers pivoted.

The Black Panthers at 50 Read our complete coverage of the anniversary of the movement.

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Writing the Panthers off as just lawbreaking political agitators doesn’t consider their entire history, because the Panther revolution evolved into a community’s focus on enrichment, fulfillment.

Black power meant self-reliance.

The Panthers put down their weapons and put an emphasis on education and health care. In 1969, they began feeding children at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church on 29th Street before school. By the end of the year, the Black Panthers were feeding 20,000 kids in 19 U.S. cities in what would later become the blueprint for the federal government’s school breakfast program.

In a 1969 memo, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who ultimately fractured the organization, defined the Black Panthers as “the greatest threat to internal security of the country.”

It wasn’t because the Panthers were wearing black and marching in the streets, Kevin Powell, an author and activist, told me.

“It was because they were educating the masses of people about who they were as black people, and teaching them to resist oppression,” Powell said. “That’s why they were dangerous.”

Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, the Panthers’ co-founders who met as students at Merritt College, understood education led to economic empowerment. It’s written in the Panthers’ “Ten-Point Platform and Program,” their black power manifesto, that “if a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.”

Seale and Newton studied how the power of the dollar could change the rules, because the black community could yield purchasing strength.

In Alabama, the Montgomery bus boycott, which began in December 1955 and lasted 381 days, caused severe economic distress for the local bus system. In the early 20th century, Greenwood, a neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., known as Black Wall Street, was one of the wealthiest black communities until a 1921 race riot. White residents killed hundreds of blacks, decimating the neighborhood.

Despite punitive zoning laws that attempted to prevent construction, Black Wall Street was rebuilt and thrived until integration diluted the concentration of black wealth.

Integration, the assimilation policy that was supposed to be the vanguard of equality in the civil rights movement, was a shock to black power.

After the successful lunch counter sit-ins, black restaurants lost significant revenue, because white diners, who begrudgingly had to eat next to black customers, were not yet venturing into black neighborhoods to make up for the customers who left.

“The problem is we confused integration for desegregation, and we confused access with success for the whole community,” Powell said. “It benefited some of us, but it didn’t benefit all of us.”

It was crippling for black businesses.

Marilyn Hollinquest, a co-founder of Radical Monarchs, an Oakland group forging sisterhood in young girls of color, said sitting at the white lunch counter presented access to previously exclusive areas, but it came with an additional cost.

“The reason we had black-owned businesses is because they wouldn’t let us buy from them,” Hollinquest said. “We had no choice, so we had to support each other.”

I’m not suggesting a return to segregated buses and bathrooms. I’m simply providing context for the period when the Black Panthers were born while showing a progressive and compassionate side that history — and Web commenters — willfully ignore.

We’ve come far as a society, but we have so far to go, because the economic and educational disparities the Panthers sought to eradicate still persist.

“We’re so diluted in terms of our power base, we find ourselves constantly reacting to every single crisis out there,” Powell said. “Everything is an emergency, because all the institutions that we used to have are struggling.”

He was referring to the schools, the grocery stores, the cultural centers — the foundations of self-reliance.

“If you don’t have that, then you don’t have a community,” Hilliard said.

Without a community, we are alone.

Otis R. Taylor Jr. is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist whose column appears Tuesday and Friday. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr

Online: More coverage of the Black Panthers 50th anniversary at www.sfchronicle.com/black-panthers

Commemoration

A free Black Panther Party 50th anniversary rally and party is scheduled to take place outside Oakland City Hall at Frank Ogawa Plaza from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 22. Additionally, an ad hoc committee of former Black Panther members is hosting events to commemorate the anniversary. More information can be found at: www.bpp50th.com