By Sun-Reporter Staff

OAKLAND — Sixty years after Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense a few miles from here, the city that once watched the Panthers sell their newspaper on Broadway has put the party’s name on the street.

The Oakland City Council voted unanimously to designate Broadway between 14th and 17th streets as Black Panther Party Boulevard, an honorary name marked by a commemorative plaque; the street keeps its legal name for mail, maps and emergency dispatch. The designation was formally marked Saturday, in the middle of a week of anniversary events that has drawn Panther veterans from across the country and, organizers say, roughly a thousand high school and college students attending free.

The anniversary itself fell on Thursday, Oct. 15. The Panthers were founded on that date in 1966, in a city where police brutality and economic exclusion were daily facts of Black life, and grew into a national organization that ran what its historians count as 65 “survival programs” — free breakfasts for children, health clinics, sickle-cell testing, legal aid, an elementary school — meant to provide what the party said government would not.

“This legacy was a legacy of love,” Fredrika Newton, Huey Newton’s widow and co-founder of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation and the Black Panther Party Museum, told NBC Bay Area. Of seeing the name go up on Broadway, she told SFist it “brings this history home.”

Mayor Barbara Lee, who worked alongside the party as a community worker before her decades in Congress, called it “the north star” and said no one “can deny that the Black Panther Party contributed to our freedom and to racial and economic justice.”

The week has also produced something the party itself could not always manage: cooperation between the Newton and Seale camps. The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation and the Bobby Seale Legacy Foundation are co-hosting a four-day conference and gala — sessions on reparations, women in the party, community education, the free clinics, and artificial intelligence — with the gala at the Oakland Scottish Rite Center. Dr. Xavier Buck, the Newton Foundation’s executive director, told KQED it is “the first time that these legacies have worked together,” and that the events are “all about looking at this current political moment.” Organizers trace much of the party’s old internal division to the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign against it.

Elsewhere: the Oakland Public Library’s main branch opened Honoring the Black Panther Party Rank & File Members, an exhibit curated by Panther historian Billy X Jennings that runs through Jan. 9; the Oakland Museum of California hosted a Friday night of music, film and storytelling; and a pop-up gallery of local Black artists ran Saturday night at Akoma Oakland.

The event most readers can still make is Sunday. Community Day runs noon to 4 p.m. at DeFremery Park — Lil’ Bobby Hutton Memorial Park to the neighborhood, named for the 17-year-old Panther killed by Oakland police in 1968 — on the same ground where the party held its rallies. Panther veterans will speak. Money B of Digital Underground, who attended the Panthers’ Oakland Community School as a child, hosts; Numskull of the Luniz and the Bobby Jackson Project perform. Admission is free.

The Sun-Reporter covered the Panthers from their first year. We will be in the park Sunday.

Reporting from SFist, KQED and NBC Bay Area contributed to this story.