In watching a documentary on the Black Panthers recently, I saw some footage of youth from a group called the "Young Patriots"; apparently they were Appalachian white youth in solidarity with the Panthers and Young Lords. The name of the documentary is "All Power to the People! The Black Panther Party and Beyond." http://www.filmakers.com/indivs/AllPower.htm
I found two references to The Young Patriots in the Black Panther alumni site, - one by Chuck Armsbury and one about him:
"The Patriot Party in Eugene looked to the leadership of Chairman Bill 'Preacherman' Fesperman and Arthur Turco from North Carolina and New York respectively. Preacherman’s Patriot Party grew from the organizing, unifying ideas and practice of the Uptown Young Patriots of Chicago. These Young Patriots from the over-policed Appalachian neighborhoods of Uptown are the group of poor white people usually refereed to, it seems, when recalling the Rainbow Coalition of Panthers, Young Lords and Young Patriots of 1969-70. Other towns and cities across the country also saw new chapters of Patriots form in response to the Young Patriots’ righteous class-solidarity with the Chicago BPP."
see page 13 of http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/home/pdf/ItsAboutTime_V6N2_fall_2002.pdf
As noted in the above cited article, Chuck Armsbury is now senior editor of the newsletter of The November Coalition, a drug-policy advocacy organization.
see also:
http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Memorials/pdf/InmemoryofRayEaglin.pdf
Bill Fesperman is now a frequent contributor to the Salisbury [NC] Post - http://www.salisburypost.com/opinion/287277180040048.php - I can’t say for 100% sure that it’s the same guy, but it seems very likely.
(If this rather long link doesn’t work, you can just search for his name on the Salisbury Post site)
Arthur Turco was a lawyer for the Panthers in NYC – see for example p. 35 of http://www.trolp.org/main_pgs/issues/v9n1/Breinholt.pdf
You can see a picture of him (page 4)
A law enforcement agent mentions his name, without any substantiation offered in the article, in connection with the Alex Rackley murder case (see http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=11450 - about 2/3 of the way down). It is known that the Panthers were targets of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation; that and more recent accusations tying the Hillary Clintons to this case (debunked in various places, see http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/panthers.asp for example) make such a claim difficult to evaluate, though I would tend to dismiss it as an attempted smear. As you continue in your research I would encourage you to evaluate information very critically as the amount of partisanship and actual disinformation about this topic is much higher than usual.