In one of the book’s few moments of levity, they arbitrarily decide that Seale will be the chairman and Newton will be minister of defense. Newton insists on developing a unique structure for the organization, though they are its two sole members. In Walker and Anderson’s account, Newton and Seale are galvanized to start the Black Panther Party by a welter of events, including the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X and the police shooting of a Black teenager in San Francisco the following year. They met in 1962 at Merritt College in Oakland, and began strategizing about revolutionary action to address racial injustice - reading Mao and Marx, refining the philosophies of previous civil rights activists. Newton and Seale were both born in the South, moving with their families to California as children in the mid-40s. In the immediate wake of the horrific killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, Walker notes that “every single concern” the Panthers addressed - from police brutality to reparations - “is still relevant.” Its Ten Point Program (reproduced in full in these pages) was a forceful manifesto demanding “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace” for the Black community. Newton, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was the most famous exponent of the Black Power movement.

Founded in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Walker admits in the afterword to his ambitious and informative graphic history THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY (Ten Speed, 183 pp., $19.99), crisply illustrated by Marcus Kwame Anderson. “Writing this book broke my heart,” David F.

Hello, New York City! by David Walker