Black Panther Party in the context of "Bobby Seale"

The Black power movement or Black liberation movement emerged in the mid-1960s from the mainstream civil rights movement in the United States, reacting against its moderate and incremental tendencies and representing the demand for more immediate action to counter White supremacy. Many of its ideas were influenced by Malcolm X's criticism of Martin Luther King Jr.'s peaceful protest methods. The 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, coupled with the urban riots of 1964 and 1965, ignited the movement. While thinkers such as Malcolm X influenced the early movement, the views of the Black Panther Party, founded in 1966, are widely seen as the cornerstone. Black power was influenced by philosophies such as pan-Africanism, Black nationalism, and socialism, as well as contemporary events such as the Cuban Revolution and the decolonization of Africa.

During the peak of the Black power movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many African Americans adopted "Afro" hairstyles, African clothes, or African names (such as Stokely Carmichael, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who popularized the phrase "Black power" and later changed his name to Kwame Ture) to emphasize their identity. Others founded Black-owned stores, food cooperatives, bookstores, publishers, media, clinics, schools, and other organizations oriented to their communities. American universities began to offer courses in Black studies, and the word Black replaced negro as the preferred usage in the country. Other leaders of the movement included Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, founders of the Black Panther Party.

COINTELPRO (a syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political parties and organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive.

Groups and individuals targeted by the FBI included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party), Student organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Chicano and Mexican-American groups like the Brown Berets and the United Farm Workers, and independence movements (including Puerto Rican independence groups, such as the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party). Although the program primarily focused on organizations that were part of the broader New Left, they also targeted white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National States' Rights Party.

The protests of 1968 comprised a worldwide escalation of social conflicts, which were predominantly characterized by the rise of left-wing politics, anti-war sentiment, civil rights urgency, youth counterculture within the Silent and baby boomer generations, and popular rebellions against military states and bureaucracies.

In the United States, the protests marked a turning point for the civil rights movement, which produced revolutionary movements like the Black Panther Party. In reaction to the Tet Offensive, protests also sparked a broad movement in opposition to the Vietnam War all over the United States as well as in London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. Mass movements grew in the United States but also elsewhere. In most Western European countries, the protest movement was dominated by students.

Kwame Ture (/ˈkwɑːmeɪ ˈtʊəreɪ/ KWAH-may TOOR-ay; born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael; June 29, 1941 – November 15, 1998) was a Trinidadian-American activist who played a major role in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, he grew up in the United States from age 11 and became an activist while attending the Bronx High School of Science. Ture was a key leader in the development of the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), then as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party and as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).

Carmichael was one of the original SNCC Freedom Riders of 1961 under Diane Nash's leadership. He became a major voting rights activist in Mississippi and Alabama after being mentored by Ella Baker and Bob Moses. Like most young people in the SNCC, he became disillusioned with the two-party system after the 1964 Democratic National Convention failed to recognize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as official delegates from the state. Carmichael eventually decided to develop independent all-black political organizations, such as the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and, for a time, the national Black Panther Party. Inspired by Malcolm X's example, he articulated a philosophy of black power, and popularized it both by provocative speeches and more sober writings. The author Richard Wright is credited with coining the phrase in his 1954 book Black Power.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and later, the Student National Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced /snɪk/ SNIK) was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic segregation and political exclusion of African Americans. From 1962, with the support of the Voter Education Project, SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of black voters in the Deep South. Affiliates such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections.

By the mid-1960s the measured nature of the gains made, and the violence with which they were resisted, were generating dissent from the group's principles of nonviolence, of white participation in the movement, and of field-driven, as opposed to national-office, leadership and direction. By this time many of SNCC's original organizers were working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and others were being lost to a de-segregating Democratic Party and to federally-funded anti-poverty programs. At the same time, the Committee took positions on international affairs that alienated establishment supporters: opposition to the Vietnam War and, in the wake of the Six Day War, criticism of Israel. Following an aborted merger with the Black Panther Party in 1968, SNCC effectively dissolved.

Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African American revolutionary and political activist who co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. He ran the party as its first leader and crafted its ten-point manifesto with Bobby Seale. Under his leadership, the Party organized numerous social programs and community events, but also advocated for collective defense and threatened political violence.

Newton learned to read using Plato's Republic, which influenced his philosophy of activism. He went on to earn a PhD in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness program in 1980.

The Chicano Movement, also referred to as El Movimiento (Spanish for "the Movement"), was a social and political movement in the United States that worked to embrace a Chicano identity and worldview that combated structural racism, encouraged cultural revitalization, and achieved community empowerment by rejecting assimilation. Chicanos expressed solidarity and defined their culture through the development of Chicano art during El Movimiento, and stood firm in preserving their religion.

The Chicano Movement was influenced by and entwined with the Black power movement, and both movements held similar objectives of community empowerment and liberation while also calling for Black–Brown unity. Leaders such as César Chávez, Reies Tijerina, and Rodolfo Gonzales learned strategies of resistance and worked with leaders of the Black Power movement. Chicano organizations like the Brown Berets and Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) were influenced by the political agenda of Black activist organizations such as the Black Panthers. Chicano political demonstrations, such as the East L.A. walkouts and the Chicano Moratorium, occurred in collaboration with Black students and activists. The Chicano Movement also crossed over with the Labor Movement using similar strategies and even overlapping goals with one another. César Chávez helped play an important role in both movements throughout their time.

Jean Dorothy Seberg (/ˈsiːbɜːrɡ/; French: [ʒin sebɛʁɡ]; November 13, 1938 – August 30, 1979) was an American actress. She is considered an icon of the French New Wave as a result of her performance in Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film Breathless.

Seberg appeared in 34 films in the United States and Europe, including Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, Lilith, The Mouse That Roared, Breathless, Moment to Moment, A Fine Madness, Paint Your Wagon, Airport, Macho Callahan, and Gang War in Naples. Seberg was among the best-known targets of the FBI's COINTELPRO project. Her targeting was in retaliation for her support of the Black Panther Party, a smear directly ordered by J. Edgar Hoover.