“From the time that college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves and announced that they were going to patrol the police and fight police brutality, a cultural match was lit that sparked a revolution. In a matter of months, the organization that they helped to found, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, managed to make enemies of the United States government, frighten ‘White America’, and fan the flames of racial tension and ‘black power.’ The Black Panther legacy has been largely misunderstood; the idealistic notion of self-reliance and self-determination that was at the core of the Panthers beliefs was too often lost in the public persona of an organization that was perceived as violent, racist, and anarchical, and the Black Panthers themselves did seemingly little to dispel that perception. Interpretations and reflections in subsequent years of recollection have often yielded uneven results, with varying accounts rife with bias and inaccuracy, leaving their legacy and impact incomplete.”