Primary Sources: People - African-Americans: Seale, Bobby

"The Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was a political and social movement whose advocates believed in racial pride, self-sufficiency, and equality for all people of Black and African descent. Credited with first articulating “Black Power” in 1966, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Stokely Carmichael represented a generation of black activists who participated in both Civil Rights and the Black Power movements. By the mid 1960s, many of them no longer saw nonviolent protests as a viable means of combatting racism. New organizations, such as the Black Panther Party, the Black Women’s United Front, and the Nation of Islam, developed new cultural, political, and economic programs and grew memberships that reflected this shift. Desegregation was insufficient—only through the deconstruction of white power structures could a space be made for a black political voice to give rise to collective black power. Because of these beliefs, the movement is often represented as violent, anti-white, and anti-law enforcement. This primary source set addresses these representations through artifacts from the era, such as sermons, photographs, drawings, FBI investigations, and political manifestos."

"This collection includes the full transcript of a murder trial that took place in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1971. The state put Black Panther Party leaders Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins on trial in connection with the torture and murder of a suspected informant named Alex Rackley. The case sparked demonstrations, unprecedented security precautions, the longest-ever jury selection process in state history, and national debate over the ability of a black revolutionary to receive a fair trial. The case ended in a mistrial; the state did not keep a copy of the transcript, so researchers since then have had no access to record of the proceedings. In the process of researching a book about the case (Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale and the Redemption of a Killer (Basic Books 2006), New Haven journalist Paul Bass obtained a copy of the full transcript from one of the trial’s court reporters, who had kept it in his basement. A digitized copy of the transcript has been donated to this archive."