The Trigger: The Black Panthers and the price of self-defense

Black activists started a militant movement for self-defense and equality in the 1960s. Experts on the Black Panther Party say that history is important to reflect on in a similarly divisive time. (Illustration by Armon Owlia)

Two experts on the Black Panther Party reveal how the Black-led movement turned protest into a fight for real power.

“The story of the Panthers is an American tragedy that we’re still not telling as often as we should.”

This story revisits a moment in American history too often simplified or erased. It begins with a question about what happens when a people, tired of waiting, decide to defend their own humanity. Through rare insights from historians and storytellers, it follows the emergence of a movement that refused to separate survival from dignity, or peace from justice.

Set against the backdrop of a country still reeling from violence and contradiction, the narrative unfolds through young leaders who challenged not just laws, but the meaning of freedom itself. Their choices would ignite fear, admiration, and an unprecedented national reckoning.

At its core, this is a story about power; who has it, who defines it, and what happens when those definitions are no longer accepted. It’s a chapter of history that changed the rules of protest forever, and its echoes still shape how America sees itself today.

Ryan Jones is the Director of History and Interpretation at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

David F. Walker is a writer, graphic novelist, filmmaker and professor at Portland State University in Oregon.

TRANSCRIPT

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We dig into a a story missing from most classrooms that is still unfolding. I spoke with Ryan Jones, Director of History and Interpretation at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, to explore what happens when Black Americans say: enough.

RYAN JONES: “So we interpret the Black freedom struggle in British North America to the United States, covering over 400 years of African American history and culture.”

ARMON OWLIA: “And that’s a pretty extensive and pretty painful history.”

RYAN JONES: “It is. It’s a traumatic history. It’s an empowering history. It’s a history that always has not always been taught and preserved in a very authentic form. It’s an unapologetic history. And so it’s also a history that is not that long ago. And we are seeing some parallels of that same history, that same fight, that same fear and divisiveness in our current state of society today.”

That fight reached an inflection point in 1966—when young Black revolutionaries in Oakland put America on notice. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The fight for freedom wouldn’t just be about marches and turning the other cheek, as Jones explained:

RYAN JONES: “We just want to be seen and treated as human beings in a first-class citizenship. That’s what they’re asking for. We’re not going to ask to give our freedom. We’re going to demand that we get our freedom and we’ll get them by any means necessary.”

ARMON OWLIA: “So when they were founded in 1966, there was already some frustration with the slow progress of nonviolent resistance that was mounting. How did the social and political conditions of the time shape the need for a more, let’s say, radical approach?”

RYAN JONES: “You know, there were always many different philosophies throughout the beginning of the 20th century when it came to the rights for African American people in this country. We see that in education in the early part of this era and system referred to as Jim Crow. You’ve got educators and scholars like Booker T. Washington urging African Americans to take a much more trade approach when you’ve got scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois urging for a much more militant, talented, we deserve this under the 14th Amendment approach. There were always these radical ideas that were out there.”

That tension—between patience and militancy, negotiation and resistance—has always run through the fight for Black freedom. From Marcus Garvey to Ella Baker, A. Phillip Randolph to Fannie Lou Hamer.

RYAN JONES: “They’re seeing the rule of nonviolence, but they grow tired. And this is in this younger age bracket where they’re seeing the limitations of nonviolent direct action. One thing that nonviolent direct action does do is that it invites the cameras into these rural, dangerous areas.”

For years the strategy was brutally simple: march, take the beating, accept the arrest—hoses in Birmingham, firebombed Freedom Rider buses, blood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. For many, that was the breaking point. The strategy drew headlines, but it didn’t stop the bullets.

RYAN JONES: “On the 18th of February, 1965, a young man named Jimmie Lee Jackson is killed for having his hands up, hands up, don’t shoot, which will spark the upcoming Selma to Montgomery campaigns. Three days later, Malcolm, this fiery opponent of nonviolence and Black nationalism is gunned down in Harlem, New York. And so the tension in this country that all these leaders have these ideas and they’re taken out with all of this power, it really sends shockwaves throughout the country.”

RYAN JONES: “They escaped the horrors of the South and that they met some of the same types of oppression and resistance out West where they should have been able to hold their head up high, yeah, the levels of frustration were there. And so the need to want to just live a decent human life with basic citizenship rights, to being treated as everyone else in the society, that was simply what they were urging for.”

ARMON OWLIA: “So unlike other Black-led organizations at that time, the Panthers embraced armed self-defense and militant imagery. Why do you think they chose that specific image as their public face?”

RYAN JONES: “Yeah. It’s paying homage to the grassroots organizers that were doing this work in the rural South. I think of the Stokely Carmichaels, the John Hewletts, that early Black political power in the Deep South. And the symbolism behind it was so important. It was [the] brilliance of doing so. When you think of the Black Panther, you think of this very concentrated and disciplined animal who is unafraid of anything that comes in its path.”

RYAN JONES: “And so, this Panther becomes this symbol of anti-oppression on Black folks. We’re resilient people, we’re a solid people, right? And so they’re going to, they influence these young students, just several hundred thousands of miles away in Oakland, California, where on the 15th of October, 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale form what is known as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense with an emphasis on self-defense.”

The Panthers confronted violence that didn’t wear white hoods or carry torches. Oakland—and much of the West—had become a destination for Black families escaping the South. But California wasn’t a safe haven. It just had different rules. Redlining locked them out of housing. Police enforced a brutal, unspoken code: Know your place. Newton and Seale knew that asking wouldn’t change the system. So they studied the law—line by line. They donned Black berets, leather jackets, shotguns slung across their chests—but rarely fired.  Panthers patrolled the streets, rifles in one hand, law books in the other. When police stopped a Black driver, they stood by—silent, armed. They didn’t interfere. Sometimes, presence alone was enough. 

ARMON OWLIA: “If you look at images of the Black Panthers, their outfit alone is enough to create the intimidation factor. They didn’t necessarily need the imagery with the guns.”

RYAN JONES: “Any time you saw in the course of history, specifically after a significant war, Black folks that were armed with guns were seen as ultra-threats. We know the long hundreds of years of enslavement being brought to a country against their will. We know the long system of Jim Crow. So I refer to the end of World War I, the Red Summer of 1919, Black men coming back not only as heroes, but they’re coming back armed. You see this large amount of racially motivated violence take place. Same thing happens post-1945 in the Second World War, Black men coming back with arms.”

You could carry a gun in Europe, fight and die for freedom—but at home, carrying one made you a threat. By the 1960s, another generation was expected to endure the same violence. But this time, young Black Americans refused. They came armed with weapons, law, rights, and resolve. They didn’t seek confrontation, and they wouldn’t flinch.

RYAN JONES: “It was to show that we are not afraid and we will let you see that we are not afraid. There’s one thing of marching into a hotbed of white supremacy, but there’s also letting that white supremacist know that if you intrude into my private space, into my personal space, or to my loved ones or personal belongings, I can and I will use this under what the law of the United States says that I can do.”

It wasn’t just guns. The Panthers were quote unquote dangerous because they were informed. Knowledge is power. They knew exactly how far to push before the system pushed back—and when it did, they were ready. For J. Edgar Hoover, then inaugural FBI director, it was war. He declared them threats to national security—a justification now widely condemned.

RYAN JONES: “What made the Panthers so pivotal during this period was that they could teach law enforcement the law. And that’s what made them such a major threat. Think about this. There’s been, at this point, up to about 4,400 racially motivated lynchings occurring on American soil from 1882 to 1961. The Panthers are in order for less than a year before Hoover creates the COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence program. That’s a century worth of racially motivated violence, some using guns, some not, right? And in less than 10 months, you create this program because of these kids out in the Bay Area simply wanting to prevent police brutality from happening in their communities.”

By 1967, America was smoldering. Civil rights had won on paper—but in the streets, it was life or death. Black communities remained overpoliced, underfunded, and marginalized.

ARMON OWLIA: “How did the conditions in Oakland in the mid-60s influence the Panthers’ priorities? And what gaps in the Civil Rights Movement were they trying to fill? I know we were talking about Nation of Islam earlier. I know it’s part of that gap, but what other gaps were they trying to fill at that time?”

RYAN JONES: “Most of the people that were in Oakland were immigrants. They were immigrating out of the Deep South during the Great Migration. Some people just didn’t always go to the land of the free, which was considered Chicago or Detroit or Harlem or New Jersey or Baltimore. They were going out West. Many of them ended up in the Bay Area like Oakland. Many ended up in Vegas. Many ended up in, of course, the South Central part of LA. But once they realized and they got out there and they saw that, yes, the deaths of racially segregation was very minimal compared to where it was in the Mississippi Delta, but the subtle attempts of racial discrimination were just as bad in some of those places.

And the Panthers kept growing.

RYAN JONES: “We see a very large chapter of the Panthers open in Chicago. And one of its more profound leaders, a young, another leader who would be victim of gun violence and police brutality, Fred Hampton on December 4th, 1969.”

If you’ve seen Judas and the Black Messiah, you know Fred Hampton. At just 21, he unified groups rarely seen side by side: poor Black communities, white working-class organizations, and Puerto Rican activists. He called it the Rainbow Coalition. To the FBI, that was revolutionary—and dangerous. On December 4, 1969, agents and Chicago police raided his apartment before dawn. Hours earlier, his bodyguard—FBI informant William O’Neal—had drugged him. Nearly a hundred rounds were fired. Hampton never woke up. His pregnant fiancée lay beside him. Only one shot came from inside. Hampton’s assassination wasn’t about weapons. It was about power—Black power in Black hands. Through ballots, breakfast programs, and bold alliances, the Panthers were building something real. The state responded with overwhelming force.

RYAN JONES: “Yeah, I mean, it’s okay to give an African-American kid a gun and go send them to fight in Vietnam. Yes, you’re serving your country. But as long as you’re in this country on this soil, in which you’ll pay the same taxes as the next person will, you are not able to have a gun because you are seen as a criminal. You are seen as a threat.”

The hypocrisy wasn’t new. White men carried guns to protect homes and enforce Jim Crow—burning Black neighborhoods as warnings. Law enforcement called it order. But Black people with guns?

RYAN JONES: “Black skin, whether it’s a Black cop or a white cop, has always been shown as a threat in American society. And so for the Panthers to say, no, I’m going to have my gun because I care about my life.”

The Panthers didn’t stockpile weapons to start a war. They followed the law—arming themselves for protection, patrolling neighborhoods, exercising Constitutional rights they’d never fully had. They weren’t asking. They were asserting. And that’s when the rules changed.

ARMON OWLIA: “How did the response of the Black Panthers contribute to the long-term evolution of gun control policies?”

RYAN JONES: “You know, no one said anything about guns until Black folks start carrying them. Nobody said anything about guns until Black folks start saying, we’ll use guns if we’re not able to achieve our constitutional rights.”

The Panthers learned the system even as it worked to erase them. And then they did something that forced America—not just Black America—to confront itself. A moment so powerful it still shapes how we talk about race, power, and the Second Amendment. And they did it without firing a shot.

What came next from the Panthers was strategic—and forced the country to see them in a new way. How did a group of young men from Oakland go from neighborhood patrols… to the steps of the California State Capitol? To walk us through what happened next—and why it still echoes—I spoke with David F. Walker. He’s a writer, filmmaker, and professor at Portland State University. He is known for reimagining iconic figures like Luke Cage and Shaft in the world of comics. He’s also the author of The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History that vividly captures a widely untold and unknown history.

DAVID F. WALKER: “I think that the thing that the Panthers had going for them the most was also the thing that was working against them, which was just they were all so young. They were young and idealistic. And I don’t think anybody thought—like, and I say this, like, it sounds flippant when I say it—but I don’t think anybody thought, like, people were going to kill them. Right? Like they were killing—when the law enforcement was killing members of the Panthers, they were killing children.”

DAVID F. WALKER: “They went in with, like, half a plan.”

May 2, 1967. Sacramento, California. It was a clear morning outside the California Capitol. Governor Ronald Reagan stood on the lawn, speaking to eighth-graders at a civic event. Then the air shifted. Men and women, mostly young, approached. They didn’t shout. They didn’t hold signs. Some carried law books. Others, loaded firearms, which was legal in California at the time.

DAVID F. WALKER: “They’re young and they’re brash and arrogant, and they’re well-armed, and they’re dressed like—you know, some people would think they looked really cool with their leather jackets and their berets and their, you know, guns, whereas other people would be terrified of that.”

They climbed the Capitol steps.

DAVID F. WALKER: “They embodied what a lot of America feared then—and what America, I think, still fears. And that’s the ‘I’m not going to turn the other cheek.’ And you see so much of that in the footage from Sacramento… and it’s political theater, right? It was—it’s some of the best political theater of that era. And even looking at it now, it’s absolutely captivating. It’s mesmerizing.”

The Panthers entered the building and walked into the main rotunda. They didn’t raise their voices. They didn’t threaten anyone. Some held rifles pointed straight up. Others opened law books to the statutes that guaranteed their right to be there—and to carry.

ARMON OWLIA: “What do you think the Panthers were trying to communicate with the protest in Sacramento? And how do you interpret how the public and the media ended up receiving it?”

DAVID F. WALKER: “Well, they were—you know, it was all about the—what was it—the Mulford Act, the California Gun Control Act, and they were trying to defend the right to bear arms, to protect themselves against the police. And what’s fascinating is that, like, even Reagan at the time, who was the governor—Ronald Reagan of California—was like, ‘Oh, we must take their guns away from them,’ right?”

The Mulford Act had been introduced just weeks earlier to ban the open carry of loaded firearms—a direct response to the Panthers’ patrols and public visibility.

DAVID F. WALKER: “It was as, like, they were pro-right to bear arms, and the government—which now won’t do anything to stop, you know, to enforce gun control—that was, like, the most aggressive their gun control laws ever were, and it was in large part to disarm the Panthers.”

The irony is sharp. No shots were fired. No laws were broken. But the sight of armed Black bodies in halls of power caused a panic. The NRA, once pro-regulation, began shifting toward absolutism. A lawful, armed Black protest helped spark the modern gun rights movement.  

DAVID F. WALKER: “If people knew more about the Panthers, and just about the, you know, their protest in Sacramento, and the Mulford Act, and their fight to arm themselves—if people knew more about that—then they would see the total hypocrisy of, you know, the Second Amendment rah-rah NRA people. Because, like, those people would never stand up for the Panthers. They wouldn’t have stood up for them then, and they wouldn’t stand up for them now.”

But what really terrified the state wasn’t that the Panthers were armed—it was that they knew the rules. And how to use them.

ARMON OWLIA: “I mean, obviously they were not just highly intelligent. They kind of—not kind of—they really understood what they were doing. Seale, Newton—you mentioned this in the book—understanding their message of the law. How would you interpret the Panthers’ use of the law, particularly the Second Amendment, as part of their larger strategy?”

DAVID F. WALKER: “Oh, it was—it was pure brilliance, right? It was like—they were armed with shotguns and guns, but they were also armed with the law. Huey had been in college for a while, and one of his professors was Ed Meese, who would go on to be the Attorney General for Ronald Reagan, right? And I think that, at the end of the day, their ability—their intelligence and the amount of research that they did, the things that they knew—that’s what made them more dangerous than them having guns.”

They carried firearms with loaded magazines—but no rounds in the chamber, exactly as California law allowed. They knew where the legal line was. And that’s what scared law enforcement most.

DAVID F. WALKER: “It’s easier to oppress people who don’t know their rights. But the moment you know your rights, you—you suddenly—you become an enemy to the oppressors, right? Like, a real enemy. A real threat. And I think that that was, you know—it’s—it’s—it’s—when I think about the Panthers, what I really think about is—it’s just—it’s like an American tragedy.”

Their protest exposed the thin line between ‘patriot’ and ‘public enemy’—a line that shifts with who holds the weapon. Their youth made them targets. And what terrified the state wasn’t their guns—it was their mastery of the law.

DAVID F. WALKER: “If you look at two cities in particular—if you look at Los Angeles and you look at Chicago—and you see the extent that law enforcement went to, to disrupt and destroy and discredit the Panthers. And in both of those cities—in L.A., you had Bunchy Carter and John Huggins. Bunchy Carter was—he was, he was—he was from the streets. He was—he was essentially, nowadays we’d call him a gangster, right? But he was bringing in members of the Panthers who were all felons, who were all gangsters, who were all thugs. And, like, that’s the—again, that’s where some of the danger is. Like, if you take people who aren’t afraid to pull out a gun and rob a bank, but then you politicize them, suddenly you’ve got armed revolutionaries. And then if you start preaching to them and—and—and giving them information, giving them knowledge, suddenly you have educated revolutionaries.”

Change, not guns, were the real threat. And that legacy still echoes more than fifty years later.

ARMON OWLIA: “So as a teacher, what do you think students most often misunderstand about the Panthers, and what single truth do you wish every young person knew—or at the very least understood?”

DAVID F. WALKER: “I think one of the biggest problems is that people don’t even know they exist, right? Or know next to nothing about them. And I—and honestly, in the political climate that we’re in now, it’s only going to get worse. I was actually thinking, “Oh, I should stockpile copies of my book before it’s completely banned.” And so I think the thing with young people is that the most important thing, I think, is that they know that it exists—that the Panthers existed—and understand the history. And then understand the history of what happens to people who are branded, for lack of a better term, enemies of the state. You know, or “threats to the Republic,” as J. Edgar Hoover called the Panthers. I think young people need to understand that. And I think young people need to take responsibility for being the new generation of historians. For questioning what’s out there and sharing with each other: ‘Hey, did you know about this?’”

They didn’t break the law. But they broke the spell—the illusion of control. For a white power structure built on passivity, that break was seismic.

ARMON OWLIA: “How do you see the role of COINTELPRO and popular media, each contributing to how the Panthers have been remembered or even misremembered over time?”

DAVID F. WALKER: “We can never underestimate what COINTELPRO did. And honestly, what it’s still doing today, because there’s variations of it going on right now. But I—I think that it had a negative impact that—that was obvious—or maybe not so obvious in the moment, but definitely obvious as the papers and all the records started coming out. But when you look at, like, how the—not just Panthers—but we’ll say the sort of generalized Black militant has been portrayed in film and TV and books, it’s—for the most part—the vast majority of it isn’t that positive. And that’s a direct result of—of what COINTELPRO did. And—and not just how it presented itself or how the Panthers were presented to the public, but also how—internally—when we think of a lot of the violence that happened around the Panthers, so much of it was instigated by the paid informants who were taking orders from either local police or the FBI.”

We forget how much of the story was shaped by distortion and fear, by design.

DAVID F. WALKER: “The story of the Panthers is an American tragedy that we’re still not telling as often as we should. And I think a lot of people don’t understand.”

Two years after Sacramento, the FBI labeled the Panthers the “greatest threat to internal security.” Surveillance expanded. Informants multiplied. State violence—often masked as law enforcement—intensified. Case in point: Fred Hampton.

ARMON OWLIA: “So, you brought up Fred Hampton earlier. We talked to Ryan Jones about his assassination. He plays a major role in the book. How did you approach portraying him—and not just as a symbol—but as a real, complex young man?”

DAVID F. WALKER: “That’s a great question. And you know, what a lot of people don’t know is that I had—when I was talking to the publisher about doing a Black Panther Party book—I was talking specifically about telling just the story of Fred Hampton and the Illinois chapter and Hampton’s murder. And to the credit of my editor, he had said, you know, “I think that not enough people know about the Panthers, especially within the age group that we’re going to be marketing this book to. I think it needs to be much more generalized.” And I was like, “Okay.” You know, I didn’t argue with it because I realized: there may never be another opportunity, right?”

Walker said the release of “Judas and the Black Messiah” only reinforced that decision. Suddenly there was an audience hungry to learn more about Hampton. For Walker, that meant giving him more room on the page than almost anyone else in the book.

DAVID F. WALKER: And this—some people might not understand this—but when you’re working in a graphic novel, you want to think about: how are things going to be visually represented? And the attack on Fred Hampton—the attack on the apartment in Chicago by the Chicago PD—was so well documented that it was, like, it was easy to represent it in graphic novel format, just as it was easy to represent it in the movie.”

That documentation—photos, testimony, reports—made Hampton’s story unusually vivid. And it underscored the scale of force the state was willing to use.

DAVID F. WALKER: “And I feel like, when we’re going to talk about the lengths that law enforcement went to to neutralize the party—Fred Hampton’s story is the embodiment of that. And so that was—and again, it’s just—it’s an American tragedy. I mean, he was a kid. You know?”

ARMON OWLIA: “What were the challenges that you faced in portraying that event—which really does read almost like a comic book climax—while still honoring the real-life gravity of what ended up happening?”

DAVID F. WALKER: “That’s also a really good question. Marcus and I talked about it a lot—Marcus being the artist—and I said, you know, “I want to try to convey a sense of terror and chaos without it being gratuitous and overly gory.” And, you know, everybody was asleep in the apartment, and it was—what?—two, three in the morning, dead of winter, and it was, you know, dark out. And like, I wanted to, as best I could, I wanted Marcus and I to try to convey it in that chaotic sense, right? Like, ‘What the hell is going on right now? We just fell asleep, and now people are shooting at us.’” 

He wanted readers to feel the dread without wallowing in gore. To him, the goal was never spectacle—it was empathy. It is terrifying because your brain fills in the gaps of violence…even when none is actually shown.

DAVID F. WALKER: “And I was just like, ‘I don’t want to glorify the violence because it’s real violence, and it’s so tragic.’ But I was like—Marcus and I talked about it and we were like, ‘We want people feeling it, right? We want people to feel it in the pit of their stomach.’”

ARMON OWLIA: “How much of a tightrope—what tightrope was that for you guys to walk while crafting that moment? Like, did you guys almost go one way or the other, like, in the process of doing that?”

DAVID F. WALKER: “Marcus and I sometimes are like a monster that shares the same brain. So we think about a lot of this sort of stuff. And I knew from the beginning what we needed to do, and Marcus agreed. And so then it was just a question of figuring out how to craft it in a way that serves the purpose of this medium—which is, you know, the medium of graphic novels, of comics. And we talked about it a lot. We talked about, like, you know—all the reports of the people who were in the apartment talk about, you know, all the screaming and the gunshots—but you couldn’t hear what people were saying over the gunfire, right? And so I just remember saying to Marcus,, “How do we capture that?” Oh—well, we just have, you know, “blam” or “bang” or whatever covering text, right? Covering what the people are saying. And so we were talking about how to try to convey as much of the confusion, the fear, the sensory overload that had to have been happening—all in static two-dimensional images, right?”

Fred Hampton was building something at 21. And he was killed for it. In 2020, armed white protesters entered state capitol buildings in Michigan and Oregon. Many carried rifles. Some disrupted legislative sessions. Law enforcement monitored—but did not intervene. No one was killed. That same year in D.C., peaceful protesters—many of them Black—gathered near Lafayette Square after George Floyd’s murder. They were unarmed. They were tear-gassed to clear space for a presidential photo-op. No weapons. No warning. No parity. January 6 ended with the man impeached for inciting it pardoning those involved. Fred Hampton was killed in his sleep. Protesters in D.C. were forced out of a park. The contrast in state response remains—then and now.

ARMON OWLIA: “So when you look at the emergence of Black Lives Matter in 2020—and everything that’s followed since then—what challenges do you think a movement like the Panthers would face if it emerged today?”

DAVID F. WALKER: “It would be facing an administration that’s looking to build an all-white nation. And it would be facing a nation that is less literate—and more apathetic—than it was 50, 60 years ago. I can’t help but think we’re going to find out. I don’t think things are heading in a good direction. Whenever I’m in another city, or even in my city in Portland, there’s still people who have Black Lives Matter signs on their front yard and bumper stickers. And in the last five years, that’s become a pretty bold statement. How long before people have to take those signs off their front yards because they’re worried the cops are going to come for them? Or some white supremacist organization is going to come for them and the cops won’t stop it? I feel like the entirety of law enforcement was brought to bear on the Black Panther Party—and it destroyed them. And now—it’s like, ain’t much changed. The thing that’s changed is just more people have guns now. They’re less literate. Some are apathetic, but others are more militant in their desire to maintain the status quo of white supremacy and oppression.”

We remember the berets, not the breakfast programs. We reduce a generation of thinkers and builders to a single headline image: leather jackets, rifles, and the wrong kind of power. The story of the Black Panther Party is a test of how we interpret protest. How we weaponize memory. And how easily law becomes a tool of control instead of justice. The illusion of order survives by silencing dissent. By deciding who gets to be armed. By fearing those who weaponize the law against those who wrote it. And labeling them “enemies of the state” for it.

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Credits

The views expressed in this story are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily reflect the positions of AfroLA. 

Executive Producers: Armon Owlia and Dana Amihere.

Editors: Katie Licari, Eliza Partika, Dan Hoyt, and Dana Amihere

Special thanks to Ryan Jones and David F. Walker for their contributions.

The musical score was composed with the help of Epidemic Sound. Opening theme, “Sonder,” produced by Man With Roses.