Black Panther Party founder and activist Huey P. Newton was honored with a bronze statue in his likeness yesterday to commemorate the party’s 55^th anniversary, ABC 7 KGO reported.  

The statue was placed at the intersection where the activist was murdered and it will remain a permanent fixture at the location to celebrate the Black Panther Party movement in Oakland.  

“I’ve created him to bring him home to West Oakland,” sculptor Dana King said in her studio, blocks away from where the monument will be installed. 

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The Black Panther Party was a grassroots community movement founded in Oakland in 1966 to help Black people deal with the racial oppression in Oakland.  

In 1969, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover began to tarnish the reputation of the Black Panther Party by referring to them as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” He even executed a plan of infiltrating the organization to destroy the party from the inside.   

Despite the party being labeled a menace to society by Hoover, the Black Panther party did a lot of good things in its community, such as the free breakfast program that fed thousands of hungry youths, which would serve as the road map for the federal government developing its free and reduced meal plans in public schools.  

The Black Panther Party was effectively dissolved in 1982, but the sculptor would like her art to help carve out a new legacy for the organization that helped so many in the Black community. 

“The story will live on,” King said. “That’s the beauty of bronze. Bronze can last forever, hundreds of years. So, every generation that sees that piece tells the story and the story lives on.” 

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