Founded in the wake of the assassination of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party came to symbolize the apotheosis of the explosive late-1960s in American society. Everything about the Panthers was provocative: their Mao-ist inspired political slogans, their ubiquitous black berets and leather jackets, their clenched fist Black Power salute, their big Afro-hairstyles, their practice of openly bearing firearms, and their disciplined militancy and revolutionary political vision. The Black Panthers not only fired the imagination of their generation but also shifted the strategy of the African American struggle and all movements for justice and social change in the United States by seeking solutions rooted in a basic redistribution of power.