The Enduring Legacy of Portland's Black Panthers

About the Author

Joe Biel is a self-made autistic publisher and filmmaker who draws origins, inspiration, and methods from punk rock. Biel is the founder and CEO of Microcosm Publishing, Publishers Weekly's #1 fastest growing publisher of 2022. Biel has been featured in Time Magazine, NPR, Publishers Weekly, Art of Autism, Reading Glasses, PBS, Bulletproof Radio, Spectator (Japan), G33K (Korea), and Maximum Rocknroll. Biel is the author of People's Guide to Publishing: Building a Successful, Sustainable, Meaningful Book Business, Good Trouble: Building a Successful Life & Business on the Spectrum, Manspressions: Decoding Men's Behavior, Make a Zine, The CIA Makes Science Fiction Unexciting, Proud to be Retarded, Bicycle Culture Rising, and more. Biel is the director of five feature films and hundreds of short films, including Aftermass: Bicycling in a Post-Critical Mass Portland, $100 & A T-Shirt, and the Groundswell film series. Biel lives in Portland, Ore. Find out more at joebiel.net Aaron Dixon was the co-founder and Captain of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party. While a student at the University of Washington, Dixon played a key role in the formation of the Black Student Union (BSU) and the Seattle Chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), while helping organize protests and black student unions at local high schools. In the spring of 1968, at the funeral of Bobby Hutton in Oakland, California, Dixon met Bobby Seale and later was appointed Captain of Seattle's Black Panther Party, the first chapter outside of California. He was 19 years old. Dixon led the chapter through its first four years, then moved to Party national headquarters in Oakland in 1972. There he worked with Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and served as bodyguard to Elaine Brown. In 2006, he ran for the U.S. Senate for the Green Party in Washington state.