In the first and second segments of this four-part interview, Billy X, a long-time member of the Black Panther Party (BPP), explains to Kakoli Mitra the historical reality of Afro-Americans in the decades leading up to the BPP’s formation in West Oakland, California (United States). He describes why, especially during World War II, Afro-Americans were motivated to migrate out of the southern U.S., where they had originally been forcibly displaced from Africa by the Europeans to be enslaved laborers on settler plantations. West Oakland (in the San Francisco Bay Area) was the westernmost terminus of the transcontinental railroad and an industrial hub for war-related manufacturing. Facing a dearth of workers due to the exodus of Euro-American men fighting in World War II, the U.S. government opened up manufacturing jobs to Afro-Americans, providing incentive for them to migrate to places like the Bay Area. Billy X describes why the practice of redlining forced most Afro-Americans to live in West Oakland, which became a thriving middle-class Black area, enabling most of the initial members of the BPP to attend college. But in reality, Afro-Americans were still heavily discriminated and mistreated (e.g., promises made at the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 that were not kept) and were thus motivated to fight for their rights. BPP founders, Huey P. Newton (who had gone to law school) and Bobby Seale, were inspired by the socialist movements in China and South America.