In August 1970, Roy Wilkins, the sexagenarian leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), used his syndicated column to criticize Huey P. Newton for urging the formation of an all-black fighting unit to assist the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. Newton cofounded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense with Bobby Seale in 1966 and had recently been released on a technicality after spending thirty-three months in prison for the killing of Oakland police officer John Frey. Wilkins saw Black Power militancy as cynical and misguided. “The Viet Cong may be hurting,” Wilkins wrote, “but nothing like the hurting of John Q. Black American. . . . Of course, Huey knows about this suffering. It was the resentment over this treatment that led, at least in part, to the founding of the Black Panthers. But Huey, for all his talents, is also a revolutionary. Revolutionaries get confused.”