Samuel William Watson (16 November 1952 – 27 November 2019), also known as Sammy Watson Jnr, was an Aboriginal Australian activist from the 1970s, who in later life stood as a Socialist Alliance candidate. He is known for being a co-founder of the Australian Black Panther Party in 1971/2. Through work at the Brisbane Aboriginal Legal Service in the early 1990s, Watson was involved in implementing the findings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. From 2009 was deputy director at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland. He was also a writer and a filmmaker, and received honours for his 1990 novel The Kadaitcha Sung. Life Watson was the grandson of Sam Watson, who was of the Birri Gubba nation. His grandfather worked in ring-barking camps and saved enough money to hire a lawyer to release him from the Aboriginal Protection Act 1869. He was one of the first Aboriginal people to achieve this status. His lifelong partner was Cathy. Watson's son is the poet Samuel Wagan Watson, and a grandson is known as Sam Watson the fifth. Career 1970s activism Watson's first foray into Indigenous rights activism started when he was just 16, handing out how-to-vote cards at the 1967 referendum. He developed a strategy which entailed seeking equality for Indigenous Australians "by elevating the race struggle to a class struggle". Watson was involved with, and a spokesperson for, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in its early days in the 1970s. In 1971, Watson and fellow Brisbane activist Denis Walker founded the Australian Black Panther Party, also known as the Black Panther Party of Australia (Brisbane Chapter), declaring it "the vanguard for all depressed people, and in Australia the Aboriginals are the most depressed of all". The new party's manifesto was declared at a conference held at Queensland University from 28 January to 2 February 1972, saying that it would "work in a revolutionary way to achieve human rights for Aboriginal people and the alleviation of racism and racist government policy". Its stated aims were "Freedom, full employment, an end to robbery by the white man of the black community, restitution to the dispossessed, land and mineral rights, decent housing, education relevant to black history and culture, exemption from military service, an end to police brutality, murder and rape of black people, freedom for blacks in gaol, all blacks