Sam Watson (political activist)

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.

Early life

Watson was born in 1952 in Brisbane, Queensland, the grandson of Sam Watson, who was of the Birri Gubba nation, while his grandmother was a Munaldjali woman. 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.

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".