Donald Lee Cox (April 16, 1936 – February 19, 2011), known as Field Marshal DC, was an early member of the leadership of the African American revolutionary leftist organization the Black Panther Party, joining the group in 1967.

Cox was deeply disturbed by events such as the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, in which 4 little black girls were killed and a further 22 people injured in an act of White Supremacist terrorism carried out by the Ku Klux Klan.

[4] He became affiliated with the Congress of Racial Equality, and in 1964 and 1965 he was involved in the series of protests directed against the Bank of America, San Francisco hotels, rental agencies and the automobile industry, who were discriminating against African-Americans.

[7] Cox became a national organizer and spokesperson for the group, which was involved in multiple legal cases and a target of the COINTELPRO project of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.

[8] In January 1970, Cox was invited to speak to several dozen guests of composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia at their penthouse apartment in the wealthy Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan.

[1][9] Cox was photographed along with the Bernsteins for a cover story essay by Tom Wolfe in New York magazine, published in June 1970 and entitled "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's".

Cox fled the United States to avoid trial, living first in Algeria (where Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver had already set up a base for exiled Panthers following their own escape from the US) and later in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France.