|
Books by Floyd W.
Hayes, III
A Turbulent Voyage: Readings in African
American Studies /
Forty
Acres and a Mule: The Rape of Colored Americans
* *
* * *
Liberated Territory
Untold
Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party
By Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazerow
Reviewed
by Dr.
Floyd W. Hayes, III
In the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party strode
across the landscape of America with a bravado and
revolutionary spirit that shook the political and
social foundations of a nation that had largely
adjusted to the measured pace of the liberal Civil
Rights Movement. Founded in Oakland, California,
during the turbulent birth of the Black Power
Movement, the Panthers saw themselves as a vanguard
organization, whose mission was the struggle against
America’s racist and bitterly violent capitalist
state. In the face of these evils, the Panthers
demanded human rights and a sustainable life for all
of the world’s oppressed peoples.
During the past decade, there has been an explosion
in the scholarly literature on the Black Power
Movement, in general, and the Black Panther Party,
in particular. Earlier book-length studies
concentrated on the Party as a national phenomenon,
on the political dynamics of the Panther chapters in
Oakland or Los Angeles, or on Huey P. Newton’s
political thought. In the last few years, scholarly
attention has shifted to an examination of local
histories of Panther chapters in various cities
throughout the United States of America. This is
the focus of the volume under review.
In
Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on
the Black Panther Party, editors Yohuru
Williams and Jama Lazerow and their contributors
challenge the conventional narrative of the 1960s
that either evaded any discussion of the Black
Panther Party or portrayed the organization in a
most negative fashion. The traditional perspective
also focused predominantly on the liberal Civil
Rights Movement to the exclusion of the radical
Black Power Movement. Bringing an account of the
black experience back into the center of U. S.
American history and inserting the story of the
Black Panther Party back into the narrative of the
1960s, the authors elaborate a tradition of black
radicalism. De-centering emphasis on the Oakland
and Los Angeles chapters, the volume’s essays probe
beneath the symbolic significance of the Black
Panther Party to the U. S. American public in order
to give both scholars and the public a sense of the
Party’s local activities that constituted the
genesis, trends, developments, contradictions, and
decline of Panther chapters and their offshoots in
New Bedford, Massachusetts, Birmingham, Alabama,
Detroit, Michigan, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. What
these narratives demonstrate is the importance of
local circumstances in Panther history.
Jama Lazerow chronicles the Black Panther Party’s
lineage and activities in New Bedford,
Massachusetts. It is the story of regional
interaction between chapters in Boston and New
Bedford, both largely unknown in Panther
historiography. Boston and New Bedford were the
sites and destination of immigrants from Cape Verde,
an island off the shore of Senegal, West Africa.
Lazerow notes that as a result of ideological
contradictions between the Oakland and an early
generation of Boston Panthers in the late 1960s, a
new generation of Panthers, who were Cape Verdeans,
emerged in Boston. Lazerow reviews the complicated
process of Cape Verdean assimilation into the black
American population of both cities. Embracing a
revolutionary perspective, Cape Verdean Boston
Panthers assisted in the development of the Panther
chapter in New Bedford. In typical Panther fashion,
the New Bedford Panthers had run-ins with the local
legal system. The Panthers established “survival
programs,” such as a liberation school and a
community health care program with the assistance of
the Boston chapter. Lazerow argues that while the
New Bedford chapter sought an independent direction,
it was largely an appendage of the Boston Panthers.
And as the Black Panther Party declined nationally,
the New Bedford Panthers lost their dynamism in the
1970s.
Robert W. Widell, Jr., tells the story of the
Alabama Black Liberation Front (ABLF) as an offshoot
of the Black Panther Party. Modeled after the
Panthers, the group emerged in the 1970s, as an
alternative to the leadership of Martin L. King,
Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, a
city known for extreme violence against its black
population. Hence, the ABLF challenges the
historical narrative of the southern black
liberation struggle that privileges the liberal
Civil Rights effort while ignoring more radical
formations. As Widell demonstrates, the ABLF was
inspired by the Black Panther Party and its
revolutionary ideology. As such, the ABLF fought
back against police terror and sought to organize a
number of “survival programs.” The fall of the ABLF
came when its core members were arrested, charged,
and convicted as a result of a shootout with the
local police in the 1970s.
Perhaps the most engrossing and informative chapter
is Ahmad A. Rahman’s narrative on the Detroit
Panthers. Expressing opposition to the police
murders of black Detroiters as well as
dissatisfaction with conventional Civil Rights
leadership, the Detroit Black Panther Party was
established in 1968. Rahman chronicles police
assaults on the Panthers, even as the Party
established a number of community “survival
programs.” He argues that the Panthers fought
social and economic inequities, but refrained from
employing counter-violence against the violence of
the police. Significantly, it was the revolutionary
underground wing of the Panthers, of which Rahman is
fiercely critical, that implemented the theory and
practice of armed struggle. However, by 1971,
Rahman argues, the complicated relationship between
the aboveground and underground had reached a point
of diminishing returns. As confrontations with the
police escalated, the counter-violence of the
underground Panthers could not match the terror of
the local state. Moreover, the revolutionary arm of
the Party suffered from infiltration, leading the
Panther underground’s collapse.
In his discussion of the Milwaukee Panthers, Yohuru
Williams chronicles the dynamics of early 1960s
civil rights activism and armed self-defense as the
confrontational cauldron that gave rise the city’s
Black Panther Party. Led by a white Roman Catholic
priest, with the support of a militant self-defense
group called the Commandoes, civil rights protestors
marched against a variety of racial socioeconomic
inequities. By the late 1960s, following the
emergence of the Black Panther Party in Oakland,
California, the Milwaukee chapter of the Panthers
came into existence, challenging the white
leadership of the city’s civil rights activists.
Williams recounts contradictions between the Black
Panther Party and community organizations over the
provision of local services, arguing that the
Panthers emphasized “survival programs” over armed
conflict with local cops. However, increasing
Milwaukee police repression, together mounting
internal conflicts within the ranks of the Panthers,
resulted in the Party’s demise.
In the Epilogue, Devin Fergus examines the changing
character of the Black Panther Party during its last
years of existence. Challenging the Party’s
revolutionary anti-statist public image, he argues
that between 1972 and 1978, the Party shifted into a
liberal organization that fitted well into the
American civic nationalist tradition. This is
evident, according to Fergus, as the Panthers,
mainly under the leadership of chairwoman Elaine
Brown, sought to use the courts of law in order to
protect their constitutional rights as any US
citizen would do. As additional evidence for this
political shift, Fergus also points out that in
1973, Brown and Panther founder Bobby Seale ran for
elective office in Oakland. Two years later, under
Elaine Brown’s leadership, the Black Panther Party
punctuated its repudiation as a revolutionary
organization by breaking with Angela Davis and the
Communist Party USA. Fergus maintains that a
similar trend characterized Panther chapters in
numerous cities.
Liberated Territory demonstrates the
importance of local circumstances in Panther
history. By focusing on the diversity of local
histories beyond Oakland and Los Angeles, the
contributors to this volume reconstruct a more
complex and illuminating portrait of the Black
Panther Party. The mission of the historian also
can become more difficult as evidenced by problems
with the location and reliability of sources.
Perhaps the chapter on Detroit is most
representative of this difficulty. Finally, this
reviewer found the Epilogue to be most troubling.
What were the internal and external forces that led
to the fundamental transformation of the Black
Panther Party from a revolutionary formation to a
liberal group under the leadership of Elaine Brown?
Because of a broad criticism of her stewardship of
the Party by former Panther members, and the glaring
inaccuracies in her memoir,
A Taste of Power, Fergus might have examined
Brown more thoroughly. This criticism aside,
Liberated Territory makes an important
contribution to the growing scholarship on the Black
Panther Party.
* *
* * *
* *
* * *
|
A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story
By Elaine Brown
Brown here relates
the dramatic story of her youth, her
political awakening and her role in the
Black Panther Party when she succeeded
her lover Huey Newton to become the
group's first female leader. Though
smoothly written, the book contains much
reconstructed dialogue that may daunt
readers. Brown's memoir takes her from a
Philadelphia ghetto to California, from
college to cocktail waitressing, from
wanting to be white to joining the black
power movement. She meets Eldridge
Cleaver, George Jackson and Bobby Seale,
goes to jail, visits North Korea and
North Vietnam, debates Marxism and gets
involved in Oakland, Calif., politics.
When other Black Panthers seemed to lose
sight of the revolution and seek power
for its own sake, Brown, with a growing
feminist consciousness, left the group.
|
 |
She now lives
in France and expresses ambivalent feelings about
the party she once loved. Having made her
acquaintance, the reader wonders about her present
life.—Publishers
Weekly
* *
* * *
 |
Weep Not, Child
By
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
This is
a powerful, moving story that details the
effects of the infamous Mau Mau war, the
African nationalist revolt against colonial
oppression in Kenya, on the lives of
ordinary men and women, and on one family in
particular. Two brothers, Njoroge and Kamau,
stand on a rubbish heap and look into their
futures. Njoroge is excited; his family has
decided that he will attend school, while
Kamau will train to be a carpenter. Together
they will serve their country—the
teacher and the craftsman. But this is Kenya
and the times are against them. In the
forests, the Mau Mau is waging war against
the white government, and the two brothers
and their family need to decide where their
loyalties lie. For the practical Kamau the
choice is simple, but for Njoroge the
scholar, the dream of progress through
learning is a hard one to give up.—Penguin
|
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
posted 29 April 2010
|
