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  • Getting Right with the Panthers
  • Jama Lazerow (bio)
Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. xii + 539 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $34.95.

Six years ago in this journal, civil rights historian David Garrow penned an extended review of what he called “a huge recent upsurge in historical writing on the Black Panther Party” (BPP). 1He hoped, as did some of us engaged in this twenty-first–century reconstruction of an iconic if misunderstood 1960s phenomenon, that historians beyond the small province inhabited by Panther scholars would take notice. Thus far, they have not, at least not in print. 2Garrow also noted the obvious: that the field was badly in need of a comprehensive narrative history that, in tracing the dramatic changes that marked the BPP’s short lifetime, would provide the necessary foundation for serious historical research. More than a decade in the making, Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin’s Black against Empirepurports to be precisely the survey that Panther historiography is missing.

We have had broad narratives before, of course, but they were written by journalists and non-academics with axes to grind. 3These include Gene Marine’s The Black Panthers(1969), necessarily a truncated history because of its early publication date; Michael Newton’s Bitter Grain: Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party(1980); and Hugh Pearson’s The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America(1995). Each attempted to capture the essence of the Panther story, to alert the nation either to the importance of Black Power (Marine) or to its deleterious effects (Pearson), or, in Michael Newton’s case, to reduce it largely to the drama of violent confrontation, with the Panthers cast as mainly innocent victims of a repressive state. Each of these authors was highly selective in his use of evidence. (Pearson, for example, said almost nothing about the Panthers’ numerous community programs.) Moreover, all three, in various ways, eschewed scholarly conventions, including adherence to factual accuracy. One of the virtues of Black against Empireis that the authors are serious academic scholars (Bloom in sociology and Martin in history), and their work reflects a familiarity with the voluminous body of secondary sources on the Panthers and, more important, with original sources [End Page 162]on them (mainly the BPP newspaper, The Black Panther, which they have mined like no previous scholars, as well as contemporary flyers and leaflets of the New Left). The story they tell is broad—ranging from community programs to sensational armed confrontations and subsequent celebrated trials. They cover local as well as national developments, both political and ideological. Indeed, their book answers Garrow’s call for a narrative that gives due attention to what he termed “the major turning points in the BPP’s eventually tragic evolution.” 4

For Bloom and Martin, those turning points—in each instance at least partly triggered by actions of the state—occurred from 1967 to 1971, when the Party moved from armed patrols of Oakland and surrounding communities to casting itself as a vanguard party; when the Party expanded nationally in the context of the Free Huey Movement, especially in the aftermath of the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.; when the Party moved toward greater organizational discipline and a commitment to social service, alongside a rhetorical commitment to armed struggle; and when the Party fractured along ideological lines (the so-called Newton-Cleaver “split”), producing a retreat to the Bay Area and a new commitment to electoral politics.

The authors’ faithfulness to the record the Panthers left in their own hand allows them to track precisely certain key developments in the history of the Party that even many Panther scholars frequently get wrong, or simply ignore: changes in the organization’s name as well as the language and content of their platform, the inauguration and evolution of Party rules and programs, and the development of their rhetoric and ideology over time. 5Though the heart of the narrative is about what they call the “three short years” of 1968–70, the...

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