Picking Up the Books: The New Historiography of the Black Panther Party

A comprehensive review of all published scholarship on the Black Panther Party (BPP) leads to the inescapable conclusion that the huge recent upsurge in historical writing about the Panthers begins from a surprisingly weak and modest foundation. More than a decade ago, two major BPP autobiographies, Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power (1992) and David Hilliard's This Side of Glory (1993), along with Hugh Pearson's widely reviewed book on the late BPP co-founder Huey P. Newton, The Shadow of the Panther (1994), represented a first-generation revisiting of the Oakland-based group that sprang to life in 1966 but sputtered out of existence in 1982. Yet aside from thoughtful and perceptive survey treatments of the BPP in two broader, more synoptic recent scholarly histories, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar's Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (2004) and Peniel E. Joseph's Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (2006), the list of truly valuable previous work concerning the Panthers is amazingly thin: Eric Cummins's unfortunately little-known The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement (1994), articles by Errol A. Henderson (1997) and Erika Doss (1998), two chapters by Ollie A. Johnson III (1998) and Reynaldo Anderson (2005) in edited volumes, and a series of first-rate contributions by Scot Brown, all focusing on a rival group and culminating with Fighting For US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (2003).¹

But the past fifteen months have witnessed the publication of six significant new books, ranging from an important memoir by the BPP's longtime head of security to a valuable study of how the media and pop culture contributed overwhelmingly to the Panthers' notoriety and fame. Paul Bass and Douglas Rae's exceptionally thorough examination of the Panthers' infamous 1969 Connecticut murder of their young colleague Alex Rackley, falsely accused of being a government informant, is more "true-crime" than academic history, but the other new titles run the university-press gamut from brief and sometimes incisive (Paul Alkebulan) to rich and discursive (Curtis Austin) to an edited volume whose chapters vary greatly in quality (Lazerow and Williams).

Panther scholarship would benefit immensely from a detailed and comprehensive narrative history that gives special care to how rapidly the BPP evolved through a succession of extremely fundamental changes. The BPP of September 1968 was dramatically different from the BPP of September 1967, and the Panthers' situation in December 1969 was radically different from what it had been a year earlier or what it would be a year later. Far too much of what has been written about the BPP fails to specify expressly which period of Panther history is being addressed or characterized, and interpretive clarity, and accuracy, will benefit greatly from a far more explicit appreciation and identification of the major turning points in the BPP's eventually tragic evolution. In particular, both Newton's initial confinement for the...