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  • The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland by Robyn C. Spencer
  • Carmen Walker
The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland Robyn C. Spencer Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016; 276 pages. $26.95 (paper), $14.55 (ebook), ISBN 978-0-822-36286-9.

Robyn Spencer's The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland provides a thought provoking account of Oakland, California's Black Panther Party. The book collectively addresses multiple significant factors shaping the Black Panther Party in Oakland—local politics, gender, and the dynamics of organizational transformation in the face of government repression. The Black Panther Party emerged in 1966 to become the vanguard of a global Black Power movement. With over forty branches established around the United States, it stretched internationally to communities in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the organization would also become the target of unprecedented government attacks aimed at discrediting, disrupting, and dismantling its activities.

Much has been publicized about the federal government's surveillance and counterintelligence tactics targeting the Black Panther Party. In fact, the federal government's surveillance efforts have overwhelmingly shaped the popular narrative of the Black Panther Party. Better known as COINTELPRO, this secret program formally emerged in 1956 and was implemented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under its former director, J. Edgar Hoover. According to Betty Medsger, it was the 1971 media burglary of an FBI office that would not only expose the program's existence, but also the origins of COINTELPRO, which rested on Hoover's attempt to circumvent the law in response to constitutional victories formally constraining federal and state power while also expanding free speech rights.1 Hoover turned [End Page 207] the FBI toward all individuals and organizations challenging white, male, heteronormative political systems and structures in the United States.2 The significance of the break-in and its exposure of FBI activities cannot be underestimated and must be linked to the ability of the Black Panther Party to later use the federal courts and laws to further publicize the ways in which multiple federal agencies targeted them. As Spencer writes: "They used the Freedom of Information Act to make public thousands of pages of FBI and CIA documents detailing government repressive tactics used against them. In 1976 they launched Black Panther Party v. Levi et al., a federal civil rights action against officials in the Justice Department, the CIA, the FBI, the Departments of Army, Treasury, and Justice, the IRS, the U.S. Postal Service, and other agencies for conspiring to destroy their organization finally and politically."3 The Panthers' exposure of these activities laid bare the destructive ways used by rogue government agencies to protect a flawed political system and repress social justice movements in local communities.

According to Spencer, the Panthers asserted that COINTELPRO and other government surveillance actions in 1968 and 1969 alone led to 739 Panther arrests with at least $4,890,580 spent to cover bail.4 The Revolution Has Come sheds important light on the sacrifices and organizational cost of government repression in the form of ever-consuming legal expenses along with fewer and fewer financial and human resources to adequately manage and build the innovative community health, education, food, and other survival programs that Oakland desperately needed. It is also worth considering how these attacks fueled existing limited and fallacious ideas about power that would result in the feminization and trivialization of the Party's authentic source of revolutionary power—its community work.5 Although the Party was unable to sustain their initiatives, Spencer's research clearly shows that members found ways to rethink their approaches to continuing their community work even in the face of government repression. Revolutionary actions would later take the form of unsexy grant writing, the formation of nonprofit organizations, civic education, and much needed local coalition building with unlikely partners.

The Revolution Has Come accounts the consequences of delayed dreams and disillusionment for many African American migrants who settled in urban cities like Oakland only to discover that the "security...

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