Why Now?: Recent Writings on Black Power and the Black Panther Party

Three recent texts offer a dazzling breadth of perspectives on black power and the Black Panther Party (BPP), and that is their most visible common ground. Curtis Austin’s Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party builds a narrative based on oral histories. Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams’s volume In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement offers scholarship from diverse perspectives and disciplines. Cedric Johnson’s Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics charts the path from black-power politics of the 1960s to contemporary “black ethnic politics” (xxv). These texts expand our view of the BPP and other manifestations of black power in the 1960s and 1970s. Though varied in their methodologies, each of these recent writings on black power restores debate, a large cast of participants, and ideological nuance to a particular historical moment. These authors enter a burgeoning conversation about black power among historians, literary scholars, sociologists, and cultural theorists. The years 2005 and 2006 alone saw the publication of books about black arts, black power, black feminist organizations, and the panthers by James Edward Smethurst, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Kimberly Springer, and Peniel E. Joseph. On the wave of current scholarly passion for the radical racial politics of two decades of tumult and possibility, Austin, Lazerow, and Williams unpack and complicate the seductive but narrow image of the BPP as a short-lived, militant group of radicals in Oakland. Up Against the Wall and In Search of the Black Panther Party illuminate in particular the many community works of the BPP, especially its free breakfast programs, work to combat sickle-cell anemia, study groups, and newspaper The Panther. They locate the BPP in context on an historical continuum where social justice and daily wellbeing, rather than primarily separatism or violent revolt, were central goals. This is not an attempt to elide violence perpetrated by and on the panthers, or to erase the problematic gender politics in many black-power groups, but rather a layering of lesser-known narratives on top of more established ones. Up Against the Wall and In Search of the Black Panther Party correct the black archive, locating the panthers as not a radical break in the history of African-American activism in a single location, but as a geographically varied moment in the larger, long tradition of self-determination and cultural nationalism among African Americans.

Revolutionaries to Race Leaders also reexamines the black-power period and argues for cultural nationalism, but Johnson’s book adds a note of urgency to the conversation. Every page of this volume is saturated with the call to make use of early black-power tactics in current political activism. These three new volumes, with their emphasis on the daily work of black-power activists, many of them women, suggest the current usefulness of a particular brand of cultural nationalism and militancy. Gloria Naylor defines cultural nationalism thus: “That means that I am very militant about who and what I am as an African American. I believe that you should celebrate voraciously that which is yours [ . . . ] So that’s what cultural nationalism means to me. To be militant about your being.” Naylor’s daily sense of self and community, rather than an image of African-American militants as misogynist instigators of violence for its own sake, characterizes the cultural nationalist stance of recent writings on black power.

In his preface to Curtis J. Austin’s Up Against the Wall, former panther Elbert “Big Man” Howard asserts that Austin’s book, unlike other writings on the BPP, will be neither a “tell...