Black Power Afterlives

The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party

Diane Fujino, Matef Harmachis

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642592085
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études afro-américaines

The first book to comprehensively examine how the Black Panther Party has directly shaped the practices and ideas that have animated grassroots activism in the decades since its decline, Black Power Afterlives represents a major scholarly achievement as well as an important resource for today's activists. Through its focus on the enduring impact of the Black Panther Party, this volume expands the historiography of Black Power studies beyond the 1960s-70s and serves as a bridge between studies of the BPP during its organizational existence and studies of present-day Black activism, allowing today's readers and organizers to situate themselves in a long lineage of liberation movements.

Endnotes

Introduction: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party

1.The influence of the BPP and his knowledge of Black radical history are evident in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writings, including his National Book Award-winning Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015) and “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic, June 2014.

2.The approach of this book to examine the impact of activism across generations is underused in studies of social movements. Nonetheless, studies that examine intergenerational continuity show the longer historical arc of social movement activity and impact. Donna Murch’s prehistory of the Black Panther Party shows that people entering the BPP also had an activism history with previous organizations. Glenda Gilmore shows the radical roots of the civil rights movement. Erik McDuffie and Dayo Gore examine early Black left feminism as a forerunner to the development of more widely known Black feminism. Diane Fujino examines the Japanese American progressive activism in the early Cold War as predecessor to the Asian American movement. See Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008); Erik McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Diane C. Fujino, “Cold War Activism and Japanese American Exceptionalism,” Pacific Historical Review 87 (2018): 264–304.

3.We acknowledge that the question of membership is contested. Some sold the newspaper and regularly attended Panther programs but may not have officially joined. The Panthers never kept formal membership rolls. Most estimates in the 1960s and 1970s state between 1,500 and 2,000 members; Bobby Seale estimated 5,000 at its peak in late 1968 and early 1969. See Ollie A. Johnson III, “Explaining the Demise of the Black Panther Party: The Role of Internal Factors,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 391, 410; Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 2; Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, eds., In Search of the Black Panther Party (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 4; United States Senate, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports of the Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book III, known as the Church Committee Report (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976), 214; Philip S. Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1970), xiii–xiv; “Panther Supporters: Many Black Americans Voice Strong Backing for Defiant Militants,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 1970.

4.Michael L. Clemons and Charles E. Jones, “Global Solidarity: The Black Panther Party in the International Arena,” in Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (New York: Routledge, 2001), 20-39; John T. McCartney, “The Influences of the Black Panther Party (USA) on the Vanguard Party of the Bahamas, 1972-87,” in Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party, ed. Cleaver and Katsiaficas, 156-63; Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 110; Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Panther on the Prowl (BCP Digital Printing, 2002), 34-53; Polynesian Panthers post on Emory Douglas’s Facebook page, November 11, 2014, at www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10205690094558033&set=a.1634685913424.2094381.142; Douglas, conversation with Fujino, October 17, 2018. Cuba became a site of political asylum for Black radicals, including former Panthers William Lee Brent, Eldridge Cleaver, and Huey Newton as well as Robert F. Williams, Nehanda Abiodun, and others. See Teishan A. Latner, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 221-51.

5.Jeffrey L. Judson, ed., Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 1; Bloom and Waldo, Black Against Empire, 2; Katsiaficas, introduction, in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, ed. Cleaver and Katsiaficas, vii.

6.Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); David Hilliard, ed., The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008).

7.Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Re-imagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: UC Press, 2018).

8.Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013).

9.Diane C. Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Diane C. Fujino, Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Diane C. Fujino, “The Indivisibility of Freedom: The Nisei Progressives, Deep Solidarities, and Cold War Alternatives,” Journal of Asian American Studies 21 (2018 June): 171-208.

10.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016); Charlene Carruthers, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018); Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017); Bikem Ekberzade, Standing Rock: Greed, Oil and the Lakota’s Struggle for Justice (London: Zed Books, 2018); Sarah van Gelder, ed., This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011).

11.Movement for Black Lives, “Platform,” https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/, accessed October 19, 2018.

12.Movement for Black Lives, “About,” “Platform,” and “Policy Demands,” https:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The enduring significance of the black panther party
• I. The persistence of the panther
• II. Sustainability and spirituality
• III. Sankofa: pan-african internationalism
• IV. Art, revolution, and a social imaginary
• V. The real dragons take flight: on prisons and policing
• VI. Black panther legacies in a time of neoliberalism
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Index
• Back Cover