The anti-imperialism frame made the alliance logical from both sides. Unlike many other Black nationalist groups, including SNCC after 1966, they avoided anti-White rhetoric and formed alliances with predominantly-White anti-war groups like the Peace and Freedom Party and the SDS, as well as with other insurgent minority groups.
At the same time, beginning in early 1969, the Black Panthers devoted substantial resources to a free breakfast program for children and other services of direct benefit to low income Black urban communities. They advocated armed self-defense: they did not initiate conflicts with police, but would use weapons to defend themselves if the police entered their premises without warrants or hassled them inappropriately on the street. The key argument of the book is that the Black Panthers succeeded briefly (1968-1970) in gaining widespread support for a politics that defined Black people in the US as an internal colony and the Black movement as an anti-imperialist anti-colonial struggle in alliance with other anti-imperialist struggles, particularly the Vietnamese resistance to US neo-colonial aggression.
In my review, after summarizing the main arguments, I want to focus specifically on the role of repression in the Party’s rise and demise. Within these rough chronological sections, however, the narrative moves back and forth in time to trace different threads. The book moves roughly chronologically through movement history, with the first three chapters devoted to events through 1967, three chapters devoted to late 19, seven chapters that focus primarily on the peak year of 1969, and two chapters that trace the unraveling that began in 1970. It stresses the changes in Black Panther ideology and practice over time. Its sources include nearly all the issues of the Black Panther newspaper, hundreds of contemporaneous and radio interviews, and dozens of interviews with participants. Based on more than a decade of work, the book was originally published in 2013 and was republished with a brief new preface in 2016. Martin, Jr., has received wide praise for its depth and scope of research on the politics of the Black Panthers. They are moderated to avoid spam and trolls, but serious engagement with the issues is welcomed.īlack Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panthers, by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E.
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