BLACK REVOLUTIONARIES

Comprehensive history of the Black Panther Party.

It is a measure of both the Black Panthers’ renown and the fear its members inspired that Ross Perot, running for president in 1992, “claimed that the Vietnamese sent some Black Panthers to kill him in 1969.” Historian Street, the chief of police in Dallas, where Perot lived, refutes Perot’s story, saying, “There were only about eight people here that belonged to the Black Panther Party. Two of those people worked for us.” Crawling with undercover police informants, its leadership under men such as Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton problematic, the BPP nonetheless made significant contributions to Black communities around the country. One of them was the distribution of free food to needy families, one of a series of social programs that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover “highlighted as the most subversive of its activities.” Hoover’s concern was symptomatic of the fear and loathing that the BPP excited among law enforcement officers in its short lifetime: indeed, by Street’s reckoning those agents killed more than 20 Panthers, and in places as far-flung as Des Moines, Seattle, and New Orleans charges were ginned up for crimes supposedly committed by party members. That the Panthers persisted in the face of so much opposition, distributing free food and offering high-quality health care and early education programs, “renders the social programs even more impressive.” Although Street criticizes the supposed monetization of the BPP experience that came with the publication of several memoirs, to say nothing of the Huey Newton Foundation’s hawking of a “Burn Baby Burn” hot sauce, he also notes the view of most surviving members that their time in the party was invaluably positive, with one even going so far as to liken the militants’ charitable works to those of Jesus.

A welcome contribution to the literature of Black political activism.