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Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
June 30, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
I wanted to pull your readers' coats, as they used to say, to the new book Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr. This book gives the best historical account of the Black Panther Party that I've read. The authors draw from many different memoirs written of the period, but they rely on the historical record—the newspapers and leaflets put out by the Party itself and others. They rigorously reconstruct the events of the time, the development of the Panthers' line and policy in relation to those events, the activity of other forces (friendly, not-so-friendly and antagonistic), the impact that the Panthers in turn had on society and why, how they handled the counterattack by the state, and other important dimensions as well. They also advance some interesting and provocative analyses of all that; I didn't agree with everything they said, but I was provoked to think more deeply on the whole experience of the Black Panther Party and the ongoing significance of that experience to revolution today.
I felt compelled after reading this to go back to Bob Avakian's memoir, From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist. In particular, I went back to Chapters 5 through 11, which get into the same period covered by Bloom and Martin. Through the memoir, I saw things from the point of view of someone who was coming into things still with one foot in college and thinking about a career, but who, in significant part through working closely with the Panthers, becomes a revolutionary and then a communist, and then continues to forge forward on this road as differences develop with the BPP. Each book has been kind of reverberating off the other in my mind, as I've been thinking about the deep lessons of that period. But I was also struck, as I went back into the memoir, with how BA addressed big questions in his own development that I know are facing the newer generation revolutionaries now coming forward: what you're going to do with your life... family... relationships... risk... responsibility... sacrifice... culture... and other ones besides.
So I would really recommend both these works to anyone grappling with the question of actually making revolution in the U.S., and especially to the youth. I might also recommend taking another look at the DVD Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, in the questions and answers at the end, where BA addresses a question on Huey Newton. I reviewed this too, after reading Black against Empire, and this also sheds very meaningful light on that whole experience and has significant relevance to meeting the challenges posed by the current situation and actually advancing toward revolution.
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