OAH Magazine of History
Volume 22, No 3
July 2008

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

Special Online Feature

The Black Panther Party: A Short Historiography for Teachers

Yohuru Williams

As we are still in many ways coming to grips with the legacy of the Black Power Movement, the historiography of the Black Panther Party (BPP) is still in its infancy. While the overall pool of sources remains relatively small and uneven, there are still some good places to start.

The earliest chroniclers of the party were the Panthers themselves. While Panther memoirs pose a unique problem in negotiating the contested terrain between memory and history, there are nevertheless a few that are essential for comprehending the BPP’s growth and development over time. Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time (1970), Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power (1992) and David Hilliard’s This Side of Glory (1992) all provide general information and background on the BPP. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses but also offers unique perspectives on different periods and aspects of the party. Seale, for instance, documents the origins of the party and its early struggles as an organization up through 1969. Brown’s book is similarly vital in its discussion of the important contributions and unique challenges faced by women in the party. A slew of Panther biographies in recent years, including Flores Forbes, Will You Die with Me (2006), continue the Panther tradition of documenting its own history. While these biographies offer a multiplicity of voices on the history and influence of the party, they still rely primarily on individual memory as the chief conduit for recording that history. In 2002, David Hilliard and Donald Weise republished Huey Newton’s 1973 book To Die for the People with a few previously unpublished works by Newton in The Huey P. Newton Reader. Although these are good places to begin examining the group’s legacy from the perspective of some of its leading members, scholars have offered more critically balanced accounts.

With the exception of a handful of dissertations in the early 1970s, journalists wrote the earliest “histories” of the party including Gene Marine’s 1969 book, The Black Panthers; Murray Kempton’s account of the trial of 21 New York BPP members implicated in a plot to bomb various locations in that city, The Briar Patch (1973); Donald Freed’s, Agony in New Haven: The Trial of Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins and the Black Panther Party (1973); and Gail Sheehy’s Panthermania (1971), to name a few. Like the Panther memoirs, these vary widely in usefulness since few placed the party in a larger historical context. With a major emphasis on the national leadership, these works tended to view the Panthers as the radical fringe of the non-violent civil rights movement often in dramatic prose. The back cover of Gene Marine’s book for example, famously characterized the Party as “Uniformed, Armed Men in America!: Black Men Who Talk Back — and Shoot Back!” Published before the verdict in the complicated 1970 murder trial exonerating Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins in New Haven, Connecticut, Sheehy nevertheless dismissed the Panthers as undeserving of national attention. “I would only hope that this year we all have more courage to consult the facts and to resist the emotional catharsis of manufacturing black martyrs,” she wrote. “There is too much real work to be done.” Such accounts would later help to fuel the idea that the BPP was little more than a media creation.[1]

Popular histories of the party are rarer still and include Michael Newton’s 1981 publication Bitter Grain: the Story of Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party which, its lack of citations notwithstanding, chronicles the party’s rise and fall in age-appropriate language, especially helpful for young readers. Despite his overreliance on newspapers, it is still a useful overview. A more recent but less cogent popular history is Jim Kaskins’ Power to the People: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party (1997).[2] For a whodunit in the style of the early journalistic accounts of the Party by a journalist and a professor of urban politics, see Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae’s informative collaboration, Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer. For photographs, see Stephen Shames’ The Black Panthers (2006). Also David Hilliard’s recent publication of The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, 1967-1980 (2007) offers students a firsthand look at some of the party’s important newspaper articles. For the revolutionary artwork produced by BPP, see Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas. [3] Two compelling video sources are The Murder of Fred Hampton (2007) and What We Want, What We Believe: The Black Panther Party Library (2006). [4]

The first wave of scholarship challenging the view of the BPP a dangerous and self-destructive entity came from outside the discipline of history. Political scientists Charles Jones’ and Judson Jeffries edited anthology The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (1998) remains a useful resource on the Party, especially for the editor’s introduction debunking some of the more popular myths about the party and the inclusion of several essays engaging critical issues of gender and violence. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas’ Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party (2001) is an interdisciplinary collection. While several of the essays are quite interesting, overall this work will be of less interest to teachers seeking to build content knowledge on the party. [5]

The first full-scale treatment of the Black Panther Party in a local setting published by a historian came in 2000. [6] Yohuru Williams’ Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven located the history of the party in the larger Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Williams demonstrated how at the local level the BPP could be an important conduit for community development and social change. For a short article examining the local origins of the BPP in New Haven see the special issue of The Black Scholar edited by Peniel Joseph that gave birth to “Black Power Studies. In his award-winning book, American Babylon, historian Robert Self further discussed the BPP within the broad sweep of Oakland's postwar urban development.

There is much to consider in the works by professional historians on the BPP. To disentangle some of the myths and assumptions about the Panthers that float as popular history, begin with In Search of the Black Panther Party (2006). Edited by Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, this collection historicizes the party’s place in history through a multi-faceted engagement with the many groups, organizations, and constituencies that affected, and in turn was affected by the Panthers.

Several short works, including articles and book chapters are available to help build content knowledge quickly. For a general accounting of the party in relation to the much larger issues associated with the Black Power Movement, you should begin with chapter nine, “The Trial of Huey P. Newton,” in Peniel Joseph’s Waiting ’Til The Midnight Hour. Chapter eight of Black Politics/White Power is also useful as an overview, especially if you are interested in relating the Panthers’ origins to events nationally and discussing their impact beyond the special confines of Oakland. Donna Murch’s essay, “The Campus and the Street: Race, Migration, and the Origins of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA,” offers new insights into the Party’s origins in Oakland. Murch masterfully situates the Panthers as part of an important Southern Diaspora from which they not only inherited their ideas on self-defense but also their emphasis on education. [7]

The BPP formed alliances with various organizations throughout its history and was internationalist in its outlook. Two outstanding essays on the Panthers’ relations with the predominately white peace and freedom party and the Students for a Democratic Society, respectively, by Joel Wilson and David Barber appear in the anthology In Search of the Black Panther Party. On the Panthers’ internationalism, see Jennifer B. Smith’s An International History of the Black Panther Party.

For the Panthers relationship with mainstream civil rights organizations, see Yohuru Williams’ essay “A Red Black and Green Liberation Jumpsuit, Roy Wilkins, the FBI and the Conundrum of Black Power” in Peniel Joseph’s anthology The Black Power Movement (2006). Simon Hall offers a more general overview on the relations between the Panthers and the NAACP while Scot Brown illuminates the party’s tumultuous relationship with Maulana Karenga’s US organization. [8]

Yohuru Williams’ “In the Name of the Law: the 1967 Police Shooting of Huey Newton and Law Enforcement’s Permissive Environment,” published in the Black History Bulletin in 1998, is a good primer on the Panthers that looks both at their early programs and encounters with police. Two recent works, Curtis Austin’s Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and the Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (2006) and Christopher B. Strain’s Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (2005) endeavor to deal with violence within the BPP from two different, if complementary, perspectives. Strain attempts to link the Panthers’ emphasis on armed self-defense with defensive traditions growing out of the South. Austin, on the other hand, squarely engages the political and personal violence that plagued the party as an important factor that contributed to the party’s demise. [9]

In a short essay, considering the local history of the Panthers, Jim Campbell observed that the BPP might be best understood not as a national organization, but as a “congress of local movements.” If you are interested in this aspect of the party, be sure to reference several short articles that document this history. In Jeanne Theoharris’ and Komozi Woodard’s anthology Freedom North, historian Jon Rice, for instance, provides an interesting if problematic portrait of the Chicago BPP. A more recent anthology by the same editors, Groundwork includes two intriguing essays: Reynaldo Anderson's "Practical Internationalists: the Story of the Des Moines, Iowa Black Panther Party" and Robyn Ceanne Spencer's "Inside the Panther Revolution: The Black Freedom Movement and the Black Panther Party of Oakland, California” document aspects of the local history of the party. [10] Much more substantive short local Studies on Panther and Panther-inspired groups in New Bedford, Massachusetts; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Omaha, Nebraska; Detroit, Michigan; Birmingham, Alabama; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are found in the forthcoming Duke volume, Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party (forthcoming 2008).[11] For a substantial treatment of the Panthers in a larger urban study, see Winston A. Grady-Willis’ well-documented study, Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960-1977.

Two other books on the BPP, Jane Rhodes’ engaging study Framing the Black Panthers and former Oakland Panther Paul Alkebulan’s Survival Pending Revolution, make important contributions to the growing body of Panther literature. In conjunction with the other studies mentioned in this brief bibliography, they will provide you with the information you need to design an informative unit on the Black Panther Party and the Black Power Movement.[12]

Yohuru Williams is Associate Professor of History at Fairfield University and the Vice President for History Education for the American Institute for History Education. He is the author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven (Boston: Blackwell Press, 2006) and Teaching beyond the Textbook: Six Investigative Strategies, Grades 5-12 (Forthcoming from Corwin Press, 2008).  He is the editor of A Constant Struggle: African-American History from 1865 to the Present Documents and Essays (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt, 2002). He is the co-editor of In Search of the Black Panther, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) and Liberated Territory: toward a Local History of the Black Panther Party, (Forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2008).

[1] Gail Sheehy, Panthermania: The Clash of Black Against Black in One American City (New York: Harper and Row, 1971 Michael E. Staub, “Black Panthers, New Journalism, and the Rewriting of the Sixties, Representations,” No. 57 (Winter, 1997), pp. 52-72.

[2] Michael Newton, Bitter Grain, The Story of Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1980); Jim Kaskins, Power to the People: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party (New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1997).

[3] Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae, Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer (New York: Basic Books, 2006); for photographs see, Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, Black Panthers: 1968 (LA: Greybull Press, 2002) and Stephen Shames, The Black Panthers (NY: Aperture, 2006). For Panther art, see the recent coffee table-style book, Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (New York: Rizzoli, 2007).

[4] The Murder of Fred Hampton. DVD. 2007, FACETS. What We Want, What We Believe: The Black Panther Party Library. DVD. 2006. Oakland: AK Press.

[5] Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, Eds, Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy (New York: Routledge, 2001). Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodward, eds., Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998); Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazerow, Liberated Territory: Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party (forthcoming from Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

[6] A new edition is now available from Blackwell Press.

[7] On the Panthers’ links to the struggles of other racial and ethnic groups see Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar’s compelling essay “Rainbow Radicalism: The Rise of the Radical Ethnic Nationalism; in Peniel Joseph, The Black Power Movement, chap. 8; or his equally engaging article “Brown Power to Brown People: Radical Ethnic Nationalism, the Black Panthers and, Latino Radicalism, 1967-1973” in In Search of the Black Panther Party, 252-280; for the BPP’s connection with Asian Americans see Daryl J. Maeda, “Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity through Performing Blackness, 1969–1972,” American Quarterly 57.4 (2005) 1079-1103. For the Panthers’ influence on Maggie Khun and the Gray Panthers, see my introductory comment, “Black Panther, White Tigers, Brown Berets, Oh My!,” in In Search of the Black Panther Party, 183-190; Donna Murch, “The Campus and the Street: Race, Migration, and the Origins of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, (October-December 2007) 9:4, 333-345.

[8] Yohuru Williams, “A Red Black and Green Liberation Jumpsuit, Roy Wilkins and the Conundrum of Black Power” in Peniel Joseph, The Black Power Movement, 169-191; Simon Hall, “The NAACP, Black Power, and the African American Freedom Struggle, 1966-1969” The Historian 69 (1), 2007, 49–82;

[9] Curtis Austin, Up Against the Wall, Violence and the Making of the Black Panther Party, (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006); Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).

[10] Reynaldo Anderson (communication studies), “Practical Internationalists: The Story of the Des Moines, Iowa, Black Panther Party,” and Robyn Ceanne Spencer, “Inside the Black Panther Revolution: The Black Freedom Movement and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California,” in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (NY: NYU Press, 2005), chap. 13

[11] Black Politics/White Power is still the only local monograph outside the Bay Area to focus on the Panthers. Also, “No Haven: From Civil Rights to Black Power in New Haven, Connecticut,” in The Black Scholar 31:3-4 (Fall/Winter 2001): 54-66; Winston A. Grady-Willis, Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960-1977 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2006). Curtis Austin’s study, though told from a national perspective, contains significant and sustained forays into the local history of a number of communities, Jon Rice, “The World of the Illinois Panthers,” in Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980, (New York: Palgrave, 2003). Two other such essays have been published by scholars outside the history discipline: Judson L. Jeffries (political science), “Black Radicalism and Political Repression in Baltimore: The Case of the Black Panther Party,” Ethnic and Racial Studies (London), 25 (Jan. 2002): 64-98; In addition to a biography on Huey Newton, Huey Newton: The Radical Theorist, Professor Jeffries has also edited two anthologies on the BPP.

[12] Paul Alkebulan, Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007); Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: The New Press, 2007). For new works on the BPP see Judson Jeffries, ed., Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).