 | |
| Series | The George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies |
|---|---|
| Publisher | University of California Press |
Publication date | 2013 |
| Pages | 562 |
| ISBN | 9780520293281 |
Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party is a 2013 book focusing on the history of the Black Panthers. It is written by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin.
Writing in 2013 for the Los Angeles Times, Hector Tobar describes Black Against Empire as an "authoritative if flawed new history" whose "most important contribution... is simply to treat the Black Panthers as the serious political and cultural force they were." As "the most dramatic failing in Black Against Empire", Tobar points to "the authors' lack of critical distance from their subject" which produces images of "Panther leaders who are, for the most part, idealists without noticeable flaws." [1]
Writing for Reviews in American History in 2014, Jama Lazerow applauds Black Against Empire as the first authoritative account of the Black Panthers. At the same time, Lazerow notes that one key problem for Black Against Empire is the weak coverage of the Panthers in serious scholarly discourse to this point: "we now have local studies of nearly two dozen communities, but most of that work has not come from historians and is often of dubious quality. The absence of reliable work may explain why the authors typically write in depth only about the places that produced the most sensational events: the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and New Haven." [2]
Robert George Seale is an American political activist and author. Seale is widely known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with fellow activist Huey P. Newton. Founded as the "Black Panther Party for Self-Defense", the Party's main practice was monitoring police activities and challenging police brutality in Black communities, first in Oakland, California, and later in cities throughout the United States.
Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was an American writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party.
Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles author, novelist, and journalist, whose work examines the evolving and interdependent relationship between Latin America, Latino immigrants, and the United States. In 2023, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction.
Kathleen Neal Cleaver is an American law professor and activist, known for her involvement with the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party, a political and revolutionary.
African-American leftism refers to left-wing political currents that have developed among various African-American communities in the United States. These currents are active around social issues, and often call for an African-American led movement that aims at bringing about some form of socialism between the African-American community and White community and other minority groups.
Emory Douglas is an American graphic artist. He was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1967 until the Party disbanded in the 1980s. As a revolutionary artist and the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, Douglas created iconography to represent black-American oppression.
Akinyele Umoja is an American educator and author who specializes in African-American studies. As an activist, he is a founding member of the New Afrikan People's Organization and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. In April 2013, New York University Press published Umoja's book We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. Currently, he is a Professor and Department Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University (GSU).
The Black Panther Party was a Marxist–Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The party was active in the United States between 1966 and 1982, with chapters in many major American cities, including San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. They were also active in many prisons and had international chapters in the United Kingdom and Algeria. Upon its inception, the party's core practice was its open carry patrols ("copwatching") designed to challenge the excessive force and misconduct of the Oakland Police Department. From 1969 onward, the party created social programs, including the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, education programs, and community health clinics. The Black Panther Party advocated for class struggle, claiming to represent the proletarian vanguard.
Revolutionary Suicide is an autobiography written by Huey P. Newton with assistance from J. Herman Blake originally published in 1973. Newton was a major figure in the American black liberation movement and in the wider 1960s counterculture. He was a co-founder and leader of what was then known as the Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self-Defence with Bobby Seale. The chief ideologue and strategist of the BPP, Newton taught himself how to read during his last year of high school, which led to his enrollment in Merrit College in Oakland in 1966; the same year he formed the BPP. The Party urged members to challenge the status quo with armed patrols of the impoverished streets of Oakland, and to form coalitions with other oppressed groups. The party spread across America and internationally as well, forming coalitions with the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cubans. This autobiography is an important work that combines political manifesto and political philosophy along with the life story of a young African American revolutionary. The book was not universally well received but has had a lasting influence on the black civil rights movement.
Ericka Huggins is an American activist, writer, and educator. She is a former leading member of the political organization, Black Panther Party (BPP). She was married to fellow BPP member John Huggins in 1968.
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is a book by Iranian-American writer and scholar Reza Aslan. It is a historical account of the life of Jesus that analyzes religious perspectives on Jesus as well as the creation of Christianity. It was a New York Times best seller. Aslan argues that Jesus was a political, rebellious and eschatological Jew whose proclamation of the coming kingdom of God was a call for regime change, for ending Roman hegemony over Judea and the corrupt and oppressive aristocratic priesthood. The book has been optioned by Lionsgate and producer David Heyman with a script co-written by Aslan and Oscar- screenwriter, James Schamus.
Wilson is a 2013 biography of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg. The book is a New York Times Best Seller.
Agate Publishing is an independent small press book publisher based in Evanston, Illinois. The company, incorporated in 2002 with its first book published in 2003, was founded by current president Doug Seibold. At its inception, Agate was synonymous with its Bolden imprint, which published exclusively African-American literature, an interest of Seibold's and a product of his time working as executive editor for the defunct African-American publisher Noble Press.
The United Front Against Fascism (UFAF) was an anti-fascist conference organized by the Black Panther Party and held in Oakland, California, from July 18 to 21, 1969.
Waldo E. Martin is an American historian.
The Black Panther was the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party. It began as a four-page newsletter in Oakland, California, in 1967, and was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. It was the main publication of the Party and was soon sold in several large cities across the United States, as well as having an international readership. The newspaper distributed information about the party's activities, and expressed through articles the ideology of the Black Panther Party, focusing on both international revolutions as inspiration and contemporary racial struggles of African Americans across the United States. It remained in circulation until the dissolution of the Party in 1980.
Judy Juanita is an American poet, novelist and playwright. She is a Lecturer in the College Writing Programs at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly a writing teacher at Laney College. In 1968, while attending San Francisco State, Juanita served as editor-in-chief of The Black Panther, the newspaper of the Black Panther Party. In her semi-autobiographical novel, Virgin Soul,, a black teen starts community college in Oakland, struggles to matriculate and then joins the Black Panther Party (BPP). The story of the female foot soldier in the black power movement, Virgin Soul exposes the unheralded women working behind-the-scenes in the BPP and the black student movement..
Harambee was an African American newspaper published in the 1960s by the Los Angeles Black Congress, an umbrella organization for diverse groups which included the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Freedom Draft Movement, the Afro-American Association, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Ron Karenga's US Organization, John Floyd's Black Panther Political Party, and others. It was instrumental in publicizing the Black Panther idea and symbol in Los Angeles. It was originally created in August 1966 by Ron Karenga, for the organization US. Karenga then donated the publication to the Black Congress. Its first issue commemorated the anniversary of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Activist Elaine Brown was a reporter for the newspaper. Editors included Ron Karenga and John Floyd. The name Harambee is Swahili for "Let's Pull Together."
Raymond "Masai" Hewitt was an American civil rights activist and one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party.