A group of Seattle Black Panthers, led by Elmer Dixon, stand on the steps… (University of California…)
Black Against EmpireThe History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr.University of California Press: 560 pp., $34.95
The defenders of the 2nd Amendment once had a powerful ally in America: the Black Panthers. The self-styled revolutionaries believed there's something powerful and liberating about holding a firearm in your hands.
In "Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party," we learn that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale felt lots of gun love as they drove up and down the streets of Oakland in 1966. Back then, it was legal for California residents to carry firearms in public — as long as said weapons were held in full view.
So Newton and Seale patrolled ghetto streets armed with rifles, shotguns and copies of California's liberal gun laws. To fight police brutality, they policed the cops. Time and again, their standoffs with officers ended with Newton and Seale giving lectures on the law.
"What's the matter with you?" Newton told one officer. "You're supposed to be people enforcing the law, and here you are, ready to violate my constitutional rights.... You can't have my gun. The only way you're gonna get it from me is to try and take it."
For a few surreal months, the newly formed Black Panther Party challenged the police again and again without a single shot being fired. These episodes make for some of the most compelling reading in "Black Against Empire," the authoritative if flawed new history of the Panthers by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., drawing heavily on the Panthers' extensive archives.
Of course, "the man" quickly grew "hip," as they might have said back then, to the Panthers' tactics. California state legislators soon proposed a bill, the Mulford Act, that made it illegal to carry firearms in public. When the Panthers entered the state Capitol for a news conference carrying shotguns, it only greased the legislative wheels: Gov. Ronald Reagan quickly signed the bill into law.
The Black Panthers were born of a world turned upside down. America was at war in Vietnam — but American cities burned too, and American soldiers were deployed to keep the peace at home. Bloom and Martin illustrate, convincingly, how the Black Panthers rose from this social and political maelstrom.
In 1967, the mostly Southern-led civil rights movement of Martin Luther King Jr. had just achieved its greatest legislative victories. But cities like Oakland, Los Angeles and Detroit seethed with injustice, much of it inflicted by white-dominated police departments on minority communities.
Between 1968 and 1970 the Black Panthers tapped into African American anger more effectively than any other group, Bloom and Martin argue. Many of its leaders were certified street brawlers, born in the South but raised in Northern and Western cities. As hardened, supremely articulate and self-appointed revolutionaries, they crafted a unique brand of Afrocentric, hyper-masculine resistance to the status quo.
One iconic image captured this spirit more than any other: It shows a bereted Newton as "minister of defense," seated on a wicker chair while holding a rifle and a spear. (The photograph was taken, we learn in "Black Against Empire," by a sympathetic white photographer.) The Panthers were savvy marketers, and they placed a large poster featuring the picture in each of their offices.
The image announced "to the world that the vanguard of Black Power had arrived," with Newton as the "leader and defender of the black colony in the white motherland America," write Bloom and Martin, a sociologist and historian, respectively, both based at UCLA.
A largely academic book, "Black Against Empire" spends many pages documenting the group's city-by-city spread across the U.S. As a piece of writing, it's most lively when Bloom and Martin give us fleeting depictions of the bravado and the theatricality with which the Panthers won over legions of followers.
Consider, for example, the 1968 speec