v. 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 speech "minister of information" Eldridge Cleaver delivered in a Bay Area park to accept the Peace and Freedom Party's nomination for president.
"I would love to sit around ... drinking wine, smoking pot and making love to my wife, but I can't afford to be doing that while all these pigs are loose," Cleaver says. "Here I am, a convict. A whole lot of respectable people nominated me for president. I'm not going to get elected.... I'm a symbol of dissent, or rejection."
There have been at least a half dozen books and films by former Panthers, or about them, over the last decade. "Black Against Empire," however, is unique among them in the scope and depth of its scholarship.