You, Too, Can Be a Revolutionary: A Black Panther Party Booklist

We’re coming up on the end of Black History Month, and this is usually the time when all the performative allyship starts to wane: people post one last Martin Luther King, Jr. quote or recycle a few facts about Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglas. It’s the perfect time to remind our audience that Black history is American History, and as such, something that should be studied/brought up/shared throughout the year, not just in the shortest month.

So, as we tiptoe into March, let’s keep our momentum going and read up on a prominent revolutionary organization (and one of its more known leaders) born in the mid-60s: The Black Panther Party (BPP). On the heels of the release of Judas and the Black Messiah (starring Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as William O’Neal), the film’s director, Shaka King, shared the books he considered “research” that helped him bring this incredibly important story to life; many of them are listed below for your reading pleasure:

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination by Alondra Nelson 
"Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization's broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party's health activism--its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination--was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms."

The Assassination of Fred Hampton by Jeffrey Haas
"Haas’s personal account of how he and People’s Law Office partner Flint Taylor pursued Hampton’s assassins, ultimately prevailing over unlimited government resources and FBI conspiracy. Not only a story of justice delivered, the book puts Hampton in a new light as a dynamic community leader and an inspiration in the fight against injustice."

Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom & Waldo E. Martin, Jr.
"the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. The authors analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence."
(Of note: The California Department of Corrections has designated this book dangerous contraband. All CA prisoners are prohibited from purchasing or reading this book. Can you imagine?!)

Just Another Nigger by Field Marshall Donald Cox
"Don Cox's revelatory, even incendiary account of his years in the Black Panther Party. His book tells the story of his work as the party's field marshal in charge of gunrunning to planning armed attacks—tales which are told for the first time in this memoir—to his star turn raising money at the Manhattan home of Leonard Bernstein, to his subsequent flight to Algeria to join Eldridge Cleaver in exile, to his decision to leave the party following his disillusionment with Huey P. Newton's leadership. "

Nine Lives of a Black Panther: A Story of Survival by Wayne Pharr
"Wayne Pharr’s riveting story of the Los Angeles branch of the BPP, giving a blow-by-blow account of how it prepared for and survived the massive military-style attack. Because of his dedication to the black liberation struggle, Wayne was hunted, beaten, and almost killed by the LAPD in four separate events. Here he reveals how the branch survived attacks such as these, and also why BPP cofounder Huey P. Newton expelled the entire Southern California chapter and deemed it 'too dangerous to remain a part of the national organization.'”

The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago by Flint Taylor
"The Torture Machine takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-years of litigation that followed—through the dogged pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the Chicago PD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects."