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Yohuru R. Williams. Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Panthers. St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 2000. 190 pp.
Reviewed by Jama Lazerow, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History Wheelock College (Boston, Massachusetts)
While the public remains fascinated by the Black Panther Party (BPP-1966-- 1982), their interest reflected in the popularity of Panther lore and imagery in movies, music, and memoir, professional historians are dismissive at best, downright hostile at worst. The state of the historiography could be glimpsed in a recent New York Times Sunday Book Review (16 January 2000) by Vines editorialist Brent Staples, who described the Panthers as "a former California street gang that informants have told us was routinely involved in murder and the protect racket." Echoing journalist Hugh Pearson's relentlessly hostile account of the Panthers, glowingly reviewed in the pages of the Book Review five years earlier, the reviewer's intent here is to counter by egregious example what he perceives as the too-rosy picture of 1960s radicalism painted in the book under review (Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s). But, Staples seems unaware of these historians' actual treatment of the Panthers in their new book. In some 300 pages of text, the Panthers receive brief mention exactly three times, each time to ridicule their activities: first as romantic Third Worldists, next as secular millennialists, and finally as coked-up gangsters. Tellingly, Isserman and Kazin cite only one source for their commentary-the journalist Hugh Pearson. And no wonder because in a very real sense, there has been no Panther history.
Until now. Finally, thirty years on, the Black Panthers have attracted the attention of a small, but growing, cadre of young historians. Among the first to publish his research is Yohuru Williams. His book is, of course, about much more than the Black Panther Party. Urban historians will be interested in his finely-textured treatment of the rise and demise of this "Model City," especially for the light that story sheds on big city Democratic mayors and the fate of postwar liberalism. Historians of the modern Civil Rights
Movement will find useful his close attention to the internal dynamics of mainstream civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)...