The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History

by David F. Walker

Other authorsMarcus Kwame Anderson (Illustrator)
Paperback, 2021

Call number

GRAPH N WAL

Collection

Genres

Publication

Ten Speed Press (2021), 192 pages

Description

"Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was a radical political organization that stood in defiant contrast to the mainstream civil rights movement. This gripping illustrated history explores the impact and significance of the Panthers, from their social, educational, and healthcare programs that were designed to uplift the Black community to their battle against police brutality through citizen patrols and frequent clashes with the FBI, which targeted the Party from its outset. Using dramatic comic book-style retellings and illustrated profiles of key figures, The Black Panther Party captures the major events, people, and actions of the Party, as well as their cultural and political influence and enduring legacy."--book jacket.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member villemezbrown
A fairly engrossing history about a very complicated group of people. It's a graphic novel that relies heavily on giant blocks of text, but still reads fairly quickly due to the subject matter.

My passing impression of the Black Panther Party reduces them to violent militants, so I was surprised to
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find that their initial 1966 Ten-Point Program of wants and beliefs is actually a very reasonable starting point for discussion of Black Americans' issues and civil rights. Most of them are rightly still debated today. Indeed, it's amazing how little progress has been made on some of them, such as police brutality, and how that leads directly to the protests we saw last year.

There is strong irony in how quickly California passed gun control legislation when Black Panthers showed up at the state capital with guns and how little action we have taken in the last year despite armed White militants parading and protesting.

This introduction to the Black Panther Party was very enlightening and leaves me wanting to pursue more information about the topic.
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LibraryThing member ericlee
In the afterword to this book, author David F. Walker provides a rather nuanced view of the Black Panthers, and correctly sums it all up by saying that the conditions that gave birth to the Panthers remain in force today in America. This is a gorgeously illustrated book that tries to tell the story
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of this uniquely Black American political movement without falling into the trap of demonising or mythologising the Panthers. To a degree, it succeeds — but only to a degree. One of the most moving parts of the book is a scene that runs for several pages, which depicts an imagined encounter between Panther founder Huey P. Newton and a white police officer. The officer has stopped the car in which Newton is sitting with three other Panthers. The Panthers are armed. Newton speaks for them, asserting their right to state only their names and also their right to bear arms. It is a very tense scene, and it ends with the police backing down. In the wake of all that has happened since, the seemingly unending killing of unarmed and innocent Black men and women by white police officers in the half century since that happened, one cannot help but feel sympathy for Newton. But having said that, one also cannot avoid noticing not only the Panthers’ glorification of violence but also their sympathy for some of the most murderous regimes of the twentieth century. The book includes an illustration of the Black Panther newspaper with an article by North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung. The Panthers’ combination of violent criminality with Stalinist politics proved to be toxic. In the end they were destroyed by the FBI and police, as the book points out on several occasions. But the Panthers would almost certainly have destroyed themselves in the end.
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LibraryThing member fionaanne
Amazing illustrations, clear concise history. I would have liked proper references, especially for government documents, rather than just a bibliography but that seems to be the standard form for graphic novels.
LibraryThing member DarthDeverell
David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson’s The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History recounts the history of the Black Panthers in the context of the larger twentieth-century Civil Rights movement. The book begins with the long view of Black History in America, tracing the racial
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inequalities of the United States back to its original sin of slavery and pointing out how efforts to correct that sin, such as the Civil Rights Amendments during Reconstruction, fell short in practice leading to new systems of racial oppression and fledgling efforts to resist that oppression. Walker and Anderson engage with the complex history of the Panthers, from their initial foundation amid various other groups also called the Black Panthers through their early efforts to resist police brutality and their shift toward more community support programs. They also touch on internecine conflict within the organization, some of which occurred at the instigation of the FBI and their COINTELPRO operations. The result is a fully realized picture of the Panthers’ history.

Walker writes in his afterword, “It is worth nothing that, more than 50 years after Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party and drafted the Ten-Point Program as their guiding manifesto, every single concern they addressed is still relevant. Every single inequality, injustice, and form of oppression impacting the Black community in 1966 is still going strong, well into the 21st century. What the Panthers wanted in 1966, we still want now. What they believed, we still know to be true” (pg. 173). Amid the racial reckoning of 2020 and the inevitable conservative pushback against progressive goals, Walker and Anderson’s The Black Panther Party is a great foundational text for those who want to know more about the organization’s history and the people that shaped its role in society during the revolutionary era of the 1960s and 1970s. As we find ourselves facing another era of great social change, Walker and Anderson’s book is critically vital to learn from the past in order to improve the future. Finally, Walker and Anderson’s careful research makes this a useful text for history teachers to help their students engage with the history of the Black Panthers and their place in the larger Civil Rights Movement.
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ISBN

1984857703 / 9781984857705
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