We can think of no radical organization of the twentieth century that exploded onto the American scene with more flair and chutzpah than the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). Although the organization’s founding coincided with the mid-sixties color television revolution, it was not until February 1967, when Panthers marched into the San Francisco airport in dramatic fashion and escorted Betty Shabazz to theRampartsoffice—for an interview with Eldridge Cleaver—that the Bay Area mass media caught wind of them. Several weeks later, the BPP garnered national media attention when a delegation of Panthers descended upon Sacramento, the...

More than three decades after the 1982 demise of the Black Panther Party, it remains a symbol of the turbulent sixties, a watershed decade of the nation’s journey toward racial equality and social justice. The party’s imagery and praxis still resonate in contemporary popular culture as in academia, as indicated by an explosion of literature on the Panthers in recent years. To date no other Black Power organization or white leftist group of the sixties has received such extensive academic inquiry. By and large, the historiography of the Black Panther Party is skewed toward the Oakland-based headquarters and party affiliates...

The Black Panthers in Washington, D.C., had little chance for success. Entrenched hostile groups within the city’s black community, combined with local and federal law enforcement, made the establishment of a chapter difficult. Nevertheless, from a hotbed of black militancy and radicalism emerged an important message of empowerment and unity focused on community. The D.C. Panthers sprouted in the District during a period in which many wealthy D.C. blacks moved to the suburbs, and it became a transitional organization to run programs needed but not provided by the government. It inspired city government projects like neighborhood spending programs and neighborhood...

Eighteenth-century revolutionary activity in America began in Massachusetts, and at the center of it all was Boston. Though not known for its revolutionary activism after the Revolutionary War, Boston has been a site of major political activity from the founding of the United States to today. Boston is a major metropolitan hub, not quite akin to New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago but important for New England and historically for the United States. The history of African Americans in Boston is as enthralling as that for any major city. The segregation experienced by Boston’s black community in the twentieth...

When people, scholars included, think of the Black Panther Party, few, if any, associate the group with the Lone Star State. Until Charles E. Jones’s 2010 work on the People’s Party II in Houston, virtually nothing of a scholarly nature existed on the Black Panthers in Texas. Indeed the footnote that is the Black Panther Party in Texas is a microcosm of the way the black liberation struggle in Texas appears in the literature generally. Historian Stefanie Decker posits one reason, albeit a debatable one, for the noticeable gap in research on the civil rights movement in Dallas: that city...

In 2017, fifty-one years after its founding, the Black Panther Party remains one of the most studied groups of the civil rights movement and Black Power eras. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles have been written about it, and increasingly films are being made in an attempt to capture the true essence of the organization and its contributions to the fight for human rights in general and to the black freedom struggle specifically. Courses on the BPP flourish on college campuses, and grade school students expand their academic horizons by researching and conducting oral histories with former members of...