Rage and Ruin: On the Black Panthers
Two scholars, Waldo Martin Jr., a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, and Joshua Bloom, a doctoral candidate in sociology at UCLA, after more than a decade of work, offer a corrective. They demolish the canard that the Panthers were anti-white. What distinguished Newton and Seale’s approach was their refusal to go along with the narrow cultural nationalism that had appealed to so many African-Americans. They fought tremendous battles, sometimes turning deadly, with those who thought, as the saying went, that political power grew out of the sleeve of a dashiki. Bloom and Martin rightly emphasize the Panthers’ steady embrace of a class-based politics with an internationalist bent. The party was inspired by anti-imperialist struggles in Africa, Latin America and Asia. They began by emphasizing the local but soon went global, ultimately establishing an international section in Algiers.
