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The Black Power movement of the 1960s developed out of anger about the way African Americans were treated in the United States. It emphasized black culture, history, pride, community, and rage. Spokesmen argued that black men were more damaged by racism than black women, that men should be the leaders, head of the household, and dominant. Black women were empowered and thrilled by the Black Power movement, including the Black Panther Party, but many had critiques of its male chauvinism, common to many nationalist movements. Female radical African American activists and Black Arts movement members sometimes did not find the intraracial cross-gender solidarity that they sought and were often disappointed.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Black Panther Party (BPP) used popular music as a means to represent its ideology and politics to potential supporters during the peak of its activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Following an initial discussion of the ways in which the traditions of the U.S. left and popular music impacted upon the BPP, it explores the idea of black nationalism as understood and represented by the Panthers, its relationship to the traditions of Marxism, and the ways in which this relationship informed the cultural practice of the BPP. Finally, there is an examination of the ‘three moments’ alluded to in the title, a series of musical performances and recordings sponsored by the party.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) from its formation in 1990 to the present time, exploring its roots, ideology, and political activities, as well as the role of key figures. It also addresses the NBPP’s difficult and complicated relationship with the Nation of Islam; its conspiratorial, racist, and anti-Semitic beliefs—including those related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The chapter examines NBPP’s involvement in such contentious political issues as the murder of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas, in 1998 and the more recent “Jena 6” controversy in Louisiana, where six black high school students were charged with the beating of a fellow white student. The connections and tensions between the NBPP and more mainstream civil rights organizations are explored as well.

Over its sixteen-year (1966–1982) history, the Black Panther Party (BPP) established official links with local black communities throughout the United States. From its epicenter in Oakland, California, the party flourished into an international phenomenon with official units in twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia. In addition, the BPP opened an international chapter in Algiers, Algeria, initially under the leadership of Eldridge Cleaver. BPP chapters were set up by African Americans in many large urban centers and in sparsely black-populated cities such as Des Moines and Seattle. One of the BPP outposts was located in Houston, Texas. This chapter examines the origins, nature of membership, leadership, activities, and government response to the three BPP iterations in Houston between 1968 and 1974, and looks at People’s Party II, founded by Carl Hampton during the spring of 1970 and modeled on the BPP. It also discusses the broad geographical appeal of the Black Power concept, Houston’s sociopolitical landscape, and black protest antecedents to Panther activism in the city. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Panther legacy in Houston.

Left-wing activism has long been a problem for the city of Detroit, yet contentious politics never quite succeeded in bringing about full racial equality. The modern civil rights movement would soon give way to the Black Power movement that would turn Detroit into a hotbed of black militancy. It was against this backdrop that the Black Panther Party (BPP) was born. This chapter, which focuses on the history of the Detroit branch of the BPP and the circumstances surrounding its establishment, looks at confrontations between police and blacks in Detroit, the violence that ensued, and the impact of that violence on overall race relations in the city. It also examines the conditions and activism of African Americans in Detroit, and the BPP’s support for black student unions around the country.

Chapter 2 turns to the political identity of the “Black Revolutionary Woman,” created by women in the Black Panther Party. The most widely recognized organization of the Black Power movement; the Panthers’ influence was pervasive, and shaped public perceptions of Black Power and empowerment both nationally and internationally. This chapter shows how Panther women used political artwork, speeches, and articles published in The Black Panther newspaper to create an evolving understanding of the female revolutionary and challenge male-centered interpretations of organizational ideology and black liberation. It also documents how Panther women’s intellectual production caused the Party to develop a more inclusive understanding of the black revolutionary activist.

This chapter focuses on the administration of the Black Panther Party’s locally controlled, alternative health clinics, describing how the clinics were staffed, supplied, and operated. In April 1970, Black Panther leader Bobby Seale issued an organization-wide directive that all Panther branches establish local, free healthcare facilities called the People’s Free Medical Clinics (PFMC). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the Black Panther branches converted Seale’s 1970s mandate into local institutions and how the PFMCs demonstrated the Black Panther’s social health perspective, including an outline of the struggles Panther members confronted in creating the clinics.

This chapter describes the Black Panther Party’s health clinics that became bases of operation for the sickle cell anemia campaign. It details the Black Panther’s efforts to highlight the problem of sickle cell anemia, which is an incurable and fatal genetic disease that depletes the red blood cell’s ability to circulate oxygen through the body. The sickle cell anemia campaign, launched in 1971, was both a practical and ideological response to the deliberate and malicious neglect of African American citizens by the healthcare state. The Black Panther established their own genetic screening programs, initiated health education outreach, and disseminated information about the disease to black communities through the newspaper Black Panther and other media outlets.

This chapter focuses on the formation of Black Panther intercommunalism as an anti-imperialist, trans-community politics that united the U.S. Black Panther Party, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and a group of Arab Jews in Israel who called themselves the Israeli Black Panthers. It considers how anticolonialism emerged as a post-1967 response to the ascendancy of the Israeli colonial state as an occupying army. The chapter looks at the ways in which the PLO and the U.S. Black Panthers drew comparisons between racial capitalism in the United States and in Israel, as well as between U.S. imperialism globally, in which Israeli politics in the West Bank and Gaza were implicated. It demonstrates how the Panthers’ political imaginary reverberated within Israel, where some Mizrahi Jews began to see themselves as members of a different sort of political imaginary, one that was shaped by the Afro-Arab politics of the Panthers.

This chapter looks further at black bonding to confront racism and discrimination. By the 1950s black urban experience became entwined with black experience of confinement. It seemed that the ghetto and the prison were places of black incarceration. Activists and nationalists portrayed racism as prison where black people were kept in ghettos in conditions of underemployment, violence, and other punitive situations. It was Malcolm X who was most vocal about this idea, espousing to his followers that his imprisonment would not come as a surprise, America already being a prison itself. Many radical organizations followed his ideas closely, of which the Black Panther Party was one. In the 1960s the prison became the metaphor for race and racial management. Reformists, social scientists, academics such as conservative Edward Banfield or liberal Kenneth Clark took on the issue. The “Berkeley Barb,” an underground newspaper and “The Outlaw,” a publication insert, spread prisoner issues, reported on strikes, and unified the revolutionary movements in the different prisons. The prison was no longer a far distant institution but occupied a place in the people's consciousness.

This chapter examines contrasting depictions of the Black Power movement in Hollywood film and television that either confirmed or resisted what Herman Gray refers to as the “civil rights subject.” The first half of the chapter explains how nineties-era movies Malcolm X and Panther presented affirmative images of radical black protest but anchored these images to traumatic counter-memories of black victimhood. The second half of this chapter critically reviews a variety of negative portrayals of the Black Panthers in media products between 1994 and 2013 including the movies Forrest Gump, Barbershop 2, and The Butler, the miniseries ‘The 60s, and an episode of the television program Law & Order to argue that Hollywood has routinely depicted black rage, not structural racism or white violence as the central problem requiring tough-on-crime solutions. The chapter interprets these portrayals in the context of the political backlash against civil rights gains and racial inequities within the criminal justice system.

The Black Panther Party (BPP) operated a chapter in Seattle that existed for ten years, and which emerged from unique circumstances that distinguish the city’s race relations from those in the rest of the nation. This chapter, which examines the experiences of its Seattle chapter, first describes the Central Area in 1968 before discussing the emergence of the civil rights movement in the city, which began with the campaign for open housing. It then looks at segregation in Seattle, the rise of Black Power, and the formation of the BPP’s Seattle chapter. The chapter also considers the BPP’s social programs in impoverished neighborhoods in Seattle, including free breakfast programs, food and clothing banks, and other “community survival programs,” as well as the party’s decision to enter into a variety of coalitions with groups of all races. It concludes with an analysis of the Seattle BPP’s golden years and the party’s reputation for violence.

This chapter explores how and why the survival or “serve the people” programs came to play a central role in the Black Panther Party organization, focusing on factors that caused the evolution of the Black Panther’s health politics. The ideas of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Mao Zedong, and Frantz Fanon provided a conceptual bridge between the Panther’s political philosophy, its community service ethos, and its health politics. The theorists’ influence is reflected in how the Party afforded an integral role to medicine in its imagination of a “robust” social body. Between January 1968 and December 1969, the Black Panther became subject to repressive police power, resulting to at least 28 murdered members.

The July 1966 Good Park rebellions that erupted in Des Moines, Iowa, showcased the city’s Black Power politics and civil rights activism. The incident was triggered by two policemen’s rough handling of two young African Americans during the Independence Day festivities. The violent clash was a prelude to the emergence of more radical politics in Des Moines, channeled by the Des Moines chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) into new programs two years later. This chapter examines the emergence of the BPP in Des Moines and its impact on local politics as well as the city’s African American community in the years 1948–1973. It looks at the establishment of the Des Moines Human Rights Commission in 1954 and its impact on the civil rights movement, as well as the BPP Des Moines chapter’s political and community programs, including one aimed at improving education for blacks in the city’s public schools.

This chapter focuses on Aoki’s participation in the Black Panther Party (BPP). Having worked in the antiwar and Third World solidarity movements and with BPP cofounders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in the mid-1960s, Aoki was politically ready to join the BPP when it started in Oakland in 1966. The chapter argues that in this period of heightened nationalism, Aoki’s BPP experiences were marked by both racial ambiguity and racial solidarity. While he himself chose solidarity, he could not completely escape the ideological and social organization of race in the United States. Despite the personal sacrifices, joining the BPP was the greatest thing that happened to him politically and personally. He put into practice the BPP’s renowned slogan, “All Power to the People”.

This chapter recounts the history of the revolutionary black nationalist and socialist organization, the Black Panther Party (BPP). The organization took shape at a time when young Americans were routinely being sent to fight and die in Vietnam, and skyrocketing urban poverty rates prevented many African Americans from securing the basic necessities of modern life. From its early years of organizing, the party's emphasis on community programs was a central piece of its broader approach to social change and served as the primary focus for many of the local BPP chapters in cities across the United States. The remainder of the chapter narrates how Community Services Unlimited (CSU) was formed as the nonprofit arm of the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party.

This chapter considers how the leaders of the BPP, the international section and Revolutionary People's Communications Network (RPCN), and the Black Liberation Army (BLA) were unable to formulate an effective response to the changed international and domestic landscape that they confronted in the age of détente and late-Cold War stagnation. As Aaron Dixon lamented, most of the party's rank and file who returned to their communities battered and bruised from their confrontations with police repression and party infighting found that “there would be no cheering crowds, no open arms, no therapy, no counselling.” Their efforts however, left a rich and contested legacy that remains relevant in the twenty-first century at a time when white supremacy, colonialism, and the ongoing effects of neoliberalism and deindustrialization continue to haunt the world.

This chapter addresses the controversies surrounding the issues of unemployment, and relations between police and the community formed the local context for the emergence of the black power movement. The proposal for a Police Affairs Committee immediately turned into a test of authority between the city council and the Oakland Economic Development Council (OEDC). The appearance of the Black Panther Party announced a radical turn in the trajectory of black protest. The campaign for the Model Cities program was the most unified example of political mobilization of the Oakland black community to date, and its ending marked a turning point for the movement. In its aftermath, local organizing for black power took three main paths: bureaucratic alliance, bureaucratic opposition, and independent party organization—the Black Panther Party. By 1972, the Black Panther Party had recovered sufficiently from government harassment and its own factional divisions, and had concentrated its resources in Oakland.

This chapter discusses how the Black Panther Party's (BPP) anticolonial vernacular sought to elide the differences between the black condition in the United States and anticolonial struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet questions about how to translate these theoretical links into practical action remained unresolved. Issues of anticolonial violence and gender identity embedded within this anticolonial vernacular also produced lingering tensions within the party. Though women often appeared in Panther iconography of the period, including striking pictures of figures such as Kathleen Cleaver as well as more abstract depictions of women warriors modeled on revolutionary art of the Third World, they generally did so in the context of a heteronormative and patriarchal framework for understanding female agency.