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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.

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.

Government agencies like the FBI and CIA and both local and statewide law enforcement agencies would successfully meet the challenge of the Black Panther Party with a military intervention that would destroy its political power, but they were relatively powerless to counteract their successes in the realm of the symbolic in which the Panthers successfully re-scripted a visual language of military might to argue for Black liberation. While most militaries conceive of propaganda as a way of ‘selling’ the violence that they are charged with conducting, the BPP saw propaganda as one of their most primary imperatives. Just as the Panthers used images of the Black body in military poses and formations to challenge ideas of national belonging in the US, the Panthers’ use of a military aesthetic challenges us to think in new ways about the uses to which a militarised body might be put beyond further state sponsored notions of masculinity.

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.

This chapter explores how Afro-Caribbean activists in London adapted the raw material of U.S. soul style to combat racial discrimination and sexism in England. Members of the Black Panther Movement Youth League in Brixton appropriated the language and imagery of U.S. soul to frame their own version of Soul Power that drew upon their Afro-Caribbean musical, culinary, aesthetic, and political traditions and responded to the discrimination and violence they encountered in their daily lives. Focusing on the brutal beating of young Afro-British Black Panther Olive Morris at the hands of the London police, this chapter shows how soul style was read as a sign of black criminality and civil disobedience—especially when worn by gender nonconforming women—by agents of the state.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

This chapter traces how soul style developed in historically black and mainstream institutions in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the student movement takes a radical turn. The chapter demonstrates that the college campus was an important site for examining how soul vocabulary was adopted and adapted by a generation of black women students to contest the status quo. As radical activists such as the Black Panthers and Angela Davis became household names, their style of dress became popular among college students. The chapter offers a close reading of magazines and yearbooks to explore how hairstyles such as the Afro and garments such as black leather jackets and African-printed bell bottoms became popular American fashion trends.

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.

This final chapter culminates in a meditation on the significance of Marvel’s Black Panther adaptation, alongside Thor: Ragnarok regarding wider social and political issues. Both films are concerned with similar themes of ethnic bloodlines, royalty and marginalisation. The Trump era gave rise to media texts which have been characterised as reigniting and normalising a politic of white supremacy alongside an overblown neoliberal, capitalist conservatism. These films are therefore positioned within this context, which is both heavily racialised and somewhat naïve in its striving for a postracial utopia. While Black Panther heavily draws from Afrofuturist aesthetics and themes to project empowered black superheroic female subjectivities, Thor: Ragnarok struggles to reconcile the potentially white-supremacist leanings of its Norse source material with an outlook that rests on racial diversity and inclusion.

In 1969, the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF) was established in New Orleans, nicknamed the Big Easy. The city presented aspiring Black Panthers with a unique set of circumstances by virtue of its storied intraracial history and its civil rights movement activity. The NCCF office was set up with the expressed purpose of accelerating the struggle for black equality. This chapter examines the experiences of the NCCF and the Black Panther Party (BPP) in New Orleans, focusing on the shootout that occurred between the Panthers and the New Orleans Police Department in mid-September 1970. It first describes the Piety and Desire neighborhoods where the BPP members operated, before discussing the birth of the BPP’s New Orleans branch. The chapter then looks at two young African Americans—Malik Rahim and Larry Preston Williams Sr—and the different paths they took. It also considers the NCCF’s community survival programs, including a breakfast program for children, free sickle cell screenings, clean-up projects, anti-drug campaign, and political education classes.

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 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”.

Colette Gaiter’s chapter looks at the work of the American artist Emory Douglas, the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther party, which at the time was subscribing to a political tendency known as ‘intercommunalism’. More expansive than other strands of leftist thought, intercommunalism sought to unite countries of the world in resistance to global capitalism and imperialism. A wave of ‘Black Maoism’ swept through black liberation movements at this time and came to visual life in Emory Douglas’s work on the Black Panther newspaper.

The final chapter documents the wide range of Black-led activist efforts to reform the police at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s. The launching point is the assassination of Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, in a 1969 killing orchestrated by the Chicago Police Department, the Cook County State’s Attorney, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the aftermath of his killing, a wave of community organizations mobilized or expanded their protests about Chicago’s police. This included groups like the Afro-American Patrolman’s League, comprised of Black CPD officers seeking to end police brutality and ensure better police services for Black Chicago. It included U.S. Congressman Ralph Metcalfe using the power of his office to expose police violence and harassment, and the fight for community control of the police led by the Black Panthers. Some activists who advocated for police reform sought more responsive police services to better community safety from escalating gun violence; others, such as those involved in the push for community control, pursued visions of semi-abolition of the police as currently constituted. Binding them together was a common understanding that the CPD was not working for Black Chicago.