Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

The burgeoning field of Black Power studies has produced a wealth of innovative and sophisticated treatments of the activists, organizations, and ideas that emerged in the late-1960s offering new and radical visions of racial equality and social justice in the United States.  Much research about Black Power has sought to understand the influence of its driving personalities, to examine specific tactics or ideals of leading organizations, or to elucidate national shifts through studies of social and racial developments in specific locales.  The existing scholarship is rich and multi-faceted, but has only recently begun to unravel and make sense of some of the central paradoxes and contradictions that allowed the militancy and self-determination articulated by proponents of Black Power to capture the imagination of African Americans and other marginalized groups both domestically and internationally—and in doing so, to win the fear and respect of agents of white power all the way up to the FBI.  Continue reading An Anti-Empire State of Mind: Black Against Empire Book Review →