Black Revolutionaries - (Since 1970: Histories of Contemporary America) by Joe Street

About the Book

"Black Revolutionaries is an accessible yet rigorously argued history of the Black Panther Party, one of the emblematic organizations of the 1960s. It highlights the complexity of the BPP's history through three key themes: the BPP's intellectual history, its political and social activism, and the persecution its members endured. Together, these themes confirm the BPP's importance for understanding Black America's response to white oppression in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on a wealth of archival material, it reveals the enduring importance of leftist political philosophy to 1960s and 1970s radicalism, and how BPP helps us understand more deeply the role of public space and public protest in the 1960s, the transformation of political activism in the post-civil rights era, the psychological and organizational impact of FBI surveillance, police repression, and prison on its victims, and particularly that the latter both helped to shape and destroy the BPP. Most significant, it demonstrates that an understanding of African American grassroots politics and protest, racial injustice, and police brutality in the post-civil rights era is only comprehensible through engagement with the BPP's history. This is the definitive study of the BPP for students, academics, and the general reader"--

Book Synopsis

Black Revolutionaries is an accessible yet rigorously argued history of the Black Panther Party (BPP), one of the emblematic organizations of the 1960s. Joe Street highlights the complexity of the BPP's history through three key themes: the BPP's intellectual history, its political and social activism, and the persecution its members endured. Together, these themes confirm the BPP's importance in understanding Black America's response to white oppression in the 1960s and 1970s.

Based on a wealth of archival material, Black Revolutionaries reveals the enduring importance of leftist political philosophy to 1960s and 1970s radicalism, and how the BPP helps us to understand more deeply the role of public space and public protest in the 1960s.Street shows how the BPP were key to the transformation of political activism in the post-civil rights era. As the BPP faced the psychological and organizational impacts of FBI surveillance, police repression, and imprisonment, Street examines how these negative forces helped to shape and destroy the BPP.

Most significantly, Black Revolutionaries demonstrates that an understanding of African American grassroots politics and protest, racial injustice, and police brutality in the post-civil rights era is only comprehensible through engagement with the BPP's history.

Review Quotes

Comprehensive history of the Black Panther Party. . . . A welcome contribution to the literature of Black political activism.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

A very good addition to the corpus of scholarship on the Black Panther Party. In particular, Joe Street unveils innovative and insightful examinations of the role of the carceral state in the development and decline of the BPP.--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar "author of America's Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy"

About the Author

Joe Street is associate professor of American history at Northumbria University. He has been researching, teaching, and writing on the Black Panther Party for over a decade, publishing a series of articles in the Journal of American Studies, the Pacific Historical Review, and the European Journal of American Studies. He has also written extensively on the relationship between politics and popular culture in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1960s, including the books Silicon Valley Cinema and Dirty Harry's America.