"The Black Panther Party was a nationwide organization that existed in Black communities in the United States from 1966 until 1982. The Panthers played several roles: they were civil rights and human rights activists, militant revolutionaries, and community organizers, and they were also a political party. They taught Black Americans how to fend for themselves in a country that treated them like second-class citizens, where police officers and politicians often failed to protect people but abused their power instead."
It can be argued that many people today have no concept of the Black Panther Party and what they stood for. This quote serves as a way for the author to introduce those readers to the topic. The backstory is there; all that is left are the myriad details that will comprise the rest of the book from this point.
"In a vacuum, it is easy to default to saying, “Violence is never the answer.” But when it comes to Black history, we mustn’t forget that violence is also the question—real and ever-present violence, against people trying to vote. Or go to school. Or ride the bus. Or walk down the street. At every turn, Black Americans’ pleas for equality and justice have been met with cruel, dehumanizing violence."
To a large chunk of America—mostly white America—the Black Panthers are inextricably linked with the fear of violence at the hands of Panther members. At the height of their infamy among a scared white populace, the Black Panthers were capable of inspiring much irrational fear. What this quotation serves to remind those who were there and teach those who weren’t is that any time violence becomes a means of revolutionary action, it is because it was deemed necessary as a defensive strategy long before it was adopted as an offensive necessity.
“The liberation of women is one of the most important issues…If we go around and call ourselves a vanguard organization, then we’ve got to be the vanguard in all our behavior, also [set an example] in the area of women’s liberation.”
This statement came from one of the leading voices in the Black community in the summer of 1969. It was inspired in no small part by the content of a book he had published just one year earlier, titled Soul on Ice. Although instantly considered a classic of Black revolutionary literature, it was also immediately controversial due to the inherent misogyny. The Black Panthers were rising to power in concert with the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and many members wanted to engage the feminist movement as a valid means of distinguishing the Party not just from white America’s institutional sexism, but from their own rivals within the Black Power movement. The depth to which this became a foundational point is expressed through the attempt by Cleaver to undo the damage he had already done.
