Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture) Review

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Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture) ReviewThis is an excellent book. It is well researched and well written and full of provocative arguments about the emergence of the Panthers (and Black radicalism generally) in Oakland. Indeed, of the half-dozen or so books I've read about the Panthers over the years, this is the best.
Although Murch sympathizes with the Panthers, she is a scholar first of all and takes care to substantiate her claims and clearly wants to (and does) provide a balanced account. This is an issue in the context of scholarship on the Panthers, in which so many of the works are tendentious (either pro or contra).
While most historians focus on Panther's militancy--obsessed with "black men with guns!"--Murch takes a step back and places them in a much broader frame. She puts the Panthers in the context of the Black immigrant communities that came to the Bay Area in search of defense industry jobs around WWII. By doing so, she accomplishes at least two very important goals. First, she links many Panther innovations to practices found in Black southern communities-- for instance, she relates Panther police patrols to the tradition of armed, community self-defense and, second, she places the Panthers in the context of much broader social and economic changes that occurred in the twentieth century. Few scholars have been able to pull this off when treating the Panthers, a group with an incredibly complicated history and one that still excites partisan passions.
I would only criticize her for failing to link the Panthers' community programs to traditions of anti-state, libertarian socialism. If nothing else, this would have helped her illustrate some of the tensions between the Panthers' simultaneously bottom-up and top-down approach to social change. However, this is a minor shortcoming.
This book was also designed and edited well. I only noticed one type-o throughout the entire text (as an editor, I can assure you that this is no mean feat). The photos and illustrations were instructive and pertinent.Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture) OverviewIn this nuanced and groundbreaking history, Donna Murch argues that the Black Panther Party (BPP) started with a study group. Drawing on oral history and untapped archival sources, she explains how a relatively small city with a recent history of African American settlement produced such compelling and influential forms of Black Power politics.During an era of expansion and political struggle in California's system of public higher education, black southern migrants formed the BPP. In the early 1960s, attending Merritt College and other public universities radicalized Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and many of the young people who joined the Panthers' rank and file. In the face of social crisis and police violence, the most disfranchised sectors of the East Bay's African American community--young, poor, and migrant--challenged the legitimacy of state authorities and of an older generation of black leadership. By excavating this hidden history, Living for the City broadens the scholarship of the Black Power movement by documenting the contributions of black students and youth who created new forms of organization, grassroots mobilization, and political literacy.

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