The Black Panther Party

Graphic novel 

     The Black Panthers were very much in the news in my later teen and immediately beyond years.  Unlike Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers, they'd given up on nonviolent action as the way to change the world.  White people who talked about them either loved them or hated them.  There seemed to be no middle ground.  Establishment minded people saw them as thugs.  I saw them as heroic defenders of the oppressed.

     David F. Walker's The Black Panther Party, brilliantly illustrated by Marcus Kwame Anderson, shows that neither side represented the Panthers accurately.  They were much more complex than all that.  They created and ran a lot of service programs for the people they served.  Probably the best known one was free breakfast for children.  On the other hand, there was a lot of violence and drama.  But much of that stemmed from old J. Edgar Hoover's paranoid FBI undertaking actions, not all of which were legal, to discredit and destroy them.

     Walker presents readers with a well researched and nuanced history of the group.  We get to see the events, large and small, and meet the principle players.  Given the dynamic nature of the movement, graphic novel is the perfect format through which to present it.

     This book was difficult for Walker and Anderson to create.  During the time they were working on it they kept hearing of the deaths of unarmed Blacks at the hands of police and vigilantes.  This violence left them with a sense of no progress having been made since the demise of the Panthers.

     "In the end, perhaps the legacy of the Black Panthers isn't about what they may have done right versus what they may have done wrong.  Perhaps it is all about the pathology of a nation so corrupted by inequality and oppression that it gave birth to the Panthers, only to then destroy what it created.  Maybe it is about a system so unbalanced that armed white supremacists could march on a state capital with no repercussions in 2020, but the Panthers were targeted for doing the same thing in 1967."

On a purrrsonal note, today was the sad day of taking down the Christmas tree ornaments after its five week beautification of the living room.  Tobago and I spent lots of precious time snuggling and reading on the sofa near it.  My favorite of the new ornaments were the two dozen racially diverse angels I found in a box at Clean Sweep.  So precious.

Actually this transition is my New Years Day.  It signals the official shift from self restoration to the busyness of getting ready for next semester.  Only, as you'll see in future posts, not all ornaments get put up until next December.  Some stick around to bring joy and help me keep the spirit of Christmas alive in my heart.  (Jules)

I'm going to miss that beautiful tree.  (Tobago)

A great big shout out goes out to the tree that presided so graciously over a memorable holiday season.

Tobago and Jules Hathaway 

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