Comrades

"Seeking to move beyond the usual media stereotypes, condemnations from the Right, and romanticization on the Left, this book follows the story of local Black Panther Party chapters in Baltimore, Winston-Salem, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. While the party "as an organization is often reduced to Oakland, and Oakland is often reduced to Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and perhaps Eldridge Cleaver," this book deliberately ignores Oakland (as well as Chicago). It follows Panthers in other communities who resisted police brutality, "participated in broad coalition politics," and "demanded self-determination for oppressed and improverished residents in urban as well as rural areas." Each chapter's authors follow a similar format, first by establishing the history of black activism in the local communities to which they are assigned, and then following the rise and fall of the Panthers in their selected areas. In most cases, the local BPP's legacy was that some members "continued the socially deviant activities that had caused the group's descent," while others "continued the evolution to respectability that the Party had experienced in the 1970s." Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."—Choice, January 2009
"Judson L. Jeffries and his contributors have done the Black Panther Party a great service by highlighting perhaps the most important, yet least studied aspect of the organization—its community survival programs. Comrades is a must read for any serious student of the Black Panther Party."—James N. Uptoneditor, Encyclopedia of American Race Riots
". . . this is an important contribution to an underdeveloped topic in the scholarship on the party. . . . offers original and important research on the subject, broadening the scope of the field in essential ways, while adding to the scope of postwar ubran history.December 2008"—Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, University of Connecticut, Storrs
". . . move[s] beyond the usual media stereotypes, condemnations from the Right, and romanticization on the Left . . . Recommended. January 2009"—Choice
"[T]his collection of essays skillfully situates seven rarely examined chapters of the Black Panther Party (BPP) within the larger scope of African American urban migration, civil rights activism, and the Black Freedom Struggle."—Indiana Magazine of History
"The public at large is indebted to Judson L. Jeffries and his contributors. Comrades is a treasure trove of hidden American history. A comprehensive excavation of the buried truth of the War against the Panthers—the war that America lost with itself. Open your eyes and read this book."—Donald Freed, author of Agony in New Haven
"While most studies of the Black Panthers have concentrated on the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago, with some attention to New York City, Dr. Jeffries and his fellow scholars have provided valuable documentation and interpretation of the Panthers' activities in several other cities—activities little known outside those communities and not that well known even within them. They have also added considerably to our understanding of the unfortunate racist paranoia that, inspired by deliberate FBI misinformation, so infected our law enforcement agencies during the 1960s and afterward. The volume is an important contribution to our understanding of this unique group and its role within the larger Civil Rights Movement of those years."—Gene Marine, author of The Black Panthers