The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland

by Robyn C. Spencer

In The Revolution Has Come Robyn C. Spencer traces the Black Panther Party's organizational evolution in Oakland, California, where hundreds of young people came to political awareness and journeyed to adulthood as members. Challenging the belief that the Panthers were a projection of the leadership, Spencer draws on interviews with rank-and-file members, FBI files, and archival materials to examine the impact the organization's internal politics and COINTELPRO's political repression had on its evolution and dissolution. She shows how the Panthers' members interpreted, implemented, and influenced party ideology and programs; initiated dialogues about gender politics; highlighted ambiguities in the Panthers' armed stance; and criticized organizational priorities. Spencer also centers gender politics and the experiences of women and their contributions to the Panthers and the Black Power movement as a whole. Providing a panoramic view of the party's organization over its sixteen-year history, The Revolution Has Come shows how the Black Panthers embodied Black Power through the party's international activism, interracial alliances, commitment to address state violence, and desire to foster self-determination in Oakland's black communities.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Politics, Feminism, Gender, African American

280 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2016

About the author

Robyn C. Spencer is a historian whose research centers on social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. She teaches survey and seminar courses on African American Heritage, Civil rights and Black Power and Black women’s history in the US as an Associate Professor of History at Lehman College, City University of New York.

Since she began studying social movements as an undergraduate history major at SUNY Binghamton, Professor Spencer’s inspiration has come from the examples of those who made often incalculable sacrifice to fight injustice, racism, and sexism. Her masters essay entitled “Contested Terrain: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the Struggle to Control Black Labor” explored the impact of the Mississippi Flood of 1927 on almost 300,000 displaced African Americans. This research, which was published in the Journal of Negro History (Vol. 79, No. 2 Spring, 1994), was featured in the documentary “When Weather Changed History,” which aired on the Weather Channel on March 9, 2008 at 9pm EST. Her writings on the Black Panther Party have appeared in The Journal of Women’s History, Souls, Radical Teacher and several collections of essays on the 1960s. Spencer’s article “Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California” was published in the Journal of Women’s History (Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring 2008) and awarded the 2008 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Article Prize by the Association of Black Women Historians. Her book The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, analyzes the organizational evolution of the Black Panther Party in Oakland and was published by Duke University Press in November 2016.

In 2016-17 she received a Mellon fellowship at Yale University to work on her second book project, To Build the World Anew: Black Liberation Politics and the Movement Against the Vietnam War. This project examines how working class African Americans’ anti-imperialist consciousness in the 1950s-1970s shaped their engagement with the movement against the Vietnam War. In many ways, it continues her emphasis on exploring overlapping and intersecting boundaries between social protest movements. She is also working on a short biography of Angela Davis for Westview Press’ Lives of American women series.

Professor Spencer is a committed activist and participates in many community education initiatives aimed at bringing the history of the Black Power movement to community based spaces. Through writing, teaching and public presentations, she aims to educate others about the contributions of urban, working-class African Americans, especially women, to the Black freedom movement. She has presented her work at close to a dozen universities, several correctional institutions in Pennsylvania and k-12 classrooms in the Bronx. She has also participated in seminars aimed at educating high school teachers about the latest interpretive trends in her field and partnered with the New York Public Library to work on public events preserving local history in Astoria, Queens. In 2016 she served as one of the co-editors of the Radical Teacher special Issue on “Teaching Black Lives Matter.”

Reviews

[Miss Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating well-researched read with a lot of important lessons for radical organizing. much of the struggles the bpp underwent brought to mind parallels with the eplf (eritrean people's liberation front) during their own period of fighting for independence and the ways reliance on charismatic leadership similarly weakened their ability to self-criticize and implement real democracy. just goes to show you bpp was right to view themselves as part of an international struggle! i would be very interested in reading more work focused on the rank and file of the bpp, especially their fundraising effort. in their heyday they had some truly remarkable achievements in community organizing that are worth learning from

4 stars

[sorrowmancer · Rating 5 out of 5]

great organizational history focusing on the foundational Oakland BPP, one that fills gaps left by more macro scale political histories like Black Against Empire

[Reese Gaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

great analysis of the life of rank and file members in an org whose history usually only focuses on it's leaders. gave a lot of context to writings of those leaders. good book.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone who tries to do any kind of radical organizing should read this book. The history of the Black Panthers in Oakland is fascinating in and of itself. But the real value in this book is that it is a detailed study of what happens when things go very right and also very wrong in a radical organization. It really gets at the conflict between community organizing and vanguardism. It shows how misogyny and hierarchy can eat organizations up from the inside. The institutions and people power they built were, at times, amazing. How and why those amazing things were lost are really important for all of us to understand.

[JRT · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book traces the creation, development, evolution, and eventual fall of the Black Panther Party, with a specific focus on operations in the founding City of Oakland, California. The author centers this BPP story within the larger framework of the Black Power movement of the 60s / 70s, detailing how the Oakland Panthers contributed to the ideological and political development of Black Power. Spencer asserts that the Panthers saw “Black Power” as a radical organizational vehicle for dismantling capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism. Thus, the Panthers connected their organizational efforts to that of colonized groups around the world, thereby situating their iteration of “Black Power” firmly in the global struggle for full decolonization and self-determination.

The book does a really good job explaining the conditions that gave rise to the Black Panther Party in Oakland. Pervasive housing segregation and insecurity, employment discrimination, capital flight and deindustrialization created the Black “ghettos” of West Oakland, East Oakland, and North Oakland (i.e. the “Flatlands”). As Black people were further concentrated in these parts of Oakland, the police were unleashed on the Black population for the purpose of managing Black movement and ensuring that the effects of entrenched poverty and inequality did not spill into the white parts of the city or threaten white-owned capital. Thus, the police—most of whom were Southern white transplants—brutalized Oakland’s Black communities with extreme prejudice and impunity. In Watts, CA, similar treatment led to the Watts “riots” of 1965. In Oakland, as Spencer explained, such treatment led to the organized, radical resistance of the Black Panther Party.

Spencer also details how the failure of the more traditional Civil Rights organizations (NAACP, CORE, etc.) to galvanize the masses of Black people in Oakland’s Flatlands created an opportunity for the Panthers to fill the void. Traditional organizations sought to replicate strategies employed in the South that successfully challenged de jure segregation. But conditions in inner-city Oakland would not allow for such replication, as the masses of Black folks in Oakland suffered from ills that simply were not addressed by the Civil Rights organizations. Importantly, Spencer states that many of the white liberals in these Civil Rights organizations blamed the Black masses themselves for “political apathy,” revealing their own racist paternalism. The Panthers were able to challenge and change this approach to organizing Black people, realizing that in order to organize the masses, one had to focus on the basic material needs of the people. Thus, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale (along with their precursor Mark Comfort, who was the individual who originally brought the Black Panther name to Oakland with the permission of Stokely Carmichael), created an organization that organized the Black masses in the inner-city around their basic economic needs, and focused on raising the political consciousness of the community toward full liberation and self-determination.

In tracing the early development of the Party, Spencer explains why women were initially attracted to it. The Panthers—despite their masculine rhetoric—eschewed the type of rigid, hierarchal sexism that many other Black Nationalist organizations (and Civil Rights orgs) practiced during that era. Women were also attracted to the self-defense program. This self-defense and “policing the police” program was the main catalyst that drove early membership for both men and women in the Party. But it would later be a catalyst for the breakdown of national membership and a split within the Party. Throughout the book Spencer covers the many growing pains and challenges the Party faced, including being forced to change their tactics due to oppressive legislation, widespread and systematic government repression, lack of organizational discipline among members and leaders, ideological inconsistency, and funding challenges. The book places particular emphasis on the many ideological debates that the organization had internally, including on interracial coalitions, armed struggle, community programs, and the role of women.

This book tells a triumphant and tragic story. Triumphant in that it showed the power of grass-roots, mass organization around the needs of ordinary people. Black people stood up and boldly challenged every aspect of this white supremacist society, embodying the term "revolutionary" every step of the way. However, the story is tragic in that it shows just how quickly promising organizations (and people) can unravel. The mistakes that were made must be studied and heeded, and this book does a great job of making those mistakes plain and easy to identify. I highly recommend this book for anybody who wants to learn about the major players of the Black Panther Party, how the organization succeeded, and how it ultimately fell apart.

[Margaux Lopez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book because some of the reviews indicated that there would be a close examination of political and organizational tactics and structure within the Black Panther Party. As a current socialist organizer, I was most curious about the survival programs and how they functioned - as oftentimes service programs do not illicit the level of consciousness or political education as may be initially hoped for. I wanted to see if BPP programs were any different.

I would recommend this book for historians and progressive organizers looking to understand the bare organizational history of the BPP. This might serve as a framework for deeper political analysis of the party’s ideology and tactics etc. but it does not provide that, and if you are looking for something of that nature, look elsewhere.

The book sets out to detail the organizational history of the BPP, centered on its place of origin, Oakland, CA. The book provides many compelling direct quotes from not just leadership but rank and file members to support the history the author is highlighting. The book does of course cover the more public leaders of the party throughout the years: Newton & Seale, Hampton, Brown, Cleavers etc. It follows the party from its conception to 1982. Generally I would say the author does a pretty good job of keeping an objective tone, and lets the story of successes and failures speak for themselves through primary sources. In the end she shares that her goal was not to sensationalize but tell the story of BPP through its organizational development and I think she achieves this.

Overall I learned a ton from this book and it made me reflect on the philosophy and tactics of my own socialist organization and other progressive organizations of today. It also gave me some insight about community use of space and fundraising and how these are tied to base building.

[Robert Bottome · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this eye-opening and dramatic account, Professor Spencer brings to vivid life the personalities and the operating context of the Black Panther Party in Oakland. Through skillful use of interviews with party members and leaders, contemporary sources and FBI Conintelpro files she shows how the party began as a movement for self defense and dignity in response to police brutality and discrimination but rapidly grew into an international, anti-imperialist and black nationalist insurrection. Throughout her narrative, she quietly documents the many ways that a diverse set of committed women provided the organization, focus and cohesion that the party required to succeed. Eventually, they succeeded in delivering vital services and support to a low resource community while at the same time transforming local (and even national) politics.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

An informative read that moves beyond iconic Black Panther Party Figures to highlight the perspectives as well as the work of rank and file members. Spencer's study offers an understanding of the organization beginning with an analysis of the conditions and early organizing efforts in Oakland to the party's end in the 1980s.

[آية]

Interesting book on the history of the Black Panther party specifically as it emerged in Oakland, the contexts of its founding, how it ran for a few decades as a grassroots community organization and formed/reformed its goals/strategies, and eventually to its decline due to fragmented leadership and unfair FBI surveillance and repression.

[Roxy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute feat! Fascinating and gripping for an academic text. Extra interesting due to being intimately familiar with so many of the locations discussed. I learned a lot and highly recommend this book.

[EddieG · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't know much about the Black Panther Party, and this book does a great job of walking you through the party's different stages. It focuses only on the party in Oakland tho

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for University Independent Research Project- very useful for that :)

[Chelsea Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Didn’t really get into the sexism until the end of the book….

[Mills College Library]

322.42097 S7459 2016