Black Panther Primer: 11 Books and Films on the Movement

African Americans’ struggle for equality in America has taken on many shapes and strategies since the Thirteenth Amendment, which officially abolished slavery, was ratified in 1865. From the Niagara Movement and the formation of the NAACP through Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association to the powerful oratory and organization of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.; from the fiery poetry and literature of Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka to the Million Man March and Black Lives Matter, the great, ongoing effort has been a defining characteristic of the American identity, ever convulsing and changing, if never quickly or comprehensively enough.

Malcolm X was killed in early 1965, and King in April 1968. In between, fifty years ago on October 15 in Oakland, former college classmates Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, inspired by the forceful rhetoric of the former and disillusioned by the nonviolent approach of the latter, formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. While contentious from the start, and dogged by both internal criminal tendencies and outside government forces seeking to discredit the group as a threat to democracy, the Panthers undeniably hold a key place in the history of the black struggle, even if many of their ambitiously broad aims, which included standing up to police brutality and the unpunished killings of unarmed black civilians, remain sadly unrealized half a century later. (The group dissolved in 1982.)

On October 18, in concert with the fiftieth anniversary of the BPP’s founding, Seale’s new book, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers, which includes original photographs taken by Stephen Shames, will be published. Below, we’ve collected another eleven books and movies about the Panthers for anyone wishing to explore the nature and impact of the controversial group.

“Panther” (1995)
This biographical drama, directed by Mario Van Peebles and written by his filmmaker father Melvin, who adapted it from his own novel, eventually veers into conspiracy-thriller territory that alleges collaboration between the FBI and the Mob to flood black communities with drugs. But before the narrative spins off, a talented cast (Angela Bassett, Courtney B. Vance, Chris Rock) reenacts the energized early days of the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense and its charismatic leaders. The elder Van Peebles had previously delivered the groundbreaking, self-financed blaxploitation classic “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” a 1971 inner-city action film whose plot takes off when the title character rescues a Black Panther from abusive policemen.

“The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” (2011)
For this documentary, director Göran Hugo Olsson compiled little-seen footage shot by Swedish journalists throughout the Civil Rights Era (which had been sitting in a Stockholm vault for decades) to create a surprisingly powerful, montage-like sketch of the Black Power movement, including the Panthers. Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Kathleen Cleaver, Louis Farrakhan, Erykah Badu, and Harry Belafonte are among the figures featured in either the original footage or in contemporary voice over, as we get a rare look at protests, personal interviews, and startling scenes, such as children chanting in a Panther-founded school, that do a lot to humanize the men and women involved in the struggle.

“Night Catches Us” (2010)
This period drama from first-time writer-director Tanya Hamilton is concerned explicitly with the legacy of the Black Power movement and how its adherents either let go of or carried on its mission. She weaves these themes into the personal story of an ex-convict and former Panther who returns in 1976 to his old Philadelphia neighborhood, where old friends and family members still blame him for the death of a fellow Panther at the hands of police. Only the dead man’s widow, who knows the truth of their shared history, comes to his defense, even as her own cousin becomes seduced by the confrontational path the Panthers offer.

“All Power to the People!” (1996)
Lee Lew Lee’s wide-ranging documentary, which mixes archive footage with present-day interviews, highlights the sustained campaign by law enforcement — from J. Edgar Hoover on down — to discredit and divide the Panthers. It places the group and its efforts in the larger contexts of the Civil Rights movement, the black experience in America, and other radical fights for equality, while also outlining the reasons the party fell apart.

“A Huey P. Newton Story” (2001)
For this Peabody Award-winning PBS film, director Spike Lee captured a performance of Roger Guenveur Smith’s electric solo show about the life of Newton and augmented it with clips from movies and news footage of the Black Power era that Newton helped personify. Smith, who had appeared in quite a few of Lee’s joints, portrays Newton later in life, after years spent in prison for manslaughter, when he was wracked by drugs and looking back on a life and a worldview that had defined him and driven a movement. Lee, of course, also made the Oscar-nominated biopic “Malcolm X” in 1992, though it only briefly referenced Seale and the Panthers.

Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton (1967)
Upon entering Howard University in 1961 still a teenager, Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) became a passionate activist, participating in Freedom Rides, enduring arrests for protesting, and eventually becoming chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This book was published before he became officially affiliated with the Panthers, but it describes Carmichael’s shift away from Martin Luther King Jr. and toward the more radicalized approach of the Black Power movement. The authors’ sobering focus on how ingrained socioeconomic disparities (and things like the military draft) exacerbate racial conflict reverberates today, as many of those deep-seeded problems still have not been amply addressed fifty years later.

Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Y. Davis (1974)
A lifelong social activist, professor, speaker, and author, Davis was a central figure in the Civil Rights movement with ties to the Panthers and other radical interests. In this early memoir, she traces the ideas and forces that led to her transformation into a revolutionary thinker, feminist, Communist, and vehement critic of the “prison industrial complex,” which she has fought to change for forty years in interviews, speeches, and books such as Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire (2005).

Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America by Peniel E. Joseph (2006)
Joseph, a historian, author, and commentator who specializes in Black Power studies, does a thorough and enlightening job not only of tracing the origins of the movement, and the earlier efforts that fed them, but also of showing exactly how its strands were woven into the larger struggle for equality and civil rights. Joseph has also written a biography of Carmichael, published in 2012.

Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton by Bobby Seale (1970)
A kind of companion piece to Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide, Seale’s version of the Panthers’ history and philosophy is comprised of transcriptions of audiotapes recorded while in prison. Though it isn’t free of regressive social prescription and sometimes rambles in a dated vernacular, the book is detailed about the types of government harassment the group (and African Americans in general) endured and straightforward about Seale’s vision for a revolution of equality and justice brought about through a Socialist agenda. His passion for social change is evident throughout.

Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton (1973)
Newton’s memoir is a more straightforward biographical narrative, and as such it provides plenty of detail on his childhood and the personal history that shaped him, especially his formative years at Merritt College, where he was exposed to Lenin, Marx, and Malcolm X and where he met Seale. In the book, Newton, the BPP’s Minister of Defense, explains the theories that led to the Panthers’ Ten-Point Program and the symbolic reasons he strove to educate other oppressed people about self-defense.

Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California by Donna Jean Murch (2010)
Murch, an associate professor at Rutgers University, takes a dispassionate, scholarly approach to the Panthers’ origins, actions, and philosophies, which makes for a well-balanced read that acknowledges legitimate criticisms of the group while taking a comprehensive, sympathetic survey of the social, economic, and political circumstances that bred it.