Description
The preferred media have portrayed the Black Panthers principally for the rhetoric of violence some members employed and for the associations between the Panthers and a black militancy drawing on racial hostility to whites usually. Lost sight of have been the efforts that branches of the organization undertook for practical economic and social progress within African-American neighborhoods, steadily in alliance with whites. Yohuru Williams’ study of black politics in New Haven culminating within the arrival of the Panthers argues that the increasing militancy within the black community there used to be motivated not by abstractions of black cultural integrity but by the continuing frustrations the leadership suffered in its dealings with the city’s white liberal establishment. Black Politics/White Power is a very powerful contribution to a discovery of the complexities of racial politics all over the indignant late sixties and early seventies.