Emory Douglas, Mary Hooks, Yoel Haile, and Diane Fujino discuss the enduring impact, and multiple meanings, of the Black Panther Party in the context of the movement for Black lives, allowing today’s organizers and readers to situate themselves in the long lineage of the Black Radical Tradition.
Today’s Movement for Black Lives is building a radically transformative struggle that demands structural change and places Black liberation at its center. Fifty years ago, the Black Power movement asserted similarly bold demands and audacious actions. Then and today, we bear witness to and seek to intervene in such critical moments when radical ideas seem to suddenly take hold and unprecedented opportunities emerge for far-reaching change.
The Black Panther Party (BPP)’s struggles against police violence and efforts to create a liberatory society are particularly relevant to today’s struggles.
Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party, edited by Diane C. Fujino and Matef Harmachis, offers the first extended examination of the BPP's role in shaping the practices and ideas that have animated grassroots activism in the decades since its decline.
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Speakers:
Emory Douglas is the former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party and was a Black Panther Party member from 1967 until the early 1980s. His artworks are the most renowned and iconic visual symbols of the Black Panther Party. His book, Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, traces his art and biography in the BPP. His artwork continues to influence radical movements across the globe, including in Chiapas, Cuba, Palestine, Australia, and beyond.
Mary Hooks is the co-director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG). SONG is a political home for LGBTQ liberation across all lines of race, class, abilities, age, culture, gender, and sexuality in the South. We build, sustain, and connect a southern regional base of LGBTQ people in order to transform the region through strategic projects and campaigns developed in response to the current conditions in our communities. SONG builds this movement through leadership development, coalition and alliance building, intersectional analysis, and organizing. Mary’s commitment to Black liberation, which encompasses the liberation of LGBTQ folks, is rooted in her experiences growing up under the impacts of the War on Drugs. Her people are migrants of the Great Migration, factory workers, church folks, Black women, hustlers and addicts, dykes, studs, femmes, queens and all people fighting for the liberation of oppressed people.
Yoel Haile is a Criminal Justice Associate with the ACLU of Northern California. Yoel grew up in Asmara, Eritrea, and moved to California in 2006. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara as an undergraduate, where he helped initiate and negotiate Black student demands to the campus chancellor that resulted in more than $3.7 million in immediate and committed funding for the recruitment and retention of Black students, staff and faculty. As the Political Director of the Afrikan Black Coalition - a statewide Black youth organization - Yoel helped lead campaigns that resulted in the University of California divesting all of its nearly $30 million in holdings from private prison companies and terminating $475 million in contracts with Wells Fargo.
Diane Fujino (moderator) is co-editor, with Matef Harmachis, of
Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party. As professor of Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara, she studies, writes, and teaches about Asian American and Black liberation movements. Her books include:
Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama; Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life; and
Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Radical Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake (forthcoming); and as editor,
Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader. She is in the core leadership of the Ethnic Studies Now! Santa Barbara Coalition and a founding member of Cooperation Santa Barbara, which seeks to develop an alternative solidarity economy based in deeply democratic participation and community building.
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The first book to comprehensively examine how the Black Panther Party has directly shaped the practices and ideas that have animated grassroots activism in the decades since its decline, Black Power Afterlives represents a major scholarly achievement as well as an important resource for today's activists. Through its focus on the enduring impact of the Black Panther Party, this volume expands the historiography of Black Power studies beyond the 1960s-70s and serves as a bridge between studies of the BPP during its organizational existence and studies of present-day Black activism, allowing today's readers and organizers to situate themselves in a long lineage of liberation movements.
Edited by Diane C. Fujino and Matef Harmachis
Contributors include: Ben Barson, Felice Blake, Tina Bartolome, Yoel Haile, Mary Hooks, Ericka Huggins, Maryam Kashani, déqui kioni-sadiki, Teishan Latner, Jalil Muntaqim, Sekou Odinga , Quincy Saul, Blake Simons, Shaka At-Thinnin, Alex Tom, joão costa vargas…and with featured chapters on former Panthers Dhameera Ahmad, David Brothers, Emory Douglas, Hank Jones, Dedon Kamathi, Akinsanya Kambon, Kiilu Nyasha, Assata Shakur, and Michael Zinzun.
