The Revolution Has Come Robyn Spencer Book Review
Come across a Trouble?
Thanks for telling united states about the problem.
Friend Reviews
Community Reviews
4 stars
...more than
The book does a really skilful chore explaining the conditions that gave rise to the Black Panther Party in Oakland. Pervasive housing segregation and insecurity, employment discrimination, capital flying and deindustrialization created the Blackness "ghettos" of Due west Oakland, East Oakland, and North Oakland (i.e. the "Flatlands"). Every bit Blackness 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 metropolis 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 Blackness Panther Party.
Spencer also details how the failure of the more traditional Civil Rights organizations (NAACP, CORE, etc.) to galvanize the masses of Blackness people in Oakland'south 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 weather in inner-city Oakland would not allow for such replication, equally the masses of Black folks in Oakland suffered from ills that simply were non addressed past the Civil Rights organizations. Importantly, Spencer states that many of the white liberals in these Ceremonious Rights organizations blamed the Black masses themselves for "political apathy," revealing their own racist paternalism. The Panthers were able to claiming and change this approach to organizing Blackness people, realizing that in order to organize the masses, one had to focus on the basic cloth needs of the people. Thus, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale (along with their precursor Mark Condolement, who was the private who originally brought the Black Panther proper name to Oakland with the permission of Stokely Carmichael), created an organization that organized the Blackness masses in the inner-metropolis 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 Political 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 besides 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 dissever within the Political party. Throughout the book Spencer covers the many growing pains and challenges the Party faced, including beingness forced to modify their tactics due to oppressive legislation, widespread and systematic authorities repression, lack of organizational discipline among members and leaders, ideological inconsistency, and funding challenges. The book places detail accent on the many ideological debates that the arrangement had internally, including on interracial coalitions, armed struggle, community programs, and the part 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. Blackness people stood upwardly and boldly challenged every aspect of this white supremacist society, embodying the term "revolutionary" every stride of the style. Withal, the story is tragic in that it shows just how apace promising organizations (and people) tin unravel. The mistakes that were made must be studied and heeded, and this volume does a great job of making those mistakes plain and easy to identify. I highly recommend this book for anybody who wants to acquire about the major players of the Black Panther Party, how the organization succeeded, and how information technology ultimately brutal autonomously.
...more
| topics | posts | views | last action | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| COUPON Code | one | 2 | November 11, 2016 08:25PM |
Since she began studying social movements
Robyn C. Spencer is a historian whose research centers on social protestation later Globe State of war 2, urban and working-course radicalism, and gender. She teaches survey and seminar courses on African American Heritage, Civil rights and Black Ability and Black women'southward history in the US as an Associate Professor of History at Lehman Higher, Urban center University of New York.Since she began studying social movements equally an undergraduate history major at SUNY Binghamton, Professor Spencer'south inspiration has come from the examples of those who fabricated often incalculable sacrifice to fight injustice, racism, and sexism. Her masters essay entitled "Contested Terrain: The Mississippi Alluvion of 1927 and the Struggle to Control Black Labor" explored the bear on 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. ii Spring, 1994), was featured in the documentary "When Weather Changed History," which aired on the Atmospheric condition Channel on March ix, 2008 at 9pm EST. Her writings on the Black Panther Party accept appeared in The Periodical of Women'south History, Souls, Radical Teacher and several collections of essays on the 1960s. Spencer'southward article "Engendering the Blackness Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California" was published in the Periodical of Women's History (Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring 2008) and awarded the 2008 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Commodity Prize past the Association of Black Women Historians. Her volume The Revolution Has Come up: Blackness Power, Gender, and the Blackness Panther Political party in Oakland, analyzes the organizational evolution of the Black Panther Party in Oakland and was published by Duke University Printing in Nov 2016.
In 2016-17 she received a Mellon fellowship at Yale University to work on her 2nd book projection, To Build the World Afresh: Blackness Liberation Politics and the Movement Against the Vietnam State of war. This project examines how working form African Americans' anti-imperialist consciousness in the 1950s-1970s shaped their engagement with the movement against the Vietnam State of war. In many ways, information technology continues her emphasis on exploring overlapping and intersecting boundaries between social protest movements. She is besides working on a short biography of Angela Davis for Westview Printing' Lives of American women series.
Professor Spencer is a committed activist and participates in many community educational activity initiatives aimed at bringing the history of the Black Power movement to customs based spaces. Through writing, education and public presentations, she aims to educate others well-nigh the contributions of urban, working-course African Americans, especially women, to the Black freedom movement. She has presented her work at shut to a dozen universities, several correctional institutions in Pennsylvania and k-12 classrooms in the Bronx. She has besides participated in seminars aimed at educating high schoolhouse 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 Result on "Pedagogy Black Lives Matter."
...moreRelated Articles
Welcome dorsum. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29362718-the-revolution-has-come
0 Response to "The Revolution Has Come Robyn Spencer Book Review"
Post a Comment