scholarly journals North Side Revolutionaries in the Civil Rights Struggle: The African American Community in Des Moines and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, 1948–1970

2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Fehn ◽  
Robert Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Des Moines ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
North Side ◽  
Black Panther

Visualizing a Black Future: Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-311
Author(s):  
Colette Gaiter
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Gun Carrying ◽  
The Us ◽  
Hero Archetype ◽  
Gun Culture ◽  
Black Panther

In the post-Civil Rights late 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) artist Emory Douglas created visual messages mirroring the US Western genre and gun culture of the time. For black people still struggling against severe oppression, Douglas’s work metaphorically armed them to defend against daily injustices. The BPP’s intrepid and carefully constructed images were compelling, but conversely, they motivated lawmakers and law enforcement officers to disrupt the organization aggressively. Decades after mainstream media vilified Douglas’s work, new generations celebrate its prescient activism and bold aesthetics. Using empathetic strategies of reflecting black communities back to themselves, Douglas visualized everyday superheroes. The gun-carrying avenger/cowboy hero archetype prevalent in Westerns did not transcend deeply embedded US racial stereotypes branding black people as inherently dangerous. Douglas helped the Panthers create visual mythology that merged fluidly with the ideas of Afrofuturism, which would develop years later as an expression of imagined liberated black futures.

The “Hollow Prospect” of Integration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward G. Goetz
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Black Power ◽  
The Other ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The U.S

This chapter describes the tension between integration and community development from the 1940s through the end of the 1960s. It describes the conflict within the African-American community between efforts to achieve integration on the one hand and building power and capacity within the community on the other. It describes the emergence and evolution of the fair housing movement in the U.S. Finally, the ways in which this conflict played out during the civil rights and Black Power eras is highlighted.

The Racial Messiah: On Huey P. Newton

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent W. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Theological Aesthetics ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Black Panther

While the Black Panther Party has often been presented as the secularist reaction to the politically ineffective religiosity of the civil rights movement, religious histories, symbols, and concepts are closely connected with the Panthers and particularly with their photogenic leader, Huey P. Newton. Reading the iconography of Newton along with Seale’s hagiography, Seize the Time, and Newton’s own Revolutionary Suicide, this chapter suggests that the Panthers offer a black theological aesthetics that has political implications. Moving between an analysis of Newton and attempts at political reflection made by white critics, particularly Raymond Geuss, this chapter also makes a case for black theology that takes political practice seriously, that takes political practice as a form of theological practice, in contrast to those who would simply apply abstract theological concepts to political problems.

Black Power Assaults the Black Newspaper

Race News ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Black Power ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
Student Newspapers ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Black Panther

The alternative black press grew in popularity and editorial stridency in the 1960s, prompting commercial publishers to try to steer the Black Power Movement into acceptable political channels. Alternative publications included student newspapers, leftist political journals, and organizational newspapers for Black Nationalist groups. The Black Panther and Muhammad Speaks claimed circulations that rivaled the largest commercial newspapers. Alternative editors questioned the value of integration, endorsed armed self-defense, and embraced a Marxist critique of American capitalism and empire. Commercial publishers attempted to advise young sit-in protesters and then tried to define Black Power as the effective use of political power. By the late 1960s, though, they almost universally condemned the Black Panther Party and other militant activists, fearing unneeded provocations would erase significant legislative achievements.

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