Written by David F. Walker
Art by Marcus Kwame Anderson
Published by Ten Speed Press
The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson, isn’t really a graphic novel at all, at least not in the sense of using a comics format to tell a story.
While the book is fully illustrated—and very powerfully so—only occasionally does a page or so of sequential storytelling turn up.
No, for the most part, this is more an illustrated treatise that attempts to clearly and succinctly summarize the Civil Rights movement and the complicated history of the Black Panther Party that grew out of it. A daunting task, but to a great extent, the creators succeed.
Let’s face it, I’m a privileged old white guy who grew up in the 1960s.
To me, it was a great and magical time for friends, toys, music, TV, movies, and family. But I remember the Black Panther Party. I remember the nightly news and the daily papers portraying them as domestic terrorists (although that term had yet to be coined).
Every time I saw Black Panthers on TV they had guns and were yelling. They were scary to me, which made black people scary to me. When I was 5, we lived at 7th Street. We were told not to cross 8th Street because beyond that was the black neighborhood. I pictured daily riots and fires and shootings.
It became ingrained in me.
But when I started school, our janitor was black, and he was very nice. Around fourth grade, our school got integrated when a single black girl and one boy started attending. They seemed nice, although they got picked on a LOT.
At home, my father was always railing against black people.
He hated every black person he NEVER met. Over time, I came to notice that as he met them, he felt differently. The black man he carpooled with was okay, as was the one who pitched horseshoes with him twice a week. The black woman insurance agent who came to the house, she was okay. The Jeffersons became my father’s favorite TV series. He was a fan of the Temptations’ music.
All of this personal observation made me start to question what I felt I had been told about black people and in time I came to look at things quite differently, seeing Malcolm X as a hero rather than the villain I had been taught he was, for example.
I’m still a privileged old white guy. No way around that.
But I did at least make some effort at thinking for myself by delving into black history, reading books, watching documentaries and finding out over and over how white Americans have been lied to right up to the present day. Sure, I still have some elements of racism, but not as much as my father, and he didn’t have as much as HIS father. My own son has even less.
Which finally brings me back to today’s book.
I think it should be made available in every school in America. Every black student needs to know this history and every white student needs to learn the names of those involved.
What made my dad less racist was getting to know people, getting past the unknown. What has made me less racist has been reading and learning about black struggle and black culture. The Black Panther Party does an excellent job of humanizing the participants. They didn’t know they were making history. They were just human beings, with all the hope and trials that brings with it.
In the book’s beginning, we are told of America’s racist history, that so many still try to bury under a rug. The tragedy of Emmett Till, the struggles of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Ruby Bridges, James Meredith, and so many other murders and martyrs.
Ultimately, it all leads up to the founding of the Black Panther Party by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Author Walker recognizes that in the end, as encompassing as it became, the Panther’s story is really the story of Huey P. Newton.
Newton is handsome and charismatic, iconic even in his famously intense and defiant chair photo, art of which is used on this book’s cover. His life, as it comes in and out of the bigger picture here, parallels the successes, the failures, the triumphs, the sacrifices, and the eventual demise of the Black Panther Party.
With the US government now known to have been out to take down the Party both from without and within, the good guys and bad guys in the overall narrative can get confusing.
Amongst the players, though, are Bobby Seale—infamously bound and gagged at the Chicago Seven trial—Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Elaine Brown, Geronimo Pratt, Fred Hampton, J. Edgar Hoover, Ronald Reagan, Angela Davis…So many more. All at least get a mention as the complex history of the Party and the movement continues throughout the book.
Some were violent revolutionaries, whose actions were little different than those of the insurrectionists currently in the news today.
But extremists are always extremists.
Behind it all, the Party did not have the goal of destroying the country but of making life better for a long-abused segment of its people. The Panthers helped black communities in many ways white people just never heard about. They operated a school, fed poor children, provided free shoes and clothes, support for families of prisoners, and dozens of other services. That wasn’t exciting enough to make the nightly news.
It seems so long ago, now, just history, but many of those involved are still alive, a number of them in prison. One big-name Panther member was actually charged with murdering the husband of a friend of my wife’s here in the 21st Century. It continues.
The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History is important stuff, told objectively and attractively, making it an easy read, and it needs to be read. It needs to be remembered. One look at US news in 2021 on any given day shows that this ALL needs to be remembered.
Maybe it’s not too late to actually learn something from history rather than just mindlessly continuing to repeat it.
Booksteve recommends.
