Book Review:
Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party is a tour de force with a title that invites the casual browser to make assumptions about it. In particular, people who studied the watered-down, paragraph-long, high-school version of the Black Panther Party (BPP) will recall a familiar photo of black men in formation sporting leather jackets, black burets, and toting formidable weaponry standing proud and ready for trouble. However, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense considered itself a revolutionary group with a ten-point program developed from its true grassroots backgrounds, a solid understanding of the needs of the communities it served, and a willingness to act. Central to that commitment was the presence of guns; however, as the author explains, guns were useful in attracting attention and recruits, but also the attention of Hoover’s COINTELPRO, which devoted most of its energies to destroying the BPP. In explaining his thesis, then, the author shows that explanations for the making of the BPP are not one-sided. In fact, it was not the violence of the BPP, but the violence of inadequate living conditions, oppression, and police brutality that provided a solid foundation from which the organization was born. (xxii)
In the initial chapters, the author expertly traces the historical roots of the Black Panther Party in the frustration of black communities around the country, illustrating how the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power movement evolved in direct and overlapping conversation with one another. Indeed, it was “civil wrongs” that provided the necessary fuel for both to work together. The author embeds several conflicts early on that presage the organization’s demise, such as the adoption of violent rhetoric and the police and FBI’s response to it, a problematic hierarchical leadership structure, the fundamental and unresolved differences between Newton and Cleaver, and finally the infighting that was emblematic of that split. The author emphasizes that it was not a geographical “east/west split,” but a wedge between Cleaver who controlled the New York faction from Algeria and Newton who held sway over the rest of the many chapters. (241) The author punctuates the middle of the book with the high-profile murder of Fred Hampton, the imprisonment of Huey Newton and the campaign to free him, and a careful explication of the southern and eastern chapters that formed key parts of the organization as a whole.
All works aspire to perfection, yet no scholarship is without its flaws. Up Against the Wall is no exception. On page 97, a minor typo does not take away from the author’s correct assessment that “Despite having access to their own media outlet and commanding a nationwide appeal, the BBP [sic] was powerless in its ability to persuade most black men and women to pick up the gun.” Media coverage of the BPP, however, emphasized guns and favored badass men, as opposed to the many women who formed the rank and file and who kept the organization going. It is fitting that the author cites Eldridge Cleaver’s ability to explain dialectical materialism (241) to an audience of laypersons. Dialectics, distilled to thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, appears not only to be the guiding thesis of the “making and unmaking” of the BPP, but Dr. Austin shares Cleaver’s facility to weave an incredibly complicated set of narratives together into a readable, cohesive whole. The only place where the narrative frays mildly is in the latter chapters. The discussion with the informant BJ, for example, needs to employ the techniques from the previous chapters by more slowly parsing some of the language and allowing the context to reveal itself within the structure of the narrative—a difficult task even for a master oral historian. Finally, while the author shows an organizational chart of the BPP leadership structure, the term “democratic centralism” needs more development; otherwise, it has no useful differentiation from an autocracy. Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power only makes the leadership structure seem less flexible.
Lest the reader misunderstand these minor critiques as a comment on the whole, Up Against the Wall is the work of a master revisionist—clear in its logic and order, detail, and narrative quality. Even the most mundane facts are placed in such a way that it is a book that, once picked up, is impossible to put down. Dr. Curtis J. Austin’s work should be a fixture in Black Studies programs, African American History courses, and any courses on protest movements. It is a historical work that would do well in an interdisciplinary context, such as political science or women’s studies.
Perhaps a feat more remarkable than the prose is evidence that the author won a tussle with his editor. It includes a bibliographic essay and a personal account of his own journey as a scholar. Historiographies often form the bulk of a thesis, and authors begrudgingly jettison them first. Regardless, editors typically locate these sorts of works in the front, where Dr. Austin favors a timeline and a chapter that embeds the BPP within the movement around it. This decision shows a commitment to the subjects of the history as the agents of their own destinies, rather than what other authors thought about them. For a book that reads from front to back with examples of this intentionality, look no further.