- Paperback: 312 pages
- Publisher: University of North Carolina Press (October 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0807871133
- ISBN-13: 978-0807871133
- Product Dimensions: 23.8 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 522 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #502,657 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
highly recommended, April 24 2011
By Wellslake "CWM" - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Paperback)
This is an excellent book. It is well researched and well written and full of provocative arguments about the emergence of the Panthers (and Black radicalism generally) in Oakland. Indeed, of the half-dozen or so books I've read about the Panthers over the years, this is the best.Although Murch sympathizes with the Panthers, she is a scholar first of all and takes care to substantiate her claims and clearly wants to (and does) provide a balanced account. This is an issue in the context of scholarship on the Panthers, in which so many of the works are tendentious (either pro or contra).
While most historians focus on Panther's militancy--obsessed with "black men with guns!"--Murch takes a step back and places them in a much broader frame. She puts the Panthers in the context of the Black immigrant communities that came to the Bay Area in search of defense industry jobs around WWII. By doing so, she accomplishes at least two very important goals. First, she links many Panther innovations to practices found in Black southern communities-- for instance, she relates Panther police patrols to the tradition of armed, community self-defense and, second, she places the Panthers in the context of much broader social and economic changes that occurred in the twentieth century. Few scholars have been able to pull this off when treating the Panthers, a group with an incredibly complicated history and one that still excites partisan passions.
I would only criticize her for failing to link the Panthers' community programs to traditions of anti-state, libertarian socialism. If nothing else, this would have helped her illustrate some of the tensions between the Panthers' simultaneously bottom-up and top-down approach to social change. However, this is a minor shortcoming.
This book was also designed and edited well. I only noticed one type-o throughout the entire text (as an editor, I can assure you that this is no mean feat). The photos and illustrations were instructive and pertinent.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderfully written and researched, April 5 2011
By Chester Himes - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Paperback)
I use this book in college courses and my students love it. In fact, my current students preferred it to usual student favorites such as Charles Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom and Tim Tyson's Radio Free Dixie. Murch has written an exhaustively researched work that flows beautifully and remains accessible to all levels of readers. Scholars will be intrigued by her arguments regarding the impact of migration on the formation of Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, as well as the materials she has dug up on the early Black student movement and proto-nationalist and revolutionary nationalist organizations that pre-date the more famous BPP. Murch, unlike many local studies, manages to show how Oakland's Black Power movement was both part of a broader national movement, but was also distinctive due to the demographic and contextual realities faced by Bay Area activists. While a number of works on the Black Panther party tend to cover the same material over and over while providing new interpretations, Murch delves into long ignored components of the BPP that range from it's pre-history to it's focus on alternative education in the 1970s. I highly recommend this work for anyone with an interest in Black Freedom Studies, Black Power, or Urban History. It is a pioneering work in each of these fields.
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