Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture) Review

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(More customer reviews)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.

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