The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. It was perhaps the most visible of the Black Power groups in the late 60s and early 70s, not least because of its confrontational politics, its rejection of nonviolence, and its headline-catching, gun-toting militancy. Important on the national scene and highly visible on college campuses, the Panthers also worked at building grassroots support for local black political and economic power. Although there have been many books about the Black Panthers, none has looked at the organization and its work at the local level. This book examines the work and actions of seven local initiatives in Baltimore, Winston-Salem, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. These local organizations are revealed as committed to programs of community activism that focused on problems of social, political, and economic justice.
"... this is an important contribution to an underdeveloped topic in the scholarship on the party.... offers original and important research on the subject, broadening the scope of the field in essential ways, while adding to the scope of postwar urban history."
Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Journal Of American History
"Dr. Jeffries and his fellow scholars have ... added considerably to our understanding of the unfortunate racist paranoia that, inspired by deliberate FBI misinformation, so infected our law enforcement agencies during the 1960s and afterward. The volume is an important contribution to our understanding of this unique group and its role within the larger Civil Rights Movement of those years."
Gene Marine, author of The Black Panthers
"Judson L. Jeffries and his contributors have done the Black Panther Party a great service by highlighting perhaps the most important, yet least studied aspect of the organization-its community survival programs. Comrades is a must read for any serious student of the Black Panther Party."
James N. Uptoneditor, Encyclopedia of American Race Riots
