LAUSR

For example, there is very little analysis of the press response to the party, particularly from the unfriendly Oakland Tribune, and Spencer ignores many of the underground activities that brought the BPP into disrepute during the s. As this suggests, there is a whiff of archive fever about The Revolution Has Come. More problematic is Spencer’s reluctance to use gender as an analytical tool. As numerous historians have demonstrated, gender is a powerful prism through which to analyze the BPP. Yet Spencer treats gender rather too cursorily, deemphasizing the corrosive impact of masculinism on the BPP and drawing the rather banal conclusion that women organized behind the scenes while the men drew the attention from both the media and the authorities. Such inattention to theory is a problem that bedevils BPP social histories such as The Revolution Has Come. The most impressive recent works on the BPP have been characterized by their authors’ willingness to use different interpretive tools to analyze the party, such as Donna Murch’s focus on migration, Jane Rhodes’s media analysis, or Robert Self’s use of urbanism and suburbanization. Spencer, by contrast, places the BPP in a social-activist context, suggesting that it be seen as another part of the civil rights movement. In doing so, she misrepresents many of its most important features, most notably its intellectual life. She misreads the BPP’s engagement with Fanon, following the tired line that the BPP only took influence from Fanon’s interpretation of violence – or rather, from Sartre’s terrible misinterpretation of Fanon. Notably, there is no discussion of Fanon’s views on revolutionary culture, or indeed of the lumpenproletariat. The profound influence of Robert F. Williams on Huey P. Newton is ignored, as are Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s writings on guerilla warfare. While Spencer acknowledges the importance of political education to the quotidian life of the party, without a full understanding of the many influences that acted on the BPP she cannot fully explain the intellectual life of its members. This might appear to be a minor point, but it is in fact crucial. One of the major criticisms leveled at the BPP is that it had little impact on the world around it. As Spencer suggests throughout, this is easily rebutted by noting the transformative impact that membership had on those who took part in party life. In encouraging Panthers to place their lives, experience, and ideas within broader intellectual – and particularly Marxist – trends, the BPP positioned its members within the wider anticolonial and anticapitalist struggles of the postwar period. While daily life in the party, as Spencer suggests, tended towards mundane activities such as selling newspapers, knocking on doors, fund-raising, and the occasional protest, political education opened a world of possibility for BPP members, one that we overlook at our peril.