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Black Panther Party



  • Exhibiting the Black Panthers' Ephemera

    An exhibition of the radical group's posters illustrates the importance-and difficulty-of documenting political movements that used visual communications through ephemeral media like postering and newspapers. 



  • Learn Lessons about Movement Building from Radical Black Women

    by Keisha N. Blain, Premilla Nadasen and Robyn C. Spencer

    Barbara Ransby facilitates a roundtable collaborative essay about the role of women in building radical movements for justice in Black communities encompassing social welfare, economic security, police accountability, women's liberation and more. 



  • Black Power and Anti-Carceral State Infrastructure

    by Joshua L. Crutchfield

    Mutual aid groups that formed in response to the COVID pandemic echo the ways that participants in the Black Freedom movement sought to create alternative instititutions for the benefit of communities and individuals that did not reinforce the power of the police. 



  • The Real Black Panthers

    Historian Donna Murch joins NPR's The Throughline to discuss the Black Panther Party's agenda and its targeting by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. 



  • Sounds of Freedom: The Music of Black Liberation

    Shana Redmond and Rickey Vincent discuss their research, which deals with the ways that musical expression has been integrated into the politics of Black freedom in different moments (and different musical styles, including the Black Panther Party's own funk band). 



  • The Forgotten Film That Paved The Way For This Year’s Oscars Contenders

    by Rebecca Prime

    For the 1968 film "Uptight!," white director Jules Dassin enlisted Ruby Dee and Julian Mayfield to remake the 1935 film "The Informer" around the Black Panther Party, a move which drew on all three principals' experiences with surveillance over political activism and provoked a sabotage effort by the FBI.



  • The Unsettling Message of "Judas and the Black Messiah"

    by Elizabeth Hinton

    The film "brings the disparities engendered by a surveillance state into focus, leaving audiences to wonder what this country would look like if the war on white supremacy were fought with the same implacable intensity as the one against the Black Panther Party some 50 years ago."



  • Why Fred Hampton Needs to Be on Your Kids’ American History Syllabus

    Writer and poet Scott Woods developed a political consciousness watching a 1971 documentary on the assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. He was prepared to be disappointed by the new "Judas and the Black Messiah" but argues the film tells a story that is more important than ever.



  • "Judas and the Black Messiah" Is an American Tragedy

    The performances of the lead actors in "Judas and the Black Messiah" elevate the story of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton's assassination by the police and FBI to a complex story of the Black freedom movement. 



  • What ‘Defund the Police’ Really Means

    by Simon Balto

    The debate about "defunding police" must return to the community-driven vision of activists like assassinated Black Panther Fred Hampton, who envisioned a program of community empowerment that could divert the vast resources spent on policing toward other social ends.