Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon

by Jane Rhodes

Overview

A potent symbol of black power and radical inspiration, the Black Panthers still evoke strong emotions. This edition of Jane Rhodes's acclaimed study examines the extraordinary staying power of the Black Panthers in the American imagination. Probing the group's longtime relationship to the media, Rhodes traces how the Panthers articulated their message through symbols and tactics the mass media could not resist. By exploiting press coverage through everything from posters to public appearances to photo ops, the Panthers created a linguistic and symbolic universe as salient today as during the group's heyday. They also pioneered a sophisticated version of mass media activism that powers contemporary African American protest. Featuring a timely new preface by the author, Framing the Black Panthers is a breakthrough reconsideration of a fascinating phenomenon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252082641
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	01/30/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	456
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jane Rhodes is professor and department head of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century.

Table of Contents

Preface to the New Edition ix

Acknowledgments xxxiii

Introduction 1

1 Forty Years in Hindsight: The Black Panthers in Popular Memory 12

2 Black America in the Public Sphere 30

3 Becoming Media Subjects 57

4 Revolutionary Culture and the Politics of Self-Representation 91

5 Free Huey: 1968 116

6 A Trial of the Black Liberation Movement 145

7 From Campus Celebrity to Radical Chic 181

8 Servants of the People: The Black Panthers as National and Global Icons 233

9 The Rise and Fall of a Media Frenzy: The 1970s 284

Conclusion 307

Notes 337

Bibliography 369

Index 387

Editorial Reviews

"By tracing the history of the Black Panther Party through the evolution of its popular imagery, Jane Rhodes has made a major contribution to scholarship. Her treatment of this controversial organization is well-researched, admirably balanced, singularly insightful, and a pleasure to read."—Clayborne Carson, Director, Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute


"No scholar has better documented and explained the Black Panther Party 's continuing hold on the popular imagination than Jane Rhodes. In a moment when black men and women dying at the hands of police is once again in the public eye, and insurgent political confrontation takes form through mediated images and pithy slogans, the republication of Framing the Black Panthers is both timely and relevant."—Nikhil Pal Singh, author of Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy

From the Publisher

Scary radicals par excellence, the Black Panthers took pains to set the terms of their depiction in the media and popular culture-and apart from Forrest Gump, they were largely successful. So notes Rhodes (American Studies/Macalester College) in this study of the shaping of the Panther image and icon. The N-word-charged scene in which Panthers shake down poor Tom Hanks notwithstanding-a scene that is "little more than a contrivance to highlight Gump's innocence against the backdrop of such inflammatory rhetoric"-and the Panthers' depiction of the media as lackeys of the ruling class and therefore enemies, the party was concerned to cultivate a heroic, positive image, at once defiant and statesmanlike. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, for instance, were careful to instruct the "pigs" that any attempt to crack down on their fellow Panthers or the black Bay Area neighborhoods in which they operated would be met with violence, insisting that their stance was defensive. The party was little known outside the Bay Area at first, but local sympathies were translated at a national level. Icons piled on icons-Rhodes notes that the famed photo of Newton seated with a shotgun in one hand and spear in the other went against his contempt for "black cultural nationalists' embrace of African symbols," but it made good suitable-for-framing revolutionary art all the same, picked up by the most mainstream of media. Most of Rhodes's referents will be familiar to anyone who was present at the time, and her narrative seldom picks up above a scholarly trudge, but she does her readers a good turn by extending the Panther story to the present-for, as she reminds us, there are still old Panthers doing good deeds inthe black community, even as Islamist "New Panthers" attempt to appropriate the old icons and images for their own causes. Good reading for the Baudrillard set-and for students of '60s politics generally.

Kirkus Reviews