Just Another Nigger: My Life in the Black Panther Party

by Don Cox, Kimberly Cox Marshall (Foreword by), Steve Wasserman (Introduction)

Overview

Just Another Nigger is Don Cox's revelatory, even incendiary account of his years in the Black Panther Party. He participated in many peaceful Bay Area civil rights protests but hungered for more militant action. His book tells the story of his work as the party's field marshal in charge of gunrunning to planning armed attacks—tales which are told for the first time in this remarkable memoir—to his star turn raising money at the Manhattan home of Leonard Bernstein (for which he was famously mocked by Tom Wolfe in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers), to his subsequent flight to Algeria to join Eldridge Cleaver in exile, to his decision to leave the party following his disillusionment with Huey P. Newton's leadership. Cox would live out the rest of his life in self-imposed exile, where he began writing these unrepentant recollections in the early 1980s, enjoining his daughter to promise him that she would do everything she could to have them published—with the title he insisted upon, a nod to W. E. B. Du Bois's remark that “In my own country, for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigger.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597144599
Publisher:	Heyday
Publication date:	02/01/2019
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Born in Missouri in 1936, Don Cox joined the Black Panther Party one year after its founding in 1966. Appointed as the party’s field marshal, known as “D.C.,” he was inducted into the party's high command as a member of its central committee and founded the party's San Francisco office. In 1970, he helped open the party's international section in Algiers. Two years later, he resigned from the party. Except for a brief trip when he entered and exited the United States incognito, using a false passport, he lived in France in the village of Camps-sur-l'Agly, where he died at age seventy-four in February 2011.

Editorial Reviews

12/24/2018

This memoir from Cox (1936–2011), which takes its title from W.E.B. Du Bois, is an unsentimental account of his evolution from a part-time photographer with a minor criminal record to field marshal for the Black Panthers in San Francisco in 1967, working with Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, David Hilliard, and Huey Newton. “I heard of blacks talk of revolution, killing our oppressors, going back to Africa, the whole works,” Cox writes. “I was drunk with this new world I had not even known existed.” He recounts arranging the famous gathering of the Panthers with conductor Leonard Bernstein and other cultural luminaries in New York City to raise funds for 21 New York Panthers who were behind bars (immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” article for New York magazine). Cox­—who fled to Algeria in 1970 to avoid jail time in the States, left the party the next year, and settled in France—evenhandedly considers the party’s legacy: he extols its armed self-defense against police brutality, advocacy for free health clinics, and breakfast programs for children, and he critiques the paranoid megalomania of Newton, Hilliard, and Cleaver; misogyny; a dogmatic devotion to Marxism-Leninism; and repressive, Stalinist leadership tactics. Written in an unapologetically plainspoken style, Cox’s book is an excellent addition to the pantheon of Panther literature. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Complex, provocative.... A gripping record of a fraught era.”—Kevin Canfield, San Francisco Chronicle

“Plainspoken and direct, Cox's writing achieves an eloquence that makes it exceedingly readable, never losing the drama of the story he is telling.”—Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch

“An excellent addition to the pantheon of Panther literature.”—Publishers Weekly

“Intimate and exciting...a valuable primary-source recollection from a turbulent time.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2018-12-09

An unapologetic firsthand account of the Black Panthers during their turbulent prime.

Cox's memoir, written in the early 1980s and posthumously published, provides a plainspoken account of a transformative moment in history and Cox's own journey from commercial photographer to committed revolutionary. His daughter Kimberly Cox Marshall provides a loving foreword ("Daddy, I kept the title you wanted"), and publisher Steve Wasserman offers further context in his introduction, describing the author's work "as Field Marshal in charge of weapons procurement, gunrunning, and planning armed attacks and defense" as well as "his star turn as a party spokesman raising money at the Manhattan home of Leonard Bernstein." Cox recalls a taste for nonconformity from an upbringing in Missouri and California, but his radicalism coincided with the 1965 Watts uprising. "I admit to having felt joy—joy and pride at seeing blacks finally saying, with their actions, that they were fed up." In 1967, he positively impressed founding Black Panthers David Hilliard and Huey Newton, and he discloses early plans for ambushes of police to serve as a blow against race-based brutality. The group seemed both righteous and practical in their outlook, but circumstances spiraled out of control following violent skirmishes and Newton's arrest. With key leaders in jail or killed in police shootouts, surviving members pursued a Marxist-Leninist ideology of rigid purification. Cox documents plenty of internecine drama as he rose through the ranks, culminating in his visit to the fugitive Eldridge Cleaver, who "told me [Hilliard] had sent me to Algiers for them to kill me!" About his 1972 resignation, the author ruefully concludes, "many of the conspiracy cases brought against the party were due to our own mistakes and excessive zeal whenever a police agent was discovered in our ranks." The narrative is intimate and exciting, although Cox seems too close to events: He elides some peoples' identities and makes arcane references to late-1960s radicalism, such as the conflict between the Panthers and black nationalists.

Despite flaws, a valuable primary-source recollection from an incendiary time.

Kirkus Reviews