In phrases and images, Power to the People is the tale of the arguable Black Panther occasion, based 50 years in the past in 1966 via Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton.
The phrases are Seale’s, with contributions through different former celebration contributors; the images, together with many icons of the Nineteen Sixties, are by means of Stephen Shames, who additionally interviewed many different contributors of the party—including Kathleen Cleaver, Elbert “Big guy” Howard, Ericka Huggins, Emory Douglas, and William “Billy X” Jennings—and vitamins his personal images with Panther ephemera and photo art.
Shames, a scholar on the college of California, Berkeley, first encountered and photographed Seale in April 1967 at an anti–Vietnam struggle rally. Seale turned a mentor to Shames, and Shames, in flip, the main relied on photographer to the occasion, remained via Seale’s aspect via his crusade for mayor of Oakland in 1973. Power to the People is a testomony to their hot organization: At its center are Shames’s memorable photographs, observed through Seale’s colourful in-depth observation culled from many hours of conversation.
favourite, reviled, emulated, misunderstood, the Black Panther celebration was once probably the most inventive and influential responses to racism and inequality in American historical past. They endorsed armed self-defense to counter police brutality, and initiated a application of patrolling the police with shotguns—and legislation books.
released at the fiftieth anniversary of the party’s founding, Power to the People is the in-depth chronicle of the one radical political celebration in the United States to make a distinction within the fight for civil rights—the Black Panther Party.