Winner of the American Book Award (2014) In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the U.S., the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism. In the face of intense repression, the Party flourished, becoming the center of a revolutionary movement with offices in 68 U.S. cities and powerful allies around the world. Black against Empire is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. The authors analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence. Bold, engrossing, and richly detailed, this book cuts through the mythology and obfuscation, revealing the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement, and its disastrous unraveling. Informed by twelve years of meticulous archival research, as well as familiarity with most of the former Party leadership and many rank-and-file members, this book is the definitive history of one of the greatest challenges ever posed to American state power. "An account that should be called, above everything else, 'definitive'." -- Bookforum "Vivid renderings of scene ... make comprehensible both the movement and the times." -- Publishers Weekly STARRED REVIEW " Black against Empire is a masterful work...Easily the most impressive, sweeping, and substantive scholarly history of the Black Panther Party." -- Journal of American History "A comprehensive history." -- New Yorker "Unique...in the scope and depth of its scholarship." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review "The first comprehensive history of the party." -- London Review of Books "This is the definitive history of one of the great revolutionary organizations in the history of this country.... Let us learn deep democratic lessons and strong anti-imperial conclusions from this magisterial book!" --Cornel West, Princeton "This is the book we've all been waiting for: the first complete history of the Black Panther Party, devoid of the hype, the nonsense, the one-dimensional heroes and villains, the myths, or the tunnel vision that has limited scholarly and popular treatments across the ideological spectrum. Bloom and Martin's riveting, nuanced, and highly original account revises our understanding of the party's size, scope, ideology, and political complexity, and offers the most compelling explanations for its ebbs and flows and ultimate demise. Moreover, they reveal with spectacular clarity that the Party's primary target was not just police brutality or urban poverty or white supremacy but U.S. Empire in all of its manifestations." --Robin D. G. Kelley, UCLA "Bloom and Martin bring to light an important chapter in American history. They carefully mine the archival data to give us an account of the rise of the Black Panther Party, of its successes and the shoals of American politics on which it fractured. In the process they give full credit to the strategic agency of the remarkable revolutionaries at the center of the story." --Frances Fox Piven, President, American Sociological Association "Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., have written the first comprehensive political history of the Black Panther Party. They present an unvarnished, judicious treatment of a much revered, much maligned, and widely misunderstood revolutionary organization leading the charge for 'Black Power' in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They provide persuasive answers to questions about the Party's rise and fall that others have failed to fully address. All other scholars will henceforth have to grapple with their substantial findings. General readers will find it compelling too." --Tera Hunter, Princeton "In a stunning historical account, Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin map the complex trajectory of the ideology and practice of the Black Panther Party. Going beyond merely chronicling 'what happened,' the authors situate the rise and fall of the Panthers within the prevailing, and constantly shifting, political climate at home and abroad. Much has been written about the Party, but Black against Empire is the definitive history of the Panthers--one that helps us rethink the very meaning of a revolutionary movement." --Michael Omi, Berkeley "As important as the Black Panthers were to the evolution of black power, the African American freedom struggle, and, indeed, the sixties as a whole, scholarship on the group has been surprisingly thin and all too often polemical. Certainly no definitive scholarly account o