H. Rap Brown

The historiography of the Black Panthers at first was very critical of them. This was largely written by middle class people who valorized the mainline civil rights movement and thought the Panthers ruined it all. That was too simplistic. That was followed by a generation of scholars who valorized the Panthers as heroes. That required ignoring a lot of sketchy things and was equally problematic. While I am not currently up to date on all the most recent scholarship, it seems to me that a better balance has been struck in books over the last half-decade or so. And balance is where we need to reside because as the death of Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who you know as H. Rap Brown, shows, these were deeply complex people who were coming out of terrible situations at a moment when anti-colonial violence was highly valorized and which could give excuse for too much violence for any number of reasons. He lived a life, that’s for sure.