Nine Lives of a Black Panther: A Story of Survival

Documentaries often portray the 1960s in America as a turbulent time marked by racial progress, but this was not obvious to a number of young blacks who, exposed to dire poverty and constant police harassment, grew to despise Martin Luther King’s advocacy of nonviolence. The result was the Black Power movement whose most pugnacious element was the Black Panthers. Their belligerence and revolutionary rhetoric goaded police and FBI to wildly paranoid measures that, aided by vicious internal conflicts, reduced the Panthers to a historical footnote by the 1970s. Pharr served in the Los Angeles branch during the late 1960s, participating in the notorious 1969 siege and shoot-out that marked the movement’s high point. After serving a jail term, Pharr pulled his life together and became a prosperous realtor. He does not regret his Panther service, concluding with several recent, well-publicized incidents as evidence that the black community still needs organized, armed self-defense. His appealing memoir makes few concessions to modern sensibilities (all police are “pigs”) or feminism (women’s physical attributes are carefully noted), but it’s a Technicolor portrait, warts and all, of a famous offshoot of the black struggle for equality. (July)