Nine Lives of a Black Panther (BOOK REVIEW)
Nine Lives of a Black Panther:
A Story of Survival
by Wayne Pharr
Chicago
Review Press
Hardcover, $26.95
320 pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 978-1-61374-916-6
Book
Review by Kam Williams
“In the early morning hours of December 8, 1969, 300 officers
of the newly-created, elite paramilitary unit known as SWAT initiated a violent
battle with a handful of Los Angeles-based members of the Black Panther Party
[BPP]… 5 hours and 5,000 rounds of ammunition later, 3 SWAT team members and 3
Panthers lay wounded.
The LAPD considered the encounter a disaster. For the
Panthers and community that supported them, the shootout symbolized a victory.
A key contributor to that victory was 19 year-old Wayne Pharr. [This book] tells
Wayne’s riveting story of the L.A. branch of the BPP, and gives a
blow-by-blow account of how it prepared for and survived the massive,
military-style attack.”
--
Excerpted from the dust jacket
The Declaration of
Independence states that “All men are
created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,”
namely, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The sacrosanct document
further stipulates that when people are denied those rights by the government,
“it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government.”
The
Black Panther Party [BPP] was founded out of a frustration felt by folks being
denied a fair shot at the American Dream due to segregation and racial
discrimination. The revolutionary organization took to heart the Declaration’s
clauses asserting a right to rebel in the face of oppression.
After
the assassination of Martin Luther King, the fledgling BPP exploded in popularity
among the no longer patient black youth of the late Sixties. After all, that
generation had come of age watching news reports featuring wave after wave of non-violent
martyrs being beaten, hosed and even lynched merely for lobbying to vote or eat
at a lunch counter.
Among
those attracted to the Party’s socialist philosophy was Wayne Pharr, a kid from
Berkeley, California
who volunteered his time at the L.A. chapter’s
understaffed Watts office before becoming a
card-carrying member. However, it wasn’t long thereafter that he landed in a
life-and-death situation.
For,
the establishment felt very threatened when Black Panthers started not only
opening offices in cities all across the country, but decided to exercise their
2nd Amendment rights in the face of police brutality by publicly
brandishing guns. So, the FBI targeted the BPP through COINTELPRO, a covert
program design to destroy leftist groups by any means necessary.
And
while still in his teens, Wayne
ended up trapped inside Panther headquarters during a 5-hour gun battle with
the police. He was arrested and charged with a host of offenses, but basically beat
the rap, thanks to stellar representation by the late Johnnie “If the gloves
don’t fit, you must acquit” Cochran.
In
Nine Lives of a Black Panther: A Story of Survival, Wayne
revisits that incident and the rest of the BPP’s turbulent years, a time when
he had intimate interactions with such celebrated Party leaders as Huey Newton,
Eldridge Cleaver, Geronimo Pratt, Bunchy Carter and Elaine Brown. The
before-and-after memoir also recounts the author’s childhood as well as what
his life was like in the wake of the assorted struggles which led to the total collapse
of the beleaguered organization.
A riveting, warts-and-all
retrospective affording an informative inside look at the meteoric rise and
equally-fast demise of an iconoclastic African-American movement with a bull’s
eye on its back, literally and figuratively.
To order a copy of Nine Lives of a Black Panther, visit:
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