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The Black Panther Party's Promise to the People
by Kekla Magoon
With passion and precision, Kekla Magoon relays an essential account of the Black Panthers - as militant revolutionaries and as human rights advocates working to defend and protect their community.
In this comprehensive, inspiring, and all-too-relevant history of the Black Panther Party, Kekla Magoon introduces readers to the Panthers' community activism, grounded in the concept of self-defense, which taught Black Americans how to protect and support themselves in a country that treated them like second-class citizens. For too long the Panthers' story has been a footnote to the civil rights movement rather than what it was: a revolutionary socialist movement that drew thousands of members—mostly women—and became the target of one of the most sustained repression efforts ever made by the U.S. government against its own citizens.
Revolution in Our Time puts the Panthers in the proper context of Black American history, from the first arrival of enslaved people to the Black Lives Matter movement of today. Kekla Magoon's eye-opening work invites a new generation of readers grappling with injustices in the United States to learn from the Panthers' history and courage, inspiring them to take their own place in the ongoing fight for justice.
"This comprehensive, meticulously researched volume helps readers understand the Panthers within the spectrum of Black resistance. The narrative is cinematic in its descriptions of the personalities and incidents that make up the party's history while presenting a throughline to the anti-racist activism of today....highly readable and not-to-be-missed." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"In this powerful history, Magoon presents an incisive, in-depth study of the Black Panther Party...Photographs, newspaper clippings, and Black Panther art are featured throughout, providing visual breaks that inform while contributing to a pace that is digestible for young readers." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Exceedingly well researched, illustrated, and sourced...This rounded accounting of a pivotal but often-overlooked time in U.S. history should be widely read." - Booklist (starred review)
"Magoon has produced a comprehensive and all-encompassing account of the group...Her history of the Black Panther Party is meticulously detailed...invaluable for both individual and classroom reading." - The Horn Book (starred review)
"Kekla Magoon is a national treasure, and Revolution in Our Time passionately and meticulously details a critical truth that is both feared and necessary in the classroom." - Rita Williams-Garcia, award-winning author of A Sitting in St. James
This information about Revolution in Our Time was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kekla Magoon's young adult novel The Rock and the River, which won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award, was the first mainstream novel for young people to feature the Black Panther Party. She is the Margaret A. Edwards Award-winning author of more than a dozen books for young readers, including Fire in the Streets and How It Went Down. She is also the coauthor, with Ilyasah Shabazz, of X: A Novel, which was long-listed for the National Book Award and received an NAACP Image Award and a Coretta Scott King Honor. Kekla Magoon grew up in Indiana and now lives in Vermont, where she serves on the faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
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