Black Power on the Move

Black Power on the Move Synopsis

Though born in the American South in the mid-1960s, the Black Panther Party went global in the years between 1967 and 1972, capturing the imagination of people of color across the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. In Black Power on the Move, Anne-Marie Angelo tells the story of two of the most powerful Black Panther movements outside the United States, showing how a distinctively American movement gave a name to a new, assertive international politics in the U.K. and Israel. West Indians, West Africans, and South Asians established the British Black Panther Movement in London in 1967. In Jerusalem, migrants from countries such as Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, and Egypt founded the Israeli Black Panther Party in 1971. The Black Panther framework enabled these groups to understand their everyday experiences of police harassment, unemployment, and poor housing as symptoms of larger structural problems and to envision community programs that might lead to a new social order. Highlighting the common grassroots strategies these parties shared, Angelo reveals how people of color all around the world drew from American narratives about race in order to make sense of their own struggles abroad.