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InOut of Oakland, Sean L. Malloy explores the evolving internationalism of the Black Panther Party (BPP); the continuing exile of former members, including Assata Shakur, in Cuba is testament to the lasting nature of the international bonds that were forged during the party's heyday. Founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the BPP began with no more than a dozen members. Focused on local issues, most notably police brutality, the Panthers patrolled their West Oakland neighborhood armed with shotguns and law books. Within a few years, the BPP had expanded its operations into a global confrontation with what Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver dubbed \"the international pig power structure.\" p>Malloy traces the shifting intersections between the black freedom struggle in the United States, Third World anticolonialism, and the Cold War. By the early 1970s, the Panthers had chapters across the United States as well as an international section headquartered in Algeria and support groups and emulators as far afield as England, India, New Zealand, Israel, and Sweden. The international section served as an official embassy for the BPP and a beacon for American revolutionaries abroad, attracting figures ranging from Black Power skyjackers to fugitive LSD guru Timothy Leary. Engaging directly with the expanding Cold War, BPP representatives cultivated alliances with the governments of Cuba, North Korea, China, North Vietnam, and the People's Republic of the Congo as well as European and Japanese militant groups and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In an epilogue, Malloy directly links the legacy of the BPP to contemporary questions raised by the Black Lives Matter movement.

The article offers an analysis of the development of concepts received from the Marxist tradition by leading figures in the Black Panther Party, especially Huey Newton. It uses the revival of the narrative figure of the Black Messiah in recent American historical films on the Civil Rights-Black Power era as an opportunity to highlight the limitations of the depictions of Black radicalism in contemporary popular culture and the oversimplified idea of Black political struggle that they tend to foster. Subsequently, it turns to concepts of the lumpenproletariat, the vanguard, and Marxist internationalism and the ways in which they were reinterpreted by the Black Panthers. Taken into account are aspects of the historical and social context of this reinterpretation, such as the demographic changes in urban Black communities, the violent state repression of the party, and the negative consequences of the choices leaders of the party made to further their agenda, such as public displays of virile masculinity or the celebration of the criminal as proto-revolutionary.

This article examines the 1967–1971 political prisoner solidarity movement for Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton as a case study of multiracial radical alliances in the San Francisco Bay Area. In contrast to the predominant trope of “unlikely allies,” I argue that the activists examined in this article who formed alliances with Newton and the Panthers were predisposed to collaborative activism through their common anti-imperialist orientation, expressed as anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti–U.S. military interventionism. In addition, I show that earlier alliances laid the foundation for alliances with later movements and organizations, creating what I term “genealogies of alliance” within the Free Huey Movement that demonstrate a persistent desire for collaborative activism throughout this era. This article prompts a reconsideration of Sixties radicalism; in contrast to scholarly and popular interpretations that focus on activists’ sectarianism and divisiveness, the Free Huey Movement illuminates how activists theorized and endeavored to work toward the collective liberation of all people.

Founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale as a grassroots organization, the Black Panther Party achieved national and international prominence through their local activities and global ideas. By employing the concepts of spaces of dependency and spaces of engagement, I detail the spatial transformations associated with the evolving political thought of the Black Panther Party. I chart how the four \"moments\" of the Black Panther Party's doctrine (black nationalism, revolutionary nationalism, revolutionary internationalism, and intercommunalism) are geographically contingent, and argue that these four moments demonstrate, both ideologically and materially, how space matters within the political thought of black radical intellectuals. Despite considerable work within geography in articulating alternative conceptions of race and racism, serious lacunae remain. The concepts associated with black separatism, black radical thought, and, crucially, the Black Power Movement have received minimal attention in the geographic literature. And yet fundamental geographic concepts, including territoriality and scalar politics, are key components of black separatism and black power. I argue that a case study of the Black Panther Party provides insights into the fundamental questions of social justice and public space.

Throughout the 1970s Arab (Mizrahi) Jews built a social movement within Israel to confront their racial exclusion from the promises of Israeli citizenship. The movement crystalized in the formation of the Israeli Black Panther Party, a group that formed solidarity with the U.S. Black Panther Party as well as with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In this essay I examine the history of the Israeli Black Panthers and identify the global conjunctures that enabled the movement. Of particular focus is the solidarity formed between the U.S. Black freedom movement and the PLO’s “global offensive.” In addition to describing the linked movements of the Black Panthers and the PLO, I consider what this example of internationalism reveals about the possibilities of Diasporic Jewish identities and politics.

This groundbreaking volume examines the transnational dimensions of Black Power - how Black Power thinkers and activists drew on foreign movements and vice versa how individuals and groups in other parts of the world interpreted 'Black Power,' from African liberation movements to anti-caste agitation in India to indigenous protests in New Zealand.

This chapter demonstrates how the growth of the Black Panther Party's (BPP) engagement with the world outside the United States became messy and difficult to categorize by the start of the 1970s. Formal state-level contacts rooted in Cold War geopolitics coexisted uneasily with informal transnational efforts that sought to transcend the nation-state altogether. These divergent directions were on full display in the pages of the Black Panther, where the party's earthy anticolonial vernacular brushed up against stilted propaganda proclamations reprinted from Pyongyang and Beijing and where discussions of guerrilla warfare tactics shared space with a celebration of feeding schoolchildren and aiding the elderly. But while it is easy to find fault with the BPP's cafeteria-style internationalism, the diverse nature of the party's foreign connections was not necessarily a flaw.

This chapter illustrates how the April 6 action and the ensuing fallout helped to inadvertently launch a new phase in the Black Panther Party's (BPP) internationalism, while also highlighted emerging divisions within the party. As Eldridge Cleaver and his allies embraced guerrilla warfare, Cold War-inspired alliances with foreign governments, and an increasingly doctrinaire Marxism–Leninism, rejected both state-level diplomacy and what David Hilliard dubbed “an orgy of wishful adventuristic militarism” in favor of local community service programs supplemented by informal transnational solidarity networks. Questions over the role of anticolonial violence and the nature of the party's international engagements, however, fed growing intra-party tensions that left the Panthers vulnerable to both government repression and changes in the larger Cold War landscape.

Recent scholarship has combined analytical frameworks from diplomatic and social history to explore the complex relationship between the black freedom struggle in the United States and such events as the Bandung Conference, African decolonization, resurgent pan-Africanism, and guerrilla movements in the Third World.¹ Most importantly, this new literature has revealed the impact on radical black protest of the Cold War, “one of the ‘hottest’ moments in world history,” in the words of Robin D. G. Kelley.² On the eve of the Cold War, African Americans all across the political spectrum looked abroad for ideological inspiration, cultural affirmation, and political allies.³