In the early morning hours of December 8, 1969, 300 SWAT team officers initiated a violent battle with a handful of Los Angeles-based members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) that lasted for five hours and went through 5,000 rounds of ammunition. From a tactical standpoint, the Los Angeles Police Department considered the encounter a disaster, but it was a victory for the Panthers and the community that supported them. A key reason for that victory was the actions of a 19-year-old “captain” in the Party: Wayne Pharr. Nine Lives of a Black Panther gives a blow-by-blow account of how the BPP prepared for and survived the massive military-style attack. But it also tells Wayne’s riveting life story. Because of his dedication to the black liberation struggle, Wayne was hunted, beaten, and almost killed by the police in four separate events. The Los Angeles branch was the proving ground for some of the most beloved and colorful characters in Panther lore, including Bunchy Carter, Masai Hewitt, Geronimo “Ji-Jaga” Pratt, and Elaine Brown. Nine Lives of a Black Panther relates Wayne’s triumph over police terror, internal warfare, and personal demons, and illuminates the entire history of one of the most dedicated, dynamic, vilified, and targeted chapters of the BPP. Wayne Pharr was a captain of the Los Angeles branch of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and has traveled throughout the country as a BPP spokesman. He now works as a realtor in Los Angeles.

In the early morning hours of December 8, 1969, three hundred officers of the newly created elite paramilitary tactical unit known as SWAT initiated a violent battle with a handful of Los Angeles&–based members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). Five hours and five thousand rounds of ammunition later, three SWAT team members and three Black Panthers lay wounded. From a tactical standpoint, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) considered the encounter a disaster. For the Panthers and the community that supported them, the shootout symbolized a victory. A key contributor to that victory was the nineteen-year-old rank-and-file member of the BPP Wayne Pharr. Nine Lives of a Black Panther tells Wayne's riveting story of the Los Angeles branch of the BPP and gives a blow-by-blow account of how it prepared for and survived the massive military-style attack. Because of his dedication to the black liberation struggle, Wayne was hunted, beaten, and almost killed by the LAPD in four separate events. Here he reveals how the branch survived attacks such as these, and also why BPP cofounder Huey P. Newton expelled the entire Southern California chapter and deemed it &“too dangerous to remain a part of the national organization.&” The Los Angeles branch was the proving ground for some of the most beloved and colorful characters in Panther lore, including Bunchy Carter, Masai Hewitt, Geronimo &“ji-Jaga&” Pratt, and Elaine Brown. Nine Lives fills in a missing piece of Black Panther history, while making clear why black Los Angeles was home to two of the most devastating riots in the history of urban America. But it also eloquently relates one man's triumph over police terror, internal warfare, and personal demons. It will doubtless soon take its place among the classics of black militant literature.

Secrets of an iconic artifact Florida Book Awards, Bronze Medal for Florida Nonfiction Florida Trust for Historic Preservation Award for Meritorious Achievement in Preservation Communications Excavated from a waterlogged archaeological site on the shores of subtropical Florida by legendary anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing in 1896, the Key Marco Cat has become a modern icon of heritage, history, and local identity. This book takes readers into the deep past of the artifact and the Native American society in which it was created. Austin Bell explores nine periods in the life of the six-inch-high wooden carving, beginning with how it was sculpted with shell and shark-tooth tools and what it may have represented to the ancient Calusa—perhaps a human-panther god. Preserved in the muck for centuries on Marco Island and discovered in pristine condition due to its oxygen-free environment, the Cat has since traveled more than 12,000 miles and has been viewed by millions of people. It is one of the Smithsonian Institution’s most irreplaceable items. In this fascinating account, Bell traces the clues to the Cat’s mysterious origins that have emerged in its later lives. Captivating readers with the miracle and beauty of this rare example of pre-Columbian art, Bell marvels at how an object originally understood to hold cosmological power has indeed transformed the people and places around it. The Nine Lives of Florida’s Famous Key Marco Cat is the story of a timeless masterpiece of staggering simplicity that has prevailed over impossibly long odds.

The hidden history of the haunted and beloved city of New Orleans, told through the intersecting lives of nine remarkable characters. “Nine Lives is stunning work. Dan Baum has immersed himself in New Orleans, the most fascinating city in the United States, and illuminated it in a way that is as innovative as Tom Wolfe on hot rods and Truman Capote on a pair of murderers. Full of stylistic brilliance and deep insight and an overriding compassion, Nine Lives is an instant classic of creative nonfiction.” —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain Nine Lives is a multivoiced biography of a dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city, told through the lives of night unforgettable characters and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed New Orleans in the 1960s, and Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. Dan Baum brings the kaleidoscopic portrait to life, showing us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved. BONUS: This edition contains a Nine Lives discussion guide.

In his youth Mumia Abu-Jamal helped found the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther Party, wrote for the national newspaper, and began his life-long work of exposing the violence of the state as it manifests in entrenched poverty, endemic racism, and unending police brutality and celebrating a people's unending quest for freedom. In We Want Freedom, Mumia combines personal experience with extensive research to provide a compelling history of the Black Panther Party--what it was, where it came from, and what rose from its ashes. Mumia also pays special attention to the U.S. government's disruption of the organization through COINTELPRO and similar operations. While Abu-Jamal is a prolific writer and probably the world's most famous political prisoner, this book is unlike any of Mumia's previous works. In We Want Freedom, Abu-Jamal applies his sharp critical faculties to an examination of one of the U.S.'s most revolutionary and most misrepresented groups. A subject previously explored by various historians and forever ripe for "insider" accounts, the Black Panther Party has not yet been addressed by a writer with the well-earned international acclaim of Abu-Jamal, nor with his unique combination of a powerful, even poetic, voice and an unsparing critical gaze. Abu-Jamal is able to make his own Black Panther Party days come alive as well as help situate the organization within its historical context, a context that included both great revolutionary fervor and hope, and great repression. In this era, when the US PATRIOT Act dismantles some of the same rights and freedoms violated by the FBI in their attack on the Black Panther Party, the story of how the Party grew and matured while combating such invasions is a welcome and essential lesson.

Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade's political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power-where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation-and home to the Chicano walkouts and Moratorium, as well as birthplace of 'Asian America' as a political identity, base of the antiwar movement, and of course, centre of California counterculture. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research, scores of interviews with principal figures of the 1960s movements, and personal histories (both Davis and Wiener are native Los Angelenos). Following on from Davis's award-winning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a fascinating historical corrective, delivered in scintillating and fiercely elegant prose.

This compact volume offers a compelling introduction to a group once deemed the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States, the Black Panther Party. In a time when African Americans' widespread tactic of direct, nonviolent protest was seen as the most effective way to fight for racial justice, the Black Panthers' confrontational style and critiques of local law enforcement throughout the nation defied both civil rights orthodoxy and white authority. The Black Panther Party: A Guide to an American Subculture situates the Black Panther Party within the shifting political terrain of the African American freedom struggle of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In an era when African Americans were assumed to have secured their basic constitutional rights, the Black Panther Party stood firm to remind black people and the nation that despite the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, social, economic, and political equality had not been achieved for large segments of African Americans, and that more needed to be done locally and nationally. Organized geographically, the book examines Black Panther Party chapters and affiliates throughout the United States. It covers the Panthers' most important developments and challenges, paying particular attention to local realities as they varied throughout the nation—from Oakland, California to New Haven, Connecticut.