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Jakobi Williams

From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture) Paperback – Illustrated, February 1, 2015

by Jakobi Williams (Author)

26 ratings

Part of: The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture (59 Books)

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In this comprehensive history of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party (ILBPP), Chicago native Jakobi Williams demonstrates that the city's Black Power movement was both a response to and an extension of the city's civil rights movement. Williams focuses on the life and violent death of Fred Hampton, a charismatic leader who served as president of the NAACP Youth Council and continued to pursue a civil rights agenda when he became chairman of the revolutionary Chicago-based Black Panther Party. Framing the story of Hampton and the ILBPP as a social and political history and using, for the first time, sealed secret police files in Chicago and interviews conducted with often reticent former members of the ILBPP, Williams explores how Hampton helped develop racial coalitions between the ILBPP and other local activists and organizations. Williams also recounts the history of the original Rainbow Coalition, created in response to Richard J. Daley's Democratic machine, to show how the Panthers worked to create an antiracist, anticlass coalition to fight urban renewal, political corruption, and police brutality.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University of North Carolina Press
Publication date

February 1, 2015
Dimensions

6.13 x 0.76 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

1469622106
ISBN-13

978-1469622101
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--Choice

A welcome addition. . . to the substantive literature on the history of the Black Panther Party and on the contested legacies of the civil rights and Black Power movements in the United States.--H-1960s

A fascinating work that everyone interested in the Black Panther party or racism in Chicago should read.--Journal of American History

A vital historical intervention in African American history, urban and local histories, and Black Power studies. . . . A mandatory addition to the bookshelves of students and scholars.--History: Reviews of New Books

A first-rate piece of scholarship. Anyone interested in social history, urban history, or the history of Chicago must read this work of history.--Journal of Illinois History

A book filled with passion and conviction. . . . This new book should be read by anyone interested in racism, civil rights, and public life in Chicago and the broader Midwest.--Middle West Review

Deserves a wide audience." --Michigan Historical Review

A major contribution to the literature and the definitive work on the Black Panther Party in the city of Chicago." --Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

He paints a clear and engaging portrait of an organization that successfully blended elements of civil rights strategy and direct individual experience with the aims and possibilities of a new era of black radical resistance.--American Quarterly

Review

Williams has produced an engrossing narrative of grassroots black urban politics during the era following the passage of landmark civil rights reforms. His account will compel subsequent historians to avoid simplistic generalizations distinguishing between the civil rights era and the black power era.--Clayborne Carson, Stanford University

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of North Carolina Press; Illustrated edition (February 1, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1469622106
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1469622101
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 0.76 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #914,600 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #711 in Political Advocacy Books
- #1,468 in Sociology of Urban Areas
- #1,732 in Human Rights (Books)

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Prepare to be educated, inspired, heartbroken and empowered

Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2018

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Amazing book how Dr. Williams elaborately and expertly explains the rise and demise of the Illinois Chapte of The BPP. Inspired from Malcolm X, respectfully known as El Hajj Malikk El Shabazz’s speech “Ballot Or The Bullet”, the historian provides extensive evidence to show how the fed government and local law enforcement infiltrated, disenfranchised, and murdered in cold blood one of the arguably most impactful chapters of the Black Panther Party. Williams elaborates on the origins and history of the federal governments organized efforts to dismantle any black or oppressed peoples movements( COINTELPRO). This book gave me s greater appreciation and understanding of the Black Panthers leading to me to believe they had the most solid and effective revolutionary plan which made the a huge threat to the sustenance of white supremacy. I could write an essay here but.. just buy the book. And if you’re reading it for class, really read it. He gives a lot of reading material but it is so worth it. Prioritize this book and The New Jim Crow.

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Michael D. McCarty

Excellant insight

Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2016

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An excellent insight into the dynamics of Fred Hampton's leadership of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party which was headquartered in Chicago.

One person found this helpful

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Diana Kitching

great read

Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2013

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Every black male young and old should read and learn the truth about the black panthers and read about the author

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Komozi Woodard

The Bullet to the Ballot by Jakobi Williams is a precious gem on Black Liberation

Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2013

The Bullet to the Ballot by Jakobi Williams

Jakobi Williams has presented a precious gem to Black Power Studies. One of the most heralded personalities in Black Panther lore is Fred Hampton; however, we have virtually no scholarly studies published on Fred Hampton and the history of the Illinois Black Panther Party. Thus, this new volume will fill an enormous gap in the scholarship on the Civil Rights-Black Power era. For more than a decade, experts have known of the unpublished dissertation of Jon Rice on the Chicago Panthers; however, Rice is not interested in turning that into a published book, providing us with only one chapter in the anthology, Freedom North.
If the story of the origins of the Black Panther Party in Oakland has fascinated students for decades, then the story of the Black Panther Party in Chicago has remained a major mystery. There have always been hints that Fred Hampton and the Illinois Black Panther Party represented the best possible hope for a future as the BPP found itself in profound crisis. However, this new volume demonstrates that possibility was just the tip of the iceberg.

Here we have the grossly neglected and exciting story of young people, beginning in high school, fighting for civil rights and the desegregation of public schools, recreation areas and specifically swimming pools. In other words, this is the big story of the grassroots struggle for justice in the Jim Crow North.
A youth movement at the grassroots in Chicago and its suburbs, starting in its newly desegregated high schools and extending into its local colleges and universities, developed in the Civil Rights movement with Dr. King and local leaders of the Chicago Freedom Movement; and after those efforts to desegregate housing, employment and recreation, that movement developed into new heights. The Illinois Black Panther Party became the political vehicle for that student movement, particularly for high school students who found themselves physically and intellectually attacked on a daily basis. This volume shows that those young people searched for vehicles of expression before the arrival of the Black Panther Party.

One of those young people was Fred Hampton who developed himself into a leader by representing the concerns of high school students in school and in the community, including the lack of desegregated recreational, cultural and intellectual spaces. Hampton stood out as a leader in everyday life, from his work as a patrol boy and Boy Scout in grammar school to his sports activities. Thus, one of the leaders of the local NAACP selected him to organize the youth branch of that civil rights organization. Because of his instinct for the social and cultural needs of young people, Hampton was able to recruit hundreds of new members in the first year.
As a leader in the NAACP Hampton developed and spread a sense of the national Civil Rights struggle, including the marches and demonstrations not only in Chicago movement but also in the Mississippi movement. And he involved his members in drives supporting the Mississippi movement. Keeping abreast of those developments in the Black Revolt, he found out about the rise of the Black Power movement, including the Black Panthers in Lowndes County, Alabama and those in Oakland, California.

Long before there was a Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, the Chicago black student movement was concerned with day to day issues of self-defense both during and after school. White students outnumbered black students and school fights triggered race riots.
In addition to concerns about the lack of school and police protection against white mobs and problems of self-defense, students were concerned with the lack of diversity in the curriculum. Those issues galvanized black students from high school to college as they began to propose black history, black teachers and black studies courses.

The black student movement was involved in the Chicago Freedom Movement and helped develop its agenda. Outside of school there were street organizations, including community groups, social clubs and gangs. And some of those groups, particularly the Young Lords were in a process of self-transformation before they knew of Black Panthers. Yet the model of the Black Panthers in terms of politics, methodology and social programs inspired the imaginative power of many of the youth groups to realize the power they had to develop solutions to their own problems.

In addition to school issues, a host of young people were concerned about the urban renewal programs that threatened their daily lives with massive evictions. The Black Panther Party offered them a perspective that helped them change their sense of identity as young people from worthless to priceless. And in line with that they developed a number of programs for children that were hungry and for neighbors that were sick and needy. That grassroots political work gave young people a new sense of themselves and the future possibilities of their neighborhoods.

For the first time, we have the important and compelling story of Fred Hampton's proposal for a Rainbow Coalition and Bob Lee's genius at organizing that vision into a political reality. This history introduces us to the ensemble of grassroots leadership that flowered around Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers. And it shows us very concretely how it spread from group to group and from neighborhood to neighborhood: Black Panthers, Young Lords, Young Patriots, Rising Up Angry, Student for a Democratic Society and so forth. We see the story high school by high school and college by college without abstraction or mystification. Indeed, this study is the northern answer to the pioneering work of Charles Payne's examination of the organizing tradition in the Mississippi Movement.

This book is at the high level of analysis that marks pioneering work like that of Donna Murch in the Bay Area, Matthew Countryman in Philadelphia as well as the best of the Southern studies (Payne, Dittmer, Jeffries, etc) that laid the foundation for this branch of scholarship. Above all, this book fleshes out a northern organizing tradition that flowered in the Civil Rights-Black Power era.

There is also plenty of evidence here to contradict the cultural poverty arguments that make the successful organizational, political and institutional developments demonstrated here "unthinkable" in most American textbooks.

In terms of this historiography, the book engages the pivotal and heated controversies about the origins, sources and anatomy of the Black Power movement by telling the distinctive and revealing story of Fred Hampton and the Illinois Black Panther Party. First, if some scholars have conceived a "Chinese Wall" between the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement, then Jakobi Williams demonstrates that the boundaries between those two were so porous and messy that only a careful analysis of the local movement would discern the thousands of threads that bound the two together.

To switch metaphors, Williams suggests that the Black Revolt was an epic upsurge that mounted into successive waves. Thus, the Black Panther Party had its sources inside the Chicago Freedom Movement, particularly in the black student movement in the high schools and local colleges. Furthermore, the Black Panther Party took over the unfinished agenda of the Chicago Freedom Movement: desegregation of public schools, desegregation of youth recreation, horrifying housing conditions, high unemployment, persistent poverty, antiquated school curriculum, malnourished school children and so forth.

The pivotal but neglected group in this drama was the black student movement: "Black Chicago youth were at the forefront of the city's civil rights struggle in the late 1960s." If high school student activism has been largely ignored in this scholarship, this book may mark the dramatic turning point after which it can no longer be overlooked. The students attending the high schools and community colleges have a very different class composition that the traditional student movements we've examined in the past. These are the children of working class and impoverished African Americans, Latinos and whites.

And I have seen no better study of the nuances in the white working class than this. Rather than lump all the poor whites together, this books shows us the struggle that splits those young people into at least three camps: those in desegregated schools that wanted to get along with their new black classmates, those who joined hate groups to attack black students, and those who saw enough commonality in social class and aspirations to join with them in the Rainbow Coalition.

I could go on and on about the virtues of this book; but as you can see there are many important reasons to study this epic tale of black liberation in the Jim Crow North.

Komozi Woodard
Esther Raushenbush Professor
History, Public Policy and Africana Studies
Sarah Lawrence College
Bronxville, New York

12 people found this helpful

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Pen Name

best book on Chicago Panthers

Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2013

Great history of Chicago Panthers and original rain coalition. Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson, David Axelrod, and Barack Obama all owe a debt to Fred Hampton and the Chicago Black Panthers.

6 people found this helpful

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Paul Gerlach

Good Chicago Black Panther History

Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2021

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Good Chicago Black Panther History

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