"The Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to internal security of the country."
-- FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in a late 1960's internal memo
With a click of the mouse, you can retrieve images of the Black Panther Party from the late 1960s -- the images that were broadcast into our suburban living rooms when Holling Hoodhood (from THE WEDNESDAY WARS) and I were junior high school students on Long Island. They were pretty unsettling images -- serious-faced black guys with those black berets and shotguns -- at least if, like Holling and me in the spring of 1968, you were thirteen-year-old suburban white kids living a million miles away from those places where policemen far too often had people of color feeling totally unsafe in America.
"The cops took turns striking Bucky with their nightsticks, fists, and feet. The radio in the background seemed to sing louder, the cheerful pop tune warring with the sick thwack of baton blows against skin.
"The tall cop bent close to Bucky, his square nose practically touching Bucky's cheek, and said something. Bucky reacted sharply, jerking backward, his fists stretched out in front of him. The cop laughed and hammered Bucky's arms with his baton.
"The music cut suddenly and the silence suffocated the street. The air grew thick, hard to breathe without choking. Only the hum of cars on nearby streets disturbed the still air. The stocky cop lifted the radio from his belt and spoke into it.
"Maxie moved closer to me. This couldn't be happening right in front of us, especially not to Bucky. It went on forever. Finally the tall cop brought his nightstick down hard against Bucky's temple. The blow connected, making a loud crack. Maxie turned her face into my shoulder. I slid my arm over Maxie's back, hugging her closer."
In the spring of 1968 in Chicago, Sam is thirteen. He is the son of black Civil Rights activist Roland Childs, a confidante of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Like Dr. King, Mr. Childs is an uncompromising advocate and practitioner of nonviolence.
Sam and his older brother Steven (Stick) have grown up in the Movement. But lately, Stick, a voracious reader, has been surreptitiously studying the books and magazines being shared by his friends who are becoming involved with the Black Panthers.
When Sam and Stick encounter white thugs armed with bats, bottles, and sticks who are beating participants at the edge of the crowd at one of Father's protests, Stick gets into a fight and is bashed in the head with a broken bottle while trying to protect an elderly woman who is being attacked. The brothers split the scene with the approach of cops (They know which color will get arrested no matter who caused the trouble.) and head to the nearest hospital to get Stick's forehead sewn up.
To observe the treatment of the brothers at that Chicago hospital is to begin to understand what life was still like for blacks dealing with white America in 1968. For black kids like Sam and Stick, you could be in danger, or at least be treated inhumanely, at any given moment. For some like their close friend Bucky -- who had done absolutely nothing wrong -- the policemen who are supposed to be protecting you can so arbitrarily hurt you or kill you.
"Violence begets violence; hate begets hate; and toughness begets toughness. It is all a descending spiral, and the end is destruction -- for everyone." -- Dr. King, 1958
I have to admit that early on in reading THE ROCK AND THE RIVER, as I began to see the path Stick is embarking upon, I got prepared to tell stories of my high school friend Jamie Dunn who so greatly affected me back then with his advocacy and modeling of nonviolence. But my expectations of what was to come in THE ROCK AND THE RIVER had far too much to do with my simplistic perceptions dating back forty years of what the Black Panther Party was all about.
In the course of Sam Childs' coming of age story, amidst the American history I thought I knew so well, author Kekla Magoon has radically altered my understanding of the Black Panther Party. In her debut novel, Magoon, who studied history as an undergraduate, does an exceptional job of integrating many sides of very complex racial and political issues into this tense tale of an adolescent who has grown up in the Civil Rights Movement.
"Maybe now I could return to Father's world, bring all of myself back to the place I'd started from. Maybe I could learn to ignore the gnawing in the pit of my stomach telling me it wasn't enough."
There are powerful metaphors to be found in the huge building block structure that the brothers have been constructing for years in the room they share -- or shared until Stick was no longer willing or able to abide by Father's orders. Sam finds himself stuck between Father and Stick who are as similar in their uncompromising natures as they are seemingly different in their beliefs of what is the right thing to do. While engaging in an innocent relationship with his schoolmate Maxie, he has to deal on a daily basis with life and death issues.
Sam must make critical decisions on whether or not -- and if so, how -- to get involved. Will he be the rock or the river? Like me, he must come to a true understanding of the philosophy that his father lives by and what the Black Panthers and brotherhood are really all about.
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