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A review by kevin_shepherd
Black Panther in Exile: The Pete O'Neal Story by Paul J. Magnarella
4.0
“…the Black Panther party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” -J. Edgar Hoover, 1969
As a child of the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party was for me the personification of African American rebellion. From my little all-white town in Oklahoma the BPP seemed scary and menacing. There they were on the nightly news with their berets and their afros and their raised fists—bold men like Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and Stokely Carmichael and Fred Hampton. I certainly had the misconception that Richard Nixon and his minions wanted most Americans to have—that the Panthers were criminals.
My adult interest in the BPP really took off when I read Susie Day’s The Brother You Choose (2020). Yes, the Panthers were topics of interest in some of my other reads on black history but not until that book were they really center stage in my consciousness. Day brought the era into sharper focus and her subjects, Eddie Conway & Paul Coates (both ex-Panthers), gave me a much needed insider’s perspective.
Black Panther in Exile is the biography of former BPP Chairman Pete O'Neal, written by Pete's long time attorney Paul J. Magnarella. Any way you slice it Pete O’Neal got shafted. He got shafted by a racist administration, he got shafted by a prejudiced bureaucracy, and (according to compelling evidence laid out here by his attorney) he got shafted by an incompetent judiciary. It’s not that Pete O’Neal was a model citizen but it’s a safe bet that were he a white man he’d be playing shuffleboard in Kansas City right now instead of being an exiled expatriate in Tanzania.
“We, the Black Panther Party, see ourselves as a nation within a nation, but not for any racist reasons. We see it as a necessity for us to progress as human beings and live on the face of this earth along with other people. We do not fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity.” -Bobby Seale
Magnarella writes well but the last third of his book bogs down in ‘lawyer-speak.’ I’m not convinced readers like me need to know what subsection of what paragraph of what case number of what precedent was violated in the writ for redress of whatever. A bit less legalese would have made it more comprehensible.
As a child of the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party was for me the personification of African American rebellion. From my little all-white town in Oklahoma the BPP seemed scary and menacing. There they were on the nightly news with their berets and their afros and their raised fists—bold men like Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and Stokely Carmichael and Fred Hampton. I certainly had the misconception that Richard Nixon and his minions wanted most Americans to have—that the Panthers were criminals.
My adult interest in the BPP really took off when I read Susie Day’s The Brother You Choose (2020). Yes, the Panthers were topics of interest in some of my other reads on black history but not until that book were they really center stage in my consciousness. Day brought the era into sharper focus and her subjects, Eddie Conway & Paul Coates (both ex-Panthers), gave me a much needed insider’s perspective.
Black Panther in Exile is the biography of former BPP Chairman Pete O'Neal, written by Pete's long time attorney Paul J. Magnarella. Any way you slice it Pete O’Neal got shafted. He got shafted by a racist administration, he got shafted by a prejudiced bureaucracy, and (according to compelling evidence laid out here by his attorney) he got shafted by an incompetent judiciary. It’s not that Pete O’Neal was a model citizen but it’s a safe bet that were he a white man he’d be playing shuffleboard in Kansas City right now instead of being an exiled expatriate in Tanzania.
“We, the Black Panther Party, see ourselves as a nation within a nation, but not for any racist reasons. We see it as a necessity for us to progress as human beings and live on the face of this earth along with other people. We do not fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity.” -Bobby Seale
Magnarella writes well but the last third of his book bogs down in ‘lawyer-speak.’ I’m not convinced readers like me need to know what subsection of what paragraph of what case number of what precedent was violated in the writ for redress of whatever. A bit less legalese would have made it more comprehensible.