As the 1960s turned into the '70s, militant Black nationalism and race-conscious identity politics came to dominate radical political organizing. That's how standard accounts of the period go -- but are they correct? According to Jason Ferreira, groups like the Black Panthers and Los Siete rejected narrow conceptions of identity, instead promoting cross-racial solidarity and creating inclusive communities of resistance. Also, Chris Carlsson describes the volume in which Ferreira's essay appears.

Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, "there is no there there." Scholar Chris Rhomberg would beg to differ; he's written a history of social movements in the East Bay metropolis that encompasses the rise of the Klan in the 1920s, the Oakland general strike of 1946, and the explosion of the Black Panthers in the 1960s. (Encore presentation.)

Why did the Black Panther Party use violent rhetoric? Was the Panthers' struggle for liberation enhanced by their commitment to armed self-defense, or hurt by it? Curtis Austin argues that the Panthers' violent rhetoric both influenced the organization's growth and helped to justify the massive police repression directed against it.