Panther Baby
A Life of Rebellion & Reinvention
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The former Black Panther offers "an inspiring, unapologetic account" of his life in the movement and in prison to becoming an acclaimed artist and academic (Kirkus Reviews).
In the 1960s he exhorted students at Columbia University to burn their college to the ground. Today he's chair of their School of the Arts film division. Jamal Joseph's personal odyssey—from the streets of Harlem to Rikers Island and Leavenworth to the halls of academia—is as gripping as it is inspiring.
As a teenager in the Bronx, Eddie Joseph was a high school honor student, slated to graduate early and begin college. But then he discovered the tenets of the Black Panther Party. By sixteen, his devotion to the cause landed him in prison on Rikers Island, charged with conspiracy as one of the infamous Panther 21. Though he was exonerated, Eddie—now called Jamal—soon landed back in prison after joining the "revolutionary underground."
Sentenced to more than twelve years in Leavenworth, he earned three degrees there and found a new calling that would ultimately lead him into a new life. In raw, powerful prose, Jamal Joseph helps us understand what it meant to be a soldier inside the Black Panther movement. He recounts his harrowing imprisonment and his difficult path to manhood in a book filled with equal parts rage, despair, and hope.
"Jamal Joseph is a long-distance intellectual freedom fighter who never lost his soul and his integrity—despite the ugly underside of America! Don't miss this powerful book!" —Cornel West
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This spirited, well-honed account of cutting his teeth as a member of the Black Panthers brings Joseph back to his youth, a painful time in late-1960s America. Abandoned by his unwed Cuban mother and brought up by an elderly Southern black couple in the North Bronx, Joseph (born "Eddie") grew up to be light-skinned, conscientious, and an accelerated student who learned early on the deprivations of blacks in white society. From becoming radicalized at the African-American Camp Minisink, in New York State, in the summer of 1968, Joseph gravitated toward the militancy of the Black Panthers, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, activists impatient with the stalled civil rights movement and ready to grasp freedom and economic destiny for poor black communities in a more compelling manner. Immersed in grassroots community-action programs, to the detriment of his high school studies, Joseph, now renamed Jamal, was steeped in the political education of the Panthers. This included weapons training for armed struggle; being arrested as part of the netted Panther 21 for allegedly planning to "go to war with the government" (Lumumba and Afeni Shakur were leaders, and they were defended by William Kunstler), and serving 11 months among hardened criminals at the age of 16. Joseph's memoir focuses on this intensely compressed period, when hopes were high for "revolution in our lifetime" and a reckless, street-fueled violence smoldered, yet the schism in Panther leadership undermined the cause. Joseph's clear-eyed casting back reveals the streamlined, fluid quality of a fine storyteller.
