A Taste of Power; A Black Woman's Story

New York, N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 1992. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 450 pages. Includes Acknowledgments, Introduction, and Illustration Credits. Also includes Introduction, as well as chapters on Assumption; York Street; "We Are the Girls Who Don't Take No Stuff"; Some Other Life; The Child Has Died; Getting Black; Living for the People; January 17th; Postmortem; Dying for the People; Where Is the Love? Becoming Huey's Queen; Kiss of the Panther; Sanctuary; A New Wave to Ride; Chairman; A Woman's Revolution; Alpha and Omega; Friends and Enemies; Enemies and Friends; "I'll Change the World for You." Also includes Illustration Credits on page 452. Elaine Brown (born March 2, 1943) is an American prison activist, writer, singer, and former Black Panther Party chairwoman who is based in Oakland, California. Brown briefly ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2008. She withdrew from the party however because she did not believe it represented acceptable change for the future. In 1968, Brown joined the Black Panther Party as a rank-and-file member, studying revolutionary literature, selling Black Panther Party newspapers, and cleaning guns, among other tasks. She soon helped the Party set up its first Free Breakfast for Children program in Los Angeles, as well as the Party's initial Free Busing to Prisons Program and Free Legal Aid Program. During Brown's leadership of the Black Panther Party, she focused on electoral politics and community service. In 1977, she managed Lionel Wilson's victorious campaign to become Oakland's first black mayor. Also, Brown founded the Panther's Liberation School. Growing up in a black Philadelphia ghetto and attending a predominantly white school, Elaine Brown learned firsthand the pain and powerlessness of being black and female. The Panthers held the promise of redemption. Elaine's account of her life at the highest levels of the Panthers' hierarchy illuminates more than the pain of sexism and the struggle against racism: The male rituals she recounts carried the seeds of the Black Panther Party's destruction. Nowhere was this undertow more evident than in the complex character of Huey Newton, who became Elaine's lover and ultimately her nemesis. More than a journey through a turbulent time in American history, this is the story of a black woman's battle to define herself. Freedom, Elaine Brown discovered, may be more than a political question. Derived from a Kirkus review: Engrossing, jolting, behind-the-scenes memoir by the woman who led the Black Panther Party to mainstream power-brokering without giving up the guns, and who ended up fleeing its violence: a stunning picture of a black woman's coming of age in America. Brown writes well and insightfully of her complex family background and Philadelphia ghetto childhood, and of her life in a paramilitary organization whose members live under the constant threat of violence from society, police, and each other. In L.A., a wealthy white lover introduces her to Communism; a black activist casually straps bandoleers of shotgun shells around her before a rally; "warriors'' expect sexual favors from revolutionary women; close friends die at the hands of a rival black organization and police. Briefly infatuated with Eldridge Cleaver, Brown falls in love with brilliant, self-educated, troubled Huey Newton-a man seemingly trapped by the Party he created, and subject to fear-and-cocaine-induced rages; he anoints her Party leader before jumping bail for exile in Cuba. Brown wins the grudging loyalty of the Party's angry men, as well as mainstream respect and influence in California politics. She takes pleasure in violent intimidation. Soon after Newton's return in 1977, a terrified Brown leaves the Party. Rhetoric and ideology are presented readably here: Brown identifies her most radical conclusions as opinion. The inherent drama plus anecdotes about revolutionary and show-biz celebs keep the pages turning. Timely, front-row view of a turbulent era. Put it on the shelf beside The Autobiography of Malcolm X.