Vermont author Kekla Magoon tells the story of the Black Panther Party

Vermont author Kekla Magoon continues to win awards for her young adult books.

His latest is a non-fiction work chronicling the history of the Black Panther Party, called Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People, and it was named a Walter Award Honor Book in the Teen category for 2022. It also won the Michael L. Printz and Coretta Scott King author awards, not to mention a 2021 National Book Award finalist.

VPR’s Mitch Wertlieb spoke with Magoon about the book. Their conversation is below and has been edited for clarity.

Mitch Wertlieb: Why did you want to write a book about the Black Panther Party for young readers?

Kekla Magoon: There were several reasons that all came together at once. I grew up in Indiana in a predominantly white community. And even though I was very passionate about history, and especially black history, and especially the civil rights movement, I never learned much about the Black Panther Party, even as a young woman. black.

And it wasn’t until after I graduated from college and moved to New York, and worked as a grant writer, that I came across an article about the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program for school kids. And it totally opened my mind to all the different work the Panthers had done.

The image I had always had in my mind was of black men with bad, scary guns – so bad and so scary, in fact, that we don’t talk about it, we don’t teach it in class of history. And so when I learned that the Panthers were community organizers, and that they had health clinics and breakfast programs and grocery store programs and senior escort and legal aid programs, I I especially wanted to share this story with young people, who deserve the opportunity to know this story.

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton are probably the best known names associated with the movement. Are there any other lesser-known names that you highlight in this book?

Absoutely. In fact, my goal was not to tell a single biography of a single Panther, but to tell a biography of the party as a whole. The party was founded in Oakland in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. But there were so many chapters – in more than 40 cities the Panthers were active.

The people who really did the work were people most of whose names we will never know. Women in particular, who are in the majority within the party. So you have people like Kathleen Cleaver, who is still an educator, a speaker, a very powerful leader who was the communications secretary for the party. Elaine Brown, who also continues to advocate and educate across the country. She served as party president for a time after Huey Newton was forced to step down. Ericka Huggins was a political prisoner in the late 60s, early 70s, and was the leader of the New Haven chapter of the Black Panther Party, is still an educator today.

There were so, so many people who were part of this movement that really changed the landscape of organizing in this country.

The Panthers did not preach nonviolent resistance in the fight for civil rights like Martin Luther King, Jr. did. How do you handle the issue of violence associated with the Black Panthers in this book?

So the civil rights movement that we talked about as a nonviolent civil rights movement was actually a movement steeped in violence. The violence didn’t come from the protesters, the violence came from the police, came from the white supremacists, came from the counter-protesters as people engaged in civil disobedience and marched for justice.

There is a famous march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, where John Lewis, the former congressman, was beaten by the police. They were trying to make a peaceful march from Selma to Montgomery and were beaten.

He almost died.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, there are many examples of people who almost died. There are many examples of people who died in the fight for justice. And it’s important to realize that the power of nonviolent resistance was that it was about nonviolence in the face of extreme violence at the hands of people who often had more power in society.

When Dr. King was killed in 1968, a few years before that, there were uprisings in communities across the country. We had the Watts uprising in Los Angeles after an incident of police brutality. There were similar protests in Detroit, in Newark, New Jersey, in Harlem, New York, there were communities of young black people who rose up in anger and protested and raged against this racism and violence pervasive systemic effects that were happening to black communities.

And so in the face of that, what the Panthers did was they said, “OK, we have to defend ourselves against the violence that is happening to us.” It was therefore never a question of advocating violence. It was about preventing violence. The Panthers’ first program was called “Policing The Police”. They followed police officers, they carried weapons that were legal in California at the time, and followed the police officers to watch them do their job, on the logic that police brutality happens when no one is watching.

What if people were watching, and those people watching said, “Hey, you’re doing your job legally respecting who we are. Nobody will have a problem. defend our community”?

And that meant taking care of people in other ways, which is why they organized so much around employment justice, worked with unions around fair wages. They boycotted businesses in the community that were very exploitative. They have done a lot of work around housing justice, organizing for tenants’ rights. All of these activities were part of what they saw as community self-defense.

More VPR: Vt. Author Kekla Magoon wins national prize for young adult novels about the history of civil rights and racism

And some of these economic strategies that you talk about were very well adopted by Dr. King before his death.

Absoutely.

I want to bring this back to the present day, because there’s been a lot of news lately about books, either being labeled problematic or calling for some young adult books to be banned outright.

I talked about it with another young adult author from Vermont, I think you know, Jo Knowles. And, you know, she had two of her books flagged in a school district in Texas for what some parents said was pornographic material. In reality, there was no such thing in the books, but both featured gay characters, which Knowles thought the opponents really took issue with.

Has any of your books, maybe even this one, encountered similar opposition that you know of? Are you worried if they do that, maybe an audience that might benefit from reading about the Black Panthers and their true history, won’t have the chance to do so if your books are labeled that way?

I certainly think in this landscape there is the risk of that. This particular book is new, it came out in November, it has not, to my knowledge, appeared on any of the banned book lists, but some of my previous books have, regardless of content.

Most of my books have black characters, black or biracial characters. So one of my middle-grade novels ended up on one of the banned book lists of one of the school districts in, I believe, Pennsylvania, and then also on one of the Texas lists. And you know, it’s a novel that’s not about civil rights. This is not about social justice. It’s about three black boys in Indiana who go on a summer adventure.

So it was never really about content. It was about the idea that we were telling stories about black characters. It has already been a fight for 50 or 60 years and beyond, to ensure that the history of marginalized communities is taught in schools.

When the Black Panthers were active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were no Black History Months or Black Studies programs available in colleges or high schools. you know, across the country. And so the Panthers were instrumental in teaching this story. And so it’s really part of their legacy to bring education, about the truth of who we are and what our story is to people, so that they can use that information to empower themselves to change. the world in ever better ways.

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