The Black Panther Party (BPP) remains one of the most controversial and contested organizations to emerge from the maelstrom of the 1960s. Josh Bloom and Waldo Martin Jr. make a notable contribution to our understanding of the organization through their patiently researched and highly detailed single-volume history of the party. Black against Empire is essentially a chronological account of the party's rise in the late 1960s, brief zenith at the turn of the decade, and swift decline thereafter. Its narrative encompasses all of the major incidents in the BPP's history, from the shooting of co-founder Huey P. Newton by a police officer in 1967, through the assassinations of his comrades Bobby Hutton, Alprentice Carter, John Huggins, Fred Hampton, and Mark Clark to Newton's eventual release from prison in August 1970. Individual BPP chapters in Seattle, Chicago, New Haven and New York receive their due, and discrete sections on particular themes such as gender, coalitions with other groups, and police repression are well represented alongside potted biographies of principal characters.

The authors argue convincingly that the BPP emerged from a variety of historical contexts both at national and local levels. Nationally, the impact of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement were crucial. This the authors link to the decline of the civil rights movement amid increasing racial tension in the inner cities following the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. New Left political activism on the campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond also boosted the appeal of the BPP. At a local level, the authors persuasively claim that the experience of police repression was central to the BPP's formation and the ease with which it attracted new members. At the other end of the BPP's life, Bloom and Martin argue that the FBI's COINTELPRO was not the sole factor behind the party's downfall. In contrast to a number of friendly studies which go to great lengths to blame COINTELPRO, they point out that other factors were just as important. Conditions within the BPP were ripe for internecine warfare, offering the FBI a relatively easy target, for example. The BPP's need for legal funding sources and the shifting historical mood in the US were also key reasons behind the organization's decline. The former prevented the BPP from maintaining a revolutionary fervour that alienated wealthy moderate supporters. The latter, which Bloom and Martin argue developed from the decline of anti-war activism and an improvement in the political and economic opportunities for African Americans under the Nixon administration, resulted in the BPP's vision losing its “political salience” (400). The BPP, put simply, found that the USA was no longer ready for revolution. Bloom and Martin deserve credit for developing a sensible, coherent and balanced analysis of the BPP's rise and fall.

Problematically, however, Bloom and Martin effectively end their analysis of the BPP in 1971, arguing that by the early 1970s the “miniscule and dying” (481 n. 49) BPP was no longer a “radical movement organization” (383). Yet this “miniscule and dying” organization ran a successful community school, forced a run-off in Oakland's 1973 mayoral election, and briefly played a key role in Oakland's political system which enabled the election of Oakland's first African American mayor, Lionel J. Wilson, in 1977. In brushing these facts aside and compressing the BPP's chronology, Bloom and Martin avoid engagement with the most troubling period in the BPP's history, when Huey P. Newton's criminal tendencies came the fore and helped to wreck both the party and its legacy. Similarly, while the authors accept that the BPP failed to maintain clear boundaries “between revolutionary action, adventurism, and criminal activity” (365), they offer no sustained examination of this relationship. These oversights render Black against Empire a fine but not comprehensive single-volume history of this fascinating organization.