Call it a trick of montage. Nelson and editor Aljernon Tunsil have a magician’s touch for giving life to period music and archival images, as well as a scholar’s resourcefulness in digging them up. When the voice-over explains the Panthers’ earliest exploits—trailing police patrols around Oakland with weapons in hand (perfectly legal at the time, under California’s open-carry statute) to discourage the use of excessive force—you see part of the scene in footage shot from inside a Panther cruiser. When interview subjects recount the incident that first brought the Panthers to national attention—striding with their rifles onto the floor of the State Assembly in Sacramento (sheer inadvertence: They were looking for the gallery)—you watch the episode unfold through perhaps half a dozen visual sources, both homemade and commercial, which take you from the moment of arrival in the parking lot to the politicians’ denunciations.
To such materials, Nelson adds a wealth of present-day interviews with former Panthers (some of them practiced in their recollections, others touchingly candid), along with newspaper and magazine clippings, excerpts from government documents, writings by anonymous young party members, and testimonies from historians, movement lawyers, journalists, police, even a retired FBI agent. I can’t call the research comprehensive; party cofounder Bobby Seale seems to have been unavailable for interview, and there is deafening silence about the known murders committed by Panthers, with or without direct orders. Still, Nelson has compiled more than enough information to present an account that is admiring when it comes to the idealism and self-sacrifice of many party members, and notably unflinching when it comes to the details.
In the words of various witnesses, the party’s growth was too rapid and undirected. (“Nobody asked these people, ‘Why are you here? What do you want to accomplish?’”) The most prominent spokesperson, Eldridge Cleaver, was uncontrollable (or flat-out “crazy,” in the laughing opinion of former Young Lord Felipe Luciano), and a cult of personality was fostered around jailed cofounder Huey P. Newton (“a fucking maniac,” in the words of another party veteran). The rank and file, concludes one of the historians, did not have the leaders they deserved.