The Revolution Has Come

The Revolution Has Come achieves a rare feat. Within a compact narrative (only 205 pages) that offers an intimate biography of a social movement, Robyn Spencer manages to weave together a profoundly imbricated story of the ways in which radical politics, personal transformation, gender, and state repression shaped the everyday act of organizational resistance that sustained the Black Panther Party during its sixteen-year history. The book has a chronological organization, beginning with the “cauldron of discontent” that comprised the residential segregation, poverty, unemployment, and police brutality of Oakland, California’s Flatlands and Fruitvale neighborhoods. Through seven smartly organized chapters, Spencer charts the evolution of the Black Panther Party within Oakland from male party leaders to female leadership and their rank-and-file organizers, nearly half of them women, who fostered a shift from internationalist revolution and armed self-defense to pragmatic survivalist and community-building programs. Within that familiar sixteen-year history, however, are a series of previously untold narratives of the rank-and-file that depict what a collective movement requires through everyday work and the central role that women played in making gender and community the essential elements of the Panther’s revolutionary politics.

Art · Biography · Black Power · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · State (computer science) · American Political and Social Dynamics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society