100 books like Eldridge Cleaver

Charlie Brown, Lucy, and “the gang” have fascinated me since I sat at the family table, fighting with my siblings for sections of the newspaper. My copy of this book is copiously highlighted because there was so much to learn about the artist’s life and technique. The opening pages reeled me in when the writer told of Schulz witnessing his mother’s excruciatingly painful death from cancer. I know cartoons have wisdom that goes beyond kids’ comprehension. This book shows how and why Schulz used all the elements of his life to write this strip. Peanuts and the comics of my childhood are why I use graphic novels like Maus in my classrooms. They have truths that hit on many levels.

I love it as a tale of heroism, youthful idealism, success, defeat, death over and over. I first read the final chapter of this book in an excerpt after which I ordered it immediately. I had been curious about the real story behind this highly intelligent icon. Disturbing and illuminating, this book shows how driven, outright murderous in the name of revolution, Che was and how this catapulted Fidel and the Cuban revolutionaries to victory over Fulgencio Batista. I had such empathy for Che as I read through his life that I couldn’t reread the final chapter about his brutal prolonged death.

I’ve thought of Sharon Stone as a rebel since seeing her breakthrough film Basic Instinct. Every interview I’d read since then convinced me that I was right. This memoir shows why. The title comes from her life-and-death fight with a brain aneurysm which derailed her film career but not her life. Right off the bat, Stone’s memoir makes the distinction between lace-curtain Irish and kitchen-sink Irish, her family standing on the kitchen sink side. This class distinction and loyalty to her roots in Pennsylvania are part of her honesty, her fight against the phoniness of the film industry, and the appeal of this story. It’s also her strength as her family comes to her side when her career is jettisoned by serious illness.

This coming-of-age story is set in Depression-era South Carolina. My relatives in Oklahoma from that era also were driven out of the South by racism, segregation, and the threat of death. Adam, who was my mentor and colleague at Laney College in Oakland, California, was a young Black male facing lynching. He was too intelligent to survive in the South. He reminds me of my father, a Tuskegee airman who fought the good fight and left the South for good also. 

You can’t truly know what activism, social revolution, and political freedom mean until you’ve read this book. Assata Shakur is a Black revolutionary woman who barely escaped U.S. police corruption, systemic racism, and state oppression, in order to find political asylum in Cuba. To know her story is to acknowledge how White supremacy and anti-Black oppression play out in the lives of Black Americans.

I recommend Ginger’s book because it inspired so many college students to go into law as well as young lawyers interested in effecting societal change. In one chapter, Ginger interviews Fay Stender, a source I consulted in writing Stender’s biography. Ginger also interviewed Fay’s law partner Charles Garry about his representation with Stender of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton in the case I consider the trial of the century. Fay’s husband Marvin Stender was also interviewed about his progressive law practice. Ginger’s book, and my interviews of Ann Ginger herself, proved essential to my understanding of the circle of Movement lawyers in the Bay Area to which they all heavily contributed during an extraordinary period of activism from the ‘50s through the ‘70s.     

The late Pearson took a lot of heat as an African-American author for telling the truth about all sides of the Panther era. But somebody credible needed to do it, and he did it well  —  in a way that can help us approach modern-day political and police accountability protest with eyes wide open.

Williams mined volumes of government documents and the memories of survivors of the era in which the country’s most concentrated experiment in urban renewal came face to face with grassroots demands for deeper change. His book reveals the limits of liberalism, as well as dynamics within different groups pushing for social justice about how to negotiate with (or take on) power.

This is a complete history of the Black Panther party in the US—its origins, its leaders, its political struggles, its accomplishments and controversies, and its ultimate dissolution. The unique poetry of the Panthers’ public pronouncements—by Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and others—comes vividly to life, as people of color confront a world of limited horizons and thwarted desires. In my new novel, I meld these voices with the beat poetry of Allen Ginsberg (who was a central figure in the 1970s New Haven gathering).

The scope of Racial Frontier is enormous. I was impressed with the timeline (1528-1990) and Taylor’s analysis of the relationships of black people with American Indians and immigrants from various regions. There’s an excellent chapter on black towns in the west. The book explores racial prejudices and challenges and triumphs in urban cultures. Racial Frontier broadened my understanding of the perilous journey of black people beyond Kansas to California and states in between. Not all were interested in owning land and Taylor provides a comprehensive overview of African Americans in occupations requiring specialized skills.