Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers' Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music - Softcover

Vincent, Rickey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1613744927 ISBN 13: 9781613744925

Verlag: CHICAGO REVIEW PR, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Connecting the black music tradition with the black activist tradition, Party Music brings both into greater focus than ever before and reveals just how strongly the black power movement was felt on the streets of black America. Interviews reveal the never-before-heard story of the Black Panthers&; R&B band the Lumpen and how five rank-and-file members performed popular music for revolutionaries.  Beyond the mainstream civil rights movement that is typically discussed are the stories of the Black Panthers, the Black Arts Movement, the antiwar activism, and other radical movements that were central to the impulse that transformed black popular music&;and created soul music.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rickey Vincent is the author of Funk: The Music, The People, and the Rhythm of the One and has written for the Washington Post, American Legacy, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches at the University of California&;Berkeley. Boots Riley is a rapper, producer, activist, and the lead vocalist of The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club.

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Party Music

The Inside Story of the Black Panthers' Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music

By Rickey Vincent

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2013 Rickey Vincent
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61374-492-5

Contents

Foreword by Boots Riley, 
Preface, 
Introduction: "Revolution in the Air", 
1 "Party Music": The Story of the Lumpen, 
2 "Power to the People": Bay Area Culture and the Rise of the Party, 
3 "The Lumpen Theme": James Brown, the Rhythm Revolution, and Black Power, 
4 "People Get Ready": Civil Rights, Soul Music, and Black Identity, 
5 "For Freedom": Cultural Nationalism and the Black Panther Party, 
6 "Bobby Must Be Set Free": Panther Power and Popular Culture, 
7 "Ol' Pig Nixon": The Protest Music Tradition, Soul, and Black Power, 
8 "Revolution Is the Only Solution": Protest Music Today and the Legacy of the Lumpen, 
Acknowledgments, 
Sources, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

"Party Music"

The Story of the Lumpen

As the backing band, the Freedom Messengers, winds down their final song in the Merritt College auditorium, the packed audience of hundreds of students, young radicals, and community members from the North Oakland area feel the anticipation building in the room. The lights go down, a drum roll starts, and a voice from the shadows bellows out:

"Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters. The Black Panther Party very proudly presents, [drum roll] ...

"The Lumpen!"

The sound of the band crashes in with a high energy rhythm and blues groove. The Lumpen members rush the stage and begin to step, kick, and spin — the show is off and running.

This is how the Lumpen began their concert on November 10, 1970, as well as their many other shows during a ten-month span from midsummer 1970 to the spring of 1971. They were billed as "The Black Panther Party's Revolutionary Band," and like many of the community programs produced by the Black Panther Party at the time, they delivered the goods. The Lumpen represented the goals and ideals of the Party and performed their radicalized renditions of popular black music through some of the most tumultuous moments in the Black Panther Party's existence. This is their story.

The story of the Lumpen began in San Jose, California, in 1968, just as the student uprisings that had been taking place at college campuses nationwide landed at the small South Bay campus of San Jose State University, fifty miles south of San Francisco. The cataclysmic events of that year — the murders of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy — and the continuing horrors of the Vietnam War and racial conflict at home had fostered the rise of a radicalized student movement on many campuses. Northern California students and activists in particular had been inspired by the leaders of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at San Francisco State University, which had successfully mobilized a student walkout to demand the creation of a Third World College. As a result of the TWLF, students on college campuses throughout Northern California began a series of walkouts in an effort to address inequalities at their schools and to support causes in the larger community. As Dr. Jason Ferreira states: "It was as if the students throughout the region were engaging in one big strike."

For entirely different reasons, San Jose State was becoming world famous in its own right. San Jose State was the home of the world-renowned United States Olympic track team, and its most celebrated members: Lee Evans, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos. While the student athletes trained at "Speed City," they also found themselves on the front lines of social change. A year earlier, the protests of disenfranchised blacks at SJSU — including a young, fiery black sociology instructor named Harry Edwards — had led to the unprecedented cancellation of the 1967 college football season opener due to the threat of an athletic boycott by the black players. The success of the black boycott emboldened the athletes, who along with Smith and Edwards spearheaded the Olympic Project for Human Rights, an effort that advocated a total black American boycott of the Olympic Games to be held in October 1968 in Mexico City.

The drama of the proposed Olympic boycott was one of the most consuming international stories of 1968. Some black athletes, such as Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), then an All-American basketball star at UCLA, honored the boycott and refused to participate in the Olympic games. The climate of protest was pervasive and tense, and as a result, the boycott plan and Edwards himself would fade into the background as the games approached. The remaining athletes were left to choose their own method of protest. On October 16, after their medal-winning performances in the Olympic two-hundred-meter final, San Jose State students Smith and Carlos would shock the world by raising their black power fists on the victory stand in Mexico City.

The impact of that moment at the Olympic games would be felt far and wide and would consume the lives of Smith and Carlos for decades. Yet the Olympic protest events were only part of a larger movement for social change taking place in the black community. Black college students who were facing daily insults, disorienting and often racist curricula, segregated and second-class facilities, and little or no administrative support felt a strong compulsion to participate in protests and challenges to the status quo. However, many black students also felt a different type of pressure, as the act of simply attending college was seen by their families as a personal breakthrough, and one not to be sacrificed on the altar of social protest.

In the streets of the Bay Area, young people were witnessing a visible assault on the black community, and on Black Panther Party members in particular. The imprisonment of Huey Newton in the fall of 1967 and the April 6, 1968, killing of young Bobby Hutton and wounding of Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver by Oakland police were clarion calls for many black youth that in 1968 a war with the power structure was imminent — if it had not already begun.

Into this mix, three black militant students arrived at the center of a storm of social upheaval at San Jose State. These young men had the conviction that they would take the struggle further than the student strike at SF State, further than the Mexico City events. They were prepared to seize the time.

That fall semester of 1968, a recent Berkeley High School graduate and former youth NAACP member named Michael Torrence enrolled at San Jose State. He was one of the first participants in the statewide Equal Opportunity Program (EOP), an emerging program spawned from student activism that sought to increase minority college enrollment. Torrence immediately began to organize black students on the campus, using as his guide the image of the Black Panther Party. "At that time I wanted to be a Panther. That was my goal," he recalls. Torrence and his allies developed a coalition with the Black Student Union at nearby San Jose City College, where they met William Calhoun, leader of the BSU there. The larger Black Student Alliance they formed then began a regimen of Black Panther Party functions, including the distribution of the Black Panther newspaper and political education classes. The young would-be Panthers also volunteered their time (along with many others) for some of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: CHICAGO REVIEW PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1613744927
• ISBN 13: 9781613744925
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 414
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar