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The article says Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction is really about a workers’ movement that got cut short. It shows how Black and white workers tried to team up but were blocked by powerful business interests, and argues that Du Bois’s idea of “abolition democracy” still helps us connect race and class today.

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W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 is one of the greatest modern studies of revolution and counterrevolution. While it deserves its place alongside the classics, it is also an extraordinary example of a materialist and class analysis of race under capitalism. In recent years, the latter aspect of the book has been obscured and even denied. This essay seeks to restore Du Bois’s great work to its rightful place on both counts.

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The article states that the Freedmen’s Bureau established schools and provided legal assistance, but ultimately failed to deliver the promised “40 acres and a mule” to Black families due to President Andrew Johnson's obstruction. It ties that land loss after the Civil War to today’s talks about reparations, echoing themes in Gates’s documentary.

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How Racist Lawmakers Thwarted This Early Attempt at Reparations

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The Freedmen’s Bureau was supposed to support formerly enslaved people.

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This piece walks through Morrison’s 1993 Nobel lecture, explaining how she uses a fable about an old blind woman to argue that words carry moral power. It shows why the speech still matters for anyone reading her fiction today.

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Toni Morrison’s transcendent Nobel Prize speech is key to understanding what made Morrison so great

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Toni Morrison understood how powerful language was and the human privilege to wield it.

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The reviewer says the film mixes interviews, art, and Morrison’s own voice to paint a warm, fearless portrait of the author’s life and ideas. It highlights how Morrison centered Black experience and why her legacy reaches far beyond literature.

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‘Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am’ Is Not Your Typical Documentary Film

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On its surface, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am looks like they typical documentary about a famous person. It’s a mélange of interviews with Morrison,…

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This recent academic article analyzes Beloved, Sula, and The Bluest Eye to show how Morrison uses memory and community to challenge racism and sexism. It argues that her stories remain a guide for today’s struggles over Black women’s rights.

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Race, gender, and identity in Toni Morrison’s novels: Relevance to contemporary Black women’s struggles in America

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This study aims to analyze how three novels by Toni Morrison, Beloved, Sula, and The Bluest Eye, function as transformative tools that critique modern social structures, especially concerning racia…

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Explains how frustration with slow integration birthed the slogan “Black Power,” urging Black political, economic, and cultural self-determination that set the stage for the late-1960s movement.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Black Power emphasized black self-reliance and self-determination more than integration. Proponents believed African Americans should secure their human rights by creating political and cultural organizations that served their interests. They insisted that African Americans should have power over th…

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Shows that the Panthers’ community programs and armed police-watch patrols pioneered tactics now echoed by Black Lives Matter and other mutual-aid networks.

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For the past half-century, depictions of the Black Panther Party in mainstream media have largely glossed over their ideas or their community activism. "They've been reduced to leather peacoats and shotguns," Shaka King, the director of the new Black Panther-focused film Judas and the Black Messiah says. They've been called terrorists, fringe separatists, "wild beasts" and "the civil rights movement's evil twin." While the words of other Civil Rights activists like Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis and Malcolm X are widely read and revered, those of Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Fred Hampton are taught and shared with far less frequency.

But if you ask many current activists fighting anti-Black racism and inequity today, they'll tell you that the influence of the Black Panthers is immeasurable. "They exist as a continual barometer to measure ourselves against-both in terms of lessons that have been garnered as well as challenges in terms of where we can improve or deepen our analysis," Aislinn Pulley, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter (BLM) Chicago and a co-executive director of the Chicago Torture Justice Center, says.

On Feb. 11, a further re-examination of their work and legacy will be spurred anew by Judas and the Black Messiah, which tells the story of Hampton and the Chicago Panthers as they work to organize, educate and feed their community while being mercilessly hunted by the FBI. While this history might be new to many, it isn't to the activists who have inherited many aspects of their work from the Panthers: their socialist ideals, focus on grassroots organizing, language about white supremacy and visual tactics. On a larger scale, some of the ideas that the Black Panthers espoused-including prison abolition-have begun making their way into mainstream discourse. Here are the ways in which their legacy lives on.

Policing the Police

Countering police brutality was at the core of the Black Panthers' mission. One of the central catalysts for their formation was the death of Matthew Johnson, an unarmed Black 16-year-old who was shot to death by police in San Francisco in 1966. In order to monitor police and discourage similar events from happening, Black Panther founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale devised a strategy in which they sent legally armed teams to observe police activity in Black neighborhoods.

At a time when much of the national discourse on police brutality centered on Southern cities with Jim Crow laws, the Panthers' actions in ostensibly progressive cities were crucial toward a deeper national understanding of the depth and ubiquity of systemic racism. "There was no focus on police brutality in the North. The Panthers really put focus on what so many people, especially African Americans in the North, felt and knew," Stanley Nelson, the filmmaker who directed the 2015 documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, says.

Black Lives Matter was formed under similar circumstances, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing the unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2013. While technological advances have allowed activists to monitor police abuse with cell phones as opposed to weapons, Nelson says the underlying principle hasn't changed. "We're in the same moment, just in a different way," he says. "In using camera phones so there can be no mistake about the police's actions, there's a direct line from the Black Panthers following the police around and observing their arrests."

The Panthers' emphasis on policing extended to the carceral system and the disproportionate jailing of Black men. "We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails," reads one of the bullet points of the Panther's party platform, known as the Ten-Point Program. In 1970, they proposed reorganizing the police toward a communal volunteer system. Angela Davis, who was affiliated with the Panthers' Los Angeles chapter, stumped for prison reform and a reimagining of what the carceral system could look like.

Over the past several decades, Fred Hampton's son, Fred Hampton Jr., has taken up his father's mantle of activism in his leadership of the Black Panther Party Cubs. This summer, the group was particularly active in calling attention to the ways in which they felt the coronavirus outbreak in Chicago's Cook County jail-which was the nation's largest COVID-19 hotspot in April-was an the extension of the jail's long history of oppression and violence. "We see prison as a microcosm of our community," Hampton Jr. says. "Chairman Fred himself was held there. Last summer, the state was literally turning Cook County into an open casket."

As coronavirus outbreaks raged in prisons across the country, protesters took to the streets demanding the end of police brutality, the defunding of police or outright abolition. While the idea of abolition has proved very controversial politically, an ABC/Ipsos poll taken last June showed a majority of Americans supported the redirection of funds from police to other services. "The fight back against police repression that the Panthers engaged in hugely has underpinnings of abolition," Aislinn Pulley says.

The Rise of Mutual Aid

While the Panthers fought against police brutality, they also invested heavily in community organizing and aid. Their free breakfast program fed thousands of hungry kids before school; they set up health clinics, child development centers and food pantries. They handled pest control, gave away coats and shoes in the winter, and started a free bus route to prisons for people to visit their incarcerated family members or loved ones.

And over the past few years and especially since the coronavirus, the concept of mutual aid, in which communities band together to unite in common struggle and provide help for the most vulnerable among them, has grown in popularity. Networks have sprung up in various cities to deliver groceries, cover rent and more. One of those is the People's Survival Program in Jacksonville, Fla., which has existed since 2017, collecting food donations, educating those in need about social services and making public record requests for body camera footage. "The Black Panther Party really set me on a trajectory towards what it looks like to organize in the community," Michael Sampson II, the executive director of the Jacksonville Community Action Committee, which runs the program, says.

Education was also a key part of the Black Panthers' mission: they started "liberation schools" that mixed traditional subjects like math and science with teachings about Black history and racial inequity. Current activists have embraced this emphasis on education: Noname, a rapper and activist, has a book club which has included Black Panther Party readings and materials, while Colin Kaepernick hosted a free youth camp in 2016 based on the Panthers' 10-point plan, focusing on the history of policing and human rights. In Chicago, Pulley hopes to integrate more educational aspects into the fabric of the Black Lives Matter organization. "Rigorous study was a big, big part of membership criteria for the Panthers," Pulley says. "That's certainly an area where we have a lot of growth that needs to happen."

Image Control

It's no accident that the image of the Black Panther Party remains so deeply embedded in the cultural consciousness. Party leaders like Huey Newton were keenly aware of the power images had in raising an organization's profile and constructing a visual mythos. Eldridge Cleaver, for instance, helped devise an imposing image of a seated Huey P. Newton that would come to define the movement for years to come; decades later, it was even replicated in a poster for the Marvel film Black Panther.

The organization's newspaper, The Black Panther, likewise placed a heavy emphasis on its visuals, prominently featuring Emory Douglas' blaring comic strips and illustrations. Those illustrations are now cited as a key influence by many younger artists, who are emblazoning similar types of designs on streetwear and urban murals. The artist Fresco Steez-whose "Stop Killing Black People" masks were worn at protests across the country last summer, including by Rep. Ilhan Omar-recently announced a collection with Levi's that includes her own take on the Black Panther logo. "We're not just talking about Black history, we're talking about Black futures," she wrote in a press release. "The future that we are moving towards is in a long tradition of Black people building power in uprising and political struggle."

In recent years, Black Panther visual mythology has also made its way into sports and pop culture. At the 2018 Super Bowl, Beyoncé performed at the halftime show with her dancers sporting Pantheresque black berets. (This iconography drew plenty of outrage, including from the executive director of the National Sheriffs' Association, who accused her of "inciting bad behavior.") And after NBA star Russell Westbrook was taunted by a fan with what he termed was "racial" and "disrespectful" abuse during a 2019 game in Utah, Jazz and Nets players turned up to a following game wearing t-shirts with a Fred Hampton quote: "You don't fight racism with racism, you fight racism with solidarity."

Female Leadership

While the most widely shared images of the Black Panthers are of men, women played an essential role in the party, making up at least two-thirds of the organization by the end of the 1960s. Elaine Brown edited the Party's newspaper and led the entire organization from 1974 to 1977. Other women were involved at all levels of organizing; they fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power, armed themselves and led many of the party's most successful community programs. (One of those women is the writer and activist Akua Njeri, who is portrayed by Dominique Fishback in Judas and the Black Messiah.)

Black Lives Matter was founded by three women- Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi -and many of its leaders across the country are female. Pulley says that a chant written by former Panther Assata Shakur is routinely used to close out Black Lives Matter actions and meetings. "We continue to learn from them: they have enormous experiential wisdom, which is really huge, especially because historical amnesia and erasure are very commonplace," Pulley says of the Panther women.

Continued Impact

Many activists acknowledge that the Panthers were neither a monolith nor perfect: they were plagued, at various points, by infighting, sexism and violence. "Sometimes they said things we just cringed from," Nelson says. But Michael Sampson II says that "what we've learned from the Panthers is much greater than the failures of what they've done." And many of their ideals continue to reverberate and gain steam. Their call for reparations has been re-energized by the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and congressional candidates who have recently made it a part of their campaigns. While the word socialism alone still rankles many Americans-just like it did when the Panthers championed it-polls have shown that support for some form of socialism has increased over the last decade. Hampton's Rainbow Coalition, in which he united disenfranchised Black, Hispanic and white organizing groups, has inspired activists like Pulley to form alliances across demographic lines in class solidarity. And long before Andrew Yang was espousing universal basic income, the Black Panthers wrote in their Ten-Point Program: "We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income."

"When the Panthers came out, so many people wondered what they were talking about," Nelson says. "But we can go down the demands of the Ten-Point Program, one by one, and so many people would agree with all of them."

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The Black Panther Party's Impact on Modern Day Activism

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The Black Panthers have long been vilified, but their impact on many prominent current activists is immeasurable

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Uses first-person stories of “Panther cubs” to reveal how the children of party leaders carry both trauma and determination into today’s social-justice work.

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What happens when the US declares war on your parents? The Black Panther cubs know

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The Black Panthers shook America awake before the party was eviscerated by the US government. Their children paid a steep price, but also emerged with unassailable pride and burning lessons for today

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Traces how the movement fused jazz-driven poetry, community theatres, and fiercely Black aesthetics to broadcast cultural pride and political self-determination in step with Black Power.

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The Black Arts Movement: A Cultural Revolution for Black Empowerment and Liberation

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Discover the Black Arts Movement, a Black nationalism movement that focused on music, literature, and the visual arts. Learn about its origins and influence in today’s music, poetry, and art.

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Baraka explains that a poem should “work like a weapon” yet remain musical, showing how he welded art and activism without apology.

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For the late poet Amiri Baraka, poetry was about the sound of the words - that the poems should come alive when they were read aloud. "I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception," he said in 1980. "So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given."

Baraka, who died in 2014, was one of the most important and controversial figures in African-American literature. On Tuesday, to mark Black History Month, Grove Press is publishing a career-spanning anthology of Baraka's poetry called SOS: Poems 1961-2013.

In his poetry, Baraka incorporated the rhythms and melodies of jazz. (He wrote music criticism and his seminal book Blues People - written under his given name, LeRoi Jones - is still in print.) Baraka said he looked at the texts of his poems like scores for pieces of music.

In the poem, "Am/Trak," Baraka said he was trying to capture the spirit of John Coltrane's music - as well as to show the context that produced that music - the social upheaval of the 1960s.

"He, like Langston Hughes before him, like Ralph Ellison to some extent, understood the pre-eminence, you'd have to say, of Black Music in Black American expressive culture," says Arnold Rampersad, professor Emeritus at Stanford University. He says Baraka started out writing poetry as part of the Beat movement in the Greenwich Village of the 1950s - casual and confessional verse in the style of his friend Allen Ginsberg.

"Gradually he became radicalized, and brought race more and more into his work until it became the central element of his writing," Rampersad says. "And for that he was vilified in many circles, but I think it was the beginning of a flood of similar poetry and other forms of writing from young black writers who became empowered as a result of the freedoms that he commissioned in the writing of poetry."

In the 1960s, Amiri Baraka was a leading figure in the Black Power movement. In the '70s, he broke with the Black Nationalists, but remained a committed Marxist. The sound and fury in much of Baraka's verse is a call to arms. Most of Baraka's poetry was first published by small alternative presses. In a 1982 interview at his home in Newark, N.J., Baraka said the major publishers wouldn't touch it.

"They would publish you if you had the same story to tell as mainstream white writers," Baraka explains. "But because no oppressed nationality can tell that story - if you're true to history, then they respond by saying, well you're complaining too much. You're always complaining. We don't want complaints. People don't want complaints."

"They would publish you if you had the same story to tell as mainstream white writers. ... If you're true to history, then they respond by saying, well you're complaining too much. You're always complaining. We don't want complaints. People don't want complaints."

Baraka said he never worried that his politics were overwhelming his poetry.

"As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is," he said. "I think if, as Mao Tse-tung said, you are successful, then what you do is combine high artistic quality and revolutionary politics. And then I think the real hallmark of an effective political artist is that the politics is accepted with the art, and is made influential because of the strength of the art."

Rampersad says sometimes Baraka went too far in his radical expression. For example, his anti-Semitic lines in a 2002 poem about the World Trade Center bombing generated a huge controversy and got him removed as New Jersey's Poet Laureate.

But Rampersad says Baraka's emphasis on racial and economic inequality has never lost it relevance.

"You have a very powerful and authentic voice - a pen writing about the African-American condition in a way that is absolutely memorable, and in a way that is absolutely prophetic," he says.

Rampersad believes that when Baraka died at 79, he left behind a body of work that "improved the heart and soul, the texture of black American poetry."

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Amiri Baraka Didn't Worry About His Politics Overpowering His Poetry

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For the late poet Amiri Baraka, poetry was about the sound of the words - that the poems should come alive when they were read aloud. "I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception," he said in 1980.

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Connects BAM’s fiery literature, theatre, and visual art to grassroots civil-rights organizing, arguing that its cultural nationalism still energizes today’s liberation politics.

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African Elements | Black History, Politics and News

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The Black Arts Movement and Black Liberation Struggle | African Elements

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An in-depth exploration of the Black Arts Movement, its ties to the Civil Rights era, and its profound impact on African American culture and politics.

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This profile traces how Joseph’s visually lush films "from Lemonade to Fly Paper" blend commercial flair with personal archive to frame Black history as everyday grandeur.

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In his new installation, “Shadow Play,” the filmmaker captures the hope, the highs, and the losses of twenty-first-century black life.

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Reviewing Joseph’s two-channel news montage, the piece explains how nonstop clips, headlines, and home videos create a living, non-didactic portrait of Black America.

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Kahlil Joseph Broadcasts the Vastness of Black Life in ‘BLKNWS’ | KQED

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The expansive two-channel video installation at Stanford University resists any conclusions about blackness.

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Film Comment hails BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions as “a refuge and charging station for resistance,” arguing its split-screen form turns viewers into active editors of Black history in real time.

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This article appeared in a special February 7, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph, 2025)

I can't begin to imagine what it would have been like to be on the ground at Sundance in the year 2025. But the disconnect between many of the movies in the lineup and the fact that the United States and the planet are hurtling toward disaster faster than Robert Redford in Downhill Racer (1969) must have been as evident in Park City as it was to me while streaming Sundance movies on my TV and PC in NYC. Redford's character survives at the end of Michael Ritchie's theatrical debut, but his face tells us that he knows winning is not forever. He founded Sundance as an antidote to the Hollywood studios, and I miss him appearing on opening day to say "Sundance is for the filmmakers"-even though by the mid-1990s, it was fast becoming a producer's and agency's market, and many filmmakers did not object to that.

A refuge and charging station for resistance, Kahlil Joseph's BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions was by far the most exciting selection that I saw, in terms of both form and content. The latest iteration of Joseph's ongoing BLKNWS video and art project-which grew out of a permanent work at the Underground Museum in Los Angeles and originally surfaced in the mainstream art world as a two-channel installation at the Venice Biennale in 2019-is the first to be shaped like a feature film, with its basic collage structure driven by sound and music (beatific beats) and organized around two intersecting locus points. One is the Africana Encyclopedia, the decades-long project of W.E.B. Du Bois, left unfinished at his death in 1963, then edited, expanded, and published by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 1999 as Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience. The other is an Afrofuturist fiction set during a "Transatlantic Biennial," an exhibition taking place on a ship anchored at the center of the maritime routes for the boats that carried Africans into slavery in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States. "This is not a documentary," Joseph remarks in voiceover, just before we see clips of Agnes Varda and Jean-Luc Godard, his early filmmaking role models whose work defied categorization.

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a collaboration between Joseph and his artist, filmmaker, and intellectual peers, among them Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, the late curator Okwui Enwezor, Arthur Jafa, Garrett Bradley, and Joseph's late brother, the lyrical figurative painter Noah Davis-for me the greatest painter of the early 21st century. It is also a moving-image bildungsroman that hints at how the concept of the Underground Museum-a generative space for Black culture, founded in 2012 by Davis his wife, Karon Davis-is now funneled onto the screen in the form of BLKNWS, a movie with global potential. In the Q&A after the screening, Joseph said that he wanted the movie to be available for free on YouTube so that people could watch it together and pause it often to investigate references and talk about them. But I also want people to see it on the biggest possible screen with the liveliest, most resonant sound system, which is still the way that films as great as this deserve to be seen.

There were only two or three other films that I hope have a life after Sundance. The rueful, understatedly caustic comedy Sorry, Baby is a more-than-promising feature debut by writer-director Eva Victor, who also stars as Agnes, a young woman to whom something very bad happens just before she gets her degree in creative writing from a small New England college. The same bad thing has been an issue in far too many movies in recent years, but I can't remember it being depicted-or rather, recounted-with such subtlety and complexity. Victor's most brilliant choice is not to show the bad thing but to leave us outside the house where we know it is happening, watching day turn to night and the lights changing behind the front windows, until Agnes suddenly emerges, sprints across the front yard, jumps in her car, and drives to her best friend's house. Only much later does she give a minute-to-minute description of what we didn't see, including her own confused and aborted attempts to keep it from happening. Victor has an amazing and unique sense of timing, as both director and actor, and a keen eye and ear for how the space around a word or a small bodily movement surprises us and makes us excited about what might come next.

At a time when anti-intellectualism is running rampant as it hasn't since the 1950s, it's a comfort to see at least two movies, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions and Sorry, Baby, that celebrate the life of the mind. The other fiction films I saw ranged from pallid to dismal. Hailey Gates's Atropia won the U.S. Dramatic Competition's Grand Jury Prize, but for me, this is not the moment for a mockumentary layered onto a fictionalization of actual war games played by American troops before they are shipped out from California to Iraq.

Among the documentaries, Geeta Gandbhir's The Perfect Neighbor, which Devika wrote about last week, uses low-end police bodycam footage to disclose a lethal situation of racism. Flying an HBO Documentary Films banner, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman's The Alabama Solution also employs basic tech: cell-phone videos and FaceTime conversations recorded by inmates of Alabama's penal system to expose horrendous conditions and barbaric treatment and neglect. The recordings are central to the resistance movement led by prisoners Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, who continue their struggle despite being beaten and thrown into solitary confinement. Alabama stonewalled the U.S. Justice department throughout the Biden presidency-and good luck to any change in the future.

This was the festival's second to last edition under contract with Park City, Utah. There was little public conversation about where its next home might be, although Boulder, Colorado; Cincinnati, Ohio; and a hybrid of Salt Lake City and Park City have all been shortlisted by the Sundance Institute. I still remember the uproar caused by a citizens' group's attempt to close an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs in 1990 in Cincinnati, and the obscenity trial that ensued. Artistic freedom prevailed in that case, but three and a half decades later, we live in less enlightened-so to speak-times. The snow in Park City is one thing; the chilling effect of public institutions run by newly emboldened conservatives is quite another.

Amy Taubin lives in New York City, where she writes about movies and art.

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Life of the mind: many of the films on view through the festival's virtual portal ranged from pallid to dismal, but Khalil Joseph's BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions was the thrilling exception

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Calling the film a “kaleidoscopic, vigorous, engrossing journey,” the review says Joseph stitches family memories, TikToks, and Du Bois quotes into a looping news feed that feels as alive as the culture it documents.

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The Film Stage - Your Spotlight On Cinema

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Sundance Review: BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a Poetic Celebration of the Past, Present, and Future of Black Culture

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Celebrating and condensing centuries of Black history that would take more than a few lifetimes for any scholar to thoroughly ascertain in totality, Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions eschews dryly academy ethnographic study to deliver a kaleidoscopic, vigorous, engrossing journey. Utilizing Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah’s W. E. B. Du Bois-inspired “Africana: The

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Screen Daily praises Joseph’s feature-length remix of his two-screen installation as a blistering news collage where viral clips, archival footage, and hip-hop beats reposition Black life at the center of the headline.

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‘BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions’: Sundance Review

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Kahlil Joseph turns his video art installation into a multi-faceted exploration of the Black experience