Support and education for today’s youth is the key to liberation. That was the overall message delivered by Jamal Joseph, author of the newly released Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion and Reinvention (Algonquin Books), who delivered the 13th annual Arthur Curley Lecture Saturday.
The lecture series was created in honor of the late ALA president and director of Boston Public Library.
Joseph, a professor in Columbia University’s School of the Arts film division, told the story of his involvement with the Black Panther Party and how those experiences helped to groom him into a writer, producer, activist, poet, and educator. He began his presentation by discussing a time in the South when it was a crime for blacks to learn to read and write—a crime punishable “with a lash or a noose.”
“It’s important to understand that when Frederick Douglass became such a great writer and such a great spokesman, he knew that the most important thing for him to secure his freedom was to learn how to read and write, using his knowledge to empower others,” Joseph told the audience. “Although my adopted grandmother only had a 6th grade education,” he continued, “our house was filled with books and she read as much as she could, especially the Bible,” encouraging him to attend school, learn to read, go to college, and make a difference in the world. Going to the library and taking books home were very important, he explained.
Joseph joined the NAACP Youth Council at the age of 13 and said one of his first jobs was collecting books that were sent to the South as part of the civil rights movement. But his life took a drastic turn when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. “I was outraged and was mad as hell,” Joseph recalled. In the aftermath of coverage of Dr. King’s death, he announced to school friends that he was going to be a black militant, “not really knowing what that word meant.”
At the age of 15, he ultimately decided to become a member of the Black Panthers, which in 1966 first patrolled the streets of Sacramento, California, with both guns and law books. Joseph found a Panther chapter in Harlem where he was “armed” with a stack of books and learned the Panther’s Ten Point Program—which, despite published reports, focused on decent housing , self improvement, and education, offering free breakfast programs, health clinics, and free liberation schools.
The Panthers’ mantra, All Power to the People, “became a real thing,” Joseph explained, noting that the phrase “rainbow coalition” was first coined by Black Panther Fred Hampton (who was murdered in his sleep in 1969) as a call for all groups to work together for progressive social change.
“I never knew my father and was raised by my adopted grandparents,” Joseph continued. “Joining the Black Panther Party for me was as much as a search looking for positive black role models as politics.”
He was jailed less than six months after joining the Panthers. In 1969, Joseph was in prison again as part of a case called the Panther 21, which focused on the arrest of everyone in leadership positions. Facing 360-plus years in prison, he later found out that his Panther Party mentor was part of an elite New York City Police Department’s undercover Bureau of Special Services unit whose goal was to destroy the Panther movement. The Panther 21 was later acquitted largely due to resistance by a coalition of blacks, whites, and Latinos who demanded their freedom.
He recalled that on his first day in prison he was told by a man with a cart of library books that “you can serve your time or let your time serve you.” Joseph said he learned the healing power of the theater arts while in prison, using it for social change by uniting the different racial factions among the inmates. He also earned two degrees from the University of Kansas while imprisoned. Out of prison, Joseph carried on his work in with the IMPACT Repertory Theatre, a program that also involves community service, and because of which, he said, some 1,000 kids have now gone on to colleges, universities, and graduate schools.
“We’re dealing with a frontline assault,” Joseph said. “Books, laptops, and video cameras are now the weapons of change. As libraries are under assault, as books are under assault, we must stand, must continue to advocate, to educate so that libraries continue to be those safe places where dreams can live. We can’t give up that fight. We still have work to do.”
