“Our Founder, the Mimeograph Machine”: Participatory Democracy in Students for a Democratic Society’s Print Culture

McMillian, John

doi:10.1353/jsr.0.0010

Cited by 4 publications

References 18 publications

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The Black Panther Party's Publishing Strategies and the Financial Underpinnings of Activism, 1968–1975

Fearnley

2018

Hist. J.

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Historians of America's post-war social movements have said little about the financial underpinnings of activism, and this article aims to address this oversight. It focuses on the Black Panther Party, which was formed in Oakland, California, in 1966, and was soon one of America's most visible, and controversial, black power organizations. The article sketches the array of funding sources from which the party drew, and reconstructs the apparatus it fashioned to steward those resources. It condenses the discussion to one of the organization's most lucrative streams, that of book publishing, and relates this to the period's literary culture, which, in the US, witnessed a ‘black revolution in books’. Between 1968 and 1975, members of the party published some ten books, which together raised $250,000 in advances, and additional sums through their sale, serialization, and translation. The production of these works relied on the assistance of several freelance writers, and was guided by the party's commercial agency, Stronghold Consolidated Productions. By recovering the role of these groups and the infrastructure they fashioned, the article shows how publishing was connected to the wider financial structure of the organization, and prompts us to see that the Panthers’ books were not just accounts of their activism, but examples of it.

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