Living for the City an Analysis

LIVING FOR THE CITY: AN ANALYSIS

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Living For the City: An Analysis

In the book "Living for the City," Donna Murch explains the struggles that the African Americans went through and the emergence of Black Panther Party (BPP) in the United States.  The author notes that several individuals who came together and formed a group for conducting a study together established the party. Through the illustration of oral history and unexploited archives as the sources for her study, the author describes how a moderately insignificant urban setting had a modern history regarding how the African American populace could help come up with such captivating and compelling systems of Black Power politics^[1]. The black immigrants living in the southern part of California formed the BPP during the period of growth, development, and political tussle within the state’s leaders and the system of advanced public education.

The movement began during the early years of the 1960s through which several youths like Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, among others, voluntarily came together and formed the party. Amid the prevailing conditions of the human predicament and police brutality, the youths, especially those coming from the East Bay community, and majorly the African Americans, felt mistreated, victimized and unfairly targeted with evident signs of alienation and isolation from other members of the society. Consequently, the group composed of young, economically challenged and emigrants resorted to contest against the legality of government authorities, particularly the police, and other leaders together with a collective group of black leaders.

 Through the exposure of the hardly known history of the African Americans, Living for the City significantly contributes to the exposure and documentation of how the black students who were influenced by the corrupt state of governance and social factors, came up with a new form of organization through a popular mobilization and partisan mastery.

Originally, the BPP was known as the Black Panther Party of self-defense, founded in the year 1966 in Oakland as a revolutionary party. During its formation, the primary objective of the party was to patrol the locality where the African Americans were living to safeguard the people from inhuman acts of police ruthlessness. The group members eventually advanced into a radical collectivist group that propagated for the need to arm all African Americans for self-defense. The group additionally called for the exclusion of its members from the white American sanctions. Besides, members also had an objective of demanding the immediate release of all the Americans who had been jailed^[2]. There were also calls from the members to the authorities to compensate the African-Americans who had been discriminated and exploited over an extended period by the white Americans.