Murch, Donna. Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

== Summary ==
Donna
Jean Much’s book looks at how “southern migration, black pride, the promise and
peril of increased educational access, and the destructive effects of the
carceral state all contributed to [black] radicalization” and the rise of the
Black Panther Party (3-4). It’s about the city of Oakland and how it both
changed the African American community and, concomitantly, the community
changed the city, or how Murch puts it, “the historical interplay between
southern migration and Black radicalism.” Oakland, California is a micro study
of this phenomenon. The political consciousness and radicalism of the Black
Panther Party reflected African Americans’ “collective experience as migrants
and their age” between the lynching of Emmett Till and the assassination of
Malcolm X.” The emergence of the Black Panther Party cannot been understand
without understanding “the rich culture, historical memory, and expectations
that Bay Area newcomers carried with them and the heartfelt disappointment they
suffered in Oakland and other West Coast cities.” (6) The Panthers core
leadership and rank and file consisted of recent migrants who wanted to escape
Southern racism only to be confronted by a different form in the Bay Area. Along
with building off of their migrant experience, the Black Panther Party was also
alienated and thus radicalized by institutions in the Bay Area, public schools,
police and universities and colleges. The increased access to college
education, via California’s Master Plan and Community College expansion
nurtured a new generation of black activists and politicians. Thus, the BPP did
not emerge in a vacuum; it drew on southern migrants’ experience, the black
church, educational access, and a tradition of creating parallel institutions. Murch
writes: “What emerged was a complex blending of two seemingly irreconcilable
worlds – the heavily rural, deeply religious, and tight-knit fabric of southern
black communities transplanted to the Cold War expanse of defense industries
and ‘multiversites,’ urban deindustrialization, and an increasingly punitive
carceral state.” (229)