Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power is a wrenching, yet dazzling, autobiographical tale of pain and maturation within the Black Panther Party. It is a revolutionary saga that is first and foremost a personal story: Elaine Brown, poor black girl, rises meteorically from ghetto poverty to ill-conceived salvation and redemption within an internationally renowned party of socio-political struggle. It is a hard-driving tale, rich in its history, unrelenting in its honesty, yet abounding in frailty, humor, and love.
This is an intense story, its personal and intimate nature being the strongest aspect of the book. Brown shares many of her most private experiences. Her North Philly childhood was painful; her formative years were punctuated by such eclectic experiences as paternal abandonment, attempted gang rape, elite schooling, proms, and dates.
Her mother attempted valiantly, in Brown's words, to "scavenge...morsels of life" for her only child, yet Brown could not "escape the despair." She was haunted by feelings of emptiness and longed for wholeness and fullness. Her search for personhood--escape from the recurring Ellisonesque feeling of nothingness--drove her involvement in relationships, in social action, in nearly every aspect of life.
Brown's involvement with the Panthers commences with her weekly return to the ghetto to teach piano lessons. Empathizing with her students, she is moved to share deeply in their "nothing-nigger-little-girl-ness." She reconnects with her blackness, which had been temporarily lost through attending a white high school and sojourning in wealthy Hollywood.
Her perspective on the Panthers is invaluable, offering a glimpse of a group with a powerful mandate, vigorously executed by fatally flawed leadership. The Panther Party was the leading black power organization of the time, involved in community organizing with the underclass in cities across the country. It had free food programs (including the famous free breakfast program), schools, and free health clinics.
The Panthers' black nationalist socialist program had a quasi-militaristic focus, with armed resistance as a part of their revolutionary agenda. Brown details in poignant, angry prose the decimation of her friends and comrades as the FBI and local police departments smeared, threatened, and assassinated many pivotal Panthers.
Brown also details the unsavory side of her former organization, but only to a point. In many ways the Black Panther Party was an organization dominated by youth and completely out of control. She speaks of misogyny, of arbitrary corporal punishment, and of drug use.
Brown stops short of particulars on the Panthers' rumored illegal activity. She is, of course, circumspect in the retelling of such history. There are stories of extortion, but no admissions to the drug-peddling and murder of which they were often accused.
HER STORY, while not a comprehensive historical document, nonetheless raises important questions. A Taste of Power tells a history of a poor man's political organization. The dominance of the poor and working class at the level of policy formation was an essential and striking characteristic of the Black Panther initiative.
Huey Newton, the principal architect of the famous Survival Programs, was from poor, urban Oakland, was involved in gangs, and spent several years in prison. He and others like him knew the people and the world they were organizing, and this knowledge informed both their programs and implementation mechanisms.
Though there were definite benefits to such poor and working-class dominance at leadership levels, one must question the impact on the Panthers of the near complete absence of the middle classes from this level: To what extent were the failings of the Panthers related to this? To what extent were senseless policy choices, such as armed resistance and violent internal conflict resolution strategies, related to insufficient class integration within the organization?
Her story also forces questions about secular social movements. Secularization inhibits the development of a set of norms and values with which people collectively feel they must comply. Do secular organizing attempts manifest many of the same dysfunctional behavior patterns as the population they propose to organize? For example, how empowering were the Panthers to poor women if Brown, a woman at the organization's elite levels, could suffer beatings from male members with no internal mechanisms of redress?
A Taste of Power also poses questions related to the African-American community in general. Brown's deep and unfulfilled needs led to her involvement in the Party. She expressed her need through a collective endeavor. This collective endeavor was a mask not only of her own need, but of the personal need of thousands like her.
How and why was this tremendous emptiness, this young, aching, black nothingness, institutionally ignored by 1) the black middle classes and 2) the black churches? The Black Panther Party was a marginalized, fringe organization that paradoxically articulated the wishes and desires of large segments of the black masses. What institutional underdevelopment on the part of African-Americans could allow an organization such as the Panthers, where drugs and violence were commonplace, to assume the programmatic cutting edge?
Elaine Brown's autobiography is an important work that should be discussed in many circles, secular and religious.
Karen Minott was a free-lance writer living in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and a member of Azusa Christian Community when this review appeared.
A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story. By Elaine Brown. Pantheon Books, 1992, $23 (cloth).
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