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)