ABSTRACT
The black liberation movement has taught its students that success must be measured by both the struggle's ability to transform society and its ability to transform those who engage in it. Hugh Pearson's Shadow of the Panther critically examines the Black Panther Party's most noted figure and cofounder, Huey P. Newton. 1 Pearson maintains that, on the whole, Newton failed to transform himself from criminal to crusader. One reviewer noted that if Pearson's assessment of Newton was accurate, then the BPP leader was little more than an intelligent, drug-addicted sociopath. 2 Relying on interviews with former Panthers Landon Williams, Mary Kennedy, Sheba Haven, and a handful of BPP supporters and detractors, Pearson's 422-page volume focuses on the criminality that the BPP, primarily Newton, was never quite able to distance itself from. In it Pearson catalogs the failures, the betrayals, the murders, rapes, robberies, and extortions, occurring within the BPP as it developed into the most recognized organization of the Black Power movement. Pearson gives far less significance to the free clinics, free breakfast programs, food giveaways, schools, ambulance service, voter registration, community patrols, and other social programs. His account also underplays the significance of Hoover's counter intelligence program (COINTELPRO), which targeted many black organizations of that era with covert police actions to disrupt and destroy them.
