Author of the week: Jamal Joseph

last updated 8 January 2015

Jamal Joseph was a teenage Black Panther, said Stephen M. Deusner in The Washington Post Express. In his new memoir, Panther Baby, Joseph, now a professor at Columbia University, recounts his history with the revolutionary group after he joined in 1968, at age 15. From the beginning, the experience wasn’t what he expected. Thinking he’d be issued a rifle, he instead was handed a spatula and some books. The spatula was for serving pancakes as part of Panther community service. “J. Edgar Hoover [said] the most dangerous program the Black Panther Party had was the breakfast program, because it reached so many people,” Joseph says. A party leader gave him books by Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver. “I said, ‘Excuse me, sir, I thought you were going to arm me.’ He said, ‘I just did.’”

Not every surprise was as pleasant, said Andrea Sachs in Time. In less than a year, Joseph was locked up at New York’s Rikers Island as part of the “Panther 21,” a leadership group accused of conspiring to bomb city landmarks. “A lot of what I was doing as a young Panther before I went to prison was very romantic,” he says. “You would talk about police brutality; in prison, I was in it. I came out really understanding that I was fighting for something real.” Later, he spent six years in a federal prison in Kansas but emerged with two college degrees, which he remains ever thankful for. The Ivy League university where he now teaches is an institution he once advocated burning down. “It kind of blows my mind,” he says.