Revolutionary History: Rethinking Black Panther Party Initiatives at Public History, 1966–1979

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Black Panther Community News Service became a major vehicle that showcased the Black Panther Party’s engagement with historical narratives, memory, and commemoration. The work done by the Black Panther Party should be read as a public history project that became a critical part of the organization’s community survival programs. Through the newspaper, the Black Panthers interwove their own stories into a larger narrative of Black history, situating themselves as inheritors and innovators of a heritage tradition that goes back centuries. That history was both global and international in scale as well as intimately local.