Out of Oakland

In Out of Oakland, Sean L. Malloy explores the evolving internationalism of the Black Panther Party. He traces the shifting intersections between the black freedom struggle in the United States, Third World anticolonialism, and the Cold War.

Sean L. Malloy is Associate Professor of History/Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. He is the author of Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War and Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb against Japan, both from Cornell.

Malloy's focus on the international dimension of the Black Panther Party is a welcomed contribution to this area of study.... Malloy also sheds considerable light on the range of differences in ideological perspective and on-the-ground tactics between Eldridge Cleaver and BPP cofounder Huey P. Newton.... Out of Oakland will be especially useful to classes and graduate seminars centered on Cold War internationalisms, black internationalism, and histories of African American and Afro-diasporic political organizing in the post–civil rights era.... [It] demonstrates that far from being uninformed counterculture renegades, the BPP and its army of revolutionary-minded members, theorists, and comrades were a central component of a political upsurge bent on dismantling U.S. imperial democracy.

Out of Oakland offers a wonderful case study in the possibilities and limitations of transnational organizing.

Nico Slate, Carnegie Mellon University, author of The Prism of Race: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and the Colored World of Cedric Dover:

The foreign policy of the Black Panther Party has not received the attention it deserves, and Out of Oakland fills that gap more than ably. Indeed, what most struck me while reading this book is the degree to which Sean L. Malloy has crafted a narrative that, while focusing on the transnational dimensions of the Panthers, simultaneously offers a comprehensive and outstanding overview of the party's history writ large. In that way, Malloy succeeds where many transnational histories fail—to interweave the transnational with the national and even the local.

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, University of California, Irvine, author of Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era:

Out of Oakland is an exciting and robust narrative of black internationalism as told through the rise and fragmentation of the Black Panther Party. Sean L. Malloy writes in an engaging manner and offers a complex, nuanced study of how the Panthers used Third World, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist politics to conceptualize the colonized status of African Americans in the United States and to develop political connections globally. Malloy takes seriously the internationalist political ideas and diplomacy of Panther leaders, particularly Eldridge Cleaver. Out of Oakland will be of great interest to readers interested in black internationalism, the Black Panther Party, Third World politics, and the Cold War.