Austin Gives Talk on Black Movement Politics in Nashville

On Thursday, October 17, 2024, Andrew Austin (Democracy and Justice Studies) presented a section of a developing manuscript on the legacy of the Black Panther Party at the conference Social Change and Resistance: Looking Back to Move Forward organized by the Mid-South Sociological Association (50th Anniversary conference) in Nashville, Tennessee.

The published title of his talk was “From Civil Rights to Armed Resistance to Community Empowerment: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party.” He argued that, to grasp the evolution of black liberation in America, one must consider the Panther’s history, its political-ideological foundation, and the severe repression it faced at the hands of the government in contrast to later instantiations of movement politics, in particular Black Lives Matter and its acceptance by the neoliberal establishment and progressive actors.