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oppose poverty, segregation, inadequate healthcare, unemployment and police violence. Much like other Panther formations across the country, by the early 1970s, state repression had crushed the political organisation represented by these Black struggles for dignity and self-determination.

Ahmad A. Rahman’s brilliant investigation of the BPP in Detroit in the fourth chapter helps us to better understand the historic encounter between Black radicalism and Marxism. Rahman situates the emergence of the Detroit Panthers in the context of the Detroit Rebellion of 1967. By interrogating the class character of the racialised tropes used to describe the insurrection, he also provides a welcome counterpoint to the pejorative language often deployed by historians and social scientists. This historical analysis also has the benefit of Rahman’s own participation in Detroit’s Black radical politics through his activity as a Panther, as both a source of evidence and analytical tool. In this way, he provides his readers with a more nuanced and careful understanding of the relationships between the BPP, RAM, Uhuru (Freedom) and the LRBW in the city. For example, Rahman notes that the month of May 1968 not only produced the formation of the Panthers but was also ‘the month that the RUM [Revolutionary Union Movement] at Dodge led a wildcat strike at the city’s Chrysler plant’, which was, of course, the impetus for the formation of the LRBW. Perhaps most importantly, his section on ‘the seven canons of armed struggle’ provides a critical commentary on theoretical sources for the underground movement in Detroit, including Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Robert Williams, Mikhail Bakunin, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Samuel Greenlee (The Spook Who Sat by the Door) and Carlos Marighella. In addition to Rahman’s fine analysis of radical theory and political cultures of dissent, he also provides an analytic to understand the criminalisation of dissent and of the Black poor.

In the fifth chapter, Yohuru Williams examines the activities of the BPP in Milwaukee. He situates its emergence in the context of local conflicts with the Milwaukee police department especially in the wake of the rebellion in the city during the long hot summer of 1967. Emphasising the ways in which the events increased the radicalism of an already organised Black community, Williams interrogates how media representations perpetuated a racialised violent image of the Panthers, one that obscured the political content of their survival programmes to combat hunger, illiteracy, poverty and racism experienced by Black and poor people. Williams offers historical analysis to counter these misrepresentations by showing the actual political work they did to counter intensified race and class antagonisms and to articulate new democratic institutions. In the epilogue to Liberated Territory, Devin Fergus sets out to challenge the ways in which Black Power has been represented in mainstream historiography. He explores how the Panthers negotiated Black nationalist, communist and liberal tendencies. Fergus examines the case of a North Carolina Panther chapter in particular and argues that, by the mid-1970s, Panther ideology was less about conflict with the state and more a manifestation of ‘civic nationalism’. Fergus writes that the Panthers moved pragmatically away from a Marxist dialectical materialist analysis and towards a Weberian impulse towards capitalism. This he unfortunately renders as a ‘strategic shift’. Fergus writes that the Panthers’ focus in the mid-1970s on