 I grew up in a caravan or so we would have a conversation going to the stairs on them. And like you, I never learned about Indian myths in school. There's a lot I've figured out, but I'm not used to it. I did not learn in school. So first, I have to say this book, Revolutionary Times 2021, yes. Sorry, it came out 2021, is a natural book or finalist, a correct stacking that bought her on her awarding in the Bollos Angels Times Book Prize for a Young Adult Literature File List and a Michael M. Pence Award honorary. And there's a lot more that could be said. Congratulations, purchase and form off. Thank you. Right. Woo! It's about what brought you to do this work. Tell us a little bit about the reception that you've received from this book. Yeah. The reception has been incredibly warm, which is a huge relief because I spent a decade researching it and starting to get it published and hoping that it would turn out. And I actually sold it to a publisher and received feedback that it was clearly quite uncomfortable. And Jordan's team was quite uncomfortable with the material. And I couldn't do the look I wanted to do in that place. So I said to them, you know, should try again. You know, what I'm finding overall over the last 10 years, not just with this book, but with the novels as well, is that people would come with the novels and say, well, this can't be true. This is fiction, right? You've made this up. This isn't really what the fans are doing. I say, oh, no, this is based in reality. And so being able to point to the nonfiction has been actually really helpful because people find it really surprising and shocking. And maybe people who linch through this era even don't know the history, the way that the Panthers taught it and the way that they really experienced it. So I'm very fortunate that the reception has been extremely warm even in this context of book challenges and what they've spent, for the most part, teachers are so excited to actually have this first nonfiction book about the like-hand debtors for this age group that's accessible and is accessible to us all as well, you know, but it just doesn't read like the academic tones that you find in somebody's dissertation on the Panthers. So I think people are enjoying the photos, they don't work almost 200 photos in the book. Our kind of photos from all over the country just to illustrate the improvements in history and trying to bring it to life, just come at that snapshot. So I think that ultimately that effort has been successful. You know what, I've been really excited to hear the input traveling into some of the schools, talking with students about this book, talking with the young people about the book. And, you know, you shared a quote with us a few minutes ago, but the epigraph to your book is that quote, in the line from Huey Newman that reads, the revolution has always been in the hands of the young. And you have written this to quote and into the hands of the young. But why did you actually open the book with that specific quote? One of the most surprising things I have learned about the Civil Rights Movement as an adult, as I start this research, wasn't that the engine of the Civil Rights Movement was young people, was teenagers, was middle school students, high school students, college students, young 20s, right? And it wasn't Rosa Parks, Muffer, which is amazing, right, Rosa Parks and the people for age were part of the movement, they chose Rosa Parks specifically because she had this adult, respectable look and feel to her. There was another young woman, Claudia Colvin, who had done something very similar in a way that wasn't planned, the way that Rosa Parks's protest was planned. Even Claudia Colvin, spontaneously, did not give up her seat on the bus and was arrested. And they did not choose to make her the model, right? It's just Rosa Parks the model because there's a way that we sort of want to package and present, right? The movement, and when we tell the history, it's always after King. But by the way, it was considered to be not about to start at this day, right? He wasn't this, you know, respectable old man, right? He was 39 when he was killed. The majority of his ministry took place in his 20s and 30s, he was considered, you know, at the end of Revolutionary II. And so the fact that the team, college protests were kind of missing from the narrative that I learned from running on, I found really distressing. And I think that that's part of the deliberate reframing of the movement to conceal, find kids, how much power they actually have in their own world today. If you understand that 13 year olds are the ones that made that happen, well, I'm 13, what can I do, right? I think it opens up that possibility. And so I wanted any kid to fix up that bug to kind of just get that little spark like, I don't know, the revolution's in my hands. It's in my friends' hands. What does that mean? That's entry fee. Yeah, the other thing that you do in your book, you have these really welcoming section headaches. So it's spark and kindling and blaze and embers. And how does that imagery of fire, how does that thread through the wrist of the book? I have, yeah, I have some of the different metaphors that I think move when I'm searching on this. And fire is something that feels very true to me, to this passion and kind of anger and kind of desperation and a need for change that's part of the movement. And so I like the idea that it's something that, yeah, we spark anger into a whole fire, right? It's been sort of a fire with a little map which we're probably, I mean, our chance to run, and stick together, but allegedly, right? People can do that. And so like a one-match fire, right? If you stack up the trees in just the right way and you put that spark, and you have this blaze, I really think that, you know, just like the wakeouts, right, it's a different metaphor for how something small can grow if it's fed, something small can grow if it joins with other things like it, right? And so that, it spoke to me as a metaphor, yeah, just as in some, we need a praise, we need a fire, we need something that grab people's attention and really transform. This fire also transforms the thing that, you know, something that you guys have where everything is still, you know, it's own thing, there's carrots in there and it's already, you know, you're taking this wood and you're transforming it into a journal, right? It's becoming a different thing and that's what we want from our evolution. We want to really transform our cultures like we have something for a version. So in doing the research from this book, tell us about one of the two characters you were really excited about and what is it about such stories that you really wanted to share? Who? Okay, so one of the, so one of the characters of the book is also a research character, so there's a guy named Billy X Chennings who lives in Sacramento now, he's a former Panther and he's kind of the archivist of the party and so he's turned his home into kind of a museum with Panther artifacts and he knows everybody and a lot of the photos in the book are from his organization and so he's somebody who's like, I was so scared to call and I was like, I have to talk to him but I know that even if he's going to do it, he's like, okay, so who do you know? What do you know? Are you a fed? He's got all these questions for you and so like just as a character now, like he was so warm and so helpful and so lovely and he just says it's this great personality and he's a librarian, he's not trained as a librarian but he has that personality where he just, he has every issue of the Black Panther newspaper that you, that's ever published and he keeps track of everything and just the, you know, he was a ranking file member, he wasn't particularly famous in the party but he's just somebody who really feels deeply for the history and kept it as a sort of meeting and talking with him was particularly special but in terms of like people who's narrative in the story, from the life of the Panthers, Erica Huggins, somebody who inspires me a lot, she was, she, so she and her husband, John Huggins came from Pennsylvania and really in a hurry to Los Angeles and they came, the first of the Los Angeles chapter, she, so there were leaders in the Los Angeles chapter and her husband was killed in by essentially probably the party of fear, but like by a sort of rival group members and when he was assassinated, she returned to the East Coast where she became the head of the New England chapter and she was imprisoned for a time, for about a year, a little over a year and went to trial and had all kinds of just really powerful experiences like across the party, like you can tell the history of the Black Anthem Party just by following Erica Huggins' narrative because she did it all, she was a chapter leader, she was on both coasts, she was in prison and a political prisoner for a time, she founded the Oakland Community School, it was the leader of the Oakland Community School for a long time and there's educators still today and they got to meet her in Oakland when they went there for the 15th anniversary celebration and she was one of the people who you think, oh my gosh, then you live through this harrowing history, you are incredibly powerful leader and maybe you still have time to have coffee with this little writer who you don't believe from a hole in the wall, but the woman I did at the school visit would have set me up for coffee and Erica Huggins just met me for coffee and it was so empowering that somebody like that would take time to chat with me and so her story has both been through the revolution and our time. I think that points to something that, many readers have taken away from the book that one, we often are told this history, right, it's kind of even erased, it's not something that we learn, oh, we do learn bits of history, we often don't learn the history of women in these old friends, tell us what it was like and what your purpose is in her story and bringing the women to the court for this book. Yeah, so just the sheer fact that at the peak of the Panthers membership, about 69% of the members were women, is amazing, right, it's a huge fact that I didn't know, it's like Erica Huggins and I met with her and I said, you know, this was early in the research process and I said something like, yeah, I'm glad I'm seeing this really important to me, it's like women's fall in the party, she had a crack on her arm, and she was like, not women's fall in the party. No one would ever say end full in the party, she was like, women were the party. And I was like, she had like the activists, like black people with their eyes on you, and you're just like, yes, yes, I will never make this mistake again ever again, right? But it was a really powerful lesson to me that like, we do tend to kind of minimize women's fall in things, right, we talked about it that way. And so just that conversation with other pieces of the story made me want to do the best I could to bring the various women who were powerful leaders within the movement to the front of my narrative. One of the challenges of that is just that the way that a broader historical record tells the story is that you really have to pull those narratives out when the organization was founded and you know, if you didn't know, obviously they were going around and finding them black men, the mission, their mission when they set out was to gather young black men. And it was a young woman named Jerika Lewis in Oakland who like came knocking on the door and were like, hey, what is this thing about a black man? Like, I can do it. Like, you'd be a leather jacket, like I'll go, you know, control the neighborhood, like I'll direct traffic at the intersection, right, which is what they were doing initially. And they were like, oh, okay. And so, yeah, sure, there's no reason why you can't, you know, instead of, they ended up being very egalitarian in their thinking around, you know, gender roles within the party when they did everything and did everything. That's not to say that individual members didn't reflect some of the gender bias that, you know, we are all steeped in our society. So there's stuff there. But for the most part, it was an extremely women's forward organization. And so, I wanted to reflect that as well as I could. You know, you have a fair number of photos in the book. Tell us about the process you went through to choose which photos you wanted to have in the book. Yeah, there's not, I think there's been like 180 photos in the book. My goal was that there be some item of visual interest on every page spread so that there aren't, you know, you open the book to any given page and you're gonna see this one image or maybe a sidebar or something colorful. And so, with every chapter, I sent in a selection of photos that could illustrate that chapter and the book designer helped choose which ones were gonna go. There were a few that I was like, this photo must be somewhere in the book, you know. But for the most part, I let him decide what would illustrate things best and what the pacing would be. But I submitted, so probably I submitted, you know, maybe a third more photos than he actually needed, does that make sense? So, if I submitted 15 photos, he might have used 10 in a given chapter and sometimes we would swap stuff out. But once he did the whole layout, we had to go and see if we could get permissions for all of those images so something just changed because of that. There were a few photos that I really wanted that were just too expensive. And, you know, it was a whole process of, you know, how much am I willing to spend? How much is the publisher willing to spend? And, you know, who can I even contact the people to get the rights for the photos? But the process was mostly, you know, trying to put women front and center as much as possible, trying to illustrate different aspects of the party and trying to combat this image of black men with guns. Like, I really didn't want there to be a gun on the cover. There's like only the little corner of one. Like, I didn't want that image of black men with guns to be the dominant image. So I thought, you know, if across the look overall, there are enough images to balance it out and it'll help change people's perception of the party. And so, you know, this, it sounds like, this is just me imagining, that you've been doing this research for years. And just tell us about when you started the research. What were kind of the obstacles that you went into challenges doing the research? You know, we've heard a lot about finding the right publisher, somebody who are publishing a query that would really want to do this, where you needed to do it. But what were also the real, like, just surprising and powerful takeaways that you came out with doing this research? I mean, the initial challenge was there was not very much online available at the beginning of the process. There's so much more available online than there's now, and that was when I started the research. So I literally was going to archives and sitting with the Little White Globes and spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress and the Oakland Museums. And just the experience of going to the archives really brought home the humanism, you know, just, you know, everything feels so distant when you read about the past, right? You read it in a history book or even an academic textbook and it's all kind of intellectualized. But then you're sitting there and it's like, oh, now here's the funeral program for Bobby Hutton, you know, or here's a button that somebody wore in the process march, right? Here are the little flyers that were up in the community and you can see that somebody is like, you know, torn off a corner or there's like a stain on one. And I don't know, it just, you could feel the, you know, that little teenager who went and like put the push pin in that paper on a bulletin board somewhere that made it feel more accessible. Than it ever felt to me in books. You feel like this research has been something that you're going to continue to move forward with and do more Caucasians in? Definitely, I mean, I love research and I'm going into the archives and I'm finding out new information and there's still more to learn about the fan theorists, you know, and more is revealed to me as, you know, I meet other people and hear other stories. One of the most interesting processes really is just meeting people at events like this, where you know, somebody will come up to me afterwards and be like, I've moved across the street from one of the Black Panther houses and here's a random story about the time I interacted with a Panther and it's always fascinating, right? So it's just this like tapestry, right? Of human experiences and stories. And so yeah, research never ends because of that. And I've, you know, I've wanted to write a picture but you know, to bring the history to even younger kids. But that's just as hard to find a way into and just as hard to find a way to publish. So, we'll see. It's very true. So, you know, what do you think is the legacy of the Black Panther one? Yeah, I mean, I think certainly there's still members that are active doing the community organizing work. I think the style of community organizing, organizing that they do actually has taken root in Black communities and has led to many other organizations. So I think their legacy is not as clear. It's like more of like a web or like a network kind of like underneath, right? The Black community is where they were active. And I think that their legacy is Black history education and hopefully we can preserve that as a nation that, you know, we now learn the history in school that they were trying to teach in the community. And hopefully we need to need to build that. And hopefully, you know, again, you know, the young inherit the revolution like the young people will go forward and the movements like the Black Lives Matter movement and young people who are involved in that and like the next, whatever comes next after that that they will look back at this and see it as a stepping stone and so that the legacy, the legacy is expansive, right? The legacy is what comes next. The legacy is we keep fighting. So, you know, I have to say, as somebody who is trying to really encourage people to think about humanities, right? You have a just body, everything of humanities that we do. She's in archives, she's looking at materials and doing research and putting out photos and talking to people, getting some oral history, doing human views. You are the epitome you can be with humanities for us. This is one thing that I take away from the conversation. What do you hope readers take away from reading this book? But also, what do you hope that we take away after this conversation tonight? So, I hope readers take away a deeper understanding of the history and how it connects to the coming day. I hope that they feel a sense of inspiration to use their particular voice or their particular skills to make a difference on an issue that feels important to them. If it's social justice, like me, great. But there's lots of other issues to advocate for, right? So, my hope is that people will see, you know, look at all of these different panthers that did all of this work, right? This is not a biography of one person, it's a biography of a movement, right? But that movement was made up of individuals who did small things or big things or a series of things, right, that made this change. And so, I hope that people leave the book feeling like, oh, I could be part of something like that. I could be someone who makes a difference and having a little bit of a sense of what that might be. And I hope the same for people who are here. I thank you for coming to listen and think about these issues. But like, yeah, what do you do to take it forward? You know, that sort of challenge that I tried to offer when I was speaking just, you know, like, what are the things that you can do? What are the little things that you do to take it forward? Like, who do you tell about what you experienced tonight? What was your take away? And how do you share that? How do you go out of the world and say, I'm gonna do something to make the world a better place on this issue, right? That I'm passionate about. That's what I hope people do. Well, I don't have any other questions and we wanna give the audience a little bit of time to ask questions as well. So we have one hand here. Are we taking one phone away? Thanks so much for coming. She is a classic humanist. Absolutely. Investigating a human story. I know that they did some really interesting intersectional work with Asian communities and Latinx communities. I wondered, we're multi-colored, multicultural, multi-generational here. Are there any successes they had in doing that bridge building that you think would help us here? Yeah, so the panthers were very active across racial and cultural and various minds. Like, they had, there's these sort of fascinating photos of Black Panther members in Chicago who are really have like a stung their black mother jacket or whatever, working with young patriots who were white working class, white working class group who had like Confederate flags, right, on their jackets. And so like, they were like working together because it was an economic struggle, right? And they worked with the young lords who was a Puerto Rican organizing group. They worked with the American Indian movement. They worked with the Red Guard. Like, there was a lot of different organizations who were all advocating for needs within their own community, their own ethnic group or their own neighborhoods. Like in Chicago, a friend of Hampton, who I am a revolutionary guy, was exceptionally skilled at bringing together those various street organizations that were working in different communities that had been rivals of these years. He talked about, like, conversation was the key, right? Getting people to talk to each other about the things they have in common, not just the things that are causing conflict between them. And so he brought all those different groups together because they had common struggles and they stopped talking about Black people. They started talking about all oppressed people, right? And so that idea of we are linked through our oppression. We are linked because there are people who have power. We are not those people, okay? We all have common interests on economic and racial fronts to have those conversations. And so in terms of what to learn from that, I think the main thing is dialogue, right? I'm being afraid to talk to people who are different from us and trying to find the commonality. If you can enter a conversation and say, okay, we come from here, you come from here, let's talk until we figure out the so-called thing that we have in common. Maybe it's only one thing that you're gonna find out if it's only one thing, right? And then you start to build those relationships, I think. Well, that's just a flood of beautiful things that we've appreciated, what we've been sending it at. I wanted to be like that, just the highlighting of commonality that I notice in Iran growing up here, coming here as a refugee when I was four. There is a special level of whiteness that is fundamentally structured around your guilty until proven wealthy. And that is one that threatens everyone. And I would like to hear more about how our commonality and recognizing that we all have this oppression in our history. The more recent, the more obvious is represented by both of you and I encourage history but then it gives back to the Irish to the training ground of colonialism and so how to speak more to that whiteness as something that is not just about skin, but about how we can saw that there is no hierarchy in oppression. Yeah, I mean, there's so many economic components to kind of every facet and the rate of our culture and country. And so there's racism and then there's economic injustice. Those things are linked, but they're different. And so talking about economic injustice is a particularly powerful, like when people really understand how economic structures in our society work, right? We understand how important it is to do things like the vote and how important it is to band together and use collective action because it takes a lot of voices to combat a single voice that has a lot of money and power, right? And so that's, I think a lesson that we can all learn is that we often feel powerless because we can't buy every other problem, right? But we can actually use collective action to pay a change too. I wish I had a longer question. I was trying to think just, what's a really short to the point question that I could ask, and instead I'm stalling, I was like, all right, okay, here's my question. Right now, in this moment and in this work, what, where do you find local open joy? Well, we think about open joy. I think one of the things that is so exciting about doing work with humanities and trying to get communities and individuals to think about how to work with humanities is, is that humanities to me is always what allows us to pause, especially when things are very difficult, right? And we can use humanities that to dissect things and figure out for ourselves how more to afford. But the more exciting part about humanities, and I don't think that everybody understands this, but you, I don't know that you find this so much of STEM engineering, you know, is humor. And I think that, you know, we forget that part of humanity is being able to laugh and being able to use that as a tool to have camaraderie with somebody, come together with people. And I just, you know, I think we forget sometimes the real foundations of humanities that allow us to then think about things with hope and think that we're going to be okay. We're gonna get through it. I say this a lot. We're gonna be okay. We're gonna get through it. We're gonna be challenged, but we're gonna use the skills that we have as individuals, but as individuals who are so tied to humanities to get through it. And whether we do that together, hopefully a lot more together, or if we really do that, kind of thinking ourselves and moving ourselves forward. You know, it seems like in this book, this is what we have seen, right? This is what you're talking about. How do these communities come together and really move things forward? And I think they laughed a lot. Do you want to try to bite you out of it? I don't know. I'm thinking you need to try. Apparently, I'm thinking you need to try. That's what I caused. Oh, oh. They won. My answer to that was actually gonna be really short. Like kids. Like, that's where I get my inspiration. My drill, like my hope. That means, like I had to study yesterday at Mountaineer, at Main Street, and at, I don't know, I'm not sure, high school. And like, they were, you know, they come in and they're like, squirrely, and they're like, what's this gonna be? And then they're like, wait, what? Like, some rings, like, what? Like, what happened? And the panthers said, what? You know, so like, they get really engaged by it. They get really outraged by it. And they get really, like, you can see, there's always only a few of them that end up being the ones who feel like they're not paying attention. For the most part, they're just like, hooked on the idea that young people did this. We could do something. We want to be just cheap. It's like that. I get them, like, they flock out at the end to be like, wait, so, you know, what can I do? Like, you saw them, like, coming out to the end, you know, to say, I don't even like the book, or really inspired by the book. I had lunch at the bike lot group at the high school. And, you know, you know, I sat in there at first, and they're all shy, and they're like, I don't know, I'm like, you know, like, I'm gonna talk to the author, I'm gonna be talking to the author. And then, like, you know, three minutes later, they're like, okay, so, like, I'm page 75. Like, you talk about this. And like, I wrote this cool thing, and I'm like, really, this whole thing was a 40-page book, you know? I went to their reading it, and they're like really passionate, and I don't know, it just, it gives me hope that, like, they're paying attention, that they aren't gonna reach across racial lines, and that they're gonna find their own voices, and they're gonna figure out, like, how to transform the world. Like, they really are, right? And I did my life. Yeah. Thank you both for that. I think that's a great place to end it, and I just wanna say thank you again kind of for all your work. Thank you. Thank you.