Armed revolution and free breakfast: The extraordinary true story of "The Black Panthers" and how they shaped our era

It’s useless to inquire whether the organizers of Black Lives Matter have learned the lessons of the Black Panthers, the explosive and extraordinary activist movement that shook the American establishment to its core in the late 1960s and was promptly destroyed. It’s especially useless, no doubt, for a white dude writing an article on the Internet to ask that question, and I claim no special insight into BLM’s collective understanding or interpretation of that not-so-distant history. But the larger point is that no one has learned the lessons of the Panthers, because half a century after their startling emergence from the streets of Oakland, California, we still have no idea what those lessons were.