Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion & Reinvention

The former Black Panther offers “an inspiring, unapologetic account” of his life in the movement and in prison to becoming an acclaimed artist and academic (Kirkus Reviews).

In the 1960s he exhorted students at Columbia University to burn their college to the ground. Today he’s chair of their School of the Arts film division. Jamal Joseph’s personal odyssey—from the streets of Harlem to Rikers Island and Leavenworth to the halls of academia—is as gripping as it is inspiring.

As a teenager in the Bronx, Eddie Joseph was a high school honor student, slated to graduate early and begin college. But then he discovered the tenets of the Black Panther Party. By sixteen, his devotion to the cause landed him in prison on Rikers Island, charged with conspiracy as one of the infamous Panther 21. Though he was exonerated, Eddie—now called Jamal—soon landed back in prison after joining the “revolutionary underground.”

Sentenced to more than twelve years in Leavenworth, he earned three degrees there and found a new calling that would ultimately lead him into a new life. In raw, powerful prose, Jamal Joseph helps us understand what it meant to be a soldier inside the Black Panther movement. He recounts his harrowing imprisonment and his difficult path to manhood in a book filled with equal parts rage, despair, and hope.

“Jamal Joseph is a long-distance intellectual freedom fighter who never lost his soul and his integrity—despite the ugly underside of America! Don’t miss this powerful book!” —Cornel West