Spitting in the Wind: The True Story Behind the Violent Legacy of the Black Panther Party

This poorly edited, disorganized autobiography is an unsatisfying amalgam of significant revelations about the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party in the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 1960s and early '70s and trivial information about the author's troubles with women and drugs. A graduate of the University of Southern California and a one-time law student, Anthony was the first black middle-class convert to the Panthers' cause, and was an intimate of Bobby Seale, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. He also served as an informant for the FBI--blackmailed into that role, he claims, by two FBI agents who falsely charged Anthony with a bombing, put a gun to his head, then cut a deal to let him off the hook in exchange for the inside story on the Panthers. Here he tells in detail how government agents apparently infiltrated black liberation organizations, fomented enmity from within and thus, he claims, caused many murders, even killing some blacks and serving as drug wholesalers to black leaders to undermine the movement. In his 1970 book Picking Up the Gun, Anthony suppressed much of the material he relates here. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)