Poetry and the Black Panther Party: from Ancestral Memory, Morphogenetic Fields to Hip Hop

Most people do not realize that Bobby Seale and Huey Newton performed and wrote poetry and that there was a poetry section in every issue of the Black Panther newspaper that ran for thirteen years.  Black Panthers appreciated poetry and in this book Regina Jennings traces poetry’s origins from the Black classical civilization of Kemet, now known as Egypt to the poetry written during the Black enslavement epoch in America, the Harlem Renaissance through to the 1960s Black aesthetic movement.  By comparing Ancestral Memory with the new Western science that involves energetic fields of habitual invisible knowledge often passed through creative speech among generations, this book offers a fresh and exciting gaze into the power of spoken words and historical memory.  From the ancient Black past to contemporary hip hop, in one chapter, Jennings compares lyrics from Tupac Shakur, a Panther cub,to the poetry of Huey P. Newton.