A Look Back at a Powerful Moment in New Orleans’s History

By Orissa Arend
Foreword by Charles E. Jones
Introduction by Curtis J. Austin

Showdown in Desire portrays the Black Panther Party in New Orleans in 1970, a year that included a shootout with the police on Piety Street, the creation of survival programs, and the daylong standoff between the Panthers and the police in the Desire housing development. Through interviews with Malik Rahim, the Panther; Robert H. King, Panther and member of the Angola 3; Larry Preston Williams, the black policeman; Moon Landrieu, the mayor; Henry Faggen, the Desire resident; Robert Glass, the white lawyer; Jerome LeDoux, the black priest; William Barnwell, the white priest; and many others, Orissa Arend tells a nuanced story that unfolds amid guns, tear gas, desperate poverty, oppression, and inflammatory rhetoric to capture the palpable spirit of rebellion, resistance, and revolution of an incendiary summer in New Orleans.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

From The Times Picayune

Two new books tell the story of the Black Panther Party in New Orleans

Posted by Susan Larson, Book editor, The Times-Picayune May 13, 2009


One thing led to another, one person led to another, and after 44 columns for The Louisiana Weekly, eventually published as a booklet in 2003, Orissa Arend has a fleshed-out, full-length book about Black Panthers in New Orleans.

This story begins with an unlikely friendship between an Uptown woman buying pralines for a Thanksgiving family gathering and a praline-maker who was freed from Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola as one of the famous Angola 3.

Read more here

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