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Showdown in Desire
The Black Panthers
Take a Stand in New Orleans
Orissa Arend
Foreword by Charles E. Jones
Introduction by Curtis J. Austin
A look
back at a powerful moment in New
Orleans’s history
“An admirably researched manuscript that illuminates an important yet
overlooked chapter of African American history in New Orleans.”
—Lance Hill, author of The
Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and
the Civil Rights
Movement
“Orissa Arend has done her homework . . . she has managed to help
disseminate and preserve the legacy of the Black Panther party, more
specifically, the New Orleans
chapter.”
—Robert H. King, a.k.a Robert King Wilkerson, freed member of the Angola 3
and author of From the
Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary
King
“Orissa
Arend has forced us to see these self-defense militants from every point
of view imaginable. Moving, informative, and in places side-splittingly
funny, Showdown in
Desire restores to Technicolor memory a chapter of civil
rights history too often neglected. The book deserves a wide audience.”
—Lawrence N. Powell, Tulane University
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.
Orissa
Arend is a mediator, freelance journalist, and
psychotherapist in private practice in New Orleans. She has written for the Louisiana Weekly,
the New Orleans
Tribune, and the Times-Picayune.
Charles
E. Jones is associate professor and founding chair of the
Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State
University. He is
the editor of Black
Panther Party Reconsidered.
Curtis
J. Austin is associate professor of history and director
of the Center for Black Studies at the University of Southern
Mississippi. He is the author of Up
Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black
Panther Party.
April
6 x 9, 216 pages,
31 photographs, index
$29.95 cloth
ISBN
978-1-55728-896-7 | 1-55728-896-8
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