It’s fitting that Huey dedicated this book to Bobby Hutton, the first member to join the Party after Huey and Bobby Seale, and the first Black Panther to be killed: Bobby was just seventeen years old when, after a stand-off, police gunned down the unarmed youth as he surrendered. Huey was devastated by the murder but also clear-eyed enough to understand that a revolutionary is “a doomed man.” In other words, every revolutionary fighter by definition struggles against the power imbalance of the establishment, and the cost of this struggle is often paid with one’s own life. Huey coined the term “revolutionary suicide” to describe this phenomenon. Not to be confused with what he calls “reactionary suicide”—wherein a person kills himself in despair and helplessness—revolutionary suicide is infused with the possibility that one’s death will further the revolutionary cause. As Huey explains, “[I]t is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions. . . . Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we move against these forces, even at the risk of death.” [...]