Ripples of Time: Memoir of a Former Black Panther

Ripples of Time is Jon-Jamal Turner's story about life as a Panther activist. It is also an unflinching examination of America's history, including how black bodies have been brutalized and policed tracing an unbroken line between the slave era and the present-day conditions. This book will expose the disinformation campaign waged by the 16th century European Enlightenment Thinkers against African people in order to justify slavery. This book will show how yesterday's injustices and racist tropes are still with us, albeit in a new form: slaves were economically exploited on plantations that were controlled by slave patrollers. Now we have neo-slavery, in which urban ghettos have replaced the plantations and police officers replaced the slave patrollers. The police still restrict (contain and control) the movements of African Americans and mete out physical abuse (e.g. George Floyd) to prop up an economic system that has white supremacy at its heart.

Little has changed; yesterday is today in Ripples of Time. While Trump's largely white supporters were able to enter the Capitol building with minimal resistance, lawful Black Lives Matter activists were met with the force of National Guard soldiers during protests over the death of George Floyd. Police brutalizing African Americans while white supremacists undermine democracy is nothing new. It's as American as apple pie. It is simply history repeating itself. The current generation of Black Lives Matter activists are facing the same issues we Panthers faced decades earlier, albeit to a lesser degree.