BLACK POWER, BLACK LAWYER

The memoir of a Black Nationalist, reformer, and lawyer.

Taifa’s life reflects the dual story of a reformer on the inside of a discriminatory system and that of a Black Nationalist revolutionary. As such, her memoir takes readers to dining room tables accompanied by Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, to early Kwanzaa celebrations at the Temple of the Black Messiah, and to behind-the-scenes meetings of the Black separatist Republic of New Afrika, while later taking them to the Roosevelt Room of the White House, to meetings with Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and to Taifa’s work as a policy analyst for billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. Personally involved in a variety of Black Nationalist groups in the 1970s, and later working for decades as a lawyer advocating criminal justice reform, Taifa’s memoir is not just a retelling of her own life’s story, but serves as a vital history of the post-1960s fight for Black liberation. It is, in her own words, “part memoir, part textbook, part study guide, part exposé,”[xii] as she weaves her own story into the wider history of Nationalists like H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, Chokwe Lumumba, and Assata Shakur. The work also discusses a more internal struggle of a Black Nationalist woman who spent years “on the cutting-edge of revolutionary action,” but whose legal career for change inside the system often requires her to play the part of a “responsible” reformer.[4] Nor does she hold back on her personal life, openly discussing her experiences with sexual abuse, two failed marriages, and a frantic hunt for a missing sex-tape. Nearly every chapter is richly adorned with historical photographs or snapshots of the author with an assortment of Black revolutionary celebrities. Original poetry, mostly centered on Black Nationalist and Pan-African themes, is similarly sprinkled throughout her narrative. While Taifa’s bold attempt to tell both her own story and that of a larger history of the Black experience can be at times cumbersome, this is nevertheless a powerful, important book.

An engaging memoir of not just a fascinating woman, but a history of a movement.