Arts & Culture

2315 Durant Ave,Berkeley CA 94704

01 December, 2021

Description

Kimberly Cox Marshall in Conversation with Steve Wasserman about Her Father’s Provocative Memoir: Making Revolution Kimberly Cox Marshall in Conversation with Steve Wasserman about Her Father’s Provocative Memoir: Making Revolution: My Life in the Black Panther Party In the remote French village where her father lived in exile, Kimberly Cox Marshall stayed up most of the night reading page after typewritten page of his memoir. “I couldn’t put it down,” she recalls of the detailed account of his five years as a leader of the Black Panther Party. “This was my father? It was the total opposite of who I had grown up with. This man was wild!” Just four months later, in February 2011, Donald Cox died in his sleep. Back home in California, Kimberly was left to fulfill her promise to get his manuscript published. It took eight years for her to convince the publishing world that this was not “just another book about the Panthers” and to overcome the objections of former members of the party who did not want the book to see the light of day. In the end, Steve Wasserman, of our local press Heyday, recognized the value of what the Chronicle later called a “complex, provocative autobiography … a gripping record of a fraught era, one that shook Northern California and communities across the country.” For Kimberly, this outcome could not have been more fortuitous. She and Steve discovered that their paths often had crossed in San Francisco when they were children. On Wednesday, December 1, Kimberly and Steve will be our featured guests at Arts & Culture. They will discuss her father’s transition from a 34-year-old San Francisco businessman and father — who owned a home, wore Brooks Brothers suits, and drove an Austin-Healy — to Field Marshal DC. He took part in many peaceful civil rights protests but also advocated for militant action, obtained guns for Party members, and taught them to shoot so they could defend themselves against what they saw as oppression from a white racist establishent. This event is free and open to the public. Masks and proof of vaccination will be required. Please pre-register using the link below so that we can allow for safe seating. In January 1970, Donald Cox acted as the Panther’s spokesperson at a fundraiser at Leonard Bernstein’s apartment for the party’s legal defense fund. Tom Wolfe famously satirized the evening in his essay “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.” When Kimberly was 11, her father fled the country to avoid arrest and never returned. She maintained contact with him but visited him only twice during his years abroad. After college, she worked in brokerage and investment banking firms and then became an IT specialist. Now retired, she lives in Vallejo with her husband and enjoys spending time with her sons and grandsons. She also has become more politically active, having recently been appointed to the steering committee of Vessels of Vallejo, a grassroots organization dedicated to “building community power through mutual aid, political education, and the dismantling of oppressive systems.” Steve Wassermman, executive editor and publisher of Heyday since 2016, has deep roots in the literary world. He was editor-at-large for Yale University Press, editor-in-chief of New Republic Books, and editorial director of Times Books/Random House, and a publisher at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A founder of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC, he also was editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Steve also has a long history of political activism. Having grown up in Berkeley, he supported the Free Speech Movement, and protested the Vietnam War as a young teen. He was student body president at Berkeley High, where he helped organize a strike in 1968 that led to the addition of an African American History and Studies Department, the first in the nation. Please join us for what promises to be a lively conversation between Kimberly and Steve about Making Revolution and the history of the Black Panthers — just a few weeks after the 55th anniversary of the Party’s founding in Oakland. Email: [email protected]