286 I N D I A N A   M A G A Z I N E   O F  H I S T O R Y

dream books that helped bettors pick 
lucky numbers, “African American 
diviners wrote the script of black ur-
banism through visions captured while 
Bronzeville slept” (p. 63). The chapter 
closes with an account of policy as 
subject matter for the documentary 
writings of the Illinois Writers’ Proj-
ect and the imaginative writings of 
Bronzeville’s poets and novelists.

Gwendolyn Brooks and Rich-
ard Wright are the focal subjects of 
Chapters Four and Five, respectively.  
Schlabach deploys biographical de-
tails to contrast Brooks’s “sense of 
ease” in her Bronzeville environment 
with Wright’s “feeling of not belong-
ing there” (pp. 76-77).  More original 
is her exploration of the tropes of 
confinement, crowding, and domi-
nation that run through works like 
Wright’s photo-documentary 12 Mil-
lion Black Voices (1941) and Brooks’s 
novel Maud Martha (1953). The 
squalid “kitchenette” flats housing 
poor blacks emerge as the prime set-
ting and concrete symbol of a “misery 
of place” limned by both writers (p. 
108). Schlabach argues, however, that 

Brooks imbues the harsh cityscape 
with a softening light of grace, of 
small victories achieved through quo-
tidian (and often feminine) rituals of 
survival. A brief conclusion offers a 
look at contemporary Bronzeville and 
suggests that its complex “mixture of 
vibrancy and decay” (p. 123) supports 
“a perspective that disallows overde-
termined narratives of hope and/or 
despair” (p. 125). 

Along the Streets of Bronzeville is, 
on balance, a flawed but sometimes 
interesting study that advances what 
may be considered a midwestern turn 
in African American studies. While 
not the historian’s best point of entry 
into this emerging field, it is a book 
to consider.

riChard a. Courate, Professor of 
English, Westchester Community 
College/SUNY, is co-author of The 
Muse in Bronzeville: African American 
Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932-
1950 (2011) and co-editor of Root, 
Branch, and Blossom: Social Origins 
of Chicago’s New Negro Artists and 
Intellectuals (forthcoming).

From the Bullet to the Ballot attempts 
to combine the history of racism and 
corruption in Chicago, Illinois, with 
a day-to-day history of the Black 
Panther Party in Chicago. Jakobi Wil-

liams argues that the chapter’s leader, 
Fred Hampton, and the Chicago-
based Panthers left a lasting impact 
on multiracial political coalitions in 
that city, and the entire nation. The 

From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black 
Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago
By Jakobi Williams
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. x, 285. Illustrations, notes, index. 
$34.95.)



 REVIEWS    287

Chicago Panthers created a template 
for working-class and poor people’s 
revolutionary political organizing 
that they called the Rainbow Co-
alition. That framework, Williams 
contends, played a direct role in 
Barack Obama’s election as president. 
Unfortunately, a limited number of 
primary sources, a poorly organized 
central narrative, and spotty analysis 
of evidence impairs Williams’s none-
theless important book.   

From the Bullet to the Ballot opens 
with an overview of twentieth-centu-
ry racism and political corruption in 
Chicago. A second chapter reviews 
the origins of the Black Panthers in 
Chicago and argues that the group 
represented a continuation of the 
city’s failed civil rights movement. A 
third chapter compares the Chicago 
Panthers with the Black Panthers in 
Oakland. Aside from a fantastic sec-
tion on women in the Black Panthers 
(pp. 110-23), this discussion relies 
primarily on anecdotal descriptions 
of assorted institutions (such as black 
churches) and events (such as the 
infamous 1968 Democratic National 
Convention) in its efforts to distin-
guish the Chicago Panthers from 
other chapters around the country. In 
Chapter Four Williams discusses the 
Black Panthers’ innovative participa-
tion in multiracial, class-based coali-
tion politics—“the original rainbow 
coalition,” as he calls it. The Chicago 
Panthers’ rainbow coalition referred 
to its hope to create a massive politi-
cal movement of all of the city’s poor 
people. Williams intends to show how 

the Panthers influenced other local 
radical groups in Chicago, but his 
narrative of this is thin and rests on a 
list of meetings, long descriptions of 
articles written by activists, and police 
surveillance reports. 

Williams’s next chapter recounts 
an important history of police bru-
tality against black Chicagoans and 
rehashes the corruption of the Richard 
J. Daley administration.  It was this 
culture of police corruption and rac-
ism, Williams argues, that led to the 
police murder of Fred Hampton and 
the nefarious cover-up that followed. 
A final chapter connects the Chicago 
Panthers’ Rainbow Coalition with the 
subsequent iterations of that political 
vision that accompanied the mayoral 
election of Harold Washington, Jesse 
Jackson’s campaigns for the presidency 
in the 1980s, and the 2008 presidential 
election of Barack Obama. 

Wooden prose and confusing 
organization abound in this book. 
Despite Williams’s judicious cita-
tions, the book also suffers from 
its overreliance on a few types of 
primary sources: The author admits 
that many former party members re-
fused to speak with him because they 
planned to write their own accounts. 
While Williams uses an impressive 
collection of Chicago police records, 
his story leans too much on these re-
ports, or on quotes culled from video 
documentaries and memorial panels.  
From the Bullet to the Ballot is a book 
that, while filled with important intel-
lectual and political subjects, could 
have benefitted from more careful 



288 I N D I A N A   M A G A Z I N E   O F  H I S T O R Y

editing, clearer organization, and 
more substantive analysis.  

Brian purnell is Associate Professor 
of Africana Studies and History at 
Bowdoin College. He is the author 
of Fighting Jim Crow in the County of 
Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality 

in Brooklyn (2013), which won the 
New York State Historical Associa-
tion’s manuscript prize in 2012. He is 
starting a second project, tentatively 
entitled, “Unmaking the Ghetto: 
Community Development Corpora-
tions and the Fate of America’s Black 
Metropolises.”

Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New 
France
By Brett Rushforth 
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. vii, 406. Illustrations, maps, 
charts, appendix, index. $39.95.)

The seventeenth-century arrival of 
French colonists in the Americas 
extended older practices of Native 
American captive-taking and trans-
formed slavery into a complicated 
mix of markets and alliances. Colo-
nists in Canada and the Pays d’en 
Haut found themselves dependent 
upon slave exchanges as a means to 
maintain alliances and ensure control 
of intertribal relations, as no other 
gift could signal the importance of 
maintaining and reinforcing the bond 
between tribes and France.

For Native Americans, slaves were 
explicitly “outsiders” who functioned 
as a means to unify members of a 
tribe as “insiders,” or non-slaves. 
Reciprocal gift giving was central to 
maintaining relations among tribes 
and slaves-as-gifts signaled especially 
significant bonds. Frenchmen, how-
ever, considered slavery an uncertain 
practice that stood in stark contrast to 
the humanist ideals emanating from 

the French Renaissance. Slavery did 
not exist in the French homeland 
(outside of visiting Mediterranean 
galley slaves). At the same time, in 
France’s overseas colonies slavery was 
a central component of economics 
and everyday life. Brett Rushforth’s 
Bonds of Alliance thus addresses 
multiple narratives, ranging from 
the Great Lakes to the Caribbean and 
across the Atlantic. 

French justifications for the le-
gality of colonial slavery ultimately 
relied in part upon distance. African 
kingdoms, understood as nations with 
the right to enslave others, simply sup-
plied France with individuals already 
transformed into slaves. In colonial 
New France, it was far more difficult 
to distinguish enslaved neighbors from 
allies.  In order to establish a similar 
distance in North America, the term 
panís became the standard means to 
designate indigenous slaves. Rushforth 
makes it clear that only a few of the