"Can’t Simply Be Read; It Must Be Witnessed"

"One of the advertisements reprinted in the book reveals just how broad the audience for this material was. A promotional advertisement for the Last Poets’ album This is Madness, printed in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, claimed 'If you are white this record will scare the shit out of you.' As if that were not startling enough, the ad continued with the pitch: 'If you are black this record will scare the nigger out of you!' We can safely assume that this kind of material is unlikely to appear in Rolling Stone today. This kind of documentation highlights one of Listen, Whitey!’s strengths: its breadth of explorations of Black Power’s influence on everything and everyone from Motown, to jazz poetry and performance, to comedians, to radio DJs, to the rock music counterculture. In short, Listen, Whitey! delivers Black Power as Americana."

Rickey Vincent in The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Pat Thomas's Listen, Whitey!: The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975.