Our research essay is centered around the cause & effect of a protest movement, the art created within the movement, and if it was effective. I picked the Black Power movement, as the fist is an iconic symbol, and it's an era of history I'm honestly ignorant about (history major). I'm also looking more into Emory Douglas and his art for The Black Panther (newspaper).
The book I'm mainly referencing is New Day In Babylon by William L. Van Deburg (professor of Afro-American studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison), and in the preface he states "But as all practicing historians surely understand, only by engaging in a project such as this (his book) does one fully appreciate how much an individual removed in time, place, ethnicity, or gender doesn't know- and perhaps can never know- about a social movement like Black Power." Almost as a warning, trying to understand the historical context as a 25y/o white, female student is a tad daunting, if not discouraging. Hence why I came here...
Any resources or personal insight is greatly appreciated.
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on using the poster art of Emory Douglas as an alternate text to understand the Black Panther Party's political ideology! Which mostly means that everything I suggest is about five years out of date.
I started my thesis by reading Peniel E. Joseph's Waiting Til the Midnight Hour. Joseph pretty much created the Black Power Studies discipline, and this book in particular is a good overview of the progression of black radicalism.
I read a lot of memoirs, but it seems you want "impartial historical context," so you can skip those. (You shouldn't, though. At least read Bobby Seale's Seize the Time, and maybe Assata Shakur's Assata: An Autobiography because she's badass.)
Even a lot of the more scholarly stuff is still In Their Own Words, but of that I do recommend the collection edited by Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party. In that collection is an essay by Ericka Doss about Emory Douglas, though I would recommend you go on JStor and find the lengthier version: "'Revolutionary art is a tool for liberation': Emory Douglas and Protest Aesthetics in the Black Panther," New Political Science 21, no. 2 (1999) It's mostly about the masculinization of black liberation movements through Emory Douglas, but it provides a reasonable introduction to Douglas. There's actually not a lot of critical art historical works on Emory Douglas, or at least there weren't when I was working on my thesis. The catalog from his 2008 LA art show was pretty helpful, though - Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, edited by Sam Durant.
I hope that helps for a start. If I think of anything else, I'll make an update.
EDIT: oh yeah, there are two other pretty good essay collections, The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered], edited by Charles E. Jones, which again was about half and half scholars and ex-Panthers (and I quote my annotated bibliography) "leading to a combination of scholarly analysis and memoir-like reminiscences. All of the chapters taken together lead to a complex discussion about the Black Panther Party, using interviews as well as COINTELPRO documents, newspapers, and various Party ephemera." Also good is In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement by Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams; this one emphasized and analyzed the Black Panther Party's radical socialism, militancy, and coalition-building efforts.
EDIT 2: Duh, also, Black Power by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton. And Peniel Joseph's got a Black Power Movement collection that I can't remember if I've read or not but I'm willing to bet is pretty solid.
EDIT 3: And don't get discouraged. When I started my thesis I was a clueless 20-year-old white girl from whitebread $$ suburbia (my first idea was to write on Rastafarianism, and thank god my advisor vetoed that) and now radical black history and anti-racism is kind of my thing.