TY - JOUR
AU1 - Joseph, Peniel E.
AB - The Black Power Movement remains a controversial, misunderstood, and relatively neglected era in the historiography of postwar American history. In striking contrast, over the past quarter century historians have devoted considerable attention to the civil rights movement, especially its heroic years from 1954 to 1965. These years were indelibly marked by bus boycotts, sit-ins, political assassinations, and legal and legislative victories that riveted the national conscience and have been successfully upheld by contemporary historians as the most important social and political development of the postwar era. Historians, even as they have critically analyzed the movement's setbacks, ambiguities, and successes, generally view civil rights as a moral and political good, with many arguing that, despite all of its notable achievements, the struggle for racial justice remains incomplete. On this score, civil rights historiography has developed into one of the richest and most prolific subfields of American history (1). Conversely, Black Power has been viewed as a destructive, short-lived, and politically ineffectual movement that triggered white backlash, urban rioting, and severely crippled the mainstream civil rights struggle. Black Power's classical period of 1966–1975 is most often characterized as a kind of fever dream dominated by outsized personalities who spewed words of fire that make this a justly forgotten era. Moreover, histories of the New Left tend to blame Black Power radicalism for inspiring white radicals towards a simplistic and tragically romantic view of “revolutionary” violence (2). “Black Power Studies” places the history of the era within the broader context of American and African American history at the local, national, and international level. Black Power is too often portrayed as a temporary eruption that existed outside the confines of American history…. The movement's antiwar activism, antipoverty efforts, foreign policy interventions, intellectual and political debates, local character and national influence have been virtually ignored in the historiography of postwar America. This is as unfortunate as it is ill considered. A new subfield of American historical scholarship and Africana Studies, what I have called “Black Power Studies,” is changing the way in which historians, teachers, students, and the general public view Black Power, civil rights, and the 1960s specifically, and more generally, postwar American history. In doing so, “Black Power Studies” places the history of the era within the broader context of American and African American history at the local, national, and international level. Black Power is too often portrayed as a temporary eruption that existed outside the confines of American history. That is, the movement's antiwar activism, antipoverty efforts, foreign policy interventions, intellectual and political debates, local character and national influence have been virtually ignored in the historiography of postwar America. This is as unfortunate as it is ill considered. Black Power grew out of the tumult of postwar America, not just the decade of the 1960s, when the possibilities of American democracy seemed unlimited. Black Power activists tested America's willingness to extend citizenship to blacks with a robust call for self-determination that scandalized and transformed longstanding American institutions. Some activists did this through, at times, a bellicose advocacy of racial separatism contoured by threats of civil unrest. Others sought equal access to predominantly white institutions, especially public schools, colleges, and universities while many decided to build independent, black-led institutions designed to serve as new beacons for African American intellectual achievement, political power, and cultural pride. Yet such efforts did not exist in a vacuum. Organized black activists encountered political repression at the local, national, and international level. A complex web of criminal justice and police agencies infiltrated, harassed, and helped to eventually cripple Black Power's most visibly militant groups. But the movement adapted to such constraints through bold efforts to transform American democracy by advocating radical goals that were tempered by a surprising and effective blend of militancy and pragmatism. Organized protests for Black Studies, efforts to incorporate the Black Arts into independent and existing institutions, and the thrust to take control of major American cities through electoral strength exemplified these impulses. Black Power activism's influence stretched from prisons to trade unions to local and national political elections. Internationally, Black Power militants forged alliances with iconic Third World leaders including Fidel Castro, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, and Julius Nyerere. Leading American political figures of the postwar era, most notably Lyndon Baines Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Ramsey Clark, Nicholas Katzenbach, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover regarded the movement as dangerous, unpredictable, and a threat to national security. Yet the movement's impact on American history, its successes, failures, and shortcomings, as well as it contemporary legacy, remain undervalued and understudied. While scholars have made important strides in documenting the way domestic civil rights struggles played out on a Cold War international stage where democracy's image was contested against the backdrop of southern civil rights demonstrations, virtually no attention has been paid to the way in which Black Power era urban riots impacted American foreign policy. Likewise, activists such as Stokely Carmichael's overseas trips proved embarrassing enough for American officials to press the U.S. State Department to follow his every move (3). Historians of the modern civil rights movement generally view Black Power as a movement comprised of armed urban militants inspired more by rage than an actual political program. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a group of young black men and women from California's Bay Area, have come to personify the period in the historical imagination. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their bold public persona—replete with leather jackets, tilted berets, and guns—than their ten-point program which called for the fundamental transformation of black poverty in central cities. Stokely Carmichael, who unleashed the “Black Power” slogan in the midst of a civil rights march in Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16, 1966, is usually dismissed as a temperamental rabble rouser who helped to subvert more promising movements for social justice. Yet such a characterization ignores Carmichael's civil rights activism in the Deep South between 1960 and 1966, where he endured physical violence and racial terror in pursuit of radical democracy. Carmichael's willingness to endure personal sacrifice and years of struggle for democratic principles that upheld black sharecroppers as symbols of a new American egalitarianism complicates narratives of the Black Power era. Black Power transformed American democracy. At the local level, in cities such as New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Oakland, and Los Angeles, urban militants used the movemenfs ethos of self-determination and cultural pride to advocate for bread and butter issues such as decent housing, better public schools, employment, welfare benefits, and an end to police brutality. Nationally, activists such as Stokeley Carmichael argued that institutional racism had distorted the shape and character of American democracy. Carmichael's call for Black Power included eloquent and angry denunciations against the Vietnam War that made him the subject of a wide ranging, meticulous, and illegal surveillance by the FBI, White House, CIA, and State Department. If Carmichael became the most visible face of black militancy in the late 1960s, Black Arts icons such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Larry Neal advocated a cultural revolution that carried with it profound political implications. Black Arts activists promoted a redefinition of black identity that wedded indigenous African American cultural traditions to a reconstructed vision of Africa, the Caribbean, and the wider global black diaspora (4). Internationally, activists visited Africa, formed lobbying groups, and made decolonization the hallmark of efforts to transform American foreign policy toward the Third World. By 1972 the movement was driven as much by international political considerations as local and domestic ones. A remarkable, but ultimately short-lived, alliance between urban militants and black elected officials resulted in arguably the most diverse array of voices in African American political history at the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. The roots of the modern Black Power Movement are found in the domestic and international freedom struggles of the Great Depression and World War II era, where coalitions of civil rights activists, trade unionists, liberals, radicals, and pan-Africanists demanded a deeper more expansive vision of American democracy. Political mobilizers such as Paul Robeson, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, and the venerable intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois advocated a national movement for racial and economic justice and world peace that found local voice through grassroots organizers such as Ella Baker and took root from Harlem's bleak street corners through the union organizing efforts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and interracial antiracist activities in Birmingham, Alabama, to the postwar boomtowns of Oakland and Los Angeles. Cold war repression dramatically scaled back these efforts and became replaced, at least at the national level, with a southern civil rights movement that gingerly couched its efforts within the context of cold war liberalism's pungent anti-Communism (5). In 1954, the same year as the Supreme Court's Brown desegregation decision, Malcolm X arrived in Harlem as the head minister of the Nation of Islam's Muslim Mosque No. 7 on West 116th Street. Over the course of the next decade Malcolm would practice a unique brand of coalition politics that attracted two generations of African American radicals. The older group included veteran street speakers, activists, and radicals who had come of political age during the freedom surge of the 1940s only to be disappointed (and at times criminalized) by the cold war. The most notable of these figures included the writer John Oliver Killens and Harlem historian John Henrik Clarke, both leading members of the Harlem Writers Guild. Malcolm also attracted a younger generation of activists, including the poets Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Maya Angelou. Harlem powerbrokers such as Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and New York Amsterdam News editor James Hicks were among the coterie of influential political, journalistic, and civic figures who Malcolm counted as allies. On February 15, 1961 many of Harlem's leading activists who viewed Malcolm as their political leader staged a demonstration at the United Nations' Security Council in protest against the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first African Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the ensuing melee dozens were arrested and the New York Times described it as the “worst day of violence” in the UN's history. Public intellectuals James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry sounded a different note, writing to the Times to express deep disappointment with stories and rumors that characterized the demonstration as a communist plot. According to Baldwin and Hansberry, the Lumumba demonstration represented a call for radical democracy that connected anticolonial struggles being waged in Africa with domestic freedom surges engulfing America. Outside of New York City, Malcolm made deep inroads among organizers in Detroit, where in 1961 local militants such as Reverend Albert Cleage, James and Grace Lee Boggs, and Richard and Milton Henry formed the Group On Advanced Leadership (GOAL), an organization that represented early Black Power impulses. In 1962, militant black college students in Ohio formed the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a group that anticipated the Black Panther Party's call for armed self-defense and viewed Malcolm X as the leader of radical movement for African American liberation. This loose coalition of militants included journalist William Worthy who founded the Freedom Now Party in 1963 and formed a political relationship with Malcolm X and Dan Watts the publisher of the radical monthly magazine Liberator, which documented the relationship between the Third World and domestic civil rights struggles. On June 23, 1963 political organizers in Detroit associated with Malcolm shared a stage with Martin Luther King during the Motor City's massive “Walk For Freedom,” a pro-Birmingham sympathy march that drew 125,000 participants. Five months later, Malcolm delivered the keynote address at the Grassroots Leadership Conference in Detroit, an event that featured key early Black Power activists and culminated in an effort to build a national movement for black self-determination. In short, from 1954, up until his death in 1965, Malcolm X led a movement for Black Power that paralleled and intersected with the civil rights movement's high tide (6). Conventional civil rights historiography largely ignores this story. Instead, it begins its coverage of Black Power in 1966, with Stokely Carmichael's fiery declaration on a humid Thursday evening in Greenwood, Mississippi. Yet even the classical period of Black Power (1966–1975) has received inadequate attention by professional historians. Fortunately, this is beginning to change. A comprehensive examination of the modern Black Power period contributes to the rewriting of postwar American history. Black Power's relationship with civil rights struggles, religion, labor activism, feminism, local, state, and federal criminal justice systems, the Cold War, and Great Society offer up suggestive avenues of exploration for professional scholars and students of history. Racially charged civil disturbances (variously termed as “riots” or “rebellions”), intellectual debates over racial identity, the political contestation over community control of central cities, and the artistic and political efforts to express solidarity with Africa also provide fruitful venues for research. Black Power's reach extended to white activists in the New Left as well as a broad range of racial and ethnic minorities ranging from Puerto Rican militants in Chicago to Mexican Americans in Los Angeles to Asian Americans in the Bay Area and Native Americans in the Midwest (7). The Black Power Movement represents nothing less than an epic in American and world history. Like any watershed historical period, the era is filled with iconic individuals and organizations as well as more obscure and relatively anonymous, but no less important, activists and groups. New scholarship attempting to chronicle this era can only do justice to its vast panorama by studying both the iconic and the obscure. On this score, important historical biographies of key icons such as Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, and Angela Davis have yet to be written. There is still no comprehensive history of the Black Panther Party and the activities of important groups such as the Republic of New Afrika remain shrouded in mystery. Similarly, the intellectual and political work of Black Arts icons such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Haki Madhubuti have yet to receive the sustained scholarly attention they deserve. The movement's intellectual legacy, which is comprised of thousands of books, pamphlets, speeches, essays, and poetry produced during the era, has thus far failed to receive systematic historical analysis. Thousands of grassroots activists—ranging from welfare mothers to trade unionists to school teachers—adopted the rhetoric of Black Power militancy in an effort to transform indigenous conditions, especially during the height of Great Society reform. Thus Black Power, while usually associated with the fiery revolutionary polemics of groups such as the Black Panthers, had a compassionate side that surfaced in the political programs of local activists across the United States (8). In the early historiography of the civil rights era, Black Power made what might be described as cameo appearances, surfacing after Stokely Carmichael's 1966 declaration. Clayborne Carson's classic study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”), In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) follows this trajectory while William Chafe's important local study, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) devoted an entire chapter to Black Power's impact in North Carolina. William Van Deburg's New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) presented the first scholarly historical overview of the period. For Van Deburg Black Power's most important achievements took place in the cultural arena, where poets, Olympic athletes, and Black Panthers issued angry declarations of militancy that endured as cultural signifiers long after the nation had stopped paying attention to their political threats. Komozi Woodard's A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) focused on the political implications of the era's cultural politics through a political biography of poet and activist Amiri Baraka. A Nation Within a Nation effectively illustrates Black Power's impact on urban politics in Newark, New Jersey, in the aftermath of the city's devastating riot in 1967. Instructively, Newark's local issues of police brutality, poverty, and urban violence resounded nationally through efforts to elect black mayors in urban centers across America and internationally through pro-Africa lobbying efforts. James Smethurst's The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) is the first comprehensive assessment of the Black Arts period that produced Baraka's, as well as much of the era's, enduring iconography. Exhaustively researched and compellingly argued, Smethurst's study presents educators with an important historical reference for understanding the Black Arts' origins, controversies, and social, cultural, and political resonance. Aspects of the Black Arts come under investigation in Madhu Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), Lorenzo Thomas, Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-century American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001), Melba Joyce Boyd, Wrestling With the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), Cheryl Clarke, After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), and Lisa Gail Collins, ed., New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006). Waldo E. Martin, Jr. provides a good discussion of African American cultural politics in the postwar era in No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) and Cynthia Young's Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) offers valuable insights into the cultural terrain of the 1960s and 1970s facing black radicals. The era's cultural politics have been the subject of several recent fruitful studies. Scot Brown's Fighting For Us: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003) is the first case study of the black nationalist organization whose community organizing helped raise black consciousness through Kwanzaa and other cultural practices, but is most often remembered for a series of violent confrontations with the Black Panthers. Brown illustrates the way in which black nationalists in Los Angeles utilized culture in an effort to transform the racial and political consciousness of the black community. Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar's Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004) is an evocative study of the period's cultural and social politics. Peniel Joseph's Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Owl Books, 2007) is the first comprehensive historical account of the era. Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour reframes conventional interpretations of the civil rights and Black Power era by refusing to see the two movements as mutually exclusive. By tracing the roots of the modern Black Power era to postwar racial militancy at the local, national, and international level, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour historicizes the political activism of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panthers by placing them side by side with their civil rights counterparts. Rather than viewing civil rights and B ack Power as separate and antagonistic entities, Joseph illuminates a complicated postwar landscape fluid enough to witness intellectual political alliances between racial moderates and militants. Ultimately, Joseph argues that Black Power, far from being a marginal movement, fundamentally transformed and scandalized American democracy. Black Power indelibly impacted urban cities across America. Robert Self's American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) highlights the way in which the Black Panther Party emerged as urban powerbrokers in Oakland by the early 1970s and embraced electoral politics in innovative ways. Heather Ann Thompson's Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001) details important aspects of how the city's black militants attempted to acquire political and economic power through bruising protests during the late 1960s and 1970s. Matthew Countryman's Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia examines the way in which Black Power radicalism pragmatically sought community control over schools, antipoverty agencies, and electoral politics in the City of Brotherly Love. Kent Germany's New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship and the Search for the Great Society (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007) pays significant attention to the development of Black Power in the Crescent City, arguing that local militants' attempts to constructively transform the city were at times upstaged by their radical posture. The Black Panther Party remains the most controversial, iconic, and widely written about group of the era. Yohuru Williams's Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven (New York: Brandywine, 2000) is a brilliant examination of the evolution from civil rights to Black Power in New Haven, Connecticut, paying particular attention to one of the Black Panther Party's most important chapters. The role of violence in the organization is taken up in Curtis J. Austin's provocative Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006). Paul Alkebulan's slim but incisive, Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007) chronicles the group's controversial history while Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: The New Press, 2007) systematically analyzes the group's use of the media to project its image. A corpus of Panther anthologies have deepened historical knowledge of the group. The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), edited by Charles Jones, is a now classic scholarly reconsideration of the group and remains vital to contemporary reassessments. Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams's In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) is the first major anthology edited by historians on the party and brings with it important scholarly analysis of the organization's failures and successes. Other notable collections on the Black Panther Party include Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy (New York: Routledge, 2001) edited by Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas and Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), edited by Judson Jeffries. Hugh Pearson's The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1994) offers a scathing appraisal of the Panthers' legacy, but is marred by poor research and interpretive flaws. Ex-Panthers have produced a veritable cottage industry of memoirs, autobiographies, and edited collections: Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Ballantine Books, 1974) and To Die For the People (New York: Writers and Readers, 1995), Bobby Seale, A Lonely Rage: The Autobiography of Bobby Seale (New York: Time Books, 1978), David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (New York: Little, Brown, 1993), Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (New York: Pantheon, 1992), William Lee Brent, Long Time Gone: A Black Panther's True-Life Story of His Hijacking and Twenty-Five Years in Cuba (New York: Times Books, 1996), Mumia Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party (Boston: South End Press, 2004), Forbes Flores, Will You Die With Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006). While these memoirs vary in quality, interpretive clarity, and historical accuracy they provide intriguing first hand accounts of the BPP's activities, internal politics, and successes and failures. On this score documentary source material on the BPP remains vital and includes Philip S. Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), Stephen Shames, The Black Panthers—Photography (New York: Aperture, 2007), Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero: A Life in Writing (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007). The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006) edited by Peniel E. Joseph, re-examines the era's historical scope, chronology, political actors, and geographical breadth. Individual topics range from Black Power feminists and Kwanzaa to black women tenants rights organizers, Los Angeles educational activists, the founding of Black Studies, and NAACP leader Roy Wilkins's complex view of the Black Panthers. Joseph's introduction outlines the historiographical terrain for future studies of the era (9). In the late 1960s and early 1970s black students, inspired by Black Power radicalism, formed Black Student Unions and pushed for the institutionalization of Black Studies programs and departments at all levels of education. The history of black student participation in the Black Power movement is the subject of several recent studies, including Wayne Glasker, Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967–1990 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), Joy Ann Williamson, Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965–1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), and Fabio Rijoas's sociological study, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2007). The evolution, pedagogy, and history of Black Studies has been the subject of several books and anthologies: Perry Hall, In the Vineyard: Working in African American Studies (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1993), Delores Aldridge and Carlene Young, eds., Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000),William Nelson, Jr., ed., Black Studies: From Pyramids to Pan-Africanism (New York: McGraw Hill, 2001), Molefi Asante and Mambo Ama Mazama, eds., Encyclopedia of Black Studies (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005), Nathaniel Norment, Jr., ed., The African American Studies Reader (Durham: Carolina Press, 2007), and Noliwe Rooks, White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies (New York: Beacon Press, 2005). Malcolm X remains the most iconic individual figure of the Black Power era, but has yet to be the subject of a definitive biography. The definitive source remains Alex Haley's (coauthored with Malcolm X), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998). Some excellent scholarly treatments on Malcolm abound however, including John Henrik Clarke, ed., Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (New York: Macmillan, 1970); William Sales, Jr., From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (Boston: South End Press, 1994); Michael Eric Dyson, Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Joe Wood, ed., Malcolm X: In Our Own Image (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992); Louis De Caro, Malcolm X and the Cross: The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Christianity (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Several studies, although not exclusively focused on Malcolm, offer keen biographical and interpretive insights: Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), Mike Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (London: Verso, 1999); Claude Andrew Clegg, III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), and Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–1965 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). Beyond Malcolm X's iconography, important Black Power era activists have written valuable memoirs including James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: Open Hand, 1985), Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (New York: William Morrow, 1973), Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997), Haki Madhubuti, Yellow Black: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet's Life (Chicago: Third World Press, 2005), and Angela Y Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, 1989). Malcolm X's political transformation while incarcerated helped to inform and inspire a radical prisoner rights movement during the Black Power era. While there is still no comprehensive history of this movement, several important books and biographies shed light on this understudied aspect of the movement. George Jackson's, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994) is a classic portrait of the imprisoned activist who helped galvanize California's radical prison movement while incarcerated. Angela Y. Davis, et al., If They Come In the Morning (New York: Signet, 1971) offers representative writings from some of the era's political prisoners. Bettina Aptheker's, The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) is an invaluable documentary history of Davis's 1972 legal trial. Eldridge Cleaver's Soul On Ice (New York: Dell, 1968) is the controversial bestseller by the ex-convict and former Black Panther Party Minister of Information. Assata Shakur's, Assata: An Autobiography (New York: Lawrence Hill, 2001) details the exiled activist's journey from precocious youth into the center of radical political activism during the early 1970s. Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) critically examines the intersection between the era's radicalism and the prisoner rights movement. Local activists shaped Black Power at the grassroots level. Perhaps nowhere was this more striking than in Detroit, where radical trade unionists defined Black Power as a workers movement. The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) is the subject of Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin's Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (Boston: South End Press, 1998) and James Geschwinder's, Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Grace Lee Boggs, Living For Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and Angela Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007) offer rich and illuminating details of the multifarious radicalism that shaped postwar Detroit. Muhammad Ahmed's We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960–1975 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2007) is a participant-observer's account of the political and organizational dynamics of the Black Power era. The movement permanently inscribed itself in popular culture through the iconic images of athletes Tommy Smith and Juan Carlos raising their fists in the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Harry Edwards's The Revolt of the Black Athlete (New York: Free Press, 1969) is a contemporary analysis of efforts to organize black athletes in the late 1960s while Douglas Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and their Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Amy Bass, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) offer crisp scholarly reassessments. The relationship between civil rights and Black Power is powerfully explored in Black Power icon Kwame Ture's posthumously published autobiography (written with Ekueme Michael Thelwell): Ready For Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003). Ture's autobiography is indispensable as a resource for understanding the connection between civil rights and Black Power. Several recent studies have explored the relationship between armed self-defense during the civil rights movement and Black Power styled militancy: Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Christopher Strain, Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), and Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2007) (10). Beyond issues of violence and iconography, the Black Power Movement left a rich intellectual legacy, one that is ably explored in two collections that focus on the writings of Harold Cruse, the period's most controversial and enduring cultural critic: William Jelani Cobb, ed., The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002) and Jerry G. Watts, ed., The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Reconsidered (New York: Routledge, 2004). The Black Power era's intellectual and political legacy has been the focus of several studies by political scientists that are noteworthy for their critical reconsideration of the era. These include Adolph Reed, ed., Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s (New York: Greenwood, 1986) and Stirrings in the jugs: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998), Robert C. Smith, We Have No Leaders: African-Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Albany State University of New York Press, 1996), Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001), Dean Errol Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Historian Winston Grady-Willis's Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960–1977 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) highlights the impact of the black think tank, the Institute of the Black World on the intellectual thought of the era. Black Power's revolutionary impulses were shaped as much by international political developments as local ones. Several studies that do not focus specifically on the Black Power Movement help to contextualize the milieu that black radicals (and early Black Power activists) operated in: Gerald Home, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1996); Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1997); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); George White, Jr., Holding the Line: Race, Racism, and American Foreign Policy Toward Africa, 1953–1961 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Called Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Several studies focus on the Black Power period's pan-Africanist political orientation, a thrust that became increasingly institutionalized during the early 1970s. Modibo Kadalie's Internationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the Struggle of Social Classes (Savannah: One Quest Press, 2000) is a fascinating first person account of the intellectual context that inspired radical Black Power activists while Ron Walters's Pan-Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993) covers this period through the lens of the political scientist. Black Power militancy renewed scholarly interest in black nationalism, African American radicalism, and the intersection between the politics of race and class. Important studies in this regard include Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Williams and Morrow, 1967), Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1992), John Bracey, August Meier, and Elliot Rudwick, eds., Black Nationalism in America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1970), Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1999), James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages From a Worker's Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), and Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: From Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism (New York: Vintage, 1971). Some landmark studies published in the aftermath of this resurgence include Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976), Alphonso Pinckney, Red, Black, and Green: Black Nationalism in the United States (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), and Wilson Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). A good contemporary collection of documentary essays is found in Wilson J. Moses, ed., Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (New York: New York University Press, 1996) while Eddie Glaude, ed., Is It Nation Time?: Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) offers an eclectic mixture of new essays and reprints. Scholar Rod Bush's We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999) is an eye-opening overview of twentieth-century black nationalism that offers fascinating interpretive analyses of the Black Power era. Ula Taylor's The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Mary G. Rolinson's Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007) have brought new levels of sophistication to the study of twentieth-century black nationalism (11). Black feminists during the era are the focus of Kimberly Springer's eye-opening sociological study Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). The classic anthology that brilliantly showcases the writings of black women during the era remains Toni Cade, ed., The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: New Library, 1970). Some vital collections include detailed examinations of women during the Black Power era: Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press, 1995); Kimberly Springer, ed., Still Lifting, Still Climbing: African American Women's Contemporary Activism (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001). Books that shed important light on the relationship between gender and black nationalism include E. Francis White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001), Wini Breines, The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006). Finally, some important essays and book chapters have shed new light on black women's activism in this period (12). James Baldwin's No Name in the Street (New York: Dell, 1972) devotes considerable attention to Black Power era icons. Michael Simanga's excellent In the Shadow of the Son (Chicago: Third World Press, 2000) is the rare novel whose protagonist is a former Black Power militant and Vietnam veteran whose past activism shapes his efforts as a school teacher in a harsh urban environment. A corpus of work sheds light on the Black Power era's social, political, and intellectual milieu through interpretive histories and collections focused on postwar African American history at the local, national, and international level: Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006, 3rd ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African American Political Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), Gerald Home, The Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), Joy James, Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), Clarence Taylor, Knocking At Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), Esther Cooper Jackson, ed., Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), Jane Anna Gordon, Why They Couldn't Wait: A Critique Of the Black-Jewish Conflict in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, 1967–1971 (New York: Routledge-Falmer, 2001), Leonard N. Moore, Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005). This emerging historiography on the Black Power Movement promises to transform historical understanding of postwar America. By going beyond the polemics, nostalgia, and memory of the social and political upheavals that characterized the 1960s and 1970s, historians, as well as historically attuned interdisciplinary scholars, are helping to document, analyze, and critically interpret the vast, panoramic landscape that gave birth to one of the century's most important, and controversial, movements for social justice. It is a long overdue task, one that promises to uncover new historical routes toward a clearer understanding of still raging debates over race, war, and democracy that continue to resonate in America and around the world today. Endnotes 1. See for example Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, eds., Voices of Freedom: An Oral history of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam Books, 1991); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 206–211; David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Quill, 1999); John Ditmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 389–407; Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley University of California Press, 1995); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–1965 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), and At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Julie Buckner Armstrong, et al, eds., Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement: Freedom's Bittersweet Song (New York: Routledge, 2002); Deborah Menkart, Alana D. Murray, Jenice L. View, eds., Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching (Washington, D.C.: Teaching For Change, 2004). 2. See, for example, Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1989). 3. Peniel E. Joseph, “Revolution in Babylon: Stokely Carmichael and America in the 1960s,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 9 (October–December 2007): 281–301. 4. See Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour. A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Owl Books, 2007). 5. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour; Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reaction in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harpers and Brother, 1954); Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 6. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour, 1–131. 7. See Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2004). 8. See the essays in Peniel E. Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006). 9. See also, Judson L. Jeffries, ed., Black Power in the Belly of the Beast (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 10. See Akinyele Umoja, “The Ballot and the Bullett: A Comparative Analysis of Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Black Studies 29 (March 1999): 558–78 and “1964: The Beginning of the End of Nonviolence in the Mississippi Freedom Movement,” Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003): 201–26. 11. The towering research reference for the study of twentieth century black nationalism is the multivolume (ten as of this writing) in-progress collection of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers edited by Robert Hill. 12. Stephen Ward, “The Third World Women's Alliance: Black Feminist Radicalism and Black Power Politics,” in Peniel E. Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement, 119–44 and Rhonda Williams, “Black Women, Urban Politics, and Engendering Black Power,” 79–103. Figures and Tables View largeDownload slide Stokely Carmichael in the midst of a crowd demonstrating near the U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. 1967. (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-121429.) View largeDownload slide Stokely Carmichael in the midst of a crowd demonstrating near the U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. 1967. (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-121429.) View largeDownload slide Malcolm X at a press conference in New York City, 1964. (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-115058.) View largeDownload slide Malcolm X at a press conference in New York City, 1964. (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-115058.) Copyright © 2008, Organization of American Historians
TI - Historians and the Black Power Movement
JF - OAH Magazine of History
DO - 10.1093/maghis/22.3.8
DA - 2008-07-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/historians-and-the-black-power-movement-YqpfrEqs62
SP - 8
EP - 15
VL - 22
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -