Peniel E. Joseph : Black Power's Powerful Legacy
[Peniel E. Joseph is an assistant professor of Africana studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His book Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America will be published by Henry Holt and Company this month.]
As far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated by what has been called the "Black Power" movement. As a young boy in the 1980s, I sat mesmerized before public-television documentaries about the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s. But for me that decade truly came alive through the powerful, often fleeting images of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, and Black Panthers, who seemed bolder and more glamorous than anything I had ever seen. In college I devoured books and articles about the movement, with its mysterious and taboo aura.
However, the more I continued to read (and by now in graduate school), the more frustrated I became by the paucity of material that took its accomplishments, setbacks, and failures seriously. As a history professor, my intellectual curiosity turned into scholarly inquiry as I came to see black power as a largely unchronicled epic in American history; one that shared a complex relationship with the more richly documented modern civil-rights movement.
Black power represents one of the most enduring and controversial stories of racial tumult, social protest, and political upheaval of our time, complete with a cast of tragic and heroic historical characters: Black Muslims, FBI agents, Martin Luther King Jr., Black Panthers, Carmichael, Lyndon B. Johnson, the New Left, and Fidel Castro all play major and minor parts in the era this movement helped define. Black power's reach was global, spanning continents and crossing oceans, yet its iconic personalities and organizations (some of whom were key civil-rights activists) remain shadowy, almost forgotten figures in spite of their vital role in shaping still-raging debates about race, war, and democracy.
Common wisdom characterizes the movement as unabashedly violent, gratuitously misogynistic, politically ineffectual, and mercifully short-lived. Indeed, most discussions of black power don't begin until the mid-1960s. At least three reasons help explain that chronology. The 1965 urban upheaval in the Watts section of Los Angeles provides historians with a signal event that focused the nation's attention outside the South. King's rough reception among Watt's poorest sections in the riot's aftermath, at least according to the usual narrative, opened his eyes to an unimaginable level of urban misery. His subsequent activism in Chicago, where his attempts to organize open housing and slum clearance bumped into the city's ruthlessly efficient world of machine politics and the skepticism of black militants, becomes a harbinger of black power's growing influence in the urban North. Finally, the election of Carmichael as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in May 1966, followed by his famous invocation of the term "Black Power" a month later, symbolizes for many commentators the organization's symbolic shift from its promising idealistic beginnings to a bitter cynicism that led to an open break with King and civil-rights moderates.
But during the course of my research, I traced the movement's immediate origins back a decade earlier: to the 1950s, when, just as Southern civil-rights struggles were making national headlines, Northern black activists (many who had come of political age during the Great Depression and World War II) formed important relationships with Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam's outspoken and eloquent representative. ...
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
As far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated by what has been called the "Black Power" movement. As a young boy in the 1980s, I sat mesmerized before public-television documentaries about the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s. But for me that decade truly came alive through the powerful, often fleeting images of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, and Black Panthers, who seemed bolder and more glamorous than anything I had ever seen. In college I devoured books and articles about the movement, with its mysterious and taboo aura.
However, the more I continued to read (and by now in graduate school), the more frustrated I became by the paucity of material that took its accomplishments, setbacks, and failures seriously. As a history professor, my intellectual curiosity turned into scholarly inquiry as I came to see black power as a largely unchronicled epic in American history; one that shared a complex relationship with the more richly documented modern civil-rights movement.
Black power represents one of the most enduring and controversial stories of racial tumult, social protest, and political upheaval of our time, complete with a cast of tragic and heroic historical characters: Black Muslims, FBI agents, Martin Luther King Jr., Black Panthers, Carmichael, Lyndon B. Johnson, the New Left, and Fidel Castro all play major and minor parts in the era this movement helped define. Black power's reach was global, spanning continents and crossing oceans, yet its iconic personalities and organizations (some of whom were key civil-rights activists) remain shadowy, almost forgotten figures in spite of their vital role in shaping still-raging debates about race, war, and democracy.
Common wisdom characterizes the movement as unabashedly violent, gratuitously misogynistic, politically ineffectual, and mercifully short-lived. Indeed, most discussions of black power don't begin until the mid-1960s. At least three reasons help explain that chronology. The 1965 urban upheaval in the Watts section of Los Angeles provides historians with a signal event that focused the nation's attention outside the South. King's rough reception among Watt's poorest sections in the riot's aftermath, at least according to the usual narrative, opened his eyes to an unimaginable level of urban misery. His subsequent activism in Chicago, where his attempts to organize open housing and slum clearance bumped into the city's ruthlessly efficient world of machine politics and the skepticism of black militants, becomes a harbinger of black power's growing influence in the urban North. Finally, the election of Carmichael as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in May 1966, followed by his famous invocation of the term "Black Power" a month later, symbolizes for many commentators the organization's symbolic shift from its promising idealistic beginnings to a bitter cynicism that led to an open break with King and civil-rights moderates.
But during the course of my research, I traced the movement's immediate origins back a decade earlier: to the 1950s, when, just as Southern civil-rights struggles were making national headlines, Northern black activists (many who had come of political age during the Great Depression and World War II) formed important relationships with Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam's outspoken and eloquent representative. ...