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New York and London: Routledge, 2015, 305 pp., $49.95 (softcover), ISBN-13: 978-0415801430.
The historian Rhonda Y. Williams has offered a rich new synthesis of black power history and a broadly conceived black radical landscape in her latest book, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century. The embodied activism and pivotal debates concerning black political visibility, the meaning of decolonization, and revolutionary answers to state repression, combine to provide an enhanced view of the stakes of black liberation. Concrete Demands brings greater nuance and breadth to previous scholarship on the black power movement. Although in a footnote in the early goings of the narrative she records her resistance to alignment with competing camps (short versus long movement historiography), by default the work effectually favors a long view of the period.
Over seven chapters, split into halves, Williams offers a fairly chronological portrait from struggles against lynching in the United States at the turn of the century, down to the calls for Black Power in Australia in the late 1970s. Williams effectively weaves together the activism of African American and other Afrodiaspora personalities, organizations, and staging grounds of resistance. The result is a world awash in Black struggles for justice and spatial democracy, linking civil rights militancy, African independence struggles, and shifts in individual and collective identity, to persistent demands for institutional, local, and structural power.
The first part of the book, “Roots and Routes,” covers the years 1917 to 1965, and retraces a constellation of activists and intellectuals that form “crucibles” of Black Power, including individuals such as Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, A. Phillip Randolph, and Claudia Jones. Stalwart organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), Nation of Islam (NOI), and the Council on African Affairs (CAA) that laid the early 20th-century groundwork that Black Power–era activists would inherit also appear as architects of social justice. By the close of the book’s first half, readers come to know as well of the Revolutionary Action Movement’s (RAM) developing influence, the Gloria Richardson–led movement in Baltimore, and the Free D.C. Movement. In this way, Williams’s book keenly searches out the periods of evolution and maturation in Black radical militancy, noting: “As younger generations of activists came of age during the Cold War era and established their own organizations, they tapped into the wisdom of elders, gaining activist educations both in theory and praxis. They responded to the political landscapes that had their own roots in prior political developments, and recognized the United States’ contradictory role as a supporter of domestic apartheid and self-described world leader of democracy” (81–82). Williams thus updates scholars’ appreciation for the intergenerational collaboration of the era, often in the form of older-to-younger mentoring or as collaborators that made possible the long fought struggle for racial justice.
The second half of the book “The Expansive Era” covers the mid-1960s through the late 1970s. In these chapters Williams revisits numerous organizing satellites of urban struggle, from well-known sites such as New York and Detroit to under-researched pressure points of Black Power activity including Cleveland and Kansas City. At each turn, Williams is attentive to local nuances and spatial peculiarities that result in an archipelago of resistance more than a unified nation, even as activists of varying ideological pedigree held out “Nation Time” as a galvanizing call. Indeed, owing in part to problematic gendered conceptions of nationalism, multifarious forms of state violence, and competing definitions of power, many would be forced to refine their ideas of revolutionary transformation. As Williams writes, “… simply spreading power to the people—however ‘the people’ was defined—would not by itself guarantee revolution. Ultimately, how and to what ends people used the power they fought for would make the difference” (259).
Though this book is not intended as a comprehensive history of Black Power, the main challenge of writing a synthesis such as this is to decide what must be discussed and what must be left out. Williams makes efficient use of extant Black Power scholarship, interviews with activists, special collections of movement literature, and government documents. Appreciably, influential periodicals such as the Black Panther Party’s Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, Liberator, Triple Jeopardy, and Inner City Voice are discussed as revelatory sites of dramatic shifts in consciousness and worldview. However, absent are two of the pivotal long movement publications, Freedomways and Negro Digest/Black World, which fall well within the scope of the study.
Additionally, more can be said about Black radicals’ concern for African, and Afro-Caribbean politics, which lasted well into the 1970s and ‘80 s. As Williams brings into focus the sense of Black Power’s reach beyond the United States, its expression in the Caribbean falls short. This is unfortunate as it is in this region where a broader hemispheric expression of Black Power is witnessed. Activists in Caribbean nations such as Jamaica, Guyana, Bermuda, and the Dutch Caribbean embraced Black Power, injecting new meaning into the phrase while deploying it as a bulwark against local class and ethnic antagonisms, and as an ideological weapon designed to upset and unhinge colonial legacies. Moreover, the careers of radical thinkers and activists such as Frantz Fanon (who is mentioned) and Walter Rodney, in addition to C.L.R. James and Garvey, fueled the Black radical intellectual-activism emanating from the United States in the Black Power era.
These issues aside, Concrete Demands reveals a highly energized, politically astute, resilient Black public whose work required speaking, publishing, protesting, organizing, and documenting, as well as nurturing, caregiving, and surviving. Importantly, Williams’s study reveals the search for power and self-preservation that governed much of the activity across this period. Students and scholars of Black liberation movements will undoubtedly appreciate Williams’s attention to the details of Pan-African thought, numerous organizational and biographical sketches, in addition to insightful analyses of state-sanctioned violence and repression. Rather than a self-contained whole, Williams casts Black Power as a stage in an ongoing evolution of Black radical imaginaries. This will be a welcome addition to course syllabi centered on U.S. based Black radicalisms, new narratives of gendered oppression and resistance, Black internationalisms, and U.S. histories from below.
In all, Williams’s work aptly demonstrates the persistent search for power that continues in the current day. As the chocolate cities of America melt under the heat of gentrification, the spatial dislocation of the prison industrial complex, the psychic myopia of a resurgent nativist discourse, and indifference to black suffering, it remains to be seen what sorts of political demands against racial capitalism and state violence will be etched into the concrete of the 21st century.
