The New Black Power History: A Souls Special Issue

The Black Power Movement (1955–1975) redefined American race relations and in the process fundamentally transformed American democracy and global movements for racial justice. During the 1960s and 1970s Black Power activists trumpeted a militant new race consciousness that placed Black identity as the soul of a new radicalism. For example, Black Power activists fought for community control of schools, Black Studies programs at colleges and universities, welfare and labor rights, prison reform, and jobs and racial justice for the poor. Simultaneously, many activists focused on increasing Black political power through conferences, community organizing, independent schools, and the strategic use of electoral politics. Local and national issues converged with the movement’s international ambitions as well. In the 1950s African independence movements helped fuel a renewed black American anti-colonialism. Malcolm X personified early Black Power militancy by eloquently confronting American democracy’s jagged edges of racism, poverty, and economic and political violence. In 1966 Stokely Carmichael gave public name to a pre-existing movement and in the process became an icon for a generation. By the early 1970s a broad coalition of Black Power activists had succeeded in placing the quest for African-American self-determination and African independence at the forefront of Black consciousness. Black Power activists addressed issues of race, war, democracy, and the possibility for social transformation that was both inclusive of, and at times went beyond,
liberal democratic capitalism at the local, national, and international levels. Moreover, Black feminists organized in small, but robust groups that made important inroads among Black activists and intellectuals. While all of these activities reflect the era’s richness and diversity, in the popular imagination Black Power is often reduced to symbols associated with its advocacy of self-defense (i.e., the Black Panthers).

The Civil Rights Movement is generally accepted as comprising the years 1954–1965. These years contour the beginning of the demise of legal segregation and the acquisition of Black voting rights. The sit-ins, protests, marches, beatings, and boycotts that highlight this era represent the heroic period of modern civil rights struggles in both public memory and historical scholarship. However, such a characterization removes from the spotlight important radical political organizations and figures (some of whom simultaneously participated in more conventional civil rights struggles) that went beyond the call for civil rights to advocate radical systemic social and political change. Further, such a description creates a situation where Black Power can be conveniently blamed for the demise of the Civil Rights Movement, rather than being viewed as an alternative to the ineffectiveness
of civil rights demands in critical areas of American life.

From this perspective, Black Power simultaneously triggered the demise of civil rights and the New Left’s apocalyptical descent into destructive ‘‘revolutionary’’ violence. 1968, the year of Tet, May Day revolts, the assassinations of Martin King and Bobby Kennedy, and the election of Richard Nixon have all become signposts (interpreted after the fact) for the end of a more hopeful era. Such narratives of declension diminish continuities between postwar Black freedom struggles and late 1960s and 1970s era Black radicalism. A complementary flaw conflates the entire New Left with the much written about Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), marking that group’s demise in 1968 as the end of the era while bypassing the 1970s’ ‘‘movement of movements.’’ Cumulatively, this scholarship posits a good 1960s, filled with hope and optimism reflected in SNCC’s early interracialism and SDS’s youthful idealism, and personified by Martin Luther King, Jr. with a bad 1960s, characterized by the omnipresent Black Panthers, urban rioting, and Black separatism.

This special issue of Souls features cutting edge scholarship on the ‘‘New Black Power History.’’ This scholarship suggests that, in order to understand Black Power’s legacy, scholars need to examine the decade before Stokely Carmichael’s fiery declaration at the Meredith March in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1966. The new, interdisciplinary, historically based subfield that I have elsewhere described as ‘‘Black Power Studies’’ is actively rewriting postwar African-American history and the very origins of the Black freedom movement. Rebeccah Welch examines Lorraine Hansberry’s public intellectual work during the 1950s to illustrate the way in which aspects of early Black Power activism
existed within the milieu most often associated with the civil rights era’s heyday. Simon Wendt’s examination of the politics of self-defense during the civil rights–Black Power era provides fresh insight into the way in which Black radicals imagined revolutionary alternatives to non-violence. Donna Murch plumbs the origins of the Black Panther Party through a fascinating tour of postwar Oakland’s struggles for racial equality and pursuit of educational access. My own essay outlines Stokely Carmichael’s pivotal importance to
understanding both the civil rights and Black Power eras’ often-times buried intimacies, tactical divergences, and continued importance. Carmichael’s political journey provides an important prism to critically view, analyze, and understand larger postwar global freedom movements that shaped the world during the twentieth century’s second half.

Common wisdom characterizes Black Power as short, violent, misogynistic, politically ineffective, and mercifully short-lived. Yet a growing body of scholarship reveals a complex portrait of radical social and political upheaval that allows us to view the postwar era (especially its ubiquitous decade of the ‘‘1960s’’) with fresh eyes. A closer look at Black Power reveals its origins and impact to be broad and deep. From Lorraine Hanberry’s groundbreaking forays into pan-Africanism, Black cultural nationalism, and feminism during the Cold War to the Black Panther Party’s origins in the struggle for good schools and equal access among Oakland’s black community in the East Bay to the way in which Black militants debated what constituted revolutionary violence, Black Power’s breadth continues to reveal previously missed historical connections. Not the least of which is the movement’s complicated relationship to the civil rights era. Early Black Power activists in the North were at once inspired and repulsed by the heroic efforts of direct action being enacted down south. By the late 1950s they had formed a parallel movement with no name, skeptical of American democracy’s belated promises of inclusion, cynical about non-violence as a political tactic, and angry at being largely ignored by the national press while they waged local struggles for Black empowerment. If the civil rights movement featured a litany of well-documented milestones between 1954–1965, Black Power activists held singular, less publicized, but no less revered, events in their own pantheon: the 1955 Bandung Conference; Ghanaian Independence in 1957; 1959’s Cuban Revolution; the 1959 airing of the documentary ‘‘The Hate that Hate Produced’’ that introduced Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam as a national phenomenon; Fidel Castro’s 1960 trip to Harlem; the 1961 United Nations demonstration protesting the assassination of Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba; 1963’s Grassroots Leadership Conference in Detroit that featured keynote speaker Malcolm X’s ‘‘Message to the Grassroots’’ speech; 1964’s Harlem Uprising and Malcolm X’s two tours of Africa the same year; the 1965 Black Arts Repertory Theater and School founded by LeRoi Jones and the publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X shortly thereafter.

But these events existed in tandem with more well-known struggles that have shaped our understanding of the 1960s. The New Black Power History then, does not seek to replace the current orthodoxy (civil rights) in favor of another (Black Power). Rather than consigning civil rights events and leaders to history’s dustbin (as has been the case with Black Power), ‘‘Black Power Studies’’ seeks to meticulously document and critically interpret and analyze the historical mosaic that Black Power activists shaped and were in turn shaped by. This necessitates situating civil rights and Black Power in their proper historical context, but also requires (as the essays in this issue do) analyzing the forces (migration; federal authorities; deindustrialization; de-colonization to name a few) that shaped the terrain which Black Power operated within. Like any good epic, Black Power is filled with tragic and heroic characters, exotic locales, and spectacular struggles over the very meaning of identity and freedom. But far from being characters and stories invented
out of some novelist’s imagination, Black Power encompasses historical events that actually took place but have been obscured by mythology and myth-making.

Ultimately, these essays continue the process of mapping the field of Black Power Studies and de-mythologizing the era even as they prove suggestive for students and scholars of civil rights, the Cold War, urban studies, Black political, cultural, and intellectual history, Black nationalism and pan-Africanism, Black radicalism, and those interested in the political economy of American society in the postwar era and its attendant global reverberations.

The Black Power Movement constitutes nothing less than an epic in American
and world history: one that shares intimate and surprising connections with the more well-known and meticulously chronicled struggle for civil rights. In documenting the movement’s successes, failures, and shortcomings and critically analyzing the era’s breadth, depth, and contemporary legacy the New Black Power History represents a watershed scholarly contribution and timely political intervention.