Abstract
Although the current wave of historical scholarship on black power has only begun to explore the richness and diversity of this movement, it has already fundamentally altered our understanding of the African American freedom struggle. In popular memory, Black Power continues to be reduced to angry cries for self-defense that fostered violent race riots, betrayed the integrationist and nonviolent vision of earlier activism, and ultimately failed to achieve its seemingly unrealistic goals. In reality, as recent studies have shown, what came to be known as Black Power was a multidimensional movement with multilayered ideologies and agendas that accomplished much more than has been acknowledged. Black activists engaged in a wide range of political, cultural, and intellectual activism, which helped reinterpret African American identity and left a significant legacy that continues to shape American society to this day1
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Notes
The most important works include Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006)
Peniel E. Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006)
Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)
James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004)
Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)
Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulena Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003)
Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)
Yohuru Williams, Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven (St. James, NY: Brandywine, 2000)
Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered] (Baltimore: Black Classic, 1998)
An earlier study that continues to provide a good overview but focuses on the cultural dimensions of the movement is William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 3.
Emilye Crosby, “‘This Nonviolent Stuff Ain’t No Good. It’ll Get Ya Killed’: Teaching about Self-Defense in the African American Freedom Struggle,” in Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement: Freedom’s Bittersweet Song, eds. Julie Buckner Armstrong, Susan Edwards, Houston Roberson, and Rhonda Williams (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 159–73
Crosby, A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
Lance E. Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
Christopher Strain, Pure Fire: Armed Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005)
Akinyele O. Umoja, “The Ballot and the Bullet: A Comparative Analysis of Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Black Studies 29, no. 4 (March 1999): pp. 558–78
Akinyele O. Umoja, “‘We Will Shoot Back’: The Natchez Model and Paramilitary Organization in the Mississippi Freedom Movement,” Journal of Black Studies 32, no. 3 (January 2002): pp. 271–94
Akinyele O. Umoja, “1964: The Beginning of the End of Nonviolence in the Mississippi Freedom Movement,” Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003): pp. 201–26
Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007)
Simon Wendt, “‘Urge People Not to Carry Guns’: Armed Self-Defense in the Louisiana Civil Rights Movement and the Radicalization of the Congress of Racial Equality,” Louisiana History 45, no. 3 (Summer 2004): pp. 261–86.
Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (New York: David McKay, 1962), pp. 94, 96, 111, 162
Grif Stockley, Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), p. 186.
Andrew M. Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), pp. 110, 117–18, 169–70; Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, interview by James Mosby, transcript, September 1968, p. 18.
Nicholas von Hoffman, Mississippi Notebook (New York: David White, 1964), pp. 94–95
Quoted in Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 90.
John R. Salter and Don B. Kates Jr., “The Necessity for Access to Firearms by Dissenters and Minorities Whom Government Is Unwilling or Unable to Protect,” in Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out, ed., Donald B. Kates Jr. (Croton-on-Hudson, NY: North River, 1979), p. 192.
Bobby Seale, A Lonely Rage: The Autobiography of Bobby Seale (New York: New York Times Books, 1978), p. 130
Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 111.
Keith Younger, “Violence vs Nonviolence,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 1, 1963, p. 4.
Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 416.
On the OAAU, see William W Sales Jr., From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (Boston: South End Press, 1994).
Quoted in M. S. Handler, “Malcolm X Sees Rise in Violence,” New York Times, March 13, 1964, p. 20.
George Todd, “Malcolm X Explains His Rifle Statement,” Amsterdam News, March 28, 1964, p. 35
Gertrude Samuels, “Feud Within the Black Muslims,” New York Times Magazine, March 22, 1964, p. 104
William Worthy, “Malcolm X Plans for Rifle Clubs,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 21, 1964, p. 2.
Daniel H. Watts, “Malcolm X: Self-Defense vs. Submission,” Liberator 4, no. 4 (April 1964): p. 3.
On the struggle to integrate the city’s schools, see Leonard Nathaniel Moore, “The School Desegregation Crisis of Cleveland, Ohio, 1963–1964: The Catalyst for Black Political Power in a Northern City,” Journal of Urban History 28, no. 2 (January 2002): pp. 135–57.
Lewis G. Robinson, The Making of a Man: An Autobiography (Cleveland: Green and Sons, 1970), p. 78
“Negro Rifle Club Leader Expects White Violence,” Cleveland Press, April 6, 1964, p. A1.
Huey P. Newton, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution: July 20, 1967,” in To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 15–16
Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 85
Erika Doss, “Imaging the Panthers: Representing Black Power and Masculinity, 1960s–1990s,” Prospects 23 (1998): p. 493
Tracye Matthews, “‘No One Ever Asks What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is’: The Politics of Gender in the Black Panther Party, 1966–1971,” in The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered], ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic, 1998), pp. 269, 278
Norbert Finzsch, “‘Picking Up the Gun’: Die Black Panther Party zwischen gewaltsamer Revolution und sozialer Reform, 1966–1984,” Amerikastudien 44, no. 2 (1999): p. 239
Rhonda Y Williams, “Black Women, Urban Politics, and Engendering Black Power,” in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, ed. Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 89–90
Andrew Claude Clegg, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), pp. 101, 122
Stephen Ward, “The Third World Women’s Alliance: Black Feminist Radicals and Black Power Politics,” in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, ed. Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 124.
Kenneth O’Reilly, “Racial Matters”: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 293–324
Ward Churchill, “‘To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy’: The FBI’s Secret War Against the Black Panther Party,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and their Legacy, eds. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 78–117.
John A. Courtwright, “Rhetoric of the Gun: An Analysis of the Rhetorical Modifications of the Black Panther Party,” Journal of Black Studies 4, no. 3 (March 1974): pp. 249–67.
Quoted in Jane McManus, “An Exile Warns of Race ‘Explosion’ in the U.S.,” National Guardian, September 12, 1964, p. 6.
Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and their Legacy, eds. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 3–19.
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© 2011 Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton
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Wendt, S. (2011). Protection or Path Toward Revolution?. In: Marable, M., Hinton, E.K. (eds) The New Black History. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230338043_12
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