The Development of African American Nationalism

Abstract

Black nationalism,³ as an ideological, intellectual, political, and cultural manifestation of the African American movement, aimed to challenge American racist capitalist structures and to redefine the relationship between Black and White Americans so that American apartheid could be dismantled and Black America could be liberated and developed. It developed in opposition to White racial and colonial domination, cultural hegemony, exploitation, and poverty.This nationalism manifested itself in three overlapping forms: cultural, reformist and revolutionary.Too much emphasis has been given to its reformist aspect, which is the Civil Rights movement, and the cultural and revolutionary aspects of this movement have been suppressed by the media, politicians, and scholars ideologically, politically, and intellectually.The primary focus on the Civil Rights movement, without integrating it with cultural and revolutionary aspects of this nationalism, has limited our understanding of the Black national movement and its main objectives. The Black struggle for freedom had different forms, ideologies, tactics, and strategies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁴ Over the past 35 years, scholars have dichotomized Black nationalism and the Civil Rights movement by focusing on their strategic and ideological differences and by ignoring the shared objectives of the Black freedom and development movements. Scholars such as Howard Brotz⁵ and Harold Cruse⁶ originated this dichotomizing tendency by emphasizing civil rights activism and separately focusing on Black nationalism, assuming that these were not related and not aspects of a single African American movement. According to Anthony Smith, “Nationalism … involves four elements: a vision, a culture, a solidarity and a policy. It answers to ideological, cultural, social and political aspirations and needs.”⁷ Since all forms of the Black struggle involved all these issues that Smith mentions, the Civil Rights movement was an integral part of Black nationalism.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.¹

Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from conviction, which produces action, uncompromising action. It also produces insurrection against oppression. This is the only way you end oppression—with power.

—Malcolm X²