Malcolm X, Smethwick, and the Influence of the African American Freedom Struggle on British Race Relations in the 1960s

2007 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 932-950 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Street
Author(s):  
Carol Bunch Davis

This book challenges the cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle era that hinges on a master narrative focused on the “heroic period” of the Civil Rights Movement. It argues that this narrative limits the representation of African American identity within the Civil Rights Movement to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest leadership in the segregated South and casts Malcolm X's advocacy of black nationalism and the ensuing Black Power/Arts Movement as undermining civil rights advances. Through an analysis of five case studies of African American identity staged in plays between 1959 and 1969, the book instead offers representations that engage, critique, and revise racial uplift ideology and reimagine the Black Arts Movement's sometimes proscriptive notions of black authenticity as a condition of black identity and cultural production. It also posits a postblack ethos as the means by which these representations construct their counternarratives to cultural memory and broadens narrow constructions of African American identity shaping racial discourse in the U.S. public sphere of the 1960s.


Author(s):  
A. A. Shumakov

This paper examines and explores in detail the key theoretical aspects and leading ideological and political trends of The black rights movement in the United States in the 1960s. As the main sources, the author uses the works and speeches of its most famous representatives, such as: Martin Luther king, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Percy Newton, Robert Seal, Eldridge cleaver, highlighting the main trends and dominant trends. Materialistic dialectics is suggested as the main research method. This makes it possible to consider the process of formation of the Movement for the rights of african americans directly in development. The author not only conducts a comparative analysis of various trends and ideological and political views of the most prominent representatives of this movement, but also does it in dynamics, explaining the nature and mechanism of qualitative changes taking place using the laws of materialistic dialectics. In particular, the opposing classical concepts of integrationism and black nationalism, which underlie the definition of the notorious ambivalence of african-american consciousness, were replaced in the second half of the 1960s by revolutionary black nationalism and revolutionary socialism, which negate the previous two and are simultaneously closely related to them. As a conclusion, the concept of understanding the qualitative transformations of The black rights Movement in the United States is proposed, and parallels are drawn with the current rise of the socio-racial movement, taking place within the same discursive Reld, which was finally formed in the 1960s and continues to dominate the protest-minded part of the african-american population to this day. This gives the author the opportunity to make a forecast for the future development of the situation in the United States and the scenario of the Movement.


2018 ◽  
pp. 15-50
Author(s):  
Rob Waters

Many people of color in Britain “became black” in the 1960s. This transformation occurred in reaction to the apparent consolidation of British politics around a revived whiteness and through the resonance within Britain of U.S. Black Power and Caribbean and African secondary decolonization. Presenting Black Power as a global formation unfolding within Britain in the face of the failure of state-led “race relations” management, this chapter charts the impact of African American visitors to Britain in the mid-1960s and follows the development of British Black Power among Caribbean, African, and South Asian activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It shows the resonance and new meanings of blackness that developed in this global conjuncture, as older anticolonial and antiracist politics were reworked.


2018 ◽  
pp. 181-227
Author(s):  
D'Weston Haywood

This chapter reinterprets the rise of black radicalism as a moment of competing “voices” across competing mass medias amid rapid changes in the black freedom struggle and media landscape of the 1960s. It also reinterprets Malcolm X as a newspaper publisher, a rather underanalyzed side of Malcolm. Black publishers had long considered their papers the “voice” of the race, and Malcolm’s founding of Muhammad Speaks in 1960 to amplify the voice of Elijah Muhammad signified this. Yet, the paper’s founding also marked the beginning of the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) robust media campaign to use various medias—radio, books, and albums of Muhammad’s speeches—to promote Muhammad’s vision for racial advancement over others. His vision promised to redeem black manhood by renewing their lives, a vision displayed through salesmen for Muhammad Speaks. Thus, readers could read both the paper and their bodies. Malcolm, however, made his display through television. But when he began to gain a voice through television that rivaled that of Muhammad’s in print, the NOI’s media campaign turned from promising to renew the lives of black men to promising to take it away. Malcolm became a newspaperman cut short of his full publishing potential.


Author(s):  
Andrey A. Shumakov

The figure of the radical African-American preacher Malcolm X has always occupied and continues to occupy a special place in the history of the protest movement of the 1960s. This is due to a number of reasons, the main of which was the pronounced ambivalence and inconsistency of the political philosophy of this public figure, who was noted for both ultra-radical religious sermons and rather progressive revolutionary and national liberation ideas at the final stage of his life. The latter, in fact, made him one of the main characters of the “rebellious decade”. While the far-right radicalism of the Harlem preacher faded into the background and began to be perceived as some “mistakes and misconceptions” that were later rethought and overcome. The question of assessing the legacy and personality of Malcolm X has always caused a lot of controversy. On the one hand, his contribution to the development of the movement of the struggle of the Black population for their rights and the formation of the African-American mentality is undeniable; on the other — it can be said that in the academic environment for all this time they practically were not subjected to critical reflection. If, during his lifetime, the ideas of the Harlem preacher were perceived by the vast majority of Americans as frankly marginal, then after his tragic death in 1965, Malcolm X became one of the most popular and iconic figures in recent US history. Any criticism of him began to be perceived extremely painfully. In this article, the author tried to trace the process of formation and evolution of the ideological and political views of Malcolm X, which was the main goal of the study. The main difference from other works on this topic was that in this article, this phenomenon is considered in dynamics, the causes of transformations and the influence of related factors are noted. At the same time, the author tried to identify certain “variables and constants” of the religious and political philosophy of Malcolm X, not only fixing them, but assessing the degree and depth of changes. That led to rather unexpected conclusions on a number of issues, the main of which was the explanation of the reasons for the incredible popularity of Malcolm X in modern American society. The main method of research is materialistic dialectics, which allows considering the political philosophy of Malcolm X in dynamics in accordance with the principle of historicism. Special attention is paid to the issues of radicalism, the transformation of ideological and political views and attitudes to religion, the debunking of myths, stereotypical and hyperbolized ideas about this figure, and the key milestones of his biography. As for the specific historical methods, the historical-genetic and historical-typological approaches are used in this work.


2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
ZOE COLLEY

This article examines the rise of the Nation of Islam (NOI) within America's penal system during the late 1950s and the 1960s. In doing so, it explores the reasons for the NOI's appeal among African American prisoners, its contribution to the politicization of those prisoners, the responses of penal, state and federal authorities to the proliferation of prison mosques, and the way in which imprisoned Black Muslims' campaign for freedom of religious expression established the legal groundwork for the prisoners' rights movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s. This research presents the prison as a locus of black protest and the African American prisoner as an important, but largely overlooked, actor within the black freedom struggle. It calls upon historians to recognize the importance of the prison as both a site and a symbol of black resistance during the post-World War II period.


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