Producing the Black Badman

Prison Power ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 53-84
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
House Arrest ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Urban Rebellion ◽  
Subsequent Passage

This chapter begins with an examination of the political context and rhetorical politics of urban rebellion as Rap Brown augmented the Black Power vernacular after the Cambridge riots and the subsequent passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act. To understand Brown’s interventions into the Black Power vernacular, this chapter examines the mobile, embodied performativity of black masculinity in Brown’s autobiographical manifesto Die Nigger Die! (1969), authored while Brown was under house arrest. Die Nigger Die! was phenomenally successful (due, in part, to its unsettling title), going through seven printings before being re-released after Brown’s murder conviction in 2002 by publishers at Lawrence Hill in Chicago. But because Brown’s vernacular style actually spurred the mass incarceration of black liberation activists, his memoir isn’t as concerned with prison conditions or resistance like Mumia Abu-Jamal’s essays or Assata Shakur’s memoir. His experiences with incarceration and repression focus more macroscopically on the ways in which white power creates the conditions for black repression and imprisonment. This chapter highlights Brown’s style, his performance as a black badman in games like the dozens, his understanding of the fragility of black boyhood and the politics of black masculinity, and his interest in both self-defense and violence in the text to understand the production of Black Power vernacular. Finally, this chapter considers Brown’s descriptions as the problems with both white culture and “Negro culture,” which causes the self-hate that makes black communities willingly submit to the nation.

“Say What you Really Believe”1: Freedom Schools, Youth Empowerment, and Black Power in 1960s Milwaukee

2020 ◽  
Vol 122 (7) ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Katerina Suchor
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
School Curriculum ◽  
Youth Empowerment ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Freedom Schools ◽  
Core Components

Background The historical literature on the civil rights movement has tended to underemphasize the movement's educational activities, while literature on the civil rights and Black Power movements has overemphasized ideological and tactical differences between these chapters in the struggle for Black liberation. A few studies have examined Freedom Schools—educational projects established as part of larger civil rights campaigns—but these studies have focused almost exclusively on Freedom Schools in the Southern context. Purpose Focusing on Freedom Schools organized as part of a school desegregation campaign in Milwaukee during the mid-1960s, this article explores the pedagogical purpose and philosophy of the Freedom Schools, as distinct from other protest activities undertaken as part of the campaign, as well as the legacy of the Freedom Schools after the campaign's conclusion. Research Design This historical analysis examines materials such as lesson plans, flyers, and correspondence from the archives of the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC), the organization responsible for the school desegregation campaign. Findings This article shows that core components of the Freedom School curriculum, which sought to challenge deficit-oriented policies and empower youth to create social change, foreshadowed key tenets of Black Power ideology. Conclusions These findings suggest that the Freedom Schools, as important sites of ideological development, highlight continuity between the civil rights and Black Power movements and situate the Freedom Schools as part of a longer tradition of education for liberation and self-determination.

1968: End of The Civil Rights Movement?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Tuck
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
New Phase

1968 is commonly seen as the end of the classic era of modern civil rights protest: a year when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, when violence seemed endemic in urban black communities, when Black Power groups fractured and when candidates opposed to further civil rights legislation made giant strides at the ballot box. 1968 seemed to usher in a decade bereft of major civil rights activity, ahead of a resurgence of conservative politics. And yet a look behind the headlines tells a different story in the post-1968 years at the local level: of increasing civil rights protest, of major gains in the courts and politics and the workplace, of substantial victories by Black Power activists, and calls for new rights by African American groups hitherto unrecognised by civil rights leaders. This chapter argues that in many ways 1968 marked the beginning of a vibrant new phase of race-centred activism, rather than the end, of the modern civil rights movement.

Attica South

2020 ◽  
pp. 216-248
Author(s):  
Robert T. Chase
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Black Panthers ◽  
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ◽  
The Moment

This chapter narrates the moment when mass incarceration cast more and more African Americans into prison during the decade of the 1970s. As such, the chapter illustrates how the onset of mass incarceration swept onto southern prison plantations a younger generation who not only had witnessed 1960s era civil rights protest, but several of whom were active veterans of the Vietnam War, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, and local Black Power groups. This chapter offers a reconceptualization of Black masculinity as African American men in both Texas and Louisiana’s Angola responded to the prison’s sexual violence with a communitarian-grounded defense of one another and the sanctity of their bodies. Chapter 6 offers the simultaneous narrative of African American politicians elected in the wake of the civil rights movement who sought prison reform, alongside radical black political organizing against the prison plantation. In response to growing fears that “Attica” might come South, Texas prison administrators doubled down on the southern trusty system and looked to “get tough” on civil rights agitation by bringing in new leadership with experience in quelling Black radicalism and civil rights suits.

“Crucial to the Survival of Black People”

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-156
Author(s):  
Rowena Ianthe Alfonso
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black People ◽  
Community Organization ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
Postindustrial City ◽  
Black Paper ◽  
Urban Issues

“This is a Black Paper,” declared BUILD’s statement criticizing the Buffalo Public School system for providing inferior education to black children in Buffalo, New York. Written in 1967 by the community organization, BUILD (which stood for Build Unity, Independence, Liberty, and Dignity), “BUILD Black Paper Number One” was a call for change. Like other black communities in late 1960s America, black Buffalo was caught up in the fervor of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. A “Rust Belt” city, Buffalo was hit hard by deindustrialization, which, coupled with unemployment, segregated housing and unequal education, adversely affected its black community. In 1967, a riot exploded in Buffalo’s predominantly black East Side. This article analyzes statements made by black Buffalonians and argues that Black Power thrived in Buffalo in the late 1960s, through community organizations which attempted to address urban issues that negatively affected African Americans in a postindustrial city.

Introduction

Prison Power ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Freedom Movement

This introduction discusses the beginnings of the “jail, no bail” strategy in the southern civil rights movement, introduces the Black Power vernacular as a critical optic of the book, and charts the ways in which jailing and imprisonment were central features of the black freedom movement from Greensboro to Black Power. This chapter also introduces the writings of Rap Brown (Jamil Al-Amin), Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Assata Shakur as the central texts for this rhetorical analysis. Finally, the chapter suggests that these extremely popular, though understudied, writings are useful spaces to understand how imprisonment occupied a contested terrain, used simultaneously for black liberation and for state repression.

Prison Power

Prison Power ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 21-52
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The State ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Black Liberation Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Phase

This chapter traces rhetorical and political history of imprisonment before and after the birth of Black Power, focusing on major moments of activist imprisonment as well as movement discourses written from prison. In charting the role of prison in the movement, the chapter also discusses the emergence and legitimacy of Black Power as a slogan, as a theoretical device, and as a series of rhetorical strategies designed to be a particularly historical intervention into the stagnating discourses of “civil rights” and “law and order.” This chapter contends that incarceration became a major strategy used by both black activists and white conservatives during the Black Power era; consequently, the period following 1966 marked a new phase of Jim Crow as Black Power became a rallying cry against state repression. This chapter suggests that the legitimacy of Black Power as a term of art, as a series of vernacular signs, and as an organizing principle in a new phase of the black liberation movement, hinged upon whether the state or the activists controlled the frame and how closely it became associated with violence. Because the Black Power slogan and ideology were articulated by activists with extensive rap sheets as the state circumscribed their activism, Black Power ideology took up the relationship between state repression and incarceration as a place to excavate new arenas for the black liberation struggle, particularly in the memoirs of movement activists.

Prison Power

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Organizational Strategies ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Political Inquiry ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site

Prison Power centers imprisonment in the history of black liberation as a rhetorical, theoretical, physical, and media resource as activists developed movement tactics and ideology to counter white supremacy. In highlighting imprisonment as a site for both political and personal transformation, Prison Power underscores how imprisonment shaped movement leaders by influencing their political analysis and organizational strategies. The book suggests that prison became the critical space for the transformation from civil rights to Black Power, especially as southern civil rights activists faced setbacks in achieving equality. In centering the prison as a locus of political inquiry, Black Power activists produced autobiographical writings, essays, and letters about and from prison beginning with the early sit-in movement. Prison Power introduces the critical optic of the “Black Power vernacular” to describe how Black Power activists deployed rhetorical forms in their writings that invented new forms of black identification and encouraged support for black liberation from prison. In using Black Power vernacular forms, imprisoned activists improved their visibility while simultaneously documenting the racist abuses of the judicial system. This new vernacular emerged to force various publics to acknowledge and end the massive brutality perpetrated against black people in prison and in the streets in the name of law and order thereby helping to shore up support for Black Power organizations and initiatives.

Vanguard

2018 ◽  
pp. 171-198
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Fitzgerald
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Working Relationship ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Liberation Movement ◽  
Black Liberation Movement

Richardson’s influence on the development of Black Power through ACT, an organization she cofounded with other radical activists in 1964, is the focus of this chapter. ACT’s goal was to provide aid and comfort to northern urban freedom campaigns, much as SNCC had done for local movements in the South. The chapter also analyzes ACT’s effect on the black liberation movement, particularly how it fostered the rise of militancy among younger activists who challenged moderates’ power to determine the civil rights movement’s goals, strategies, and tactics. Also covered is Richardson’s personal and working relationship with Malcolm X, who served as a consultant to ACT and was influenced by Richardson, as evidenced by his “ballot or bullet” speeches. Finally, the chapter discusses Richardson’s reasons for ending her active participation in the black liberation movement.

The Struggle Is Eternal

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Fitzgerald
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Gender Egalitarianism ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Justice Movements

Using an extensive body of sources, including more than thirty interviews, this biography details and analyzes the life of human rights activist Gloria Richardson, leader of the Cambridge movement in Maryland during the 1960s. Because her radical and uncompromising positions on black liberation were highly influential on the Black Power wave of the black liberation movement, this book depicts Richardson as a progenitor of Black Power who served in its leadership vanguard. This book also moves the geographic borders of Black Power’s roots south to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, detailing the Cambridge movement’s social justice campaign for more jobs and improvements in housing, health care, and education. Activists in Cambridge used the vote and armed self-defense to achieve their goals, and Black Power activists embraced these same strategies and tactics in the mid-1960s, seeing Richardson as a transitional human rights leader and role model. In addition to examining Richardson’s social, economic, and political philosophies—secular humanism, socioeconomic egalitarianism, and gender egalitarianism—and how they impacted her human rights activism, this book analyzes the gendered interpretation of Richardson’s activism and discusses how she was both similar to and different from other national civil rights leaders. Readers also get an insider’s view of her personal life before and after the 1960s, including her marriages, motherhood, and careers and her assessments of recent social justice movements.

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