Their Rhetoric Is That of Revolution

2019 ◽  
pp. 200-236
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
National Guard ◽  
Student Activism ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
Black America ◽  
Local Law Enforcement

This chapter discusses Greensboro, North Carolina as the unofficial headquarters for the Black Power Movement in the south and the role that North Carolina A&T State University played in facilitating that development. Since the dawn of the turbulent 60s, A&T had been a force for change and an epicenter for student activism. With the dawning of the Black Power Movement, A&T students completely embraced the rhetoric of the era and followed it up with action. Those activists’ energies fed other Black Power initiatives across the state and soon led to the creation of a new national organization, as well as a powerful local organization that embodied the shifting agenda of the civil rights movement to address abject poverty throughout Black America. Those energies also attracted the attention of local law enforcement and the National Guard, which invaded the campus in May of 1969, shot and killed a student, and terrorized the predominantly black side of Greensboro. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the shifting landscape of HBCUs during the early 70s and the external and internal pressures that arrested the development of Black Power organizations during the decade.

From Absence to Flight

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Power Movement

This chapter explores radicalization of comic rage in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. Emerging in the middle of the transition from the integrationist period of the civil rights movement to the nationalism of the Black Power movement, both works openly challenge fundamental concepts about race. In addition to targeting fundamental assumptions of Western superiority, these works also question simplistic counter-representations that African Americans present to combat racist stereotypes. Using forms increasingly important in African American literature, like drama and neo-slave narratives, these works enact comic rage as way to depict unique and powerful forms of resistance.

scholarly journals British Black Power: The anti-imperialism of political blackness and the problem of nativist socialism

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 945-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Narayan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
British History ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

The history of the US Black Power movement and its constituent groups such as the Black Panther Party has recently gone through a process of historical reappraisal, which challenges the characterization of Black Power as the violent, misogynist and negative counterpart to the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, scholars have furthered interest in the global aspects of the movement, highlighting how Black Power was adopted in contexts as diverse as India, Israel and Polynesia. This article highlights that Britain also possessed its own distinctive form of Black Power movement, which whilst inspired and informed by its US counterpart, was also rooted in anti-colonial politics, New Commonwealth immigration and the onset of decolonization. Existing sociological narratives usually locate the prominence and visibility of British Black Power and its activism, which lasted through the 1960s to the early 1970s, within the broad history of UK race relations and the movement from anti-racism to multiculturalism. However, this characterization neglects how such Black activism conjoined explanations of domestic racism with issues of imperialism and global inequality. Through recovering this history, the article seeks to bring to the fore a forgotten part of British history and also examines how the history of British Black Power offers valuable lessons about how the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism should be united in the 21st century.

scholarly journals Book Review: Black Power Encyclopedia: From “Black Is Beautiful” to Urban Uprisings.

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
D. Singleton
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
African American History ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
American Society

The Black Power Movement was largely a youth-led effort that broke from past thinking and methods of confronting American society and marked an important evolution in how African Americans continued their struggle in the wake of hard-fought landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. There is no shortage of reference works on the Civil Rights Movement and African American history in general that include entries on facets of the Black Power Movement.

Kangaroo Court: The Black Power Movement and the Courtroom as a Space of Resistance

2022 ◽  
pp. 000276422110660
Author(s):  
Joyce M. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Contested Space ◽  
The Law ◽  
A Site ◽  
Law And Social Movements

Scholars in many disciplines have examined how social movements use the law to create social change. While the study of the law and social movements has largely relied on studies of the US civil rights movement to develop theoretical tools for understanding how movements target the state to create legal changes, none of these studies have examined the legal strategy of the Black Power movement. This article draws on data from a larger project on Black Power law and the National Conference of Black Lawyers to develop the idea of the courtroom as contested space and construct a concept of courtroom resistance. I argue that the courtroom, operating as hegemonic white space, was viewed as a site of contestation by Black Power activists who found creative ways to challenge the legal, ideological, and physical “space” of the courtroom. These conceptual tools open an important avenue for researchers interested in examining the relationship between social movements and the law and how race operates in the courts.

Between Revolution and the Racial Ghetto

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cedric Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
Revolutionary Nationalism ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Political Realities

This article revisits an historic exchange between two black ex-communists, Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood, a debate that prefigured many of the central contradictions of the black-power era. Their exchange followed Cruse’s influential 1962 essay forStudies on the Left, ‘Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American’, which declared that the American Negro was a ‘subject of domestic colonialism’. Written against the prevailing liberal integrationist commitments of the civil-rights movement, his essay called for black economic and political independence, and inspired many of the younger activists who would give birth to the black-power movement. In a series of essays for the Bay Area black radical journalSoulbook, Haywood criticised Cruse’s mishandling of class politics among blacks, and his retreat from anti-capitalism. This forgotten episode is important on its own terms, for what it says about the character and limitations of left-political thinking during the sixties, and equally for understanding and contesting those commonsensical notions of African-American public life in our times which too often remain rooted in the vanished social context and political realities of the twentieth-century racial ghetto.

Fall ’67: A Hectic Beginning

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-110
Author(s):  
Michael V. Metz
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
National Guard ◽  
Student Movement ◽  
Coffee Shop ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
News Broadcasts ◽  
Draft Resisters

News broadcasts in summer 1967 were filled scenes of riots, burning cities, and National Guard troops. The peaceful civil rights movement had morphed into a demand for black power. Death totals were rising in Vietnam as the war intensified and became the central focus of the student movement. As the semester began, President Henry handed off Urbana campus management to Jack W. Peltason, the new chancellor. Millet announced looser women’s dorm rules, Steve Schmidt announced the opening of the Red Herring coffee shop, and Berkey, Durrett, and Fein, the primary campus-movement leaders, announced that SFS was disbanded--just as the Draft Resisters Union formed.

Women’s Activism in the Modern Movement for Black Liberation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aisha A. Upton ◽  
Joyce M. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Modern Movement

This chapter examines women’s activism in the modern movement for Black liberation. It examines women’s roles across three phases of mobilization. Starting with an exploration of women’s participation in the direct action phase of the U.S. civil rights movement (1954–1966), the chapter discusses the key roles that women played in the fight for legal equality for African Americans. Next it examines women’s central role in the Black Power movement of 1966–1974. The authors argue that Black women found new roles in new struggles during this period. The chapter ends with a look at the rise of radical Black feminism between 1974 and 1980, examining the codification of intersectional politics and discussing the continuation of issues of race, privilege, and diversity in contemporary feminism.

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