The Blues Revival and the Black Arts Movement

This chapter, which originally appeared in somewhat different form in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006), places that Black literary and cultural revolution in dialogue with another cultural earthquake of the 1960s, the emergence of a mass white audience for blues music. For some Black Arts writers and thinkers like Ron Karenga, Sonia Sanchez, and Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), the blues savored of black southern abjection and were, in Karenga’s dismissive judgment, “invalid,” an outmoded form without the political utility urgently needed in a time of Black revolution. Yet for many others, led by Larry Neal, the blues were a cherished ancestral rootsock and inalienably Black cultural inheritance—“the essential vector of the Afro-American sensibility and identity.” Even as the blues were being debated within the Black intelligentsia, a white blues revolution was transpiring, one in which white fans imagined themselves forming a beloved community with aged Black blues players who had been brought back into national circulation at festivals and college gigs, and in which white blues artists like Paul Butterfield and Janis Joplin, enjoying mass popularity, drew the fierce condemnation of Black Arts writers Ron Welburn and Stephen E. Henderson.

The Slave Revolt That Changed the World and the Conspiracy Against It: The Haitian Revolution and the Birth of Scientific Racism

This paper argues, first, that despite the transnational impact of the Haitian Revolution, it remains mostly unknown in the Western hemisphere. This is primarily the result of an international racist project to repress the idea of Black Revolution and undermine Haiti’s progress. Second, I argue that, since the second half of the 19th century, intellectuals and social scientists have contributed to this racial project, and thus that scientific racism was born primarily as a response to the Haitian Revolution. The proliferation of racially oriented pseudosciences was part of significant efforts on the part of European and American intellectuals to undermine the notion of Black Revolution and Black power, and to demonstrate that Blacks were not capable of self-governance.

Learning Is an All-Black Thing

This chapter situates Ebony’s evolving black history content within the broader struggle for black-centred education and the ‘Black Revolution’ on campus during the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, Ebony’s historical content presented a militant and, at times, heavily gendered interpretation of the African American past. On an individual level, Bennett’s developing relationship with organisations such as Northwestern University and the Institute of the Black World underscored the uniqueness of his role as Ebony’s in-house historian, and the complexity of his position as both a magazine editor and a black public intellectual.