Sissy Insurgencies

In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.

Black Nationalism

The popular media often illustrate black nationalism with images of Malcolm X and black leather-jacketed, Afro-wearing, armed Black Panthers in the 1960s, and, in later decades, Louis Farrakhan and hip-hop artists such as Public Enemy. Although historians disagree about black nationalism’s composition and origins, they argue that it has a long pedigree in American history, traceable at least to the first half of the 19th century, if not earlier. While men were most often black nationalism’s public exponents, and some emphasized manhood and female subordination, black nationalism also appealed to many black women, some of whom also exercised leadership and organizational skills in its service. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican, led the first mass black nationalist organization in the United States, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), during the 1920s. Like 19th-century black nationalists, Garvey advocated an independent state for people of African descent, black uplift, and the “civilizing” of Africa. Although not original to him, his emphasis on the right to self-defense, independent black economic development, and pride in African history boosted the UNIA’s popularity. Garvey fell victim to state oppression in the United States, but some former Garveyites joined the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) and probably also the Nation of Islam (NOI), both of which rejected Christianity, identified blacks as Asiatics, and adopted particularist interpretations of Islam. In the 1950s and 1960s, Malcolm X, the charismatic son of Garveyite parents, became the Nation’s chief recruiter. Personal differences with Elijah Muhammad, the Nation’s leader since the 1930s, eventually led to Malcolm X’s departure in 1964. Although he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X’s calls for armed self-defense, self-determination and black pride, and identification with anticolonial struggles heavily influenced Black Power advocates. Some civil rights organizations and workers, who were disillusioned by intransigent white racism and distrustful of white liberals, championed Black Power, which was multifaceted and sometimes more reformist than nationalist. In the early 1990s, polls suggested that black nationalist ideas were more popular than during their supposed heyday in the late 1960s, before internal dissension and state repression undermined many Black Power groups.

“Aboveground, Underground, and Locked Down”

Incarcerated people in Washington have published a variety of periodicals, ranging from general prison news to radical newspapers that debated ideologies like communism, anarchism, and Black nationalism. This article examines radical periodicals published in and concerning prisons to better understand struggles over the prisoners’ press in Washington. First, it contextualizes this history with a discussion of militant prisoner support movements in the 1970s. These movements included the Sunfighter, an underground newspaper; and the George Jackson Brigade, a guerrilla group, whose members were involved with both the Sunfighter and subsequent prison newspapers. This article then analyzes the politics, inside-outside relationships, and censorship of two radical prisoner quarterlies: the Marxist-Leninist Red Dragon and the Anarchist Black Dragon. Influenced by their prison environment, these newspapers provided space for networks and writings that sought to address interconnected problems such as mass incarceration, sexual violence, and racism. Ultimately, these newspapers demonstrate how prisoners’ politics are worthy of closer consideration by historians, as their ideas and actions shaped news, public discourse, and movements on both sides of the prison walls.

Audley Moore

Audley Moore (b. 1898–d. 1997) was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, to St. Cyr and Ella Moore and had a relatively happy girlhood in New Orleans until the death of both parents left her and her sisters, Eloise and Loretta, orphaned. Her activist life began shortly after when she joined Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in New Orleans in 1922. Moore’s fervor for Black Nationalism led her to migrate to Harlem—the location of UNIA headquarters—in the late 1920s. When she arrived, the UNIA had dissipated, but the Communist Party had taken its place as a group successfully organizing the local Black community. Moore joined the Communist Party and worked within it to organize the Black working class. By 1935, she was a lead recruiter and organizer for the Upper Harlem Branch of the Party. Her work at the grassroots level led to citywide, Party-backed appointments including managing communist candidate Ben Davis’s successful campaign for a New York City Council seat in 1944. During and after World War II, she worked with a range of Black leftist organizations including the National Negro Congress, the Civil Rights Congress, and the National Council of Negro Women. When 1950s anticommunist hysteria targeted communists and progressives alike, Moore left the Party and struck out on her own. In the second half of the 20th century Moore sowed the seeds of Black Nationalism across the United States. Moore fostered gender-conscious Black Nationalism and started the modern reparations movement through her New Orleans–based group, the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women (UAEW). She also nurtured Black Nationalism and reparations activity through Black Power–era organizations such as the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Republic of New Africa, and the Black Panther Party. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Moore served as a mother and mentor of the radical Black liberation movement, taking on the honorific “Queen Mother.” She was a sought-after teacher and theoretician who traveled globally. For example, Moore was the keynote speaker at the All-Africa Women’s Conference in Tanzania 1972 and a personal guest of Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere and Guinean President Sekou Touré in subsequent years. She was also member of other Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist groups such as the All-African People’s Party and the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations (N’COBRA), among others. She passed away in Brooklyn, New York, on 2 May 1997.

Black Consciousness, Black Nationalism and Black Theology: Is there a possibility for theology of dialogue?

This article gives some historical development of Black Consciousness, Black Nationalism and Black Theology during the colonial and apartheid eras. The three worked symbiotically to address the racial injustices of the past. Each tenet is historically explained and ideologically defined. Black Consciousness and Black Nationalism are still prevalent in the South African sociopolitical landscape. This is expressed through the current political parties that are the minorities in the National Assembly. However, the ruling party, African National Congress (ANC), as a ‘broader church’ also possesses some constituents and adherents who are the Black Consciousness and Nationalistic aspirants. South Africa is developing into a peasant society regardless of capitalistic embraces of development. Poverty and equality are visible in societal structures. Those who were formerly equality aspirants are now in sociopolitical and economic circles and had forgotten their aspirations of justice and equality. Corruption, maladministration, bad governance, etc., are the menaces that cause imbalances and create a wider gap between the rich and the poor.Contribution: Black Theology is invited to lead dialogical deliberations to assess and ascertain how to bring justice into the volatile situation where people’s security and safety is uncertain and warped ideologies such as ethnic cleansing are promoted. Black Theology should resort to the theological mandate of speaking for the poor and oppressed and promote the sense of the New Testament spirit of communality.

Amiri Baraka's "In Memory of Radio": Marxist Dialectics

The paper discusses the dialectics of Baraka's Marxism in relation to "In Memory of Radio," one of his best poems written during his Beat period and published in 1962. Though much of his poetry written during this period is judged by critics as having nothing to do with Marxism and thus no attempt is to be made to discuss his poetic production in the light of this literary theory, other literary critics prove that the seeds of establishing himself as a Marxist poet can find its roots in his Beat poetry prior to his transition to other two phases, namely the phase of Black nationalism and the phase of Marxist-Leninism.

Dialectics of the development of the Black rights movement in the United States in the 60s of the XX century on the example of its outstanding representatives

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.