Introduction

This introductory chapter briefly captures the major themes covered in this book. It explores three key concepts regarding Black Power: how the ideas, tactics, and language readily associated with Black Power permeated the community activism, and everyday lives, of ordinary African Americans at the local level; how and why mainstream politicians and institutions exploited Black Power's flexibility as an ideology and organizing tool in their efforts to guide the course of black advancement; and the subsequent impact and meaning of those efforts. The chapter examines how public policies intended to engage, modify, and sublimate the Black Power impulse evolved as a response not only to the deepening urban crisis and growing black radicalism but also to the Johnson administration's troubled War on Poverty.

Epilogue

This epilogue considers the developments in racial progress since the decades covered in this volume. It shows how millions of African Americans find themselves mired in poverty and trapped in a world shaped by post-industrial urban decline and the retrenchment of the welfare state, their chances for a better future severely constrained by the failure of public education and the persistence of discriminatory practices in employment, housing, credit and insurance markets, the criminal justice system, and a range of public institutions. Having more African Americans holding elected office, working in corporate management positions, owning their own businesses, or working and studying on college campuses over the past few decades has not substantially undermined structural inequality or cyclical black poverty.

Black Power and Battles over Education

This chapter examines what were often multiracial battles over public education. In New York and Los Angeles, education reform movements evolved from existing school desegregation protest and antipoverty organizing and were shaped by the emergence of Black Power. Demanding “community control” of public schools, movement participants insisted upon the transfer of decision-making power away from white city officials to locally elected community school boards, as well as the need for black principals, teachers, and more culturally relevant curricula. In Atlanta, grassroots organizers focused on the need for busing to integrate the city's schools. Tracing the trajectory of education reform in each city from the mid-1950s forward, this chapter explores the different ways white politicians, institutions, and organizations supported, facilitated, absorbed, subverted, and defeated grassroots-led challenges to established white educational authority.

Community Development Corporations, Black Capitalism, and the Mainstreaming of Black Power

This chapter explains how Kennedy's Community Development Corporation (CDC) program and Nixon's black capitalism initiatives evolved out of the apparent failures and limitations of the War on Poverty and looked to confront the deepening urban crisis, the growth of black radicalism, and increasing white hostility to the racial politics of Great Society liberalism. After examining the rationale and assumptions that guided this shift in policy, the chapter explores how inner-city African Americans engaged with the opportunities it presented. Focusing first on the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC), the nation's first CDC, and then on a number of similar black-controlled organizations in New York and Los Angeles, this chapter shows how Black Power ideology shaped the institution-building and community development efforts of those organizations, as they used programs to foster racial pride and unity, celebrate black history and culture, and promote greater community self-determination.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter summarizes the major themes explored throughout this book. It argues that Black Power was a flexible and ambiguous concept, and the goals it broadly encompassed—black political, economic, and cultural empowerment—had wide appeal among African Americans. Defining no single path for achieving those goals, Black Power was open to interpretation. In the tumultuous, highly charged urban political landscapes of mid-1960s America, Black Power's meaning was constantly being contested and was always evolving and being adapted to suit different needs and contexts. Moreover, mainstream white politicians, institutions, and organizations played a vital yet understudied role in that process.

Black Mayors and Black Progress

This chapter assesses how African Americans fared under black political leadership during the 1970s. After first exploring the upsurge in the number of black elected officials from the mid-1960s onward, the chapter turns to developments in Los Angeles and Atlanta, cities that in 1973 both elected their first black mayor (Tom Bradley and Maynard Jackson, respectively). An in-depth analysis of Bradley and Jackson's campaigns and first two terms in office focuses on the various factors that shaped their respective political philosophies and mayoralties. Confronted by broader national economic problems, and with limited city resources at their disposal, both Bradley and Jackson deferred to white downtown business interests and pursued pro-growth policies that ultimately reinforced the disadvantages facing their poor and working-class black constituents. For the black middle class and elite in both cities, however, African American city leadership proved to be a wellspring of opportunity.

“A Mouthful of Civil Rights and an Empty Belly”

This chapter explores the War on Poverty's genealogy by tracing its roots in New Deal and Cold War liberal policy making and 1950s social science research, and by revealing the gendered social and economic assumptions that both underpinned the Johnson administration's antipoverty program and limited its effectiveness. It then maps how the War on Poverty unfolded in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and at the federal level, explaining how it became intertwined with the black freedom struggle and the ideological shift toward Black Power, before detailing the multiple and contrasting ways in which elected officials responded to the challenge that the program posed to their political authority. The chapter concludes by addressing the War on Poverty's impact on the American political landscape.