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The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field
Peniel E. Joseph
| "By all rights, there no longer should be much question about the meaning—at least the intended meaning—of Black Power," the journalist Charles Sutton observed in January 1967. "Between the speeches and writings of Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)," Sutton continued, "the explanations of Floyd McKissick, director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the writings of more than a score of scholars and commentators, the slogan and its various assumptions have been fairly thoroughly examined."1 |
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Clearly Sutton was wrong. Despite efforts to define it both then and today, "black power" exists in the American imagination through a series of iconic, yet fleeting images—ranging from gun-toting Black Panthers to black-gloved sprinters at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics—that powerfully evoke the era's confounding mixture of triumph and tragedy. Indeed, the iconography of Stokely Carmichael in Greenwood, Mississippi, Black Panthers marching outside an Oakland, California, courthouse, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's wanted poster for Angela Davis serves as a kind of visual shorthand to understanding the history of the era, but such images tell us very little about the movement that birthed them. |
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This fact has been complicated by conventional civil rights narratives, which, until recently, accepted as wisdom the idea that black power undermined struggles for racial justice. Those narratives differed more in their level of condemnation than in their analysis of the black power movement's self-destructive impact. The embrace, at times, of violent rhetoric, misogyny, and bravado by black power advocates have made them and their struggles easy targets for demonization and dismissal. For instance, black power stands at the center of declension narratives of the 1960s: the movement's destructiveness poisoning the innocence of the New Left, corrupting a generation of black activists, and steering the drive for civil rights off course in a way that reinforced racial segregation by giving politicians a clear, frightening scapegoat. The backlash that followed seemingly destroyed the potential of the civil rights movement to establish new democratic frontiers. This narrative still too often provides the basis for popular understandings, as well as scholarly framings, of black power as an unabashed failure and a negative counterpart to more righteous struggles for racial integration, social justice, and economic equality.2 |
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Given the overwhelmingly negative images associated with black power, efforts to define it have largely been arbitrary. Until recently, perspectives on the movement were shaped primarily by the memory of those who saw it only as an angry response to the slow pace of the struggle for civil rights. Not surprisingly, a clear working definition of black power has proven elusive, especially since it was so often viewed as the civil rights movement's "evil" twin. |
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The black power era was initially documented as part of the first wave of civil rights historiography, but, especially over the past fifteen years, studies of the black power movement have grown in ambition, complexity, and breadth, culminating in a new subfield that Peniel E. Joseph has called "Black Power Studies."3 This wave of scholarship on the era has begun to demystify, complicate, and intellectually engage demonized, dismissed, and overlooked actors and struggles by providing nuanced, well-researched, and weighty narratives that document the profound implications of black power politics for the study of African American history and U.S. history more broadly. Black power may have been harnessed in black communities, but its manifold iterations challenged the scope of liberalism, democracy, and the nation-state, as well as how we envision the practice of democracy at the local, regional, national, and global levels. This essay examines the evolution of black power historiography, its changing meaning within civil rights scholarship, and its recent growth as a distinct subfield within U.S. history.
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