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Questions of Gender, Class, and Politics in Philadelphia's Black Power Movement
| I am enormously grateful to Lisa Levenstein, Robert Self, and Joe Trotter for their thoughtful and incisive reviews of Up South. There is no greater compliment than to have colleagues seriously engage one's arguments, particularly colleagues whose own work at the intersections of urban, African American, and gender history I so admire. I welcome, too, this opportunity to respond to their questions about and criticisms of my historical analysis of the black freedom movement in Philadelphia. The history of African American activism and of racial politics in Philadelphia is complex and multilayered. But it is my hope that Up South, in conjunction with other recent and forthcoming studies of the African American freedom movement in the North and West, will open new realms of debate in important areas of post–World War II U.S. history—including, but not limited to, the life cycle and impact of nonelectoral social movements, the role of racial politics in the shift from the welfare to the neoliberal state, and issues of gender and class relations within the civil rights and Black Power movements.1 |
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It is particularly gratifying to have three distinguished historians so aptly summarize the arguments that I sought to put forward in Up South. For this reason I see little need to restate here the broad outlines of my book and will instead focus my comments on the important issues that these authors have raised. Joe Trotter raises key questions about the ways that intraracial class relations within the African American community played out within and shaped the development of the black movement in Philadelphia, questions that I was only able to address partially in Up South. As I argue in the book, middle-class domination of African American civil rights advocacy remained largely unchallenged until the mid-1960s. To the extent that labor and neighborhood activists sought to represent working-class voices and interests within civil rights organizations of the early postwar period, they did so without mounting a class-based challenge to the ministers, attorneys, and other professional-class leaders who traditionally dominated black leadership in Philadelphia. This was true whether these activists saw themselves as proponents of left-wing or Popular Front politics or simply as representatives of black workers and working-class communities. I don't think it's coincidental that a journalist and public school teacher, Joe Rainey and Goldie Watson respectively, were the most prominent African American proponents of the Popular Front in 1940s Philadelphia. |
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The one exception of course was the Nation of Islam, which since its inception had accused the black middle class, and in particular its well-educated professional-class leadership, of betraying working-class interests in its pursuit of racial integration. As a number of the Black Power activists I interviewed remembered, it was the Nation of Islam that in 1950s Philadelphia most effectively promoted the idea that there were divergent class interests in the black community. It is thus, I think, not surprising that when a class-based challenge to the professional-class leadership of the civil rights community did emerge in the mid-1960s, it came not from labor or left-wing activists but from advocates of black nationalism. Here I agree with Trotter completely when he points out that these emergent Black Power activists were not so much working-class activists as the upwardly mobile, college-educated children of the black poor and working class, a fact that points to the fluid nature of class relations within the black community. While I don't subscribe to the nostalgic view that segregation and ghettoization during the Jim Crow era created in black communities a kind of cross-class utopia in which people from every class status lived together and supported each other, I do think that the contradictory nature of educational and economic opportunity for African Americans in the postwar era contributed to the growth of a generation of relatively well-educated sons and daughters of the black working class who rooted themselves in and sought to speak for "the ghetto." As one activist told me as he was discussing the Black People's Unity Movement's efforts to organize black high school students, the student government activists in predominately black high schools and the leaders of corner youth gangs in Philadelphia's black neighborhoods were often the same people. |
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