SOCIOLOGY AND BLACK POWER
THE TREATMENT OF THE Black Power movement in academic research has been insufficient, and the result is an underestimation of its impact on U.S. society. Many scholars have concluded that while the movement did not have much of an effect on the state itself, it had profound psychological and cultural ramifications for African Americans (Van Deburg 1992). That the Black Power movement inspired and educated black people about Africa, democratic pluralism, and the liberatory function of art, as well as creating space to celebrate a uniquely black aesthetic, is central to what scholars have had to say about its influence. This, however, is an incomplete picture.
Black Power not only contributed to the development of race consciousness and solidarity but also “stimulated the formation of separatist black interest organizations, and sped up the process of black incorporation and cooptation into systemic institutions and processes” (Smith 1992:101). The Black Power influence on the emergent black organizations of the era cannot be overestimated. In fact, the creation of a network of separate black professional, educational, cultural, and political caucuses and organizations is a central outcome of the Black Power movement, one that led to greater incorporation of (at least) the black middle class (Ogbar 2004; Smith 1981).
An interdisciplinary body of literature, which has been referred to as “Black Power Studies,” has emerged in the last fifteen years or so that attempts to rectify this mistreatment of the movement (Joseph 2008). In addition to several excellent histories of the movement as a whole (cf. Jeffries 2006; Joseph 2007; and Ogbar 2004), scholars of the Black Power movement have significantly expanded our knowledge of the outcomes of the movement. Martha Biondi (2012), Stefan Bradley (2009), Ibram Rogers (2012), and Fabio Rojas (2007) have produced excellent studies that treat the rise of black studies departments across the United States as an outcome of the movement. Keith Mayes’s (2009) book on Kwanzaa argues that the holiday was a result of the movement’s focus on carving out space for blacks, even on the calendar. Andrea A. Burns’s (2013) book on black museums brings attention to the Black Power influence on these institutions. Alondra Nelson’s (2011)
Body and Soul provides an account of the health related social programs of the Black Panther Party as a corrective to the popular one-sided academic treatments of the Party. These texts—and the subfield they represent—started the task that I take on in this book: revising the historical and social science account of the movement to include its impact on existing institutions and influence on the development of independent black institutions.
1Despite this growth in the historiography of the movement, sociologists have been particularly dismissive of Black Power, having mostly focused on the Black Power movement inasmuch as it affected the moderate civil rights movement upon its advent. What little has been written has primarily—whether explicitly or implicitly—centered on radical flank effect arguments. The radical flank effect refers to how radical factions of social movements affect their moderate counterparts. Haines (1997) defines both negative and positive flank effects and how they work. A negative flank effect occurs when the activities of radicals work to threaten the success of moderates because the latter become associated with the undesirable tactics and ideas of the former. On the other hand, a positive flank effect can occur “when the bargaining position of moderates is strengthened by the presence of more radical groups” (440). Haines’s analysis of the Black Power movement bears out that it had a positive flank effect, with the threat of radical action by Black Power advocates making the organized, nonviolent civil rights movement look like a preferable alternative. This resulted in increased funding for organizations that remained moderate.
All in all, the sociological literature on social movements has been guilty of ignoring the enduring impacts of Black Power or, worse, lumping together Black Power activists as a ragtag group of illiterate, uneducated, and unorganized thugs. Doug McAdam (1982), for example, cites Peter Goldman (1970) with no qualification when he calls the Black Power movement a “ghetto-bred generation with reputations no larger than a single city or neighborhood or even a particular block” (Goldman 1970, as cited in McAdam 1982:185). This characterization of Black Power activists and their impact on society is simply untrue.
It is important to note here that there are significant disagreements among sociologists and historians alike about whether the civil rights and Black Power movements constitute one shifting black liberation movement or two separate movements entirely. In my estimation, it is a bit of both. Clear temporal transitions occur among civil rights activists and organizations that mark a shift in the earlier movement towards a Black Power frame—take, for example, the transformation of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from the nonviolent inventors of the sit-in movement to foremost Black Power advocates. However, the moderate, integrationist thrust of the civil rights movement that dismantled legal segregation, while retreating from dominance in the face of Black Power, did not disappear; nor did black radicalism start with the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Given this, I conceptualize the black liberation movement as encompassing both the civil rights and Black Power movements and use the term to refer to this larger constellation of black political movements.
Along these lines, a lack of clarity about the boundaries of these movements is one reason sociologists in particular have failed to recognize the impact of the Black Power movement. This is evident in the way scholars have handled its periodization. In the usual periodization of the movement the cycle of the black liberation movement has three important phases.
Figure 2.1 illustrates the standard argument about the movement’s cycle. The years 1955–1960 are considered the emergence; the years 1961–1965 are the heyday, marked by the height of direct action; and finally, 1966–1970 is the period of decline. It’s important to note that the time period widely considered as the decline of the black liberation movement overlaps with the rise of Black Power politics. This is because the increasing radicalization of the movement is considered part of the reason that the movement ended.
FIGURE 2.1 The periodization of the black liberation movement, as usually identified by scholars. Note how it follows an arc from emergence to climax and then decline. Adapted from Doug McAdam’s Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999).
In this narrative, the Black Power movement comes along and ruins everything for the moderate movement. Their brand of protest is unpalatable for elites so they become the subject of extreme repression and die off. It is certainly true that the Black Power movement was subjected to repression. From government-sponsored infiltration by informants, to unlawful surveillance, violent police repression, and the use of incarceration to quell movement activity, Black Power organizations experienced severe state suppression. However, the notion that the radical movement simply died ignores the ways in which the Black Power movement was incorporated into the organizations of civil society.
If we accept these indicators—and this cycle—we miss out on where the real action happens: the movement to implement the movement.
Figure 2.2 shows the number of national level black professional associations founded between 1955 and 1980. The division is based on the standard periodization seen previously in
Figure 2.1, where the first time period represents the emergence, the second time period the heyday, and third the decline. It is during the period widely accepted as the decline of the movement that the founding of black professional associations actually peaked. By focusing only on traditional movement organizations, standard protest events, and the like, we miss the opportunity to understand another whole phase of the movement, which I am contending is at least partially captured by the rise in black professional associations, and is the same type of phenomenon as the black studies movement—a sort of black radical march through the institutions (Dutschke 1969).
FIGURE 2.2 The number of black professional organizations founded, held against the standard periodization of the black liberation movement. The number of organizations actually reached its peak during the period scholars identify as the movement’s decline. Adapted from Kristy A. Swartout, ed., Encyclopedia of Associations, 44th edition (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 2006).
Drawing on Gramsci’s (1971) ideas, Rudi Dutschke (1969), the militant representative of the German student movement, proposed the notion of the long march through the institutions as a form of radical revolution. In arguing that universities cannot be the only site for the movement, he claims that revolutionaries “must regard the ‘long march through the institutions’ as a practical critical action in all social spheres” (249). Dutschke also went further, maintaining that the long march was necessary to bring the ideas of the movement into the organizations that structure our lives. This process of civil institutionalization is critical to understanding the ways in which the movement was institutionalized in U.S. society, and works to complicate our understanding of what happens at the so-called end of a movement cycle.
MOVEMENT HISTORY
Black professional associations are a direct outcome of the Black Power movement. In many ways, their patterns of emergence, structures, and general form reflected the shift from civil rights to Black Power politics and fit right into the larger history of black liberation movements in the United States.
Since the arrival of the first Africans to the United States, the long struggle for black liberation has taken on varying forms, but all of its permutations can largely be sorted into two parallel streams. As political scientist Cedric Robinson (1997) suggests, “by the second half of the nineteenth century, two alternative political cultures had arisen.” The first, rooted in a black desire to claim “privileged political and social identities jealously reserved for non-Blacks,” led to an “assimilationist Black political culture that appropriated the values and objectives of the dominant American Creed.” The second, grounded in the desire of slaves to “form a historical identity that presumed a higher moral standard than that which seemed to bind their masters” led to an alternative political culture that promoted the rejection of white institutions, norms, and values and that espoused separatism at some level (96). As the civil rights movement gave way to Black Power in the mid-1960s, this second, more radical black political culture came into dominance. But these two cultures have always been complicatedly connected.
What I find is that it was the concerns of the of the Black Power movement, not those of the civil rights movement, that dominated the demands of black social workers as well as other black professionals in this era. Indeed, black social workers were very much products of their time in that they saw themselves as a part of the constellation of black political and cultural formations that were eschewing the integrationist goals of the civil rights movement. While a full discussion of the differences between and histories of the civil rights and Black Power movements is beyond the scope of this current project, it is important to understand the relationship of black social worker movements to the larger black political environment through a brief discussion of the history of the black liberation movement.
Civil Rights: The Heroic Period
The civil rights movement, normally placed between 1954 and 1964, is generally seen as encompassing the struggle for desegregation, voting rights, and against discrimination in general. The beginning of the “heroic period” (Joseph 2007) of the black liberation struggle is often marked as beginning in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision because it signals the emergence of a surge of direct action. The roots of the Brown decision, however, date back to the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, when the Supreme Court held that segregation was constitutional so long as the separate accommodations were equal. Through law, the United States had become “two societies, one white, one black, separate and unequal” (United States National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 1968). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took up a monumental legal fight against the “separate but equal” clause of the Plessy decision, using education as the site of struggle.
The culmination of a twenty-year long legal battle, the Supreme Court’s decision in the
Brown v. Board of Education case outlawed segregation in public education, a critical outcome of the NAACP’s legal strategy toward desegregation in public schooling. Following this civil rights victory, however, African Americans witnessed massive resistance to school integration across the country.
2 Southern whites resisted integration with school closures, refusal to integrate, and outright violence. In many ways, the direct action phase of the movement that we associate with the civil rights movement grew out of black reactions to white resistance to integration.
As Lewis Killian (1981) points out, the civil rights movement in its early years “was fundamentally and unrelentingly assimilationist” (43). The movement was preoccupied with ending legal segregation and gaining access to institutions previously reserved for whites only. Focused on equalizing access to public accommodations and services, movement campaigns not only targeted the state through actions aimed at integrating education and government programs, but also sought to integrate public transportation, eating establishments, and other public facilities. Overall, the movement was less about a restructuring of U.S. society or challenging the basic institutions of U.S. life than about reforming the country in such a way that African Americans would have equal access to existing U.S. political and social formations. The dominant rights frame employed by the movement claimed that each person in the United States should have the same rights as anyone else. In this way, the movement relied on an individual notion of freedom, appealing to American individualism by asserting that no person should be denied the basic rights of citizenship. Movement actors also attempted to appeal to Americans’ moral conscience through tactical choices such as marches, sit-ins, boycotts, and other nonviolent demonstrations.
There are several key marking points in the timeline of the movement. An early important moment was the Montgomery bus boycott. This campaign followed the now legendary arrest of Rosa Parks, who sat in the white section of a segregated bus on December 1, 1955. Parks’s demonstration and subsequent arrest resulted in a mobilization that lasted a whole year and ended with a Supreme Court decision that desegregated Alabama’s bus system in 1956. Despite the fact that it was actually the movement’s second mass bus boycott, it was its first major success and the campaign catapulted Martin Luther King Jr. into the movement’s spotlight.
The movement’s integrationist values were largely shaped by King and the black church’s adherence to the ideal of the beloved community. The dominance of King’s Gandhian-Christian values was reflected in the central ideological and practical role the black church played in the movement (Morris 1984). Not only did the church provide organizing centers for the movement, but Christian values and ideals also shaped movement strategies and tactics in essential ways. King explicitly used Christian themes and language in describing the goal of the movement, which is clear in a speech he delivered reflecting on the successful Montgomery bus boycott: the goal was “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority…. The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends” (King 1956, as quoted in Garrow 1986:81). The notion that “the end” should be reconciliation and redemption relies on a distinctly Christian notion of agape love—one that forgives, sacrifices, and is unconditional enough to move beyond the horrors of white racism into a meaningful beloved community. This sentiment distinctly shaped the movement’s integrationist thrust.
Another centerpiece of the nonviolent civil rights movement was the sit-in strategy. This tactic was used to challenge the discrimination existing in the South’s predominantly segregated public accommodations. Black students took the lead with the sit-in movement, often challenging lunch counter segregation at eating establishments across the region. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which would go on to become one of the most important organizing forces of the civil rights movement, was formed out of the sit-in movement’s momentum.
Founded in 1960 at a student conference called by Ella Baker (then executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference), the SNCC was conceived of as a student-centric wing of the nonviolent civil rights movement, and would coordinate sit-ins and other student actions. The organization was also an effort to come together as a student community within the larger civil rights movement. They initially adopted the dominant frames of the movement, such as the Gandhian-Christian principles of nonviolence and integrationism. However, unlike many of the other civil rights organizations at the time, they were not willing to impose those ideas on local leaders in a way that constrained the idea of radical militancy. The SNCC became a vital part of the wave of direct action that resulted in the passing of significant civil rights legislation such as: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in public accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which banned discrimination in voter registration; the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed poll taxes; Executive Order 1124, which required “affirmative action” in hiring; and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination in housing.
As the organization’s early focus shifted from desegregation to political rights, the SNCC’s commitment to nonviolent direct action shifted to a form of radicalism shaped by their experiences in black communities. During this shift, which largely occurred in the aftermath of their Mississippi voting campaign that brought hundreds of college students to the state, the organization went into a period of reflection. This turn inward was particularly focused around whether they would remain committed to ideas of interracialism and nonviolence and whether the best path forward was to continue confronting existing institutions or to build independent institutions (Carson 1995). As SNCC members worked to define their path forward in the mid-1960s and to resolve internal conflicts, the organization moved towards a form of radicalism that would eventually be given the name “Black Power.” As a result, the organization excluded white activists and created conflict with other civil rights groups over issues of radicalism and separatism. This development helped dissolve the coalition between civil rights organizations that had successfully resulted in civil rights legislation and racial integration in public life.
Between 1954 and 1965, while the nation’s attention was riveted on the modern civil rights movement, there was a parallel movement for self-determination that was the precursor to Black Power. After all, the enormously influential Malcolm X was organizing with the Nation of Islam during this period and was only assassinated in 1965, well after the passing of key civil rights legislation. It is only after 1965 that this parallel movement came to the forefront of politics, and was given the name “Black Power.”
The Transition to Black Power
In June 1966, James Meredith began a solo march across the South to protest the severe racism against African Americans in the region. Shortly after starting his trek, he was shot by a sniper and sent to the hospital for treatment. Upon hearing about James Meredith’s lonely march and subsequent shooting, several civil rights activists decided to pick up where he left off and continue the march in his name. It was when the march reached Greenwood, Mississippi, that Stokely Carmichael delivered his now famous Black Power speech, sparking off what would become a new, controversial slogan for black organizing in the United States. Carmichael—by all accounts an oratorical genius—told the audience, “this is the twenty-seventh time that I’ve been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more. The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” The crowd responded with unified shouts of “Black Power!” with the SNCC’s equally passionate Willie Ricks leading the crowd in a call-and-response:
“BLACK POWER!”
“What do you want?”
“BLACK POWER!”
(Joseph 2006; Woodard 1999)
Black Power quickly moved from an extemporaneous rallying cry to a prominent, identifiable political and ideological force in American life. Following on the heels of the Watts Rebellion of 1965, Black Power gave voice to a generation of black young people who wanted more—more than the civil rights movement was asking for and certainly more than the “establishment” was giving. Indeed, Black Power provided a framework for many in the black community to express a wide range of reactions to the dismal situation in poor black communities. The Black Power movement soon developed as a loosely organized network of organizations and individuals committed to radical social change and independence in black economic, political, social, and aesthetic life. The movement challenged the wholesale acceptance of integration as the appropriate strategy for black people in the U.S., advocating instead for various forms and levels of separation from the white mainstream.
The Black Panther Party, formed in 1966, was one of these organizations, and soon came to embody these goals. It became the archetype of a Black Power organization in the eyes of the general public and certainly in the media. The Black Panther Party was originally focused on fighting police brutality in black communities through self-defense and self-help, but their armed civilian surveillance of the police, armed protests, and acts of civil disobedience garnered the kind of media attention that made the Party the face of the Black Power movement well past its prime.
3Working on the overarching premise that the civil rights movement failed to bring about real social change, Black Power advocates argued for alternative ways of achieving concrete social transformation. Black Power activists were involved in movements for community control of resources, including public schools, local police forces, and social services. They fought for welfare reform, employment opportunities, and housing rights. The movement also focused on prison reform, and worked to end the relentless police brutality that plagued black communities. This latter point is particularly germane in light of the severe police and state repression that the movement faced.
4 Self-help was another primary aim. The Black Panther Party survival programs, for example, provided needed services for children and the elderly that were not being provided by the state. (For detailed accounts of the movement see Jeffries 2006; Joseph 2006, 2007, 2010; Nelson 2011; Ogbar 2004.)
The Black Power movement also gained steam from the international political environment. Black Power activists placed the movement for black liberation in the United States in the broader context of African struggles for independence and anticolonialism movements across the globe. Black Power organizations made both symbolic and real linkages to Africa, often drawing parallels between African colonialism and African American experiences. Organizations like the Republic of New Afrika, for example, argued that as an internally colonized people, black Americans should secede from the United States and occupy the southernmost states as a new African nation.
While Black Power was not one united movement with a single clear ideology that was universally adhered to, it is clear that the movement arose in reaction to lagged progress in implementing civil rights gains and in opposition to the integrationist ideas that dominated the civil rights movement. However, it still retained very significant connections to earlier black radical formations (Marable 1984; McAdam 1999; Van Deburg 1992; Killian 1981; Smith 1981). Despite its many permutations, the Black Power movement at the most basic level advocated for self-help and self-defense in the black community and rejected white aesthetic norms, cultural standards, and values. Self-definition, self-determination, and black pride were central to Black Power (Joseph 2006; Killian 1987; Ogbar 2005; Van DeBurg 1992).
The tactics of the Black Power movement are harder to generalize because they did not follow a dominant pattern like those of the nonviolent civil rights protests. Moreover, many of the tactics of the movement were oriented towards individual and community self-help. For example, the Black Panther Party’s provision of breakfast for black children and supervision of traffic stops in the black community were, indeed, movement acts. The movement used acts of civil disobedience as well. College campuses, for example, saw the occupation, takeover, and sometimes destruction of classrooms and administrative buildings as the movement was translated into demands for black studies programs at universities. Scholars have also placed the urban rebellions of the late 1960s within the tactical repertoire of the Black Power movement.
TABLE 2.1
|
CIVIL RIGHTS |
BLACK POWER |
| GOALS |
Access |
Self-Determination |
| DOMINANT FRAMES |
Rights |
Empowerment |
| STRATEGIES |
Integration |
Separation |
| TACTICS |
Marches, sit-ins, boycotts |
Self-help, riots, occupation |
NATION TIME: BLACK FACES IN HIGHER PLACES
There was more to the Black Power movement than the popular image of the movement that dominated television newscasts and COINTELPRO
5 reports. Specifically, there was a strain within the movement that was aimed at dismantling institutionalized racism. In their famous treatise on Black Power, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and Charles Hamilton explicated one of the first social science theories of institutional racism, and made a call for Black Power advocates to work to carve out space in existing institutions and to close ranks in order to build independent black institutional capacity. Carmichael and Hamilton (1992[1967]) define racism as “the predication of decisions and policies on considerations of race for the purpose of
subordinating a racial group and maintaining control over that group” (4). They argue that racism is overt and covert, as well as individual and institutional. The first form of racism consists of the overt acts of individual whites against individual blacks. “The second type,” they contend, “is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of
specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type” (4). In other words, institutional racism refers to the kinds of practices and actions that exist within and operate through the existing institutional arrangements of social life.
Their book
Black Power (1992[1967]) makes the case that black people must build independent institutions. Making the now famous argument that African Americans must first “close ranks” to build independent power, Carmichael and Hamilton state that “black people must lead and run their own organizations” (45). In the face of persistent racism that treated black people as incapable of handling their own affairs, they provide an important justification for closing ranks: “Only black people can convey the revolutionary idea—and it is a revolutionary idea—that black people are able to do things themselves” (45).
They make a key second argument: Black Power can also be gained by carving out space and developing power bases within existing institutions. Carmichael and Hamilton say:
Black Power means, for example, that in Lowndes County, Alabama, a black sheriff can end police brutality. A black tax assessor and tax collector and county board of revenue can lay, collect, and channel tax monies for the building of better roads and schools serving black people…. It means the creation of power bases, of strength, from which black people can press to change local or nationwide patterns of oppression—instead of from weakness.
(46)
They note, however, that this march through the institutions “does not mean merely putting black faces into office. Black visibility is not Black Power” (48). There is also a vital distinction between individual uplift and representation in their line of reasoning. What they are really interested in is having black people who would press for institutional change appointed to important positions, rather than the visible placement of black people in positions of power for the simple sake of providing jobs for a couple visible African Americans.
In this way,
Black Power and similar endeavors provided the blueprint for a generation of new black professionals and political figures who actively worked to develop strategies for gaining institutional power. From the Black Power conferences to the black political conventions and the rise of black mayoral and congressional politics, the Black Power movement profoundly shaped the black political context of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Further, with Black Power as a central ideological force in black life, African Americans who were situated in a variety of institutional settings brought the movement with them. Black people in the United States, informed and inspired by the movement, fought for black studies departments in American universities, the development of Afrocentric curricula in various educational settings, and representation on the boards of directors of organizations serving black communities. They also sought greater racial diversity and inclusive climates within organizations of all sorts. Though the influence of Black Power on politics has been documented, this particular but essential element of the Black Power movement—the work that African Americans in all kinds of organizations did to bring the ideas of the movement into institutions—is one of the least understood facets of the movement.
Black Politics
Shortly after the SNCC’s 1966 call for Black Power became popularized, Harlem Representative Adam Clayton Powell attempted to define it in political terms (Woodard 1999). Calling together a small group of black leaders from across the country, Powell held a small Black Power conference. This meeting in turn led to the creation of a planning committee to put on the first national Black Power Conference in Newark, New Jersey, the following year.
The conference was held between July 20th and July 23rd, 1967—in the wake of one of the bloodiest urban rebellions in American history. Lasting a whole week, from July 11th to July 17th, the Newark Rebellion had left over twenty people dead and at least a thousand injured (Hayden 1967). Despite controversy over whether the timing was appropriate to hold a Black Power conference in the aftermath of the rebellion, more than a thousand delegates and representatives from 286 organizations attended this first national Black Power Conference (Woodard 1999). The conference consisted of workshops and presentations focused around strategies for black community control. In the end over eighty resolutions calling for black power in social, political, economic, and cultural life were passed—some officially and others “in spirit” (Woodard 1999).
The resolutions passed at the conference were a set of wide reaching mandates aimed at “the propagation of self-determination, self-sufficiency, self-respect and self-defense.”
6 The conference document opens with this basis for action: “Whereas, the Black people stand at the crossroads of either an expanding revolution or ruthless extermination, it is incumbent upon us to set our house in order.” The document continues by arguing that because “Black people have consistently expended too much energy and resources reacting to white definitions, it is imperative that organizational and technical competence develop to initiate and enact new insights, new definitions, and new programs.” The more than eighty different resolutions are then listed, some of which were aimed at “closing ranks,” as Carmichael would later explicate. Others were aimed external goals, such as gaining power in existing political institutions and carving out autonomous space in historically white organizations. One example was a call for a simultaneous push to “buy black” by supporting black businesses and to exert pressure “against the federal government for the marked ineffectiveness and discrimination of present programs” in order to address black economic development.
7The political resolutions are surprisingly “mainstream” for a Black Power conference. Calling for the development of a black lobby in Washington, D.C. and condemning the U.S. government for passing H.R. 421, a controversial anti-riot bill, the political resolutions were generally aimed at reforming existing political formations. This reflects the reality that while Black Power was certainly concerned with self-help and separatism in some cases, there was a strain of Black Power interested in gaining power in traditional political formations and institutions. In fact, several resolutions also called for black control over existing current community resources.
Under the heading of “cultural development,” the conference endorsed resolutions to establish an independent black university system, a new black religious philosophy, and the construction of “experimental communities” out of existing black communities. Similarly, the conference recommended the development of a national African American teachers organization and “the formation of new black professional organizations.” These new organizations, they argued, should be created with a mind towards “a re-definition of professionality [
sic] peculiar to and essential to the Black community.”
8At the 1969 National Black Economic Development Conference, the final resolutions also focused primarily on building black institutional capacity. James Forman wrote a document that would eventually be called the
Black Manifesto, which, despite some disagreement over the content, was adopted as the official statement of the conference. The
Black Manifesto, in short, was a call for a particular form of reparations. It calls on white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues to come up with $500 million to be divided among several endeavors to develop independent black institutions, including the development of a land trust so that black people can purchase or retain land, the establishment of black publishing houses and television networks, and the creation of a black research institute and university.
The Black Power conferences built a power base and organizational vehicle for the development of black political conventions and stronger black presence in mainstream politics. Ebony Magazine’s annual progress report for 1967 titled, “Political Victories Climax, Year of Strife and Explosion in Nation’s Black Ghettoes,” opens with a declaration about the year’s importance in the struggle for black liberation (Ebony, January 1968). It reads, “The events of one day alone—Tuesday, November 7—made 1967 a year of significant political victory for the Negro. On that day Carl B. Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, the nation’s tenth largest city, and Richard G. Hatcher tallied enough votes to become mayor of Gary, Indiana…” (118). The article then detailed the Newark Rebellion and the other urban riots of the year, but maintained a hopeful tone when reporting the election of the nation’s first black mayors and celebrated the appointment of Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice. The dominant sentiment was that times were changing. African Americans were becoming more integrated into mainstream political formations and there was a feeling that life as it was in America’s inner cities could be ignored no longer.
The election of the nation’s first black mayors was evidence of African American electoral power in cities with large black populations and coincided with intense racial conflict in those cities. There was an air of hopefulness that black leadership would stall the violence that was tearing across U.S. cities (Biles 1992). However, it was precisely because of the mix of urban violence, Black Power movement building, and the growth of black mainstream politics that the power in American politics was shifting from the urban centers to the periphery with white flight to the suburbs. African Americans were gaining political power in big cities at the exact time that the influence of urban areas was shrinking (Wilson 1980[1978]). Still, black mayoral victories are representative of a strain of the Black Power movement that sought black representatives in existing power structures.
This “black faces in higher places” variety of Black Power was also evident at the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, in 1972. In what Manning Marable has called the “zenith of the entire black movement during the Second Reconstruction,” this unprecedented collectivity gathered twelve thousand black delegates from across the country in Gary to both discuss a plan of action for the National Democratic Convention coming up later in the year and to strategize about the larger movement (Marable 1984). Even though the convention was full of conflicts between individuals and organizations with differing views on what black people needed and how to go about doing it, the conference brought together grassroots activists, established political leaders, and multiple ideological strains all under the umbrella of Black Power. From revolutionary nationalists who advocated armed resistance to recently elected officials, the participants in the largest and widest reaching convention in black history (Woodard 1999) certainly dealt with the issue of institution building.
In an early reflection on the Gary Convention, Imamu Amiri Baraka (1972)—who is widely recognized as the single most important leader at the convention—summarized this joining of the minds of Black Power:
We need voter registration not because of a Democratic nominee but because we need to register Black voters to begin to move toward local self-determination. We are woefully under-registered and electoral politics must be seen as a legitimate area of struggle if we are dealing for the Black community and trying to seize political power where we can. We should not talk about world revolution if we cannot even win a councilmanic [sic] spot in our very city. The goods and services that accrue to these local elective and appointive office must be in the hands of Black people interested in the liberation of Black community…
(47)
The Gary conference was an attempt to pull together the various Black Power advocates to unify around institution building, with the goal of not only creating independent institutions but also using black access to existing institutions and electoral politics as a power base for gaining black liberation.
The impact of the Black Power movement on black participation in mainstream politics is clear. From the election of black mayors to the development of the Congressional Black Caucus, Black Power’s theme of building political and institutional power shaped African American participation in U.S. political formations in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even Richard Nixon picked up the movement’s slogan, though his true political agenda was aimed at co-opting the movement (Kotlowski 1998). Nixon saw an uncontrolled Black Power movement as a major threat to American life, so his administration developed the black capitalism initiative and funded the Office of Minority Business Enterprise as a black capitalist alternative (Weems and Randolph 2001). Though in some ways he was able to subvert the movement, black mainstream political participation continuing into the 1980s and beyond is an enduring outcome of the Black Power movement (Joseph 2010). For example, the historic election of Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago in 1983 was largely a result of black militant support and voter registration drives (Joseph 2010). In fact, Peniel Joseph (2010)—drawing a connecting line between Black Power and black electoral politics, including Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns—places the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, in the Black Power tradition.
The “nation building” strain of the Black Power movement was not only played out in the political arena. From the rise of black studies programs, the development of black student unions, to the creation of independent black educational institutions, black theaters, and black museums, African Americans used the fuel of the Black Power movement both to carve out institutional space within white institutions and to develop independent black institutions in civil society. This black radical “march through the institutions” (Dutschke 1969), though an important outcome of the movement, has largely been understudied and under-theorized in black power and social movement studies, with significant debate over whether all Black Power-era institution building and business endeavors should even be considered part of the movement at all. (See Warren Hill and Rabig 2012 for several treatments of this debate.) This critique is reminiscent of Rap Brown’s response to Whitney Young’s 1968 announcement that the Urban League would work for Black Power through black capitalism. Brown retorted that the whole idea of Black Power had been “diluted and prostituted to the point where even the most conservative negroes are now for Black Power” (Brown 1967, as cited in Carson 1981:289). Indeed, in a movement principally remembered for its more radical tenets, for its pushing the boundaries of black movements, and for its staunch critique of capitalism and the existing racial order, these seemingly mainstream elements appear to fall outside of the movement. But there is no single authority by which to answer the question “What is Black Power?” In considering all of the ideological, organizational, and action elements that fell under the tent of Black Power, Michal O. West’s (2012) answer to the question of “to whom did the tent belong?” is the only one that makes sense: to “all of its occupants. In sum, Black Power belonged to all who claimed it” (294).
Regardless of the scholarly debates, this phenomenon is important not only because it changed the organizational landscape of civil society, but also because it created important shifts in racial practices in organizations and contributed to the incorporation of the black middle class into mainstream institutions. The rising black middle class of the late 1960s was central to the development of a network of black organizations, which shared a “mood of protest” about racial issues with the working class and poor African Americans—issues that were the concern of the Black Power movement (Smith 1981). This network, radicalized by Black Power to turn the black political focus toward institution building and gaining institutional space in white organizations, led to the widespread development of independent black organizations. Indeed, between 1966 and 1967, Charles Hamilton’s speaking and consulting centered on the idea of closing ranks through the creation of black political organizations that would be independent of the white power structure (Smith 1992).
Thus, while Hamilton’s influence on the way the general public understood Black Power is undeniable, his influence on black social workers was far more direct. He was invited to speak to black social workers in 1967 and 1968 and his conception of Black Power is central to the way National Association of Black Social Workers emerged as an independent organization. Rather than being formed because of exclusion, as it happened with the earlier generation of such organizations (like those of black doctors and lawyers), the black professional associations that came up in the 1960s saw themselves as “technical support for the black liberation movement” (Sanders, as cited in Smith 1992:435).
Moreover, this importation of Black Power into mainstream organizations contributed to the co-optation of the movement in such a way that its transformatory power would look more like today’s diversity initiatives than what it looked like at its most revolutionary—certainly not what Stokely Carmichael had in mind when he and Hamilton suggested that black people take the struggle into institutions. Still, in the extant literature on the movement, very little is known about this process.
