Black Power in the Bluff City: African American Youth and Student Activism in Memphis, 1965–1975 by Shirletta J. Kinchen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Power in the Bluff City: African American Youth and Student Activism in Memphis, 1965–1975 by Shirletta J. Kinchen Peniel E. Joseph Black Power in the Bluff City: African American Youth and Student Activism in Memphis, 1965–1975. By Shirletta J. Kinchen. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 255. $49.95, ISBN 978-1-62190-187-7.) Historian Shirletta J. Kinchen's Black Power in the Bluff City: African American Youth and Student Activism in Memphis, 1965–1975 is an important contribution to the growing scholarship examining the Black Power movement's impact at the local and municipal level. Over the past two decades, a burgeoning field of historical studies has reimagined the breadth, depth, chronology, and geography of Black Power activism and, in the process, has forced scholars to reconsider narratives of the 1960s that posited the movement as the "'evil twin'" that destroyed civil rights (p. 9). On this score, Kinchen's superb book joins studies by Komozi Woodard, Winston A. Grady-Willis, and Yohuru Williams, among many others, that uncover previously hidden histories of Black Power–era radicalism by focusing on black political activism at the neighborhood level. In Memphis, Tennessee, after the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel, Black Power developed at the local level through groups such as the Black Organizing Project (BOP) that stressed grassroots community organizing by appealing to young people dissatisfied with conventional civil rights groups such as the NAACP. Kinchen chronicles how young black activists in Memphis used the movement's rhetoric to initiate "a tactical change" away from civil rights in an ongoing effort to "redefine the struggle" (p. 51). The BOP sought to galvanize a local struggle, but one inspired by the national rhetoric of Black Power radical Stokely Carmichael and partly inspired by the programmatic vision of the Black Panthers, especially that group's focus on community control. [End Page 1061] Like the Black Lives Matter movement of today, the BOP served as a clearinghouse organization that attracted a number of youth groups, with membership spanning from high schools to local colleges. These groups included the Invaders, radical black activists in Memphis who approximated the swaggering image and politics of the Black Panthers. The Invaders initially broke into the national spotlight during the sanitation strike that drew King to the city and that featured violence, during a march, that authorities traced back to the group. Through antipoverty efforts such as the Neighborhood Organizing Project (NOP), Black Power activists tried to turn Memphis into a base of local and national political power in the wake of the King assassination. The project offered black history and art courses, civic lessons on politics, and outreach toward some of the city's poorest and most marginalized sectors of the black community. Plagued by controversy over the presence of the Invaders in the NOP, rumors that federal funds would be misused by black militants, and a lack of resources, the project never achieved its full potential. Black Power in the Bluff City's final two chapters shift focus from the city to the campus by examining the radicalization of black student groups at LeMoyne-Owen College and Memphis State University. Black students on both campuses, inspired by the national movement, organized Black Power groups that demonstrated, occupied buildings, confronted administrators over the racial climate on campus, pushed for black studies programs and departments, and called for more black students, faculty, and staff. While not achieving all of their demands, the students on both campuses paved the way for an increasing climate of racial justice in higher education and in the city. "Ultimately," Kinchen argues, "Black Power in Memphis in its different incarnations created a space for the youth and student activism that emerged in the period after the sit-in movement of the early 1960s" (p. 186). Black Power in the Bluff City reveals this argument and much more. Kinchen's invigorating local study of black youth activists in Memphis, the relationship between municipal politicians and the Invaders, and how the Black Organizing Project foundered on the shoals of a declining liberal appetite to transform urban centers is truly revelatory. This...