“Negro Leadership and Negro Money”: African American Political Organizing in Oakland before the Panthers

Abstract

The historiography and much of the social science theorizing about the post-WWII black freedom struggle draw on the Southern experience. Indeed, the Southern civil rights movement has been rendered so normative as the paradigmatic postwar freedom struggle in the United States that historical surveys like the American Social History Project’s Who Built America? make little mention of the North and West, outside of a brief discussion of Black Power, and offer no framework in which to understand the Northern and Pacific Coast dimensions of African American politics and social movements. The collection of readings edited by Jonathan Birnbaum and Clarence Taylor, Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle, includes a section entitled “The North Has Problems Too,” an opaque reference to the North’s status as a secondary site of struggle. Attention to the South is richly deserved, but an over-reliance on the Southern story has shaped national understandings of black politics and given them a spurious twist: As triumphant civil rights supposedly “moved North” after 1965, the movement foundered on the shores of urban rebellions and black nationalism, and whites withdrew critical support in ever larger numbers. North and South have come to represent the binary histories that we tell about black liberation politics in the second half of the twentieth century. The South is “the movement.” The North is the foil.KeywordsBlack CommunityAfrican American CommunityOral HistoryRacial EqualityBlack Panther PartyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.