“There Is NoNewBlack Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

On the Novel and Civic Myth

The Evolution of Identity Politics

Resisting “Law and Order” in California: Howard Moore Jr., Angela Davis, and the Politics of Prison Radicalism

Reviewed by: Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination by Salamishah Tillet Patricia Stuelke Tillet, Salamishah . 2012 . Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. Durham, NC : Duke University Press . $84.95 hc. $23.95 sc. 248 pp. In a second-season flashback, viewers of Shonda Rhimes’s delicious soap opera Scandal finally become privy to African-American political fixer Olivia Pope’s reasons for (temporarily) abandoning her job and her affair with married white president Fitzgerald Grant, despite having helped steal the election for him. “I’m feeling a little Sally Hemings–Thomas Jefferson about all this,” she tells Fitz in a stolen hallway conversation. How does this rare historical invocation fit into Scandal’s optimistically postracial yet manifestly corrupt world? Salamishah Tillet’s penetrating study of the uses of slavery in African-American post–civil rights culture offers a means of approaching this question, suggesting that we might understand Rhimes’s show and other texts like it as complicated articulations of African Americans’ ambivalent dreams for American democracy in the post–civil rights era. Tillet’s elegantly constructed book analyzes representations of slavery in the post–civil rights period by African-American authors, artists, and intellectuals as responses to the experience of “civil estrangement”: the paradox in which African Americans possess equality under the law but remain barred from American economic prosperity and the nation’s official myths, monuments, and histories. African-American post–civil rights representations of slavery respond to this paradox by advancing what Tillet terms “a democratic aesthetic,” a “mode of poetics and politics” (12) that critiques myths of American equality while simultaneously writing African Americans back into those narratives and revising them for a radically democratic future. In defining this aesthetic, Tillet explains that these representations neither idolize the past nor revere the state but rather advance a “critical patriotism,” one that incorporates elements of postmodern skepticism and Post-Soul aesthetics in order to advance a utopian dream of democracy while “remaining skeptical of its materialization” (12). In her book’s first two chapters, Tillet investigates the deployment of this “democratic aesthetic” by interrogating post–civil rights revisions of antebellum icons. The first chapter traces how novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud, playwright Robert McCauley, and historian Annette Gordon-Reed reimagine Sally Hemings not as a victim or an empty symbol, but rather as a “radical black female subject” (23). These authors’ restagings of the interracial intimacy between Hemings and Jefferson, Tillet argues, revise sanitized myths of slavery and register post–civil rights civic disenfranchisement while casting Hemings as an agent of history and an ideal model for post–civil rights citizenship. In the second chapter, Tillet [End Page 146] considers post–civil rights renditions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom and Topsy, tracing how works by Ishmael Reed, Robert Alexander, Bill T. Jones, and Kara Walker use satire to puncture the hegemony of Stowe’s sentimentality while reimagining more complex Uncle Toms and Topsys. Both of these chapters would make for excellent reading in undergraduate literature or composition classrooms, as Tillet organizes them in clearly framed sections that would offer undergraduates useful models for comparative analytical essays. The second chapter, however, is ultimately more compelling than the first, due to Tillet’s careful exploration of how the texts she discusses “are remembering slavery at different points in time” (85). She is beautifully attentive, for example, to how Reed’s 1976 Tom registers a cynical critique of the Black Power movement, while Alexander’s later reappropriation of Tom registers the frustration of the civic estrangement that arose after Rodney King’s beating. In contrast, such attention to shifting historical context is noticeably absent from Tillet’s first chapter. Further consideration of her authors’ revisions of Sally Hemings in relation to the different historical moments of their production (ranging from 1979 to 2008), particularly the evolving context of US feminisms, might have helped Tillet more fully account for the texts’ variegated presentations of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship. The second half of Tillet’s book takes up more collective forms of remembering and representing slavery, considering post–civil rights African-American heritage tourism and African-American...

movement for represented in many ways a new phase in the black freedom struggle in the United States and other parts of the African world. And whereas the campaigns in the United States to end legal segregation and to advance black civil rights have been the subject of scholarly analysis for several decades, Black Power Studies is an emerging subfield in African and African American Studies and in the history of the African Diaspora. And even at this early stage of scholarly research and interpretation, certain themes and trends have emerged in the examination of the Black Power Movement (BPM), especially regarding continuities and discontinuities with earlier social, political, and cultural movements among African-descended people. This Special Issue of Journal of African American History presents Black Power which document those characteristics shared with earlier black social movements as well as those organizations, activities, and leaders who arrived on the political and cultural scene only in the late 1960s and 1970s. (1) Scholars have already described the preoccupation with Africa and African affairs on the part of Black Power groups such as Malcolm X's Organization of Afro-American Unity, Maulana Karenga's US Organization, the Republic of New Africa; the advocates for the creation of Black Studies programs; and Stokely Carmichael and other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members in the late 1960s. (2) Fanon Che Wilkins in his essay The Making of Black Internationalists: SNCC and Africa Before the Launching of Black Power, 1960-1965 presents a well-documented account of the relations between the black student activists and Africa in the 1960s. James Forman, who served as SNCC Executive Secretary beginning in early 1961, had been involved in African Studies from his undergraduate years when he studied with social scientist St. Clair Drake at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Forman established the connections between SNCC and the Pan African Students Organization in the Americas and other international student organizations, and coordinated joint protests and other activities with African students and diplomats in the United States. 1964 trip of eleven SNCC members to Africa solidified the relationships between the newly independent African nations and African Americans, and laid the groundwork for increased international activities in the Black Power era in the late 1960s. Black Power era witnessed not only a cultural and artistic revolution among African-descended people in various parts of the world, but also the appearance of a wide variety of new black publications, including Black Scholar, First World (magazine), Journal of Black Studies, and Review of Black Political Economy, founded in 1970 by economist Robert S. Browne. (3) In her essay An African-Vietnamese American: Robert S. Browne, the Antiwar Movement, and the Personal/Political Dimensions of Black Internationalism, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu examines the unique internationalist perspective that Browne brought to the movement for Black Power. Browne not only lived and worked in Southeast Asia for the U.S. government in the 1950s, he also married a woman of Vietnamese and Chinese ancestry. When nationwide protests erupted in the late 1960s over the U.S. war in Vietnam, Browne emerged as the authentic African Vietnamese voice in numerous antiwar campaigns and protests. Wu documents Browne's activities in support of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam long before that stance was taken by other civil rights and Black Power leaders and organizations. As Browne pointed out, I was the one Black who had been connected with [the antiwar] movement before prominent Blacks like Martin Luther King, Julian Bond, and Dick Gregory eventually spoke out. movement for Black Power emerged in the United States in 1966 and eventually spread internationally to the Caribbean and South America, and in South Africa with the launching of the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steven Biko. …

An invaluable resource that documents the Black Power Movement by its cultural representation and promotion of self-determination and self-defense, and showcases the movement's influence on Black communities in America from 1965 to the mid-1970s. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement's emphasis on the rhetoric and practice of nonviolence and social and political goal of integration, Black Power was defined by the promotion of Black self-determination, Black consciousness, independent Black politics, and the practice of armed self-defense. Black Power changed communities, curriculums, and culture in the United States and served as an inspiration for social justice internationally. This unique two-volume set provides readers with an understanding of Black Power's important role in the turbulence, social change, and politics of the 1960s and 1970s in America and how the concepts of the movement continue to influence contemporary Black politics, culture, and identity. Cross-disciplinary and broad in its approach,Black Power Encyclopedia: From "Black Is Beautiful" to Urban Uprisingsexplores the emergence and evolution of the Black Power Movement in the United States some 50 years ago. The entries examine the key players, organizations and institutions, trends, and events of the period, enabling readers to better understand the ways in which African Americans broke through racial barriers, developed a positive identity, and began to feel united through racial pride and the formation of important social change organizations. The encyclopedia also covers the important impact of the more militant segments of the movement, such as Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers.

Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party offered an alternative discourse to the Civil Rights Movement, primarily using Black power rhetoric, Black nationalism and internationalism, and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary politics. This article provides a historical analysis of the Party's international news coverage, published between 1967 and 1970, in its newspaper The Black Panther Black Community News Service. Although previous literature has largely analyzed the Party's use of print media, less work has analyzed how the Party's newspaper became a tool for internationalizing the U.S. Black Power Movement (BPM), immediately following the launching of The Black Panther. An analysis of the newspapers’ first 3 years of publication locates the 1960s BPM within a global movement focusing on both race and class struggle. Although there is little evidence that suggests the newspaper had a significant effect on fostering an international BPM, its existence is important. This article shows how the newspaper helped shape the discourse of race and class by highlighting how The Black Panther informed their members and other readers about the organization and its messages, but also educated readers about international affairs (particularly about socialist and liberation movements abroad). Such a project underscores the importance of the relationship between media history and social movements.

In the 1960s, the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party gave voice to many economically disadvantaged and politically isolated African Americans, especially outside the South. Though vilified as extremist and marginal, they were formidable agents of influence and change during the civil rights era and ultimately shaped the Black Power movement. In this fresh study, drawing on deep archival research and interviews with key participants, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar reconsiders the comingled stories of - and popular reactions to - the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, and mainstream civil rights leaders. Ogbar finds that many African Americans embraced the seemingly contradictory political agenda of desegregation and nationalism. Indeed, black nationalism was far more favorably received among African Americans than historians have previously acknowledged. Black Power reveals a civil rights movement in which the ideals of desegregation through non-violence and black nationalism marched side by side. Ogbar concludes that Black Power had more lasting cultural consequences among African Americans and others than did the civil rights movement, engendering minority pride and influencing the political, cultural, and religious spheres of mainstream African American life for the next three decades.

Reviewed by: Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity Lisa M. Corrigan Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. By Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004; pp vii +249. $45.00. This comprehensive history of the politics of black power incorporates interviews by the author, archival materials, an extensive survey of periodical literature, and a large range of primary sources penned, uttered, and published by black power activists themselves. Historian Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar crafts a text that examines the complexities of the concept of black power. Ogbar argues, "Black Power affected African American identity and politics as much as any speech, march, or legal victory of the civil rights movement" because the thrust of its power was "black nationalism" (2). He is quick to point out that although black power was not always nationalist, it [End Page 331] "employed—even co-opted—the activism typified in civil rights struggles and operated on basic assumptions of rights and privileges" (2). Through activism, black power advocates sought the self-pride and self-determination of their political predecessors (Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and A. Phillip Randolph) to forge a group consciousness "that substantively altered American politics and culture" (9). Ogbar's text is noteworthy because it attempts to integrate the cultural, economic, political, and radical elements of nationalism into a history of black power that has been shaped largely by two institutions: the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). The text surveys a plethora of other black power organizations (including extended commentary on the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress on Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Us Organization, and so forth) and their relationships with both the NOI and the BPP. Still Ogbar argues that the Nation of Islam had the most significant impact on black power activists. This influence is because of the rhetoric of the NOI surrounding the foolishness of integration and "the organizational and leadership skills of [Elijah] Muhammad and his chief minister, Malcolm X" (19). Ogbar argues that the NOI was central in crafting a language and culture of self-determination, black support for black enterprises, and a mass black culture, even as it succumbed to problematic trends: sexism, denigrating blacks in the spirit of racial uplift, and conceiving of the races as entirely separate, distinct, and different peoples. In Malcolm X, black power found a martyr, particularly after he was gunned down in the Harlem ballroom on February 21, 1965. Ogbar traces Malcolm X's rhetorical influence on Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Stokley Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, and others. Ogbar details the split between advocates for integration and nonviolence and those who saw a future in which revolution would involve self-defense. This book provides a compelling portrait of the gradual transformation that many advocates of nonviolence experienced with the increasing police brutality and state-sanctioned violence and decreasing protection from the state, even after the passage of some of the most remarkable pieces of civil rights legislation in the nation's history. Ogbar also tackles the NOI's incorporation of the lumpen proletariat, the criminal, the street hustler, the prostitute, the gambler, and the downtrodden masses as a model for later black power organizers who embraced the Marxism(s) of Mao, Che, Fidel, and Ho Chi Minh. Organizing the poor black masses became central to the BPP in its community breakfast programs, literacy programs, and other service-oriented projects to benefit inner-city communities. The BPP survival programs integrated black power [End Page 332] into the communities that the party members needed for financial, intellectual, and political support. In creating this tapestry of organizational and intellectual histories, Ogbar is also incredibly savvy in weaving together the relationship between black power and the "Rainbow Coalition" of other vanguard ethnic nationalist organizations that late Panther Fred Hampton was so keen on recruiting for the urban revolution. Ogbar includes the histories (albeit brief) of the Deacons for Defense, the Young Lords (and other Puerto Rican nationalist organizations), the Brown Berets (and other Chicano nationalists), the Young Patriots, the American Indian Movement, the Yellow...

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 68 sense of purpose in the summer of 1965 had all but evaporated by the spring of 1968” after a series of “abortive advances and disorganized retreats ” on civil rights (pp. 238, 243). Carter’s discussion includes attention to selected grassroots efforts and civil rights organizations, but it focuses mainly in the policy discussions within the executive branch as “policy drift threatened to become policy paralysis, and concrete White House initiatives dwindled” (p. 244). In addition to the papers of the administration, Carter depends, perhaps too heavily, on more than 130 oral histories, six of which he conducted. Although his narrative often suffers from a confusing tendency to depart from a chronological presentation, it provides an important supplement to the works of Steven F. Lawson, Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Gareth Davies, Hugh Davis Graham, and Taylor Branch. CHARLES W. EAGLES University of Mississippi Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. By Hasan Kwame Jeffries. New York: New York University Press. 2009. xviii, 348 pp. $39.00. ISBN 978-0-8147-4305-8. In 1906 the venerable scholar and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about his experience living in Lowndes County and the brutally corrupt forces of racism there: “I do not think that it would be easy to find a place where conditions were on the whole more unfavorable to the rise of the Negro” (p. 9). Half a century later, during the modern Civil Rights movement, the moniker “bloody Lowndes” referred to the well-earned reputation for dramatic acts of violent repression of any effort to expand democracy in the county. Indeed, a hundred years after the abolition of slavery, local whites erected such a brutal system of white supremacy that no black person was registered to vote in a county that was over 70 percent black. Yet, as historian Hasan K. Jeffries reveals in this excellent study, local people mustered the temerity to organize for new freedoms in the face of great risk. Since the end of Reconstruction, terrorist attacks against blacks who protested injustice created a climate where resistance seemed futile. Local, state, and federal indifference ensured that white supremacy would not be effectively challenged in the county. By detailing the various methods used to maintain white domination, Jeffries illustrates that, in many respects, Lowndes was no different from most parts of the South J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 1 69 for most of its history. By the mid-1960s, however, as many areas achieved some erosion of white supremacy’s codified structure, virtually nothing had changed in Lowndes. Using impressive original sources, interviews, and government documents, Jeffries describes the development of local activism, which pulled resources and support from the Lowndes diaspora , extending as far away as Detroit. In 1965 locals formed the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights and organized for voter registration. With the help of seasoned activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) such as Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), locals eventually created the Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP) to challenge the local Democratic Party, which was completely controlled by white supremacists. The LCFP’s adoption of the black panther as a party mascot in 1966 inspired black militants across the country. And while they had no formal connections with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, LCFP’s activists shared the belief in armed self-defense. The ambitious third-party “black panther” candidates did not win elections, despite a huge black majority. Voting fraud and intimidation continued after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 opened the way to greater black suffrage . Merging with the National Democratic Party of Alabama, the local black leadership, under veteran activist John Hulett, began a series of compromises that ultimately ended the viability of third-party politics by 1972, but not before blacks were elected into important offices in the county, including Hulett as sheriff. Blacks moved into the Democratic Party leadership as whites migrated into the Alabama Conservative Party and eventually into the Republican Party. Jeffries makes an important contribution to...

Challenging Historical Iconography:A Look at Women's Everyday Political Mobilization Crystal R. Sanders (bio) Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 255 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $34.95 Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 352 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography and index. $34.95 Rebecca Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xii + 313 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography and index. $29.95 Iconography in history can be a dangerous thing. It encourages the deification of men such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X as lone freedom fighters in the long civil rights movement. It codes Pan-African strategists as male and reduces the long and wide geographical arc of white supremacy to the actions of a few men such as George Wallace and Ross Barnett. The danger with historical iconography is that it leads to inaccurate and reductionist accounts of history. It often marginalizes women's leadership or excludes them altogether. Three recently published monographs about black and white women's everyday political mobilization, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom; Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy; and Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, push back against historical narratives that center exclusively on men. These works show that from civil rights struggles and massive resistance in the United States to global black nationalist movements, women have played pivotal roles. Together, the books complicate our understanding of gender and the ways in which women have attempted to make sense of the world they live in and transform. The works also challenge male-dominated narratives about civil rights activism, black emigration, and American conservatism. While these books are not the first [End Page 629] to put female actors at center stage, they expand our knowledge of women's political work in various arenas. In Strategic Sisterhood, Rebecca Tuuri introduced readers to the longstanding political and social justice work of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), an elite black women's organization formed by Mary McLeod Bethune in 1935. The esteemed black woman educator and activist sought to unite black women's sororities, professional organizations, and auxiliaries to improve black women and their communities. Under Bethune's tenure from 1935 until 1949, the council focused on obtaining federal government jobs and military opportunities for black women but failed to shed its elitist image. In addition to Bethune, other powerful black women who held NCNW leadership positions include Sadie Alexander, the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in economics in the United States, and Patricia Harris, the first African American woman to serve in a United States presidential cabinet and to serve as a United States ambassador. While NCNW membership has consisted mainly of middle-class black women, the council supported both moderate and radical black activism throughout the twentieth century, partnering both with interracial groups and groups committed to black separatism. While it is now expected that scholarship on the civil rights movement include the contributions of women, studies that focus on women's civil rights organizations remain rare. Historian Tiyi Morris's Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (2015) is one notable exception. Tuuri's scholarship on the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, helps to fill the void and complicates traditional understandings of radical political organizing. Dorothy Height assumed the NCNW presidency in 1956 and used the position to ensure that black women's voices and perspectives were included in civil rights leadership gatherings throughout the 1960s. When March on Washington organizers denied women a major speaking role at the historic event in 1963, Height, under the auspices of the NCNW, organized a women's conference the very next day. She convened...

Identity Politics Is Not Enough: Why the Left Needs Universalism to Survive

Black Nationalism emerged in the early nineteenth century because African Americans felt a disconnect between American idealsliberty,independence, democracy-and the everyday realities-slavery, racism, oppression-that they faced because of their skin color.Early proponents of Black Nationalism were often free blacks struggling to make their way in a white-dominated society. Booker T.Washington and others promoted an economic version of Black Nationalism as a solution to African Americans' plight. Writer andactivist, Marcus Garvey, integrated these three themes-political, economic, and cultural nationalism-into one ideology that rejectedwhite values and embraced blackness on its own terms (Grant, 2008). Stokely Carmichael defined the concept of Black Power as “acall for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community” (Hamilton,1967). This meant“Black leadership for black goals” (Franklin, 1988). The Nation of Islam, or Black Muslims appealed their followers “for separationfrom whites rather than integration and for violence in return for violence (Carson, 1996). The key speaker for this movement wasMalcolm X, known for his critique of the non-violent methods of civil rights movement. It is a widely known fact that MartinLuther King before his death, had been extensively criticized by more militant African Americans, arguing that whiteswould never act in response to their nonviolent actions. In 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale organized the BlackPanther Party in Oakland, USA, inspired by Malcolm X's call to "freedom, by any means necessary”.Keywords: Black Nationalism, Marcus Garvey, Black Panthers, Black Power, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael

Reviewed by: Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community, 1965–1980, and: Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law Nghana Lewis Eaton, Kalenda C. Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community, 1965–1980. New York: Routledge, 2008. 107 pp. $105.00. Schur, Richard L. Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2009. 256 pp. $26.95. In the aftermath of the progressive social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as industrial decay, corrupt law enforcement, violent crime, and the abject failures of public education beset cities across America, hip hop emerged in New York’s [End Page 291] South Bronx as a distinct set of musical, artistic, and dance practices expressing the frustrations and desires of urban youth. Since that time, a variety of platforms have emerged for examining hip hop’s enduring and expansive impact. Until quite recently, when then presidential candidate Barack Obama invoked the lyrics of Jay-Z on the campaign trail, hip hop was a regular whipping post of politicians and pundits, who blamed it for perpetuating misogyny, sexism, and materialism and for encouraging violence among American youth—this despite our nation’s founding on capitalist, patriarchal, and revolutionary principles. Among academics, by contrast, hip hop has been a subject of informed inquiry and debate for nearly two decades, yielding a rich body of scholarship that cuts across the humanities, social sciences, education, and law. It is in the latter framework that this review situates Kalenda C. Eaton’s Womanism, Literature, and the Transformation of the Black Community, 1965–1980 and Richard L. Schur’s Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law. Both works take their place in the expanding corpus of critical literature shaping hip hop studies and demonstrate its growing importance as a field of rigorous inquiry. Placing Womanism, Literature in hip hop studies may at first glance appear odd, as Eaton claims that the goal of her five-chapter book is to replace male-dominated interpretations of the civil rights, Black Arts, and Black Power movements with more nuanced narratives of political and artistic resistance in which black women play pivotal roles. No expressed concern with beats and rhymes, B-Boys, B-Girls, or battling factors into this study’s conceptual framework. Rather, chapter one, “ ‘Let Me Know When You Get Through’: The Afro-Politico Womanist Agenda,” introduces an Eaton-crafted term—“Afro-Politico Womanism”—to characterize the theoretical foundation on which the book’s revisionist project builds. “Afro-Politico Womanism,” Eaton argues, is “a holistic, community-based approach to political mobilization within the Black community which was largely ignored during the activism of the post-Civil Rights period” (8). When applied to literary works produced in the same period, Afro-Politico Womanism unearths a tradition of black women’s writing committed to chronicling black women’s “struggle for justice within the Black community” and to showing “how healthy gender relationships can be used to heal the Black community” (8). Eaton concedes that Afro-Politico Womanism is not an altogether new term, citing Alice Walker’s “womanism” and germinal formulations of black feminist thought by, among others, Barbara Christian, Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, and bell hooks, as precursors. Nonetheless, she maintains that Afro-Politico Womanism adds depth and dimension to conventional black feminist theory by identifying the act of writing as a conscious form of activism, where neither the needs of the individual nor the interests of the larger community are capable of being sacrificed. In this respect, Eaton’s notion of Afro-Politico Womanism can be said to invoke hip hop on at least four discursive levels. First, it focuses on the historical period that gave way to hip hop’s emergence and mainstreaming. Second, it interrogates the intersection between individualistic and collective values that have defined hip hop since its origins. Third, it accounts for black women’s contributions to shaping debates about the social, political, and economic plights of the masses, as the gains— and costs—of the civil rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements were becoming measurable in both national and international contexts. Of particular significance here is...

The frequent police killings during the COVID-19 pandemic forced a reckoning among Americans from all backgrounds and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into a global force. This manuscript addresses major issues to aid practitioners in the effective treatment of African Americans via the lens of Critical Race Theory and the Bioecological Model. We place the impacts of racism on Black families in historical context and outline the sources of Black family resilience. We critique structural racism embedded in all aspects of psychology and allied fields. We provide an overview of racial socialization and related issues affecting the parenting decisions in Black families, as well as a detailed overview of impacts of structural racism on couple dynamics. Recommendations are made for engaging racial issues in therapy, providing emotional support and validation to couples and families experiencing discrimination and racial trauma, and using Black cultural strengths as therapeutic resources.