Waiting 'til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. By Peniel E. Joseph. (New York: Holt, 2006. xx, 399 pp. Cloth, $27.50, ISBN 978-0-8050-7539-7. Paper, $17.00, ISBN 978-0-8050-8335-4.)

Abstract

Recent scholarship has proffered a vision of black power not as a racist inversion of white supremacy but as aggressive pursuit of political and economic empowerment: the twin engines of black advancement. Peniel E. Joseph's Waiting 'til the Midnight Hour, a companion to the author's edited volume The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (2006), is part of this movement. Like the edited volume, Waiting 'til the Midnight Hour effectively challenges traditional explanations that portray black power as a critical and lamentable break from earlier civil rights reform; unlike The Black Power Movement, it offers a single-voiced, narrative account of this dimension of the struggle for black equality: less a particular moment in the twentieth-century struggle for black liberation and more a logical complement to direct action and voter registration, “a natural outgrowth of [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's] organizing history” (p. 164). The book begins and ends with Malcolm X, who, along with Stokely Carmichael, emerge as the story's heroes. In the beginning of the narrative, the author juxtaposes familiar signposts of the civil rights movement with lesser known examples of black power—in this case, comparing the April 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, with events in Montgomery, Alabama. Joseph reminds the reader that black power did not emerge in a vacuum. Carmichael's use of black power as a rallying cry at the Meredith March in 1966 was both evolutionary and revolutionary, not only referencing the historical uses of the phrase by Paul Robeson and Richard Wright but also signifying a militant shift away from the necessarily conciliatory tactics of mainstream civil rights leaders.