What’s Old Is New Again: Recentering Black Power and Decentering Civil Rights

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In November 2014, protesters clashed with police in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, following the refusal of a grand jury to indict police officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager. Shortly thereafter, I met with Paul Cox, chief counsel for the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio, Inc., to discuss policing in Ohio’s Black communities. During the course of our wideranging conversation, I was struck by a remark that Mr. Cox made about those who had taken to the streets to decry police violence. Try as he might, he said, he had been unable to identify the goals of the protesters. Sure, they wanted indictments brought against officers involved in the recent spate of police shootings of unarmed Black men and boys, but beyond that, what? It would be helpful for policy purposes, he said, if the protestors stated exactly what they wanted. Mr. Cox’s remark reflected a familiar critique of Black protest. Over the years, despite Black activists’ clear articulation of their wants and desires, they have been sharply criticized for a lack of specificity. During the Black Power era, for instance, critics excoriated them for embracing rhetoric for the sake of rhetoric, for organizing without plan or purpose, and for encouraging the disaffected and disenfranchised to take to the streets for no reason other than to raise a ruckus. As a consequence of this misguided critique, Black activists were summarily dismissed, and their legitimate wants and desires consistently ignored. In Concrete Demands, author Rhonda Y. Williams takes on this common critique of Black Power and Black protest by exploring the goals and objectives of Black Power activists and organizations, from their deep roots in the rich soil of early twentiethcentury Black protest to the full flowering of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s. Her work reveals that, “[i]n addition to civil and voting rights, they desired ratfree neighborhoods, affordable rents, better schools, an end to police brutality, access to wellpaid jobs, and socially just treatment by white landlords, banks, bosses and workers, teachers, and government officials” (88). But Concrete Demands seeks to do more than just identify what Black folk wanted. It aims to render visible the conditions and circumstances that gave rise to their demands, to illuminate the struggle to secure them, and to highlight the obstacles, internal and external, they faced. Toward this end, Concrete Demands charts the “roots, routes, and expressions that comprise the search for Black