Black Freedom Movement Research Articles

Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

Brigham Young and the Expansion of the Mormon Faith

Brigham Young and the Expansion of the Mormon Faith

Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, by Monica M.White, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 208 pp. $14.99 (e‐book). ISBN: 978‐1‐4696‐4370‐0.

Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, by Monica M.White, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 208 pp. $14.99 (e‐book). ISBN: 978‐1‐4696‐4370‐0.

Teaching Freedom Song as Antiracist Praxis

In the teaching of history, oversimplification is, perhaps, unavoidable. In certain cases, however, that oversimplification can be deadly. There are some lessons that are too complex, some stories that are too nuanced, to be reduced in such a way. By their contours and particularities, they resist easy digestion. In the spirit of this particularity, my contribution to the colloquy is specific, but hopefully applicable to contexts beyond its specificity: I argue that the US Black Freedom Movement (or civil rights movement) and its music is a story that must be taught in all its complexity, for oversimplifying it does concrete harm to the ongoing struggle against white supremacy in the present. Teaching the US Black Freedom Movement and its music is also vital if we hope to enable our students to be forces of understanding, healing, and justice in the world, and should be an integral component of any undergraduate music curriculum that hopes to be antiracist.

Teaching Black Lives Amidst Black Death

In this essay the author addresses the struggles of teaching a special topics course, Black Freedom Movement Education, in the midst of a global pandemic and Donald Trump’s proposed ban on anti-racist training and critical race theory. The educator framed the course under the conceptual lens of stealin’ the meetin’—a Black Antebellum practice of creating otherwise literacy practices under repressive circumstances. This form of educational resistance continued beyond enslavement as Black communities used the resources available to educate each other by any means necessary (Robinson, 2020). On a smaller scale, this class carried on the resistance through critical meta-cognitive engagement with Black education history. The author discusses how he navigated the course when, less than halfway through the quarter, a Black man was killed and burned in a trench. Using emails, lecture notes, student evaluations, texts, and reflections, the author shares vignettes of tension, Black affinity, and communal restoration.

Garrett Felber. Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State.

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Traci Parker. Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s.

T<scp>raci</scp> P<scp>arker</scp>. <i>Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s</i>.

“Ebony” Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America

“Ebony” Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America

Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s

Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s

Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 142–144 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.10 Book Review Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) Spencer Dew Wittenberg University, Springfield, USA and Ohio State University, Columbus, USA When, in the late 1990s, I taught college courses on religion to Chicago cops, my students would occasionally gift me their old, dog-eared copies of the glossy “Intelligence Report” magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center. These sources helped shape their sense of who the “bad guys” were: extremists, terrorists , sovereign citizens, hate groups. These cops—like the cops and prison officials described in Those Who Know Don’t Say—were actively seeking out and exchanging knowledge about religious movements, and, in the process, perpetuating fantasies of dehumanized villains dead set on irrationally disrupting a society predicated on “law and order.” This memory recurred, with new poignancy, as I read Garrett Felber’s essential book on the Nation of Islam (NOI), one intervention of which is attention to how police and carceral officials read—and shared—C. Eric Lincoln’s 1961 The Black Muslims in America. Lincoln himself volunteered to consult with police departments and cooperated with prison officials interested in his research. Following Lincoln, agents of the state could insist that the NOI was not authentically Islamic or “legitimately” religious, that it eschewed political engagement Spencer Dew 143 for eschatology, that it was an insular group unaware of and unlinked to global trends and networks, and that it was inherently violent. Lincoln’s work did not just misinform; it helped maintain a fantasy of innocence . His scholarship simultaneously provided law enforcement and prison officials with a narrative in which the NOI “was a subversive hate group masquerading under the guise of religion” while ignoring the fundamental violence of their own work and the ways that the NOI offered a critique of and response to that violence (48). Such logic reads Malcolm X’s assassination as an instance of “‘Black-on-Black’ violence,” while remaining silent about law enforcement interventions which stoked internecine conflict within the NOI (180). Lincoln’s work on the NOI contributed to a broader narrative that, while emphasizing “violence, nihilism, and political naiveté in Black communities,” framed state violence as exceptional—whether in relation to the NOI, the urban rebellions of the late 1960s, or the prison uprisings at Tombs, Folsom, and Attica (170). Lincoln’s “Black Muslim” label, flagging a supposed division between NOI and global forms of Islam, served as replacement for earlier descriptions of the NOI as a primitive “jungle cult” (20). Yet like the term “New Religious Movement” employed as a fashionable replacement today for the word “cult,” the echo of earlier hierarchies remained. Indeed, Lincoln’s scholarship itself served as a replacement for actual activity by and actual law enforcement knowledge of the NOI—a useful reduction, a conceptual tool for the law enforcement / incarceration industry. Felber’s central argument is that the NOI played an essential role in the growth of this industry, in the rise of the modern carceral state. Through what he terms the “dialectics of discipline,” NOI organization and protest was met with “new modes of surveillance, punishment, and ideological knowledge production ” (2). Attention to the “ground up” dynamic of policymaking—with interpretations of information collected and shared by police officers and wardens ultimately reaching officials on the federal level—is paired with attention to the NOI’s legal work, including “the first major organized prison litigation movement in the country’s history” (49, 7). Felber insists—rightly—on reading prisons and courts as “sites of activism,” where the legitimacy of the state was challenged, locating litigation alongside hunger strikes, sit-ins, takeovers of solitary confinement , street protests, and prison uprisings as acts of resistance within a broader Black Freedom struggle—acts to which the state responded, often with crushing force (81, 5). Felber describes “the revanchist violence of the state” both in individual terms (the torture and rape of Muslim prisoners after the Attica revolt) and on a national...

‘Fight the reds, support the blue’: Blue Lives Matter and the US counter-subversive tradition

In the wake of the rightwing siege of the US Capitol, which put ‘Blue Lives Matter’ supporters at odds with police protecting the Capitol, the authors look to the history and contours of the ‘counter-subversive tradition’ in the United States and its locus in local police departments. They examine a similar moment of social unrest – the mid-to-late 1960s – and the pro-police organising undertaken by Support Your Local Police (SYLP), a front group of the ultra-right John Birch Society, which blended anti-communism with opposition to the Black Freedom Movement, with particular anxiety about the spectre of united white and black revolt from below and the encroachment of the federal government on local power from above. The campaign also presented a kind of uniquely rightwing anti-statism, largely through the rejection of impediments to local powers and, specifically, the untrammelled power of the cops. In making sense of the Capitol siege, and the years of rightwing organising that preceded it, the article argues that this important precursor to ‘Blue Lives Matter’ presents a schema for understanding longstanding efforts in police organising in defence of what James Baldwin called ‘arrogant autonomy’ – freedom from civilian oversight or political challenges to cop power, and from all challenges to locally entrenched structures of white power.

Garrett Felber. Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 272. $90.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsGarrett Felber. Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 272. $90.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).Michelle D. DeardorffMichelle D. DeardorffUniversity of Tennessee at Chattanooga Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Political Thought Volume 10, Number 2Spring 2021 Published in association with the American Political Thought organized section of the American Political Science Association and the Jack Miller Center Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/713714 Views: 82Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s by Traci Parker

<i>Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s</i> by Traci Parker

Stained University

AbstractDuke University was founded on tobacco wealth, and now it has a tobacco-free campus. How should we understand this change? How can communities around this university, and higher education broadly, reckon with our historical and ongoing complicities with tobacco capitalism? This article examines how the individualized subject has been historically constructed, in response to resistances, through supplementary relations between the university and tobacco industries. With abolitionist university studies, the authors focus on the postslavery university as a key site for these individualizing processes. They situate Duke as a nexus of new means of capitalist accumulation, including, on the one hand, the postslavery university as an institution for disciplining, individualizing, and differentiating wage laborers and, on the other, the tobacco industry's shift to monopolization and mass consumption of tobacco commodities. The long Black freedom movement continues in the post-WWII era with resistances that push capitalism into crisis, while simultaneously, capitalism's coping mechanism of tobacco use has the unintended consequence of mass death. This article explores how, at the site of Duke, part of capitalism's response to resistance movements has been to deepen the individualization processes, charging individuals with taking on responsibility for the costs of both tobacco use and higher education. The authors ask how narratives of smoke-free and tobacco-free campuses could interlink with postracial narratives to obscure how the tobacco companies and universities have accumulated capital through racism, deception, dispossession, and exploitation.

Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement by David Martinez

Reviewed by: Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement by David Martinez John H. Cable David Martinez. Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 480 pp. Cloth, $75.00. Activist-intellectuals loom large in the history of American social movements. In the 1960s and 1970s, consciousness-raising works like Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power (1967) were essential reading for [End Page 204] a counterculture whose sights were set on revolution. For the American Indian protest movement that came to be associated with Red Power, Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) was key. Deloria’s combination of wit and erudition made him a towering figure in the American Indian intellectual tradition. In Life of the Indigenous Mind, David Martinez attempts an ambitious analysis of Deloria’s “Red Power Tetralogy,” which, in addition to Custer, included We Talk, You Listen (1970), God is Red (1973), and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties (1974). While Deloria has previously been the subject of some scholarly attention, including, most recently, David E. Wilkins’s 2018 Red Prophet, Martinez is the first to offer such a comprehensive and, importantly, critical engagement with the activist-intellectual’s early work. As Martinez argues, of central concern in the tetralogy was tribal self-determination. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which coincided with John Collier’s tenure as commissioner of Indian Affairs, had been an important (if imperfect) show of federal support for that goal, as had the Indian Claims Commission, established in 1946. But by the 1950s, the federal government had changed course and sought to end the historic trust relationship with Indian peoples. Its termination policy was “an assault on tribal self-governance,” and, more than any other force, it shaped the milieu in which Deloria wrote (112). Possessed of a thorough understanding of treaties and case law, Deloria chronicled the pattern of bad faith and betrayal that had long characterized the United States government’s relationship with Indians. Termination, he argued, was but the latest chapter in a centuries-long history of American imperial land-grabbing, much of which happened under the pretense of beneficence. (The basic position of the government, after all, was that termination would free Indians from wardship.) But, as Martinez demonstrates, Deloria’s writing was solution-oriented. Chronicling abuses was not an end in itself—rather, it informed his pursuit of tribal self-determination. While Deloria’s vision for the future could never be reduced to bullet points, it included the strengthening of tribal governments; a truly sovereign-to-sovereign relationship with the United States; the affirmation of existing treaties and a return to treaty-making; tribal control of the relocation program; and greater unity between urban and reservation Indians. Taken together, such ideas were, as Martinez suggests, “nothing short of revolutionary” (131). But Deloria was never wholly consumed with the strictly political [End Page 205] aspects of self-determination. His tetralogy also engaged such subjects as Christianity, anthropology, and civil rights, each of whose relationship to American Indians had been left to non-Indians to define. Martinez writes that, for Deloria (who had once studied to be a priest), “the spread of Christianity across North America went hand in hand with the appropriation of Indian land” (213). Christianity was a settler-colonial tool that Deloria hoped Indians would soon forsake. Similar to Christian missionaries, anthropologists came to Indian Country with distorted ideas of who Indians were and what they represented, and with careerist agendas. At a time when Indians were facing perhaps the greatest assault on their sovereignty since Removal, anthropologists seemed more concerned with their own status as experts than with helping Indians. Martinez notes, however, that Deloria’s wholesale rejection of the institution of anthropology—which generated much debate within the social science community—included ad hominem attacks that, while probably satisfying to some readers, were unwarranted. Perhaps most impressive is Martinez’s treatment of Deloria’s views on the Black freedom movement in a chapter entitled...

The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City by Destin Jenkins

Reviewed by: The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City by Destin Jenkins Joe William Trotter Jr. THE BONDS OF INEQUALITY: DEBT AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN CITY. By Destin Jenkins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Focusing on the city of San Francisco from the aftermath of World War II through the late 20th century, this book creatively documents the role of municipal debt in the creation and maintenance of a class and racially fragmented and unequal metropolis. Carefully conceptualized, deeply researched and persuasively argued, this book makes a signal contribution to knowledge by focusing on the social, cultural, and political as [End Page 36] well as economic history of municipal debt. Unlike most existing studies of finance capitalism that give the lion’s share of attention to the ideas and behavior of the organized white labor movement, the real estate industry, and journalistic accounts among other similar sources, The Bonds of Inequality places the municipal bond market and a coterie of heretofore little acknowledged actors at the center of the story. This study revolves around the activities of what the author describes as a “fraternity” of white professional and business elites — specifically, city controllers, accountants, bondholders, lenders, bond financiers, peddlers of debt, credit analysts and bond raters (11). In careful detail, Jenkins demonstrates how municipal finance officers collaborated closely with banks and professional credit and bond rating agencies to sell municipal bonds. Together, bankers and their allies and city finance officers crafted a system of urban finance that depended on the sale of municipal bonds to secure capital for a variety of urban infrastructure projects — including schools, roads, public parks and playgrounds. The tasks of financial officers was by no means left to chance. Working through their “modernized” national Municipal Finance Officers’ Association of the United States and Canada (MFOA), city finance officers not only successfully accessed the municipal bond markets, but also used credit rating professionals, bankers, lawyers, and legal experts to stymie popular input into their actions. As such, they were able to shield municipal debt from the close scrutiny and demands of activist public service and civil rights groups. The buyers of municipal debt took a seat at the influential heart of urban financial strategy discussions. They served as members of urban governmental advisory committees and diverse governing bodies responsible for such local spending projects as urban renewal, public housing, and city transportation systems. Such in-house influence of bondholders ensured policy decisions that repeatedly favored the profit-making interests of finance capitalists over the social welfare and infrastructure-building needs of the vast majority of the city’s people. Moreover, the statutory power of such municipal organizations as the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the San Francisco Housing Authority enabled the approval of bond issues without a public referendum on the matter. When the interests of the broader public good clashed with the profits of funders, the former always gave way to the latter. But the broader public good was by no means monolithic. In the wake of the Great Depression and passage of the Glass-Steagall Act, New Deal financial policy helped to transform what Jenkins calls the “rights consciousness” of white Americans in “new ways.” To the painful and destructive disadvantage of African Americans and Latinx people, New Deal social policy facilitated the emergence of what Jenkins describes as an “Intraracial [white] cross-class compact.” The collusion of white workers and their middle-class counterparts enabled municipal government to dramatically expand the bonded debt by extensive borrowing for a series of infrastructural improvements: schools, roads, museums, and other leisure facilities, to name a few. These projects benefitted white citizens, particularly elite white men through such entities as the San Francisco Bond Club. Although communities of color paid taxes and put the weight of their votes behind most bond issues during the first two postwar decades, they received little in return for their support. After several decades of delivering benefits to white citizens, The Bonds of Inequality shows how this system finally broke down under the demands of the Modern Black Freedom Movement, an emerging left-wing critique of municipal bonds as lopsided “redistributionary” elite claims on the...

Monica M. White: Freedom farmers: Agricultural resistance and the Black freedom movement

Monica M. White: Freedom farmers: Agricultural resistance and the Black freedom movement

Private Arms and Civil Unrest: Lessons from the Black Freedom Movement

The turmoil of 2020 amplifies the American conversation about the utility and legitimacy of firearms during periods of civil unrest. This article engages that conversation through the lens of the Black American experience. The principles drawn from this treatment help frame a sphere of legitimate gun use during periods of civil unrest and underscore the enduring importance of firearms as a resource for individuals whom the state cannot protect. These principles emerge from a considered philosophy and practice of arms developed by a people who have a long history of confronting violent threats that the state has been unable or unwilling to stop.

Black/Africana Studies and Black/Africana Biblical Studies

Abstract In this study, Abraham Smith introduces the nature, history, and interventions of two theoretical-political cultural productions: Black/Africana studies (the systematic and rigorous study of Africa and African descendants) and Black/Africana biblical studies (a biblical studies’ subfield that analyzes and appraises the strategies of reception and the historical and contemporary impact of the Christian bible for people of African descent). Both cultural productions were formally introduced in U.S. educational institutions in the late 1960s as a part of the Black Freedom movement. Both have long and deep intellectual antecedents on the one hand and ever-evolving recent interventions that challenge a narrow politics of identity on the other. Through the interrogation of keywords (such as race, family, and Hip Hop or cartographies, canons, and contexts), moreover, the study examines how these two theoretical-political projects question the settled epistemologies or prevailing intellectual currencies of their respective times.

Between Protest and Politics

Abstract This article examines the official Black Lives Matter Movement (the Black Lives Matter Global Network) as a point of departure to argue that Black Lives Matter (BLM) in general expands our epistemological framework for thinking about black freedom movements, black freedom dreams, and black freedom strategies. By analyzing the movement’s explicit refusal to be likened to civil rights movement organizations as a concurrent attack against intraracial sexism, heterosexism, and transphobia, the article insists that BLM deprivileges heteronormativity to show that black freedom dreams must include gender and sexual liberation. By considering BLM’s rejection of capitalism as a broader critique of neoliberalism’s forceful role in maintaining black dispossession, the author posits that BLM desires to disrupt the state’s tendency to use the black middle class to enact, enforce, and reinforce an economic order that relies upon race and racism to codify and cement black inequality. Finally, the author posits that the movement’s tactics and goals provide a framework through which to enact short-term change, while pushing to dismantle the larger system of antiblack racism that is refracted through global capitalism.