Black Power Movement Research Articles

Aspiration and the Violence of Gentrification in Marvel’s Luke Cage

This article analyzes the cultural politics of gentrification as they are deployed in the Netflix series Marvel’s Luke Cage. Based on the comic book character, Luke Cage, who was created in response to the popularity of the 1970s blaxploitation films, and the Black Power movement, the television series portrays a Black superhero who defends contemporary Harlem and its people from crime and exploitation. Critically recognized and widely watched during its first airing from 2016 to 2018, Luke Cage was a breakthrough television series that not only centered a Black superhero but directed itself to Black experience and public dialogue during the time of Black Life Matters. The Harlem portrayed in Luke Cage is both a specific community, and a virtual invocation of Black community aspiration, and the structural violence of gentrification. The violent emotions and displacement of gentrification that are presented in the series represent a form of intramural dialogue between the Black creatives working on the show and the broader Black public that is engaging with the long-time debates around the meaning and future of Harlem.

Author Response

Author Response

The Black Pacific and the Shapes of Global Black Power

The Black Pacific and the Shapes of Global Black Power

Post Slavery and the Plight of Black Americans: An Analysis of Langston Hughes’ “Not without Laughter”

This paper discussed the lives of black Americans in the Post Slavery period. It was believed that black Americans who were former slaves were then free from being treated brutally by the slave masters and that the whipping of the so called offenders was a thing of the past. On the contrary, Black Americans were not free to receive education, have access to legal marriages, own properties and enjoy all other benefits that an American should enjoy. Life after slavery was still difficult. The reality was that black Americans were free only in a narrow sense as they were still discriminated by the government institutions. This gave rise to activism and movements such as Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement. Great Black scholars, The Talented Tenth, such as Alice Walker, Du Bois, and Langston Hughes emerged. Not without Laughter is one of the books that Langston Hughes wrote. This paper is an analysis of civil injustices that Black Americans had to endure according to Hughes in Not without Laughter. Today, the situation has not changed much as racism is still rampant as depicted by violence still perpetrated against the Blacks. The rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement worldwide against the death of Floyd in the USA gives evidence to such. One encouraging aspect, though, is that the current President, Joe Biden is against racism as he has ordered that those that killed Floyd should face the full wrath of the law.

Reflections on Ben Okri, Goenawan Mohamad, and the 2020 Global Uprisings

The global Black Lives Matter uprisings against police violence prompted by Floyd’s murder were connected to a longer history of transnational Black struggles. As Ben Okri and Goenawan Mohamad and others have suggested, the civil rights and Black Power movements from the 1950s to the 1970s were not confined to US terrain; they were part of a global conjuncture. Protests throughout the Western world highlighted the blood-soaked record of the global color line, coalescing around demands for the official repudiation of the continuing legacies of racial oppression, enslavement, segregation, and empire. In the United States, the Black Lives Matter movement transformed the public conversation in the US about police violence. Caught in the act, Derek Chauvin seemed untroubled at being recorded by a courageous 17-year-old Darnella Frazier. We do not know what he was thinking, but still one recalls those members of lynch mobs posing for photographs during the Jim Crow era. Convinced that he would not be held accountable by a system of state-sanctioned violence, Chauvin appears to have believed that his use of deadly force was justifiable, just as similar extrajudicial killings by police officers of Black people have been upheld by juries and the criminal–legal system. BLM linked the crisis of oppressive policing to longstanding racial inequities in health, housing, employment, and income while insisting on the sanctity of the lives of Black poor, queer, and transgender persons, and persons living with disabilities. Republican-authored laws seeking to wrest autocratic control of education by criminalizing the teaching of race in US history are a craven response to the ways that the global reckoning on racism in 2020 has altered the US political landscape.

A Return to Psychedelic Funk: An Inquiry into Childish Gambino’s “Redbone”

Childish Gambino’s “Redbone” has incited many waves of impact across today’s pop culture media. His song uses features of the 1970s psychedelic funk movement, such as slap bass space feels and paranoia, to recall the Black Power Movement and illustrate the fear of Blackness in modern society while asking listeners to “stay woke” in political activism. This paper examines the origins of the Funkadelic movement along with its social implications within the Black Power Movement. It is then followed by a musical analysis of “Redbone” with a focus on the harmonic, melodic, and instrumental aspects of the piece and its direct relations to the 1970s movement while providing a novel variation. Cries to “stay woke” in the lyrics reemphasize the call to action, bringing wide reception and success to both the subsequent album and Glover as an artist.

Intoxicating Blackness: Addiction and Ambivalent Sounds of Fugitive Life in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

Abstract This article examines the intersection of drug-use, aesthetics, and Blackness at work in James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” (1957). While much of the scholarship on Baldwin’s story has dwelt on the significance of music, far less attention has been paid to the equally prominent and related theme of drug addiction and intoxication. Through an historical contextualization and analysis of the story, I provide an exegesis of Baldwin’s unique theorization of drug addiction, or what I am calling intoxicating Blackness, particularly as it relates to black aesthetics. By surveying formulations of drug addiction in European thought and the counter-discourse of black radical thought, I argue that Baldwin’s short story figures an innovative notion of being on drugs. Unlike subsequent, often disparaging depictions of addiction in the political discourse of the Black Power Movement and other late twentieth-century black popular culture, ‘Sonny’s Blues’ represents addiction as a cite of possibility. Baldwin suggests that an openness to intoxication and addiction, although perilous for the addict, might function as an aesthetic of black fugitivity and that any sort of black life might be thought of as a dangerous, fugitive narcotic. To elaborate on this theory of intoxicating Blackness, I consider it in relation to Western philosophical, legal, and psychoanalytic paradigms of addiction, as well as conceptualizations of Blackness and fugitivity in the work of thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, and Frantz Fanon.

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

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

Agency versus Insurgency

Agency versus Insurgency

“Loving Couples and Families:” Assimilation as Honorary Whiteness and the Making of the Vietnamese Refugee Family

Integration studies of Vietnamese refugees and their children begin with the problem of assimilation based on cultural and racial difference and ultimately lead these groups to achieve upward mobility against great odds. While scholars have offered alternatives to linear models of assimilation which assume a prescribed path to determine when migrants become integrated, the ideologies and norms which underlie the so-called problem of assimilation remain largely unexamined. Building from a feminist and Foucauldian analysis of power, this article examines state-sponsored knowledge production, such as semi-annual government surveys of Vietnamese refugees as representations which reproduce and reinforce logics of heteronormativity and white supremacy. I contextualize the production of these social science surveys as legibility projects in the geopolitical context of international (Cold War) and domestic (state attempts to dismantle black power movements through civil rights) maintenance of white supremacy. By examining self-sufficiency surveys of Vietnamese refugees conducted upon arrival to the US from the 1970s–1980s and 1990s studies of the second generation, I argue that the family is an instrumental yet overlooked dimension of the racialization of Vietnamese as new immigrants which is rooted in heteronormative, Orientalist, and anti-black notions of family.

Challenging Essentialist Anti-Oppressive Discourse: Uniting Against Racism and Sexism

Challenging Essentialist Anti-Oppressive Discourse: Uniting Against Racism and Sexism

The Politics of the Black Power Movement

In notable ways, analysis of the Black Power Movement (BPM) by political scientists has been woefully neglected in comparison to analyses proffered by historians, sociologists, and Black Studies scholars. This comparative neglect is partly owed to political science's reticence to meaningfully engage the ideological locus of the BPM, black nationalism, through rigorous theoretical or methodological analysis. In this review, I highlight some of the major contributions of political scientists to the analysis of the BPM while exploring some of the challenges and opportunities for further study and examination of this singular period in US and international politics.

Narratives of resistance and decolonial futures in the politics of the Bermudian Black Power movement

AbstractIn this paper, I examine the spatial politics of the Bermudian Black Power movement and its connections to Black Power political formations in the wider Caribbean and North America. This spatial politics is examined in detail through an engagement with the First Regional International Black Power Conference (BPC) held in Bermuda on 10–13 July 1969 and the subsequent Black Power political activity on the island that the conference inspired. Through this engagement it is shown how the island of Bermuda and its black population were constitutive of transnational circulations of radical Black Power, and aligned thinkers and activists. This paper develops a reading of a politics of Black Power on the island as challenging hegemonic geographies and political spatialities of white supremacy through the envisioning of alternative, decolonial futures and a resultant pre‐figurative political praxis. Such a reading is built on the theory of West Indian scholars David Scott and Brian Meeks and the spatial ontology of Doreen Massey. D. Scott and Meeks have been key contributors to Caribbean critical thought for many decades, with D. Scott the long‐time editor of the Caribbean studies journal Small Axe, and both have been concerned with post and de‐colonial politics in the region and the role of temporality and historiography in conceptualisations of the Modern Caribbean and Jamaica in particular. This paper offers an exploration of a decolonial spatial politics and political praxis, through the theory of post‐colonial Caribbean intellectuals, that foregrounds the agentive and insurgent capacity of Black Power as a political movement in the imagining and pre‐figuration of emancipatory futures beyond hegemonic geographies of white supremacy, (neo)colonialism, and (neo)imperialism.

Black Student Unions to the Gang of Four

Organizations within the Black Power movement strategically deployed interracial alliances and community organizing across the country during the late 1960s, from Los Angeles to Newark, Chicago, and New York. This methodology is especially striking in the Black Student Unions (BSUs) founded in San Francisco and Seattle in 1966 and 1967, respectively. Indeed, this line of activism that originated with San Francisco’s BSU extended directly to Seattle. Careful study of the interracial alliances and community organization among these BSUs and other Black Power groups in this era challenge the dominant narrative of the movement, which characterizes Black Power as myopic, destructive, and a departure from the prosocial protests of the 1960s.

“The Epitome of Black Masculinity”: Isaac Hayes, Black Moses, and the Long Freedom Struggle

Isaac Hayes provides a vital public figure through which scholars can analyze, evaluate, and more fully understand the comprehensive nature of the black freedom struggle as it progressed into the 1970s. Hayes merged the integrationist political objectives of mainstream civil rights organizations and leaders with the notions of racial pride, assertiveness, and autonomy that characterized the popular appeal of the black power movement. Hayes, through his “Black Moses” persona and LP of the same name, moved those freedom struggle promises and opportunities into the cultural realm, where he personified African American artistic self-determination. In doing so, he demonstrated that the contemporary conceptualization of black masculinity was not monolithic, as Hayes introduced and embodied an ideal that countered the prevailing notion of black manhood which pervaded popular culture and remains a central component of popular memory concerning black power. Most importantly, Isaac Hayes embodied a model of black masculinity that contradicted the prevailing “black macho” ideal. “Black Moses,” therefore, embodied the freedom of African Americans to move beyond contemporary racial classifications in a cultural capacity and presents scholars with an intriguing model through which to examine the evolution, possibilities, and accomplishments of the post-1960s American black freedom struggle.

Queer Connections

This article examines the gay French author Jean Genet’s 1970 tour of the United States with the Black Panther Party, using Genet’s unusual relationship with the Panthers as a lens for analyzing the possibilities and pitfalls of radical coalition politics in the long sixties. I rely on mainstream and alternative media coverage of the tour, articles by Black Panthers and gay liberationists, and Genet’s own writings and interviews to argue that Genet’s connection with the Panthers provided a queer bridge between the Black Power and gay liberation movements. Their story challenges the neglect of such coalitions by historians of the decade and illuminates some of the reasons the Panthers decided to support gay liberation. At the same time, Genet distanced himself from the gay liberation movement, and his unusual connection with the Panthers highlights some of the difficulties activists faced in building and sustaining such alliances on a broad scale.

No Justification for a “Symbol of Counterrevolution”: Toward an Intersectional Reading of the Confederate Flag

ABSTRACT This article uses the cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s work to examine how one group of white leftists, the Young Patriot Organization (YPO) and their splinter organization the Patriot Party, attempted in the late 1960s and early 1970s to rearticulate the Confederate battle flag as a non-racist symbol of working-class empowerment, Appalachian regional pride, and cross-racial solidarity and egalitarianism. The Patriots’ failure to bestow the flag with a lasting anti-racist meaning despite their public alliances with the Black Power movement suggests that the flag has such an ingrained racist connotation that is almost entirely irreconcilable with progressive, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist politics. Nonetheless, among people who do claim the flag as their own, the flag is often embedded in a meaningful subcultural context. I make the case that attempts to discourage people from embracing the flag should speak directly to their cultural situation and politics of class in addition to criticizing the flag’s racist and violent history.

Keepers of the Culture at 3201 Adeline Street

This article examines how the increase in the numbers of black-operated theaters between the 1960s and 1980s molded the character of black cultural and social movements in the West and nationally. The emphasis placed on institutionalizing black theater demonstrated a significant cultural front within the larger social, political, and economic conflicts of this era. These theatrical institutions were physical manifestations of the heart of Black Power campaigns, facilitating community outreach and sovereignty through separatism. Black theaters reflected local distinctions in leadership and ideology but within a broader, national call for black liberation and black autonomy. Professional theater impresarios Nora and Birel Vaughn began laying the foundations for their theater, the Black Repertory Group, in Oakland, California, in 1964. A repertory theater company performing in a fixed location, Black Rep would cycle through a repertoire of black-culture-specific plays, providing black performers and playwrights both recognition and income. Operating in a black-owned space gave Black Rep control over its productions and performance. Giving neighbors and community leaders the opportunity to participate behind the scenes or even perform in Black Rep theatrical productions endeared the troupe to its supporters, enmeshing Black Rep as a valued communal institution. Black Rep opened its space as an autonomous black community center, running voter registration drives, social and political gatherings, and classes in black culture and history that spread the values of the Black Arts and Black Power movements. In the right place at the right time, Black Rep led a black repertory theater movement that spanned the nation. More importantly, Black Rep survives to this day. It stands as a testament to the strength and vision of the women leaders of black theater, and to the values of coalition building, economic self-sufficiency, and community-based activism that guided its founders.

In Memory of Patrice Emery Lumumba: His Speech at the Proclamation of the DRC’s Independence—A Systematic Reflection

The improvised speech of Patrice Emery Lumumba on June 30, 1960, the day the Democratic Republic of Congo gained its independence from Belgium, was criticised by Western media as being unwise and ungrateful towards the so-called civilising mission of Belgium in the Congo. Yet it was acclaimed by many Pan-Africanists and black power movements. In this article, the author systematically observes, reflects on, and analyses the speech. The author finds that it is a life-giving and hope-filled speech that called for a restoration of dignity and respect to black Congolese who suffered decades of oppression and exploitation at the hands of the colonial power.

Dalit/black solidarity: Comrades in the struggle for racial/caste justice

ABSTRACT India’s struggle for caste justice has been likened by many to the struggle for racial justice in the United States. Small wonder then, that the activists who spearheaded the movement for caste justice were inspired by the most famous of the activists in the United States, the Black Panthers of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s. One of my most memorable encounters from my newsroom days in India in the early 1990s was with Namdeo Dhasal, one of the Dalit activists who had founded the Dalit Panthers movement. This essay draws on that experience, as also some others with the Dalit movement and Dalit leaders in India and links their struggle for social justice with that of African Americans, from the Harlem Renaissance era to the present.