Black Power Research Articles

Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin by Damani J. Partridge (review)

Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin by Damani J. Partridge (review)

The Roots and Routes of Black Power

The Roots and Routes of Black Power

Black Power in Hemispheric Perspective: Movements and Cultures of Resistance in the Black Americas

Black Power in Hemispheric Perspective: Movements and Cultures of Resistance in the Black Americas

Feminist cash for feminist culture: considering philanthropy in the UK women’s liberation movement, Black power and beyond

ABSTRACT Feminists of the 1960s-80s linked women’s emancipation to economic, social and political equality. So, despite long traditions of women’s giving, activists seeking financial support for their work generally looked to public funders or trade, whilst philanthropy was rejected. Women with wealth in turn experienced uncertainty, guilt or shame in how to give or invest in political contexts. Yet in fact, women did donate to feminist ventures, including literary productions, magazines and activist presses. This article uncovers this history, looking at how philanthropy helped sustain the cultural arms of social movements, yet usually unplanned and a last resort. Focusing on Spare Rib, WIRES, Trouble & Strife, Onlywomen and Black Power press Bogle-L’Ouverture, it explores the motives for both givers and receivers. Do donors have to be wealthy? What about donations to women’s activism from men, or to Black activism from white people? In answering these questions, I compare philanthropy in the UK with women’s funding movements in the US and the Netherlands at the time, considering their more proactive approaches to the risks that inequalities would be cemented. These examples demand consideration in today’s context of revived feminist activism and shrinking state funding, in which many are turning to private funding for support.

Book review: Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times

Book review: Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times

A History of Black Power We Need and Deserve

Say Burgin reviews Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family's Journey, an account of the fight for Black Power as told through the Simmons family, and particularly, Michael and Zoharah Simmons, from their first meeting during SNCC's Atlanta Project to their later painful struggles as a family. The story that shines through, Burgin writes, is a story of Black Power that is deeply personal, often messy, and, above all, a refreshing challenge to popular narratives that serve to demonize the history of Black Power and the radicals who devoted their lives to the struggle.

Book Review: Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing. New York: Melville House. 2021.

The tenth anniversary revised and updated edition of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing is a critical retelling of New Left politics in the United States. This retelling should be of interest to historians, political scientists, sociologists, community organizers, and anyone concerned with the possibilities and challenges of creating a meaningfully inclusive society. It should be of interest to this diverse audience for the following reasons.

Beyond the Black Power Salute: Athlete Activism in an Era of Change

Beyond the Black Power Salute: Athlete Activism in an Era of Change

Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit by Say Burgin (review)

Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit by Say Burgin (review)

Recipes for Life: Black Women, Cooking, and Memory

In African American history, food has functioned as expression of colonial power and control, and as a source of Black celebration and liberation. Cookbooks written by Black women from the mid-eighteenth century to late twentieth century reflect the long history of the development of African American cuisine. These texts are practical and instructional, while also offering insights into the transnational development of food as an expression of cultural history through African, Indigenous, and European influences. African Americans, and more specifically Black women, have contributed to the food history of the Southern United States by developing a distinct African American cuisine and creating the texts by which to publicly declare their knowledge and ensure its survival. By analyzing the cookbooks of Malinda Russell, Edna Lewis, Vertamae Smith-Grosvenor, and Carole and Norma Jean Darden, a timeline of cookbooks from the Civil War to the Black Power Movement can be established. Their commonalities, including the use of cookbooks as autobiographies, community memoirs, and genealogical records, are features that resonated with the Civil Rights Movement in the latter half of the twentieth century. Food is more than a means of survival. It is a constantly evolving expression of culture, people, and celebration.

Black power in 1970s Israel: the Israeli Black Panthers

Black power in 1970s Israel: the Israeli Black Panthers

Black Power in Hemispheric Perspective: A Book Review

Black Power in Hemispheric Perspective: A Book Review

DEPICTION OF VIRULENT IN RACISM AND AN UNDEFINED FUTURE OF AFRICANS IN ERNEST J. GAINES’S CATHERINE CARMIER

Being a one of the most illustrious African American novelists Ernest J. Gaines has written numerous novels to his contribution. He meticulously focused the sufferings of Africans by the white domination. The prime objectives of his novels are Racism, Gender issue, Socio-Economic status of Africans, Alienation and Isolation. In the series of Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa’ Thiong’O and Flora Nwapa Ernest J. Gaines also been considered as one among the most resourceful and inspirational novelist. Gaines was born on a Louisiana plantation in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression. He began working the fields when he was nine, digging potatoes for fifty cents a day. He spent most of his childhood with his aunt, Augustan Jefferson, a determined woman who had no legs but managed to take care of her family. Gaines considered her the most courageous person he ever knew. At age fifteen, Gaines moved to Vallejo, California, joining his parents who had moved there during World War II. In Vallejo, Gaines discovered the public library. Since he could not find many books written about the experience of African Americans, he decided to write his own. In 1964 Gaines has published his first novel, Catherine Carmier and after he published the novel Of Love and Dust three years, followed by a short story collection entitled Bloodline (1968) and another entitled A Long Day in November (1971). He received little attention for these efforts, but felt happy about his progress as a writer. In 1971 Gaines completed one of his most famous novels, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. The novel follows the life of a fictional woman, Jane Pittman, who is born a slave and lives to see the Black Power movement of the 1960s. After the critical and financial success of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Gaines published several more novels on the topic closest to his own heart: the black communities of Louisiana. The most successful of these was A Lesson Before Dying, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and, in 1993, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.Catherine Carmier, however, is much more than a love story, as its critics have recognized. Their descriptions focus on relationships within the families of the plantation quarters; caste conflicts, past and present, within the Louisiana black community facing changes in old social and racial codes; the psychology of racial prejudice and racial identity; and the struggle for human relationships in this context. The novel expands on all these issues. Taken as a whole, however, it is a story of the struggle for human maturation through choices-choices young people must make when early loves conflict with new loves, when commitments to family, race, culture, and religion collide with the need to move independently beyond the limits of those communities. As in the short stories, individual movement away from the quarters community is expected and reluctantly supported for young men; commitment to home folks and values is expected, and virtually required, of young women. The novel takes the boys of the stories into young adulthood, when manhood is still to be defined. It enlarges on "Mary Louise" by reintroducing the choices facing young women. It is a story of the question of whether, in their circumstances, young people can choose at all-freely choose any love at all.

Not Your Good Germans: Holocaust Memory, Anti-Fascism, and the Anti-Zionism of the Jewish New Left

Abstract It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab–Israeli War and the emergence of Black Power engendered a split between Jews and the New Left. Some understand the rise of Holocaust memory in the late 1960s as an expression of Jewish nationalism, while others locate increased public expression of Holocaust memory within the context of a late 1960s Jewish revival. Either way, both narratives assume the tension between left-wing Jews and Black Power and anti-imperialism, and locate a new American Jewish commonsense of Jewish nationalism abroad and a quickening of Jewish identity politics at home. Yet most prominent Jewish radicals of the 1960s and early 1970s – from Abbie Hoffman to David Gilbert – did not agree. Not only did much of the Jewish New Left in organisations such as SDS and the SWP continue to back the anti-Zionist BPP, many deployed Holocaust and Red Scare memory to formulate their revolutionary global politics.

A Precursor to Necropolitics: Decoloniality in Black Theology and Black Power

ABSTRACT Black Theology and Black Power (BTBP) features liberationists who are devoted to resisting liberalism’s realpolitik. The decolonial implications of their devotion illustrate the necropolitical frame of reference BTBP foreshadows. Section one describes liberation as the method Black theology uses to dismiss liberal politics that displace Black death. The ideals that established conditions for norms regarding death and life are political and, as the second section shows, emblematic of liberal theories that emphasise the inviolability of the individual. The last section explains the importance of French critical theory to necropolitics through the concepts biopolitics and homo sacer. Francophone theoretical accounts of necropolitics should be celebrated neither as a novel nor as a fatalistic way to affirm decoloniality and die, sacrificially. As a result, Black theology’s method can be appreciated both by theists and humanists whose death and life function as a decolonising, illiberal necropolitics.

Between art and activism: political masculinities in Caribbean narratives of revolution

This article enquires into imaginations of ‘political masculinity’ in a Caribbean-British context and the engagement of artists with the ideologies of the political sphere and their co-construction of it. The article focuses on gendered strategies of political self-fashioning in George Lamming’s Water With Berries and Orlando Patterson’s An Absence of Ruins, which emerge from the tension between political engagement and artistic detachment that structures the work and public image of Caribbean artists and their political interpellation into the public sphere. I propose that artists manoeuvre in a political field of tension as regards citizenship, nation building and cultural authority – themselves inherently gendered concepts – by problematising the basis of black revolutionary politics as tied to essentialised codes of masculinity that in turn rest on specific ideals of cultural authority, such as the (Victorian) ‘man of letters’, the ‘peasant’ or ‘folk hero’, or a more radical political masculine blackness associated with Black Power.

Claudia Jones and Black Power: A Close Reading of the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News

When Claudia Jones was deported to Britain in 1955, the U.S. Government likely expected that the Communist threat she presented was finally neutralized. Yet, from the shores of Britain, Jones continued her radical activism. The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News (WIG), created by Jones in 1958, became an effective bullhorn to foster unity and solidarity amongst Black migrants in Britain toward many causes – at home and abroad. She called upon her previously established transnational connections to bring news of international developments to her British audience. The WIG’s coverage of the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power Movements throughout the 1960s was also significant. Linking the United States and the UK to global changes, Jones kept a finger on the pulse of radical movements across the world and amplified them to her audience in editorials about uprisings in the Congo in 1960, revivals of Garveyism in Jamaica, and revolution in Cuba, for example. Drawing closely from the WIG, this article will analyze some of the continuities that rippled throughout the activism of Claudia Jones into the period of the Black Power Movement, as well as the overlapping activists, their strategies, and the important discussions the WIG was able to platform during its run. It will highlight that the many crossovers observed through the pages of the WIG evidence how a generation of activists may have been influenced by the knowledge transmitted through the life and work of Claudia Jones.

Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory by Mark Christian Thompson (review)

Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory by Mark Christian Thompson (review)

The Internationalist Vision of Black Theology and Black Power

The Internationalist Vision of Black Theology and Black Power

An American Dilemma? It's Happening in Detroit, or the Swedish History of Finally Got the News (1970)

Abstract: This paper presents the Swedish history of the legendary documentary Finally Got the News (1970), a collaboration between Newsreel and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. Through an analysis of the re-edited print made by Swedish TV in 1971 and archival research on the League member Glanton Dowdell, who distributed the film in Sweden, the paper sets out to both correct some of the previous research and reveal how racism was a blind spot in Sweden, which at that time appeared to be the model of a politically progressive country that engaged with the American Black Power movement.