Black Power Research Articles

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.

Black Power in Hemispheric Perspective: A Book Review

Black Power in Hemispheric Perspective: A Book Review

Black power in 1970s Israel: the Israeli Black Panthers

Black power in 1970s Israel: the Israeli Black Panthers

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

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

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.

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.

‘ONE WITH THE EARTH’: Mapping Solidarities for the (Un)Queering of Space in the Black Lesbian Journal Aché, 1989–1993

AbstractThis study traces how Black lesbians in the San Francisco Bay Area made a place for themselves in the world at the end of the twentieth century, after the decline of the Black Power Movement and before the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Geocoding and analyzing the content of a Black lesbian journal in the San Francisco Bay Area that had global distribution, the author examines how the placemaking of Black lesbians remade them as cultural‐political subjects, expanded their networks, and inspired them to reimagine their relations with the earth. As they crafted cultural spaces across the African diaspora, they faced threats—most notably, street violence, harsh policing and ecological degradation—yet they also experienced joyful interactions with each other, with allies and with nature. The belief grew in their cultural spaces that their liberation required world transformation and that they could change the world. This research, providing a frame for studying the interaction between the making of cultural spaces and the formation of political solidarities, contributes to urban movements research, critical environmental justice studies, and Black feminist/LGBTQ+ research.

Examining the nature of the ultraluminous X-ray source Holmberg II X-1

We present a comprehensive spectral analysis of the ultraluminous X-ray source Holmberg II X-1 using broadband and high-resolution X-ray spectra taken with the XMM-Newton satellite over a period of 19 yr, taking advantage of data from a recent campaign. We tested several models for the broadband spectra, including a double thermal component provided a reasonable description for the continuum between 0.3 and 10 keV and enabled us to constrain the properties of the accretion disc. The luminosity–temperature trends of the inner and outer disc components broadly agree with the expectations for a thin disc, although the exact values of the slopes are slightly sensitive to the adopted model. However, all tested models show L − T trends that deviate from a power law above a bolometric luminosity of about 5 × 1039 erg s−1, particularly for the hot thermal component associated with the inner accretion flow. Assuming that such deviations are due to the accretion rate exceeding its Eddington limit or, most likely, the super-critical rate, a compact object with a mass of 16–36 M⊙ was inferred, specifically, a stellar-mass black hole. The time-averaged (2021) high-resolution spectra present narrow emission lines at 1 keV primarily from Ne IX-X and a very strong at 0.5 keV from N VII, which indicate Ne–N-rich gas with non-solar abundances. This favours a nitrogen-rich donor star, such as a blue or red supergiant, which has escaped from its native stellar cluster characterised by a low-metallicity environment.

Majority jury verdicts in England and Wales: a vestige of white supremacy?

In England and Wales, the requirement for a unanimous jury verdict in criminal cases was abolished in 1967, marking a significant departure from a centuries-old legal tradition. Majority verdicts are now common practice, yet no research to date explores the origins of this sudden change to the jury system. In contrast, recent research in the US uncovered a connection between the conception of majority verdicts in Louisiana and Jim Crow era law-making, finding that majority verdicts were strategically introduced to suppress the black juror vote and facilitate quicker convictions to fuel free prison labour. The US Supreme Court later outlawed majority verdicts in a case known as Ramos v. Louisiana, amid recognition of their racist origins . Adopting the critical epistemological position guiding the US research, we consider how race and class underpinned the decision to introduce majority verdicts in England and Wales. Drawing on Home Office files and other archival materials, we find that an increase in eligible jurors from different racial and class backgrounds led to a perceived decline in the ‘calibre’ of jurors – reflective of wider public anxieties about Commonwealth immigration, Black Power and white disenfranchisement. We conclude that a desire to dilute the influence of ‘coloured’ migrants on juries contributed to the introduction of majority verdicts in England and Wales.

Confronting Japan's Anti‐Asian Racism: The Transformation of the Beheiren Movement's Identity during the Vietnam War

This study explores the Beheiren movement (also known as The Citizens' Alliance for Peace in Vietnam), Japan's first transnational anti‐war movement (1965–1974). It focuses on the transcultural formation and transformation of its movement identity during the Vietnam war. Initially, movement participants developed an ethnoracial consciousness toward the Vietnamese based on their perceptions of a common victimization by U.S. imperialism. Yet, Beheiren leaders' transcultural interactions with both Korean detainees in the Omura Detention Facility in Japan and members of the Black Power movement in the United States helped them to develop an antiracist consciousness toward fellow Asians beyond the context of the Vietnam war. While their interactions with Korean detainees forced them to examine Japan's internal structural oppressions against fellow Asians (e.g., Korean residents in Japan) and fellow Japanese (e.g., the Okinawans), their interactions with the Black Power movement raised their awareness of antiracism and Third‐Worldism. These interactions were necessary to transforming the movement's identity, resulting in a confrontation with its own anti‐Asian racism in the local cultural context of Japanese society as well as in the form of economic imperialism in Asia.

“Music that Moves Me”: Preliminary Thoughts on Black Music and Urban Education in the Era of Black Power

“Music that Moves Me”: Preliminary Thoughts on Black Music and Urban Education in the Era of Black Power

Black Power, Jazz Ambassadors, and the African Maghrib in the Revolutionary 1960s

Black Power, Jazz Ambassadors, and the African Maghrib in the Revolutionary 1960s