Black Power Encyclopedia: From "Black Is Beautiful" to Urban Uprisings [2 vols., ebook ed.] 1440840067, 9781440840067, 9781440840074

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Black Power Encyclopedia

Recent Titles in Movements of the American Mosaic Series Encyclopedia of Cesar Chavez: The Farm Workers’ Fight for Rights and Justice Roger Bruns Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement Bruce E. Johansen The Civil Rights Movement: From Black Nationalism to the Women’s Political Council Peter B. Levy, Editor

Black Power Encyclopedia From “Black Is Beautiful” to Urban Uprisings Volume 1: A–I

Akinyele Umoja, Karin L. Stanford, and Jasmin A. Young, Editors

Movements of the American Mosaic

Copyright © 2018 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The editors and publishers will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Umoja, Akinyele Omowale, editor. | Stanford, Karin L., 1961- editor. |   Young, Jasmin A., editor. Title: Black power encyclopedia : from “Black is beautiful” to urban uprisings /   Akinyele Umoja, Karin L. Stanford, and Jasmin A. Young, editors. Description: Santa Barbara, California : Greenwood, an Imprint of ABC-CLIO,   LLC, 2018. | Series: Movements of the American mosaic | Includes   bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017045242 (print) | LCCN 2017046431 (ebook) |   ISBN 9781440840074 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440840067 (set : alk. paper) |   ISBN 9781440847776 (vol 1 : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781440847783 (vol 2 : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Black power—United States—Encyclopedias. | African   Americans—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. | Civil rights   movements—United States—Encyclopedias. | United States—   Race relations—Encyclopedias. Classification: LCC E185.615 (ebook) | LCC E185.615 .B546647 2018 (print) |   DDC 323.1196/073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045242 ISBN: 978-1-4408-4006-7 (set) 978-1-4408-4777-6 (vol. 1) 978-1-4408-4778-3 (vol. 2) 978-1-4408-4007-4 (ebook) 22  21  20  19  18   1  2  3  4  5 This book is also available as an eBook. Greenwood An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 www.abc-clio.com This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction xi Chronology xxv Overview Essays Armed Resistance in the Black Power Movement  xlv Black Power, Red Power, and the Potential of Red-Black Unity  lxi Black Power Studies  lxxv Gender, Black Women, and Black Power  ci Urban Rebellions  cix Entries Abubakari, Dara (Virginia Collins) (1915–2011)  1 African Liberation Support Committee  5 Afro Set Black Nationalist Party for Self-Defense (1967–1973)  11 Alabama Black Liberation Front  14 Ali, Muhammad (1942–2016)  18 All-African People’s Revolutionary Party  23 Assassinations 26 Attica Prison Rebellion  36 Baker, General Gordon, Jr. (1941–2014)  43 Bambara, Toni Cade (1939–1995)  52 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones) (1934–2014)  55 Black Aesthetic  76

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Black Arts Movement  78 Black Bookstores  85 Black Churches  93 Black Economic Union  99 Black Internationalism  102 “Black Is Beautiful”  108 Black Liberation Army  112 Black Marxism (Book)  117 Black Music  122 Black Panther Party  134 Black Power Abroad  143 Black Power Conferences  155 Black Prisoner Activism  157 Black Psychology  162 Black Student Activism  168 Black Student Alliance  176 Black Studies  180 Black United Front  185 Black Women’s Alliance/Third World Women’s Alliance (1970–1975)  189 Blaxploitation Films  194 Boggs, James (1919–1993) and Grace Lee (1915–2015)  199 Bond, Julian (1940–2015)  202 Bremond, Walter (1934–1982)  208 Brown, Elaine (1943–)  211 Brown, Hubert “H. Rap” (1943–)  214 Brown, James (1933–2006)  219 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture) (1941–1998)  223 Carter, Alprentice “Bunchy” (1942–1969)  248 Che Lumumba Club  251

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Chisholm, Shirley (1924–2005)  256 Cleaver, Kathleen Neal (1945–)  260 Coltrane, John (1926–1967)  265 Combahee River Collective  270 Committee for Unified Newark (1968–1976)  275 Communist International and Black Power  278 Cone, James Hal (1938–)  282 Congress of African People (1970–1979)  286 Congress of Racial Equality  291 Council of Independent Black Institutions  295 Counterintelligence Program  297 Cuban Revolution (1953–1959)  303 Cultural Nationalism  307 Davis, Angela Yvonne (1944–)  315 Deacons for Defense and Justice  319 Douglas, Emory (1943–)  322 Edwards, Harry (1942–)  325 Electoral Politics and Black Power  328 Fanon, Frantz (1925–1961)  333 Forman, James (1928–2005)  336 Fuller, Hoyt (1923–1981)  340 Garvin, Victoria “Vicki” Ama (1915–2007)  343 Giovanni, Nikki (1943–)  347 Group on Advanced Leadership (1961–1965)  349 Hampton, Fred, Sr. (1948–1969)  353 Hare, Nathan (1933–)  355 Hatcher, Richard (1933–)  358 House of Umoja  376 Institute of the Black World  383

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Jackson, George L. (1941–1971)  387 Jackson, Jesse L., Sr. (1941–)  392 Jackson, Maynard Holbrook (1938–2003)  399 Jackson State Massacre (May 14, 1970)  402 Johnson, Nelson (1943–)  406 Karenga, Maulana (1941–)  411 Kawaida  418 Kennedy, Florynce “Flo” (1916–2000)  424 King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929–1968)  428 Kiswahili  434 Kochiyama, Yuri (1921–2014)  438 Koen, Charles E., Jr. (1945–)  441 Kwanzaa  444 Kwayana, Tchaiko (1937–2017)  449 Last Poets  457 League of Revolutionary Black Workers  459 Lowndes County Freedom Organization  463 Lumumba, Chokwe (1947–2014)  467 Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee) (1942–)  471 Malcolm X (1925–1965)  473 Malcolm X Liberation University  485 Mallory, Mae (1927–2007)  493 Mao Zedong (1893–1976)  496 March Against Fear  501 McKissick, Floyd B., Sr. (1922–1991)  509 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party  519 Moore, Carlos (1942–)  529 Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley (1898–1997)  532 National Black Economic Development Conference and the Black Manifesto  537

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National Black Feminist Organization  541 National Black Political Assembly  545 National Black United Fund, Inc.  548 National Conference of Black Lawyers  553 National Welfare Rights Organization  556 Nation of Islam  560 Neal, Larry (1937–1981)  565 Newton, Huey P. (1942–1989)  568 Obadele, Gaidi (Milton Henry) (1919–2006)  577 Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry) (1930–2010)  584 Ocean Hill–Brownsville Campaign for Community Control of Schools  587 Olympic Project for Human Rights  590 Operation Breadbasket  595 Pan-Africanism  599 Parks, Rosa (1913–2005)  603 Police Brutality  607 Political Prisoners and Exiles  626 Political Prisoners of the Black Power Movement  634 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr. (1908–1972)  636 Pratt, Geronimo ji-Jaga (1947–2011)  640 Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa  643 Publications  647 Religion and Black Power  661 Reparations  664 Revolutionary Action Movement  670 Revolutionary Nationalism  675 Richardson, Gloria (1922–)  679 Ricks, Willie (1943–)  684 Rodney, Walter (1942–1980)  687 Sadaukai, Owusu (Howard Fuller) (1941–)  695

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Salaam, Kalamu ya (1947–)  698 Sanchez, Sonia (1934–)  701 Scott-Heron, Gil (1949–2011)  704 Seale, Bobby (1936–)  707 Shakur, Assata (1947–)  714 Shakur, Mutulu (Jarel Williams) (1950–)  718 Shields, Rudy (1931–1987)  721 Sixth Pan-African Congress  725 Smith, Barbara (1946–)  730 Smith-Robinson, Ruby Doris (1942–1967)  733 Stanford, Max (Muhammad Ahmad) (1941–)  738 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee  741 Student Organization for Black Unity  757 Students for a Democratic Society  763 Sunni-Ali, Fulani (1948–2016)  767 Toure, Askia (1938–)  773 Towards a Black University Conference  777 UHURU  785 United Front, The  788 Us Organization  793 Vietnam War  801 Waller, Joseph (Omali Yeshitela) (1941–)  809 Walters, Ronald W. (1938–2010)  813 Wattstax  814 Williams, Mabel (1931–2014)  818 Williams, Robert F. (1925–1996)  821 Wright, Nathan, Jr. (1923–2005)  825 About the Editors and Contributors 829 Index  849

Introduction

Origins of a New Movement In June 1966, young activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) led a rally in rural Greenwood, Mississippi. The rally was ostensibly for Black voting rights and registration and featured Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); Stokely Carmichael, the chairman of SNCC; and Floyd McKissick, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Carmichael in his address, chanted to the audience “What do you want?” His SNCC comrade, field organizer Willie Ricks, initially responded “Black Power!” As Carmichael continued to inquire to the audience “What do you want?” first a few, then more, and finally hundreds responded with Ricks’s “Black Power!” “Black Power” was a new slogan to represent a new orientation for SNCC, moving away from an emphasis on integration, multiracialism, and nonviolence to independent Black politics, Black identity, and armed self-defense. Black Power also represented the emergence of a new orientation for the entire Black freedom struggle. Self-determination, self-respect, and self-defense would be emphasized in political, cultural, and economic action with a simultaneous minimized appeal to the moral conscience of white Americans, nonviolence as a vehicle to achieve change, and integration as a goal of the movement. The Black Power Movement distinguished itself from the Civil Rights struggle for freedom. Civil Rights stressed desegregation and the inclusion of African Americans in the public institutions of mainstream society. Civil Rights leaders advocated the goal of a multiracial “beloved community” to be achieved through nonviolent activism, litigation, lobbying federal officials, and making moral appeals to white Americans, particularly northern liberals. Black Power emphasized Black political and economic control of Black institutions and communities, Black cultural identity, and abandoning the rhetoric of nonviolence. Certainly, Black nationalism, radical thought, and activism existed long before the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. We argue that by 1965, beyond organizations and ideology, a dynamic movement emerged that became the dominant social force within the Black freedom struggle. What occurred in 1965–1966

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that signaled the emergence of a new movement? According to historian and scholar activist John Bracey, by 1965 the term “Black Power” was popular among the Black masses in U.S. cities as a response to white supremacy. Bracey was a participant with other Black activists from Chicago, Detroit, and other midwestern cities who came together to form the Organization for Black Power (OBP) over a year before the popularization of the term by Carmichael and Ricks in Greenwood, Mississippi. Socialist Black worker James Boggs made the inaugural address to the OBP, citing the possibility of Black people to achieve political power in U.S. urban centers. Boggs encouraged his fellow activists to develop a movement to seize power, not to make appeals to the moral conscience of “America” as the integrationist Civil Rights Movement had done (Boggs, Ward, and Boggs 2011, 22, 166– 168; Boggs 2012). The same year as this gathering of radical and Black nationalist activists, several other events occurred that led to the explosion of a national insurgent movement. In August 1965 a spontaneous uprising occurred in the Watts community of Los Angeles, California. An incident of political terror against Marquette Frye, a Black motorist, and his mother and brother resulted in six days of turmoil, 34 fatalities, and tens of millions of dollars in damages. Called a “riot” by the media and the power structure, the uprising was considered a Black rebellion and became a national symbol of resistance. While Civil Rights and moderate leaders’ urge for calm was rejected by the working and poor Black resistors of Watts, new militant spokespersons emerged to articulate the rage of the oppressed Black masses. Hakim Jamal’s Malcolm X Foundation and Maulana Karenga’s Us organization would be two of the groups that surfaced like a phoenix from the flames of the Watts Rebellion. Members of street organizations and neighborhood clubs (aka gangs) became radicalized from the resistance of Watts and helped form new groups such as the Community Alert Patrol and the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Watts was not only a local phenomenon in Los Angeles but also inspired Black radicals nationally. From Cuba, Black revolutionary in exile Robert Williams stated that Watts was “the beginning of a ferrous and devastating firestorm. . . . We are living in an age . . . of revolution” (Williams 2005). Spontaneous uprisings such as that in Watts became major occurrences in municipalities throughout the United States in the mid to late 1960s. These rebellions represented a mass sentiment away from nonviolence and the politics of respectability in the Black freedom struggle. Black Power activists such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown became spokespersons to interpret and articulate the rage of the spontaneous resistance in the streets of American cities. The assassination of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965, had a profound effect on the renowned writer LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka). Weeks after Malcolm’s assassination, Jones would leave his white wife and move his base of creation and operations from predominately white avant-garde Greenwich Village

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to the Black community of Harlem to initiate the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/ School. Jones connected with activist and revolutionary nationalist Black writers Rolland Snellings (Askia Toure) and Larry Neal in Harlem to initiate the Black Arts Movement. That same year authors and playwrights Ed Bullins and Marvin X Jackmon established Black Arts West in the California Bay Area. The Black Arts Movement became a national phenomenon and the artistic wing of the Black Power Movement, primarily producing poetry, plays, music, and visual arts. The creation of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) in rural Alabama was another development that sparked the emergence of a new Movement. This SNCC-organized group was developed as an alternative to the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and represented a move toward independent Black politics. The LCFO’s symbol was an image of a black panther. Inspired by the LCFO, members of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and northern SNCC affiliates sought to build Black Panther parties in northern urban areas such as Harlem, Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco as a political party for the Black Power Movement. The editors of Soulbook (“the revolutionary journal of Afroamerica”) proclaimed that “the Black Panther Party must be organized in the North, as well as the South,” and that “the Black Panther Party is the next organizational stage for Afroamerica” (Editors 1967, 176–177). Later two Oakland Black college students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, developed the BPP in Oakland. This group became a national organization advocating armed self-defense, political power, and organizing “serve the people” programs, including free breakfasts for children and free medical, legal, and clothing services. Ultimately, the BPP became the largest and most feared group in the Black Power Movement. These events, which included the Watts Rebellion, the initiation of the Black Arts Movement, the development of the OPB, the organization of the LCFO, and the establishment of the BPP were all a part of a new generation of resistance. By the nature of these manifestations, a national Movement came into existence that represented the emergence of new social forces interrelated by an ideology distinct from the integrationist Civil Rights Movement. Black Power would represent a challenge and even dominated the Civil Rights orientation of the Black freedom struggle from the mid-1960s through the middle of the next decade.

From Civil Rights to Black Power From the post–World War II period, the movement for desegregation captured the hearts and minds of Black people in the United States. The development of an activist movement challenging U.S. apartheid in the South through boycotts, sitins, marches, Freedom Rides, etc., inspired hope that “a change was gonna come.” Hundreds of thousands committed their human, material, and spiritual resources to the fight to eliminate segregation.

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By 1965, the energy of Black people began to assert Black Power as the dominant theme of the Black freedom struggle. What brought about the ascendancy of Black Power as the dominant social movement for Black people in the United States? There were several social factors that motivated the shift of social forces that made Black Power the primary ideological orientation and social movement in the Black freedom struggle. Among these factors are the following. Militant Civil Rights forces. Militant expressions by southern Black freedom activists were a factor in inspiring the Black Power Movement. The leadership of the major Civil Rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and the SCLC—tended to be more conservative or moderate than the rank and file as well as local members of their organizations. The NAACP and National Urban League leadership also promoted conciliation with the federal government as opposed to confrontation. Nonviolent activists such as those involved in SNCC and CORE argued for more confrontation through direct action against segregation and challenge to federal officials, including the president, to intervene on the side of the Black freedom struggle against segregationists. SNCC and CORE also embraced the orientation of radical elders such as Ella Baker who promoted grassroots control of local movements by indigenous people and consensus decision making and internal democracy in Civil Rights organizations as opposed to hierarchy and top-down leadership. Militant Civil Rights activists challenged the rhetoric and tactics of the national leadership of the movement. Some militant leaders disagreed with the imposition of nonviolence as the sole strategy of the movement. The primary and most vocal critic of nonviolence in the southern Black freedom movement was Robert F. Williams of Monroe, North Carolina. Williams organized a paramilitary group, the Black Guard, to oppose the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other white supremacists in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He and colleague Ethel Azalea Johnson and his wife Mabel produced the newsletter The Crusader to openly advocate armed self-defense. The development of a local movement openly advocating armed self-defense and confronting the KKK in Monroe, North Carolina, inspired a national solidarity network. Black radicals and their allies distributed The Crusader and raised funds to provide material support, including guns and ammunition, for the freedom fighters in Monroe. Williams was forced into exile in 1961 but still became a symbol of resistance from Cuba, as he and his wife Mabel continued to publish The Crusader, which was smuggled across the Canadian border. Robert and Mabel Williams also broadcast Radio Free Dixie into the United States. The distribution of The Crusader and the broadcast of Radio Free Dixie continued Williams’s ideological influence and spiritual presence in the Black freedom struggle. Williams analyzed the white supremacist violence against the Civil Rights Movement and African American communities in the South as reaching

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genocidal proportions. He began to seek and propose revolutionary solutions to the unresolved demand for Black people’s freedom in the United States. In the early 1960s, militant activist Gloria Richardson challenged segregation in public accommodations but also demanded economic justice for oppressed Blacks in her Eastern Shore city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Armed resistance was necessary to protect Richardson’s Cambridge Nonviolent Action Movement and the Black community from the violent white supremacists. Characteristic of militant local Civil Rights activists, Richardson embraced and publicly acknowledged Black armed resistance to white violence. Richardson’s leadership and posture became a model to student activists who came to Cambridge to support the movement there. Like Robert Williams, the development of the paramilitary Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana became another influence that challenged the hegemony of nonviolence in the Black freedom struggle. Fourteen Black citizens of the rural town of Jonesboro, Louisiana, came together in response to police cooperation with KKK harassment of Black neighborhoods in 1964. KKK forays into the Jonesboro’s Black community ceased following the patrols established by the Deacons for Defense. A parallel development was initiated in another Louisiana town, Bogalusa. After learning about the Jonesboro Deacons, the Bogalusa group decided to start the group in its town. The Deacons for Defense gained national attention in Bogalusa because of their dynamic campaign for voting rights. The Deacons became a major force in desegregation campaigns in Louisiana and in Mississippi from 1965 through the end of the decade. Like William’s Monroe movement, a national network of supporters developed in solidarity with the Deacons for Defense. The influence of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X. The disenchantment of Black refugees from the plantations of the South in their new residences in urban cities led to their receptivity to Black nationalist ideology and organizations. Prominent among these Black nationalist groups was the Nation of Islam (NOI), which called for Black people to “do something for self” and to “separate from the white devils.” With the reality of lynching and Jim Crow segregation fresh in their minds, the labeling of “the white man” as the “devil” resonated with Black ghetto dwellers. A brilliant spokesperson, Malcolm X emerged from the NOI in the 1950s. By the early 1960s he was an internationally recognized personality and orator for his brutal critique of white supremacy and illumination of the hypocrisy of U.S. democracy and Christianity. He was also critical of the philosophy of nonviolence and national Civil Rights leaders, labeling them “Uncle Toms.” At the same time, Malcolm X also began to develop relationships with militant Civil Rights activists, including Robert Williams and Gloria Richardson. In 1964 Malcolm X left the NOI and openly advocated the necessity of independent Black organizations, armed self-defense, an African-centered cultural revolution,

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Pan-Africanism, anticapitalism, and anti-imperialism. The fiery leader’s oratory and perspective resonated with young Black radicals, including members of SNCC and CORE. Malcolm’s image would become a unifying symbol for Black Power activists after his untimely assassination in 1965. Influence of African nationalism in the United States. Before the Black Power Movement emerged during the 1960s, the last great upsurge of Black nationalism was in the 1920s, when Marcus Garvey organized and served as the spokesman for the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey and the UNIA led a movement with millions of members and supporters throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa. The organization declined because of the counterinsurgency campaign waged by the U.S. government and internal dissension within UNIA. Marcus Garvey was jailed and deported from the United States in 1927. Despite the demise of UNIA, African nationalism persisted through neo-Garveyite movements such as the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement (ANPM) in New York under the leadership of Carlos Cooks. The ANPM advocated support for Black entrepreneurs through “Buy Black” campaigns, the wearing of natural hair and African clothing through Black-oriented fashion shows, and the celebration of independence movements on the African continent. The Afro-American Association (AAA) paralleled Harlem’s African nationalist trend in northern California. Established by law student Donald Warden in northern California in 1962, the AAA organized street rallies to denounce white racism and teach African history. Like the ANPM, the AAA supported Black entrepreneurship and called for independent Black education. The AAA formed study groups with Black college students and provided a vehicle for the intellectual and political development of Black Power activists such as Kenneth Freeman and Ernie Allen of the revolutionary nationalist journal Soulbook, RAM, and the BPP of Northern California; Huey Newton and Bobby Seale of the BPP; and Maulana Karenga of the organization Us. Global influences: Anticolonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Black people in the United States identified with and were inspired by the independence movements in Africa fighting off the shackles of colonialism. The battle waged by Kenyan nationalists against British colonialism in the 1950s attracted attention of African Americans. In particular, the armed resistance of the Kikuyu Land and Freedom Army, popularly known as the Mau Mau, is what sparked this interest. Mississippi NAACP activist Medgar Evers provides an example of the admiration of the Kenyan movement by activists in the Black freedom struggle. In the 1950s, Evers told friends and comrades that a “Mau Mau” was needed in Mississippi. Like several African Americans, Evers gave his oldest child the middle name “Kenyatta” after the Kenyan nationalist leader erroneously believed to be associated with the Kikuyu Land and Freedom Army.

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Black author Richard Wright provides another example of an African American inspired by the liberation efforts in Africa. Wright visited the Gold Coast, a British colony in West Africa, in 1953. His observations of the proindependence Convention People’s Party (CPP) motivated him to write a book of his experiences titled Black Power. In 1957, Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah and the CPP achieved political independence from British colonialism. Nkrumah attended college in the United States at Lincoln College and the University of Pennsylvania and established relationships with Pan-Africanist–oriented scholars and activists in Harlem, New York. Nkrumah’s independent Ghana attracted several African American émigrés to help build the new republic. Activist leaders of the Black freedom struggle such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X both cited independent Ghana as an inspiration and a victory for Black freedom internationally. The newly independent Central African country of Congo gained its independence from Belgium in 1960. However, the mineral-rich and strategically located country was beset by crises soon thereafter. In the context of the Cold War, the Congo was viewed as valuable by Belgium, the United States, and the Soviet Union, which associated themselves with various political factions within the Congo. Amid the crisis, Congolese head of state Patrice Lumumba was abandoned by the international community, captured, tortured, and executed by internal enemies with the support of U.S. and Belgium imperialists. Lumumba’s death reverberated in Harlem, New York. Black nationalists and other activists took to the streets and invaded the halls of the United Nations (UN) in New York City and disrupted the visitors’ gallery in protest of the UN’s failure to intervene on the side of Lumumba. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba remains a symbol of resistance in the Black freedom struggle. The revolution of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China was another inspirational movement to Black radicals. Mao and the Chinese communists’ strategy and tactics organized and mobilized Chinese peasants in alliance with radical intellectuals to defeat feudal elites aligned with U.S. imperialism and established the People’s Republic of China as a formidable international power. The Chinese Revolution represented a nonwhite people challenging the hegemony of U.S. and traditional Marxist doctrine that held the industrial working class in Europe and North America as the primary revolutionary agent. One Detroit Black nationalist student activist, Charles Johnson, was nicknamed “Mao” by his comrades. Mao also earned more admiration from Black radicals when he issued a statement in response to the appeal of exiled freedom fighter Robert F. Williams and condemned U.S. racism and imperialism after the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama, church that killed four young African American females, Denise McNair (age 11) and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley (all age 14). The march to seize power by Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement in Cuba from the Batista dictatorship was another influential international development

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that would radicalize the Black freedom struggle. Castro’s seizure of power from privileged Cubans and his nationalizing of Cuba’s industries and resources from foreign interests was seen to some as a victory for oppressed people worldwide. The choice of the Cuban delegation and Castro to seek lodging in Harlem, facilitated by NOI leader Malcolm X, while visiting the UN in New York was viewed as an act of solidarity with the subjugated Black nation in the United States. The journeys to Cuba by Robert F. Williams, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and renowned scholar John Henrik Clarke in the early years of the revolution to express friendship also demonstrated a growing bond between Cuba and the Black freedom movement. After being forced into exile, Robert and his wife Mabel Williams and their entire household sought political asylum in Cuba. As previously stated, the revolutionary Cuban government allowed the Williamses to produce and distribute The Crusader and broadcast from Havana, which again demonstrated its solidarity with the Black freedom struggle. The convergence of neo-Garveyite African nationalism, self-determination ideology expressed by the NOI and Malcolm X, militant Civil Rights activism, and anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America all served as a stew that nourished the emergence and eventual ascendance of the Black Power Movement as a dominant force. Within the Civil Rights organizations such as SNCC and CORE, the trend toward self-determination, self-defense, and Black identity and cultural integrity challenged the integrationist, nonviolent, and assimilationist orientations within the struggle. Many SNCC and CORE activists began to move in a more autonomous direction after believing that President Lyndon Johnson and moderate and conservative Civil Rights leaders sold out their attempt to replace the Mississippi delegation with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Some militants were also disappointed with more compromising conservative and moderate Civil Rights leaders and the slow pace of change. Many SNCC activists lost faith that the federal government and northern liberals could be depended upon as allies. They began asking new questions, looking to global radical and anticolonial movements for answers. The ideas of Malcolm X also presented an alternative. The pro-self-determination, pro-self-defense ideological trend within SNCC is a factor for the ousting of John Lewis as the organization’s chairman and the election of Stokely Carmichael. Lewis was considered an integrationist and was deeply committed to nonviolence. SNCC’s Atlanta Project wrote a position paper in 1966 calling for Black identity and self-determination and challenging the integrationist origins of the organization. CORE activists also embraced armed self-defense and began to identify with Black nationalism. Young activists organized Black revolutionary nationalist collectives in urban centers and campuses throughout the U.S. empire. Inspired by Robert Williams and the Crusader solidarity network, the oratory of Malcolm X, the nationalism of

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the NOI and the AAA, and the anticolonial movements internationally as well as guidance from elders such as James and Grace Boggs, Harry Haywood, Albert Cleage, Milton Henry, Queen Mother Moore, and Ethel Azalea Johnson, these activists helped to nurture the development of activist-oriented radical Black nationalists. From this development came revolutionary nationalist groups such as RAM in Ohio, Philadelphia, and Chicago; the Soulbook collective in northern California; and UHURU in Detroit. Robert F. Williams invited members of these radical Black collectives to Havana, Cuba, to form a national Black Liberation Front (BLF) under the umbrella of RAM in 1964. RAM also played a role in influencing the emergence of Black Power as a dominant ideological and political trend within the Black freedom struggle. Through several journals including the Black America and Soulbook and the Afro-American Student Movement (AASM) newsletter The Razor, RAM promoted Black nationalism and advocated armed self-defense within Civil Rights organizations such as the NAACP, SNCC, and CORE as well as in Black communities in the United States. RAM-BLF cohosted two gatherings in Nashville, Tennessee, at Fisk University with the AASM to promote Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism. This engagement helped to create greater debate within the Black freedom struggle around questions such as nonviolence or armed self-defense as well as integration and assimilation or Black self-determination and nationalism.

Black Power: Its Primary Organizations and Ideologies Black Power manifested itself in several different ideological expressions, including political pluralism, Black capitalism, revolutionary nationalism, cultural nationalism, territorial separatism, Pan-Africanism, and Black feminism. These expressions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as some groups or activists may have expressed two or more of these perspectives at the same time. One expression of Black Power was political pluralism. Pluralist Black Power meant Black people achieving political representation with the constitutional order. This meant Black control of municipal and county jurisdictions where African Americans were in the majority. Carmichael was asked to articulate the meaning of Black Power after popularizing the term in Greenwood in 1966. He initially spoke of Black Power in very pluralist terms. In one interview, he argued that to achieve Black Power, Black people must “organize themselves politically, to register to vote, and to form independent political bases” (Carmichael 1966). Black Power pluralism led to the election of Black mayors and majority representation in urban and rural municipalities across the United States. Some counties even became governed by a majority number of Black elected officials. One of the best examples of this is the election of Kenneth Gibson in Newark, New Jersey, in 1970. Amiri Baraka and other Black Power advocates organized the Committee

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for a United Newark (CFUN) as an umbrella organization for Black political power in the city and assisted with the election of Gibson. Baraka was also a key organizer of the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, in 1972 and its thrust toward independent Black politics by developing the Black Agenda, which promoted grassroots- and liberation-oriented interests. Like activists who believed that Black Power could be achieved through the constitutional order, others promoted Black economic development through Black capitalism. Black capitalism was the empowerment of the Black community through the proliferation of privately owned enterprises that would provide employment and social development. The capital for Black capitalist development, or Green Power, could be initiated through federal stimulus to Black entrepreneurs. One of the most well-known Black capitalist efforts was former CORE director Floyd McKissick’s proposed “Soul City” development in North Carolina. Others believed that Black Power could not be achieved within the current constitutional order and called for revolutionary change. Advocates of revolutionary nationalism contended that the Black Power Movement must seize state power from the white capitalist ruling class and establish Black self-determination and a new social order. Many revolutionary nationalists believed that this seizure of power would come through armed struggle by Black and other oppressed people united against the forces of U.S. capitalism and imperialism. Robert Williams was the principal architect of this strategy of revolutionary nationalism. RAM was the first organization to embody this expression, and the BPP was the largest and most popular and well-known of this type. Others such as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Black Workers Congress believed that organized Black workers in industries central to the U.S. economy held the key to disrupting the economy and winning the Black revolution. Other Black Power advocates emphasized the primacy of identity, culture, art, and ideological perspectives. The proponents of cultural nationalism argued that a Black cultural and ideological transformation was necessary to achieve Black Power in the United States. Maulana Karenga advocated that Black cultural revolution must be the primary vehicle. Karenga developed the cultural nationalist ideological framework kawaida and the the African-centered holiday Kwanzaa as examples of liberating Black culture. Kawaida also became a guiding perspective to organize pluralist political campaigns, such as the election of Gibson in Newark, and Black Power–oriented united fronts, like CFUN, the Black Congress in Los Angeles, and the Congress of African People. Demonstrating support for cultural nationalism as an avenue to define their own reality and articulate their own perspectives, college students protested on college campuses demanding Black studies, and high school students protested for Black history courses. Black intellectuals also formed ideological and literary journals such as Soulbook, Black Dialogue, the Journal of Black Poetry, The Liberator, and

Introduction | xxi

the Black Scholar to promote the politics and arts of the movement. Johnson Publications changed the title of its public affairs magazine Negro Digest to Black World, reflecting a Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist orientation. Some Black activists sought sovereignty and independent nationhood through territorial separatism. These advocates argued that Black Power could only be achieved through Black people having their own government on their own territory. At the National Conference on Black Power in 1967, Black economist Robert Browne proposed the partition of the United States into two different territories, one Black, the other predominately white. The conference resolved to Initiate a national dialogue on the desirability of partitioning the U.S. into separate and independent nations, one homeland for white Americans and the other to be a homeland for black Americans. (Lester 1970, 10, 25, 169) The following year, the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA) was formed and demanded reparations from the United States, including the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, for the establishment of an independent Black nation. Particularly in the early 1970s, a focus of Pan-Africanism ascended in significance. Pan-Africanism took two forms. One Pan-Africanist orientation emphasized solidarity between Africans and people of African descent worldwide. This expression is exemplified through mass mobilizations in North America and the Caribbean to provide political and material support for national liberation movements on the African continent against Portuguese colonialism (Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and Angola) and white settler regimes (in Zimbabwe and South Africa). The first major effort was the worldwide African Solidarity Day organized by the Pan-African Secretariat in 1971, followed by the African Liberation Support Committee’s African Liberation Day, which mobilized a rally of 75,000 to Washington, D.C., in 1972. The Congress of African People in Atlanta in 1970 and the international Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania in 1974 were major gatherings of Pan-Africanists during the period. The other form of Pan-Africanism was an effort to form a United States of Africa on the African continent under socialism. This was the vision of independent Ghana’s first head of state, Kwame Nkrumah. Its mantle would be continued by Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. Black female activists formed organizations to challenge white supremacy and patriarchy through Black feminism. Black feminists articulated the necessity of intersectionality and the defeat of white supremacy, patriarchy, and gender and sexual oppression for all Black people to be empowered and liberated. Feminist Black activist attorney Florence Kennedy raised the question of Black Power in early gatherings of the National Organization for Women and women’s liberation activists at Black Power conventions. Kennedy, Michelle Wallace, Faith Ringgold,

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Margaret Sloan-Hunter, Doris Wright, and other Black feminists formed the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) in 1973. SNCC activists in New York formed the Black Women’s Liberation Committee and Third World Women’s Alliance, challenging racism, capitalism, and sexism. One year after the founding of the NBFO, another Black feminist organization, the Combahee River Collective, issued a seminal treatise challenging patriarchy in the United States and within the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements and white supremacy in the predominately white female women’s liberation movement.

Rebellion and Repression The emergence of the popular Black Power Movement was considered a tremendous threat to the ruling classes of the United States. After the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles in 1965, urban centers were virtual powder kegs. Urban revolts exploded in 128 cities after the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Students at K-12 schools and on college campuses throughout the United States also protested through walkouts and occupations of campuses, making Black Power demands (e.g., Black studies curriculum, hiring of Black faculty and staff) but also against the U.S. war in Vietnam. The Black Power Movement also began to develop and offer international support and solidarity with national liberation and anti-imperialist forces and governments in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia. In response to the growing militancy of Black people, U.S. federal, state, and local governments systematically destabilized and destroyed the Black Power Movement. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shifted the priority of its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) from socialist and communist organizations to Black activists and organizations. Other national security and intelligence agencies and local law enforcement agencies established similar programs. Activists were arrested and indicted on bogus charges, some incarcerated and others forced into exile. Police harassed and raided Black Power organizations’ events and offices and the residences of activists. Infiltration and divide-and-conquer tactics were used to disrupt and damage relations between and within organizations and destabilize the movement overall. The FBI also utilized journalists to promote disinformation in the media to isolate Black Power activists from their constituencies and Americans in general. Media was also used to promote division and conflict within the Black Power Movement. The repressive agencies were effective in criminalizing the political resistance of activists, as COINTELPRO resulted in hundreds of political prisoners, prisoners of war, and exiled activists. Many Black Power advocates died while attempting to defend their lives and organizations from invading police forces or in FBI-inspired internecine conflict. Some survivors went underground to escape

Introduction | xxiii

repression, joining clandestine forces such as the Black Liberation Army. However, government repression combined with the immaturity of this young movement led to its decline by the late 1970s.

Legacy of the Black Power Movement: The Struggle Continues Black Power ideas remain an important component of political organizations and Black liberation networks that advocate self-determination, reparations, anticapitalism, Pan-Africanism, and anti-imperialism. Organizations such as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the Organization for Black Struggle, the National Black United Front, and the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America are expressly committed to continuing the Black Power legacy. In fact, elders from SNCC, RAM, the Congress of African People, the BPP, the PGRNA, and other Black Power organizations are active with contemporary Black liberation groups. The continuation of Black/Africana studies programs and youth programs that promote Black liberation ideological expressions represent the continuity of Black Power politics. The growing celebration of Kwanzaa and community events honoring Black heroes such as Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, and the BPP also demonstrate the movement’s resilience. The campaigns and elections of activists in the Black Power tradition such as both Chokwe Lumumba in 2013 and his son Chokwe Antar Lumumba in 2017 in Jackson, Mississippi, and Ras Baraka in Newark, New Jersey, in 2014 to mayor in their respective cities represents a continuation of the grassroots political campaigns reminiscent of the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. The contemporary organizing to assert that Black lives matter and the rejection of the traditional Civil Rights orientation by young activists in the Ferguson anti–police abuse protests in 2014 are akin to the militancy of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s. Black Power still lives. Black Power Encyclopedia: From “Black Is Beautiful” to Urban Uprisings will contribute to the understanding of the Black Power Movement and its origins, contributors, and legacy. These two volumes contain entries on the major personalities, events, organizations, ideologies, themes, trends, and impacts of Black Power. The contributors of the encyclopedia are a diverse group of students, academics, and leading scholars and participants of the Black Power Movement, which contributes to the richness of each reference book. Their narratives, recommended readings, and other resources are invaluable to students and researchers of the African American experience, U.S. history, and the studies of the 1960s and 1970s. Akinyele Umoja Further Reading Ahmad, Muhammad. 2007. We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960–1975. Chicago: Charles Kerr.

xxiv | Introduction Boggs, Grace. 2012. “The Malcolm X I remember.” The Boggs Blog, http://conversa tionsthatyouwillneverfinish.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/the-malcolm-i-remember-by -grace-lee-boggs/. Boggs, James, Stephen M. Ward, and Grace Lee Boggs. 2011. Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: James Boggs Reader. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Carmichael, Stokley. 1966. “1966 Throwback: Stokely Carmichael on CBS ‘FACE THE NATION.” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3WTOEybll8. Editors. 1967. “Blackness Is Where It’s At.” Soulbook (6) (Winter/Spring). Joseph, Peniel E. 2006. Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Holt. Kelley, Robin, and Betsy Esch. 1999. “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 1(4): 6–41. Lester, J. 1970. “The Necessity for Separation.” Ebony 25(1) (August). Springer, Kimberly. 2005. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Umoja, Akinyele. 2013. “From One Generation to the Next: Armed Self-Defense, Revolutionary Nationalism, and the Southern Black Freedom Struggle.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 15(3): 218–240. Williams, Robert F. 2005. “The Age of Revolution and Urban Rebellion.” SelfDetermination, Self-Respect, and Self-Defense: An Audio Documentary as told by Mabel Williams. Audio CD. Chico, CA: Ak Press Audio. Woodard, Komozi. 1999. A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.

Chronology

1950s

The modern Civil Rights era begins, and the Nation of Islam (NOI) contrasts Civil Rights activists’ quest for integration with its platform for Black self-determination.

1955

Emmett Till, a 14-year-old child visiting Money, Mississippi, from Chicago is lynched by white racists. His mother, Mamie Till, allows public viewing of her son’s badly disfigured body to show the world what they did to her son.

1957

Malcolm X is promoted by Elijah Muhammad as the national representative for the NOI.



Led by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana becomes the first African nation to gain independence from Great Britain.



Robert F. Williams assumes leadership of his local North Carolina National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter, providing a more militant contrast to Martin Luther King Jr.’s work in the South by promoting armed self-defense. Williams forms the armed Black Guard to provide resistance to white vigilantes and vocally advocates armed insurgency in his newsletter The Crusader.

1959

The Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel Castro, inspires militant political groups internationally, exerting a powerful influence on the formation of Black Power.

1960

Patrice Lumumba emerges as the Congo’s most powerful leader. His rise to power opposing the colonial forces of Belgium fans the flames of Black militancy.



On Monday, September 19, Fidel Castro and Cuba’s diplomatic delegation visit Harlem’s historic Theresa Hotel. Malcolm X is the first local African American leader to meet Castro. They speak through a translator on a range of issues.

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In April, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded in Greensboro, North Carolina. The youth-led organization attracts some of the Black freedom movement’s most radical nationalists and revolutionaries, as SNCC facilitates voter registration drives in the most dangerous areas of the South. SNCC’s work will later pave the way for its trajectory toward Black Power activism.

1961

Robert F. Williams goes into exile in Cuba after racial upheaval in Monroe, North Carolina, leads to him being charged with kidnapping a white couple. Three of Williams’s associates, including New York activist Mae Mallory, are arrested and charged with kidnapping.



On February 15, a group of Black nationalists take over the United Nations in response to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.



In October, William Worthy, a journalist and professional associate of the NOI, interviews Robert F. Williams from Havana, Cuba.



In November, Reverend Albert Cleage Jr. and attorney Milton Henry, along with other Black activists in Detroit, form the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), advancing radical political activism.

1962

Los Angeles Police Department officers attack several members of the NOI outside of a Los Angeles mosque, culminating in the death of Robert Stokes and injuries to other members of the NOI.



On May 1 in the aftermath of Stokes’s death, William Worthy and Malcolm X speak at an evening symposium titled “The Crisis of Racism.” Jointly, their presence represents the unification of Worthy’s internationalism with Malcolm X’s sharp criticisms of racial oppression.



In Ohio, radical Black college students form the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a group promoting revolutionary nationalism.



Donald Hopkins, Dennis Ramsey, and Donald Warden form the Afro American Association (AAA) at the University of California, Berkeley. Members of the AAA birthed significant Black Power leadership and organizations including the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Us organization.

1963

James Boggs publishes The American Revolution, an analysis of labor, race, class, and revolution that influences young nationalist and anticapitalist activists.



After the publication of The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin emerges as one of the most respected Black writers in the United States.

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Birmingham, Alabama, becomes the site of open warfare between Civil Rights demonstrators, police, white thugs, and local Black citizens. For the first time, a major Civil Rights demonstration receives widespread media coverage. Blacks throughout the nation respond with vigils and other demonstrations.



The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is held at the Lincoln Memorial. More than 250,000 people attend, including advocates of Black Power and socialism. It is during this march that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gives his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream.”



In November, GOAL organizes the Northern Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference in Detroit. Malcolm X delivers his “Message to the Grass Roots” speech, laying the ideological foundation for political revolution undergirded by Black self-determination. A combination of Black nationalism, anticolonialism, and self-defense, the speech showcases Malcolm’s global vision, uniting two generations of Black activists to organize a national movement for Black Power.

1964

In March, Malcolm X declares his political independence from the NOI. Malcolm establishes two organizations, the Moslem Mosque, Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American Unity after departing from the NOI.



Harlem erupts into unrest after off-duty police officer Thomas Gilligan shoots and kills 15-year-old student James Powell. Young activists and residents battle police as Harlem is transformed into a battleground. The Harlem rebellion is the result of decades of police brutality.



Radical Black youths from Philadelphia, Detroit, and California meet in Cuba to expand RAM as a national revolutionary nationalist network. The meeting is convened by Robert and Mabel Williams.



The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) is established to organize and advocate for more support and expanded aid for recipients. By 1969, the NWRO will have more than 22,000 members organized into chapters nationwide.



The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party is established. It is founded by Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Robert Parris Moses.



The inaugural issue of Soulbook, the “revolutionary journal of AfroAmerica,” appears in the California Bay Area. The editorial team includes Bay Area California activists Mamadou Lumumba, Ernie Allen, Carol Freeman, Donald Freeman, and Issac Moore, as well as New York intellectual Bobb Hamilton.

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After graduating from Howard University with a degree in philosophy, Stokely Carmichael becomes a full-time activist with SNCC.

1965

On February 21, Malcolm X is assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, sending shockwaves throughout Black activist circles and the nation at large.



Catalyzed by Malcolm X’s assassination, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), who had been influenced by Malcolm X’s ideology during the early 1960s, announces his plans to establish the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), deploying Black Arts as a means of political expression. Representing a major shift in the Black freedom struggle, BARTS used the arts to politicize the poor in Harlem.



Ossie Davis serves as cochair of the Emergency Rally on Vietnam, sponsored by the National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and held on June 8, 1965. The noted actor and avid antiwar activist eulogized Malcolm X and was blacklisted during the McCarthy era.



In March, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (known as the Moynihan Report), written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is published. The report identifies several issues concerning Black poverty in the United States that he deems a pathology. Moynihan concludes that Black female heads of households were hindering the progress of Blacks. He ultimately argues that Black men needed to reestablish their patriarchal rights to leadership by enrolling in the military.



In response to police terrorism, the Watts Rebellion tears through the city of Los Angeles from August 11 to August 16.



The Community Alert Patrol is founded by Ron Wilkins (aka Brother Crook) in Los Angeles to monitor law enforcement and police behavior in Black communities.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley, is published in October.

In November, Look magazine publishes a piece on the Lowndes County Freedom Organization’s efforts to combat racist Democrats in the small rural town. The magazine refers to Stokely Carmichael as a “young revolutionary engaged in the arduous task of organizing rural people against a back drop of fear.”



Carmichael and other SNCC organizers, including Judy Richardson, Scott Smith, Willie Vaughn, and Bob Mants, organize Black people in Lowndes County, educating them in African history, political literacy, and local politics. Carmichael organizes Alabama’s only Black-led political party, which becomes known in the press and to locals as the

Chronology | xxix

Black Panther Party because of its use of the black panther as the party symbol.

The Us organization is founded in Los Angeles, California, following the Watts rebellion and the assassination of Malcolm X.

1966

Stokely Carmichael is elected SNCC’s new chairman, solidifying the organization’s support of Black Power.



SNCC begins using Black Power as an organizing tool in Atlanta’s Vine City district. Tensions between Black Atlanta residents and white authorities ignite when a police officer shoot a Black man allegedly suspected of car theft. The incident quickly swells into an uprising. Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. is knocked down by the force of the crowd and orders the police to “tear the place up.”



The Atlanta SNCC Project drafts a position paper emphasizing Black consciousness and identity and calls for the organization to exclusively have Black organizers in Black communities. While initially rejected by SNCC leadership, this position reflects a shift in the multiracial and integrationist ideology in SNCC.



LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) publishes Home, a collection of essays including “Black Is a Country” in which he posits that Black people in the United States constitute a nation within a nation.



The New School for Afro-American Thought is founded by Gaston Neal and Baba Lumumba in Washington, D.C.



The Black Congress is founded as an umbrella Black Power formation in Los Angeles, California.



In June, during a voting registration march initiated by activist and law student James Meredith, Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks give voice to the declaration “Black Power,” while Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference shout “Freedom now!” The activities during the march juxtapose the ideologies of the Civil Rights Movement with the emerging ideologies of Black Power.



In July, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) holds a convention in Baltimore. CORE announces its declaration of independence from the Civil Rights Movement, stating that Black Power is now the official organizational policy.



The war in Vietnam becomes a major source of protest among student activists, particularly on college campuses. The House Committee on Un-American Activities seeks membership lists of student groups fighting against the war and the bombing in Hanoi.

xxx | Chronology



Rosa Parks travels to Lowndes County, Alabama, to support the Black Independent Political Party initiated by grassroots organizers and SNCC.



In conjunction with the New York Review of Books, Carmichael publishes “What We Want,” a response to detractors of Black Power.



The first Kwanzaa celebration occurs in Los Angeles, California, to honor African American heritage, family, community, and culture. It becomes the first Black Power holiday.



Carmichael outlines Black Power advocacy, speaking to SNCC’s organizing history and those who are actively facing white terrorism, violence, and suppression.



RAM and SNCC supporters form a Black Panther Party chapter in Harlem, New York, in June as a Black Power political party.



The Black Panther Party of Northern California is introduced at a Black Power and Black Arts conference in San Francisco in September 1966.



The Black Panther Party (BPP) is founded in October by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. They begin raising funds by selling Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book on UC Berkley’s campus. Using Harold Cruse’s terminology, they label themselves “revolutionary nationalists,” demanding social justice, economic equality, peace, and the end of police brutality.



On November 7, Carmichael speaks to Black Power politics in Lowndes County. On November 8, though whites evict sharecroppers for registering to vote, among other underhanded tactics, Black candidates make history, as they are represented by ballot boxes labeled with black panthers.



Jesse Jackson is selected to lead Operation Breadbasket in Chicago. A core component of Breadbasket is selective-buying campaigns to force corporations to hire and purchase from Black-owned businesses. Black expositions that showcase Black companies are equally important.

1967

Ramparts magazine attracts a sizable reader audience featuring antiestablishment writers such as Eldridge Cleaver.



Civil unrest continues in cities such as Newark and Detroit.



A three-day Survival of Black People Conference in the Bay Area of California. Activists view the election of Ronald Reagan to California governor as the latest example of a national conspiracy to thwart Black Power.

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Dr. King releases Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? in which he gives his most detailed analysis of Black Power. He asserts that “When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance only when they accumulated the power to enforce change.”



The First Annual Malcolm X Grassroots Memorial Conference, featuring Betty Shabazz, is held. Shabazz receives an armed escort from the San Francisco airport by local militants, led by BPP minister of defense Huey P. Newton.



In May, Carmichael steps down as SNCC chairman and is succeeded by Hubert “H. Rap” Brown.



On August 15, amid the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, SNCC releases a statement in its monthly newsletter that identifies Palestinians as victims of colonialism.



At the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. delivers a speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” condemning the role of the United States in the Vietnam War.



Black Power activist Floynce Kennedy joins the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women. Along with Pauli Murray and Shirley Chisholm, Kennedy become an outspoken advocate of women’s rights, including abortion rights.



The Second Annual Black Power Conference is held in the wake of the Newark Rebellion. LeRoi Jones becomes Amiri Baraka and along with other Black Power activists, including Larry Neal, Maulana Karenga, and Floyd McKissick, holds a press conference discussing community-based movements with national ambitions.



Detroit explodes in rebellion against police brutality, resulting in the 43 people dead, 467 injured, and 7,200 arrested. Other civil disorder takes place in Philadelphia, Harlem, Cambridge, and Maryland. J. Edgar Hoover receives approval for the expansion of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to coordinate investigations of “black nationalist, hate-type organizations.”



H. Rap Brown while speaking at a SNCC sponsored-event in Washington, D.C., in July utters his famous words “I say violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.”



The Western Regional Black Youth Conference is held at a South Central Los Angeles high school.



San Jose State professor Harry Edwards organizes Black student-athletes into the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which calls for a

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Black boycott of the 1968 Olympics to protest U.S. racism, apartheid in South Africa, and white minority rule in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).

Heavyweight boxing champion and NOI member Muhammad Ali refuses induction into the U.S. Army on religious grounds and in opposition to the Vietnam War. As a result, his boxing licenses are suspended, and he is convicted of draft evasion. In 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn the conviction.



Congressional leaders refuse to allow Congressman Adam Clayton Powell to take his seat, alleging misconduct. In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn the congressional decision in Powell V. McCormack.



Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America is published, offering a framework for the concept of Black Power including suggestions for political and intellectual experimentation as well as discussion of an emerging “Black consciousness.”



Harold Cruse releases The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, outlining an archaeology of Black radical political failure stretching back to the Harlem Renaissance.



Merritt College in Oakland, California, announces that it will offer an associate degree in Afro-American studies, the first at a college in the United States.



The National Conference for a New Politics is held in Chicago to forge an alliance of “New Left” activists and organizations. A primary goal is to develop a strategy to change the existing political and economic structure of the United States. Antiwar, Civil Rights, and Black Power activists and socialists participate in the conference.



Albert B. Cleage Jr. establishes the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit, Michigan. The theology of the church is centered in the African origins of the Bible and Christianity.



The Third World Press is founded by Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Johari Amini, and Carolyn Rodgers to publish the literary works of African peoples.



RAM ends its BPP projects in New York and San Francisco. RAM members in northern California form a revolutionary nationalist secret society, the House of Umoja.

1968

Carl Stokes becomes mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, on January 1 after winning a November 1967 election. Stokes is the first Black mayor of a major city in the United States.

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On January 1, Richard Hatcher becomes the first Black mayor of Gary, Indiana, a U.S. city larger than 100,000 people. He is the first elected Black mayor in the state of Indiana and is a major advocate for independent Black politics.



Five hundred Black nationalists convene in Detroit at the Black Governmental Conference called by the Malcolm X Society. Attendees include Queen Mother Moore, Betty Shabazz, Nana Oserjiman Adefumi, Maulana Karenga, and Amiri Baraka. Conference participants form the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA), declare independence, demand reparations, and identify South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana as the “national territory” of the Black nation. Robert F. Williams is named the PGRNA’s first president.



Due to repression, RAM disbands. The Black Liberation Party (aka African People’s Party) is formed as a successor organization to RAM.



J. Edgar Hoover issues a directive to the FBI to “prevent the rise of a black messiah, who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.”



Carmichael travels to Cuba, angering the U.S. government as well as SNCC. He is hailed by the Cuban press as a harbinger of an African American revolution. Carmichael holds Cuba as “a shining example of hope” to Blacks in the Western Hemisphere.



Shirley Chisholm becomes the first African American woman elected to Congress, representing New York’s 12th Congressional District. She champions education and employment opportunities for her constituents. She will become one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1969.



On February 8, 3 young men are killed and 27 others are wounded in Orangeburg, South Carolina, at South Carolina University during a protest against segregation.



On November 4, Black students occupy the administration building at San Fernando Valley State College, leading to mass arrests and felony convictions. The confrontations with university administration lead to the establishment of the first Black studies department in southern California.



Huey P. Newton faces first-degree murder charges in the shooting death of Oakland police officer John Frey after a violent altercation.



Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver is published, establishing Cleaver as a radical social critic and a premier voice of his generation. Though commercially popular, it was critiqued by Black and white feminists

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alike as a glaring example of the Black Power era’s overly aggressive machismo and sexism.

Sonia Sanchez emerges as a literary prodigy after the publication of her book Homecoming.



San Francisco State’s Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front lead a campaign to challenge racism on campus, create greater access to college education, and radicalize the curriculum, inclusive of Black and ethnic studies.



Rallies for Huey P. Newton’s release in Oakland and Los Angeles include appearances by Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, James Forman, and Maulana Karenga.



Four thousand workers support a three-day wildcat strike organized by the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement at the Dodge Main plant in Detroit. Their actions spark the organization of Black workers into revolutionary union movement organizations at other automobile plants in Detroit.



The Third Black Power Conference is held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.



A five-month strike at San Francisco State ends with the founding of the first Black studies program and department. Sociologist Nathan Hare is hired to coordinate the effort.



On April 4 the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. triggers sadness and violence across the nation, with 125 cities in 29 states experiencing racial unrest. An estimated total of $45 million in property damage is reported. At a press conference Carmichael exclaims that “When white America killed Dr. King last night, the country declared war on black people.”



On April 6 convoys of Black Panthers engage in a shootout with police, leaving Cleaver and two officers wounded and 17-year-old Bobby Hutton dead. The Panthers claim that Hutton had his hands in the air, gesturing surrender, at the time of his death.



Women of SNCC form the Black Women’s Liberation Committee (BWLC), a caucus to address the combined issues of sexism and racism in the movement.



The Last Poets is formed on May 19, 1968, on the birthday of Malcolm X. Their hit “Niggas Are Scared of Revolution,” released in 1970, galvanizes the Black Power Movement.



On July 15 Kathleen Cleaver, the Panthers’ communications secretary, leads supporters in chants demanding Newton’s freedom. Cleaver

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speaks publicly with a commanding image as the role of women in the revolution is debated internally.

At a speech in Cambridge, Maryland, H. Rap Brown declares “If America don’t come around, we are going to burn it down!” Brown calls for an escalation of Black liberation politics.



On July 26, H. Rap Brown is arrested in Virginia for inciting a riot. He exclaims that “America has finally taken off the black robe and put on the white sheet!”



During the Summer Olympics under the banner of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, Olympic award winners John Carlos and Tommie Smith raise their fists in a Black Power salute while “The Star Spangled Banner” plays.



In the summer of 1968, Larry Neal’s article on the Black Arts Movement is published in Drama Review. In this article, Neal defines the Black aesthetic and argues that the Black artist must not be alienated from the Black community.



A four-hour gun battle occurs between Cleveland police and members of the Black nationalist New Libya, led by Fred Ahmed Evans. The conflict results in the deaths of three Black Power activists, three police officers, and a bystander and ends with Evans surrendering to police. Evans is ultimately convicted of murder and sentenced to death.



African American scholars on Africa Ronald Walters, James Turner, Herschelle Challenor, and Willard Johnson secede from the African Studies Association, the leading academic organization on Africa. Charging the association with Eurocentrism, they launch the African Heritage Studies Association, with John Henrik Clarke as the founding president, in 1969.



In September, J. Edgar Hoover’s publicly labeling of the BPP as an internal security threat leads to a series of destructive counterintelligence measures designed to disrupt the party’s effectiveness, in part by fostering internal conflict among Black Power organizations.



The Towards a Black University Conference is held at Howard University on November 13, with 1,900 attendees, to challenge Eurocentric teaching and research at historically Black colleges and universities. Students, professors, and organizers come from more than 40 states to participate.

1969

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declares the BPP the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” This leads to intensive political repression on the BPP.

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Armed Black students occupy a campus building at Cornell University.



The League of Revolutionary Black Workers forms in Detroit from the uniting of the revolutionary union movement groups from automobile plants in the metropolitan Detroit area.



A gun battle between Detroit police and security forces of the PGRNA at the New Bethel Baptist Church results in the death of a Detroit police officer; 142 Republic of New Afrika (RNA) workers and supporters are released after being arrested on the scene. Four PGRNA security officers are tried for murder and acquitted of all charges.



PGRNA president Robert F. Williams and his wife Mabel and two sons return from political exile in Tanzania. Williams fights extradition in Michigan before returning the North Carolina in 1975, where all charges against him are dropped.



Internecine conflict ignites between the members of the Southern California chapter of the BPP and the Us organization, leading to a shootout at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), on January 17, 1969. Defense Minister Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and Captain John Huggins are killed. Although several members of the Us organization escape, two are eventually arrested, charged, and convicted for murder of Carter and Huggins.



Black Power organizations continue to thrive despite being targeted by a cadre of government officials and agencies including local police departments, special services bureaus, the National Guard, and a dense network of informants and agent provocateurs.



The Weather Underground, a splinter group of Students for Democratic Society, is formed as a clandestine organization of white radicals who support the goals and strategies of the Black Liberation Army (BLA).



Black activist groups and street organizations in Illinois organize the Cairo United Front, formed in response to intimidation and racially motivated violence from white supremacists in Cairo, Illinois.



Bobby Seale, chairman of the BPP, is indicted on federal conspiracy charges stemming from a 1968 protest at the Democratic National Convention held in Chicago.



On April 2, 21 members of the Black Panther Party in Harlem, New York, are indicted for conspiracy to blow up several department stores, railroads, and police stations, as well as the New York Botanical Gardens. Although several spent close to a year in jail, all 21 were acquitted.



In the fall, Angela Davis becomes a member of the faculty at UCLA.

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Twenty-one members of the BPP in New York are charged with bombing and conspiracy to kill police officers. All BPP defendants are acquitted of the 156 charges. The trial lasts eight months, the longest in New York history at that time.



The Institute of the Black World (IBW) is established in Atlanta as a Black nationalist–oriented think tank of Black intellectuals. The IBW is led by the great and prolific historian Vincent Harding, with John Henrik Clarke, Walter Rodney, and Katherine Dunham as members.



The Student Organization of Black Unity (SOBU) is founded in Greensboro, North Carolina. The student group opposes the forced integration of schools and capitalism. It was headquartered at Malcolm X University.



Republican president Richard Nixon issues Executive Order 11478, requiring federal agencies to adopt affirmative programs to promote equal employment opportunities. Nixon’s affirmative action measure intends to promote jobs, entrepreneurship, and Black capitalism.



On December 4, Chicago Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark are murdered while sleeping, in an early morning raid coordinated by state and federal police officers. Approximately one hundred bullets are fired, with only one coming from a member of the Black Panther Party.



For five hours, members of the Southern California Chapter of the BPP resist a predawn raid by the Los Angeles Police Department. This police raid is the first time SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams are deployed in the United States.



The Black Manifesto becomes the platform of the Black Economic Development Conference. With James Forman as the key author and spokesman, the Black Manifesto demands reparations of $500,000 from white churches and synagogues.

1970

In retaliation for an attack against a Black Power group in West Point, Mississippi, an armed clandestine unit dynamites the Clay County Courthouse and shoots a suspected white supremacist on January 25.



The Congress of African People (CAP) is established in Atlanta, representing a united front of diverse Black nationalists, integrationists, artists, Pan-Africanists, intellectuals, and grassroots organizers. It will become an influential institution within the Black freedom struggle.



Toni Cade Bambara’s anthology The Black Woman is published. The contributors range from notable artists such as Nikki Giovanni and Abbey Lincoln to local activists and leaders. Bambara envisions an

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assessable anthology and ensures that the book will “fit in your pocket” and cost less than a dollar.

A citizens’ committee cochaired by Roy Wilkins finds that the Panthers’ civil liberties were violated during the late 1960s.



On July 2, 1970, Tommy “Ndugubede” Harper dies after placing a pipe bomb outside of the new police station at Willowbrook in Compton as a message against police oppression.



Huey Newton is released from prison provisionally on August 5.



George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, a collection of letters from prison, ignites Black Power activists, particularly those interested in armed revolution.



Soul Train debuts in Chicago in August as a local dance show. The highly popular show showcases the Black aesthetic in music, dance, fashion, and language through syndication beginning in October 1971.



Ideological differences within the BPP create a split whereby two factions exist, one side emphasizing community programs and the other focusing on armed revolution and defense.



Gil Scott-Heron’s song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is released on his album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.



On Labor Day weekend, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) hosts the Congress of African People, attempting to draw Black Power groups from the United States and abroad into a coalition.



Cotton Comes to Harlem is considered the first blaxploitation film of the era. Based on the writings of author Chester Himes, the film is directed by Ossie Davis. The action/comedy film is based on two Black Harlem police detectives’ attempt to solve a robbery from a back-toAfrica organization.



SNCC activists Ralph Featherstone and Che Payne are killed when their vehicle explodes while they are driving to the Maryland courthouse where H. Rap Brown is on trial. Movement forces believe that the deaths of Featherstone and Payne were political assassinations.



Kenneth Gibson is elected mayor of Newark, becoming the first Black leader of a major northeastern city.



A seminar on Pan-Africanists and revolutionary Black nationalists is held in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown, Guyana, in February 1970. African, Caribbean, and U.S.-born radicals form the PanAfrican Secretariat.

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The Congress of African People is convened in Atlanta, Georgia, and unites Black nationalists, Pan-Africanists, grassroots activists, and socialists around the kawaida principle of operational unity.



Baraka’s slogan “It’s Nation Time” represents a shift from urban rebellions to the construction of political institutions that promote vibrant Black communities.



The Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention is held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is convened by the Black Panther Party to rewrite the Constitution and advocate for an alternative government structure in the United States.



On August 7, 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson leads a guerrilla raid on a Marin County, California, courtroom. He arms three Black prisoners— Ruchell Magee, William Christmas, and James McClain—and takes Judge Harold Haley, District Attorney Gary Thomas, and three white female jurors hostage. All are killed in a gun battle with California correctional officers except Magee and Thomas. Jackson’s weapons were owned by activist-scholar Angela Davis, who went underground after the incident.



In New York on October 13, Angela Davis is arrested after evading capture for months.

1971

Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism is published, detailing Carmichael’s ideas for restoring Africa as a global superpower.



On March 8, Robert Webb is murdered in Harlem, heightening the tension within the Black Panther Party. Sam Napier, head of the BPP’s newspaper distribution, is tortured and killed at the Black Panther’s New York headquarters on April 17.



The FBI’s COINTELPRO program is exposed after the Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarizes federal offices and discovers records of counterinsurgency, which are turned over to media.



A PGRNA residence is raided by FBI agents and local police in Jackson, Mississippi, on August 18, resulting in the death of a Jackson police officer. Federal and state charges from the raid lead to the case of the RNA 11.



The Attica Prison Rebellion occurs in New York, resulting in the deaths of 29 inmates and 10 hostages. During the five-day crisis, more than 1,000 inmates participate. The prisoners demand better living conditions and fair treatment by guards.



The Pan-African Secretariat organizes African Solidarity Day from Guyana in May. Demonstrations are also organized in Belize, Peru, the

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United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. The African Solidarity Day network provides the foundation for African Liberation Day the following year.

Revolutionary author and prison inmate George Jackson is murdered by correctional officers at San Quentin State Prison.



Tupac Shakur is born to New York BPP member Afeni Shakur and Billy Garland on June 16. The famed rapper, actor, and recording artist becomes known for his Black Power–oriented lyrics that educate a new generation.



Charles Diggs of Michigan becomes the founding chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. As a member of Congress, Diggs is an important and vocal opponent of South Africa’s apartheid system.



Melvin Van Peeples’s film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is released. The independent movie leads to the Blaxploitation genre that emerged out of the Black Power Movement.

1972

Angela Davis’s criminal trial for allegedly aiding in Jonathan Jackson’s takeover of the courthouse begins. She is on trial with Ruchell Magee.



Angela Davis is acquitted of all charges. The protest surrounding her trial briefly unites activists including Black Panthers, prisoners, liberal intellectuals, and left-wing radicals, casting her as the most popular woman/icon of the Black Power era.



In Gary, Indiana, Black Power comes of age at the National Black Political Convention, considered one of the most important political, cultural, and intellectual gatherings of the Black Power era. The conference brings together a broad scope of 8,000 attendees under the banner “Unity without Uniformity.”



African Liberation Day is held on May 27. Organized by Owusu Sadaukai, a leading Black Power advocate in North Carolina.



Detroit activists Hayward Brown, John Boyd, and Mark Bethune are pursued in a national manhunt after being accused of shooting and wounding four undercover Detroit police on December 4. The gun battle is believed to have occurred after Brown, Boyd, and Bethune (aka “the Three Bs”) raid a known illicit drug house. Boyd and Bethune are killed by Atlanta police. Bethune is acquitted after his capture.



The National Black United Fund is established with the mission of promoting charitable fund-raising and philanthropy in the Black community.

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RAM organizer Muhammad Ahmad is captured in San Diego, where the Congress of African People is convening at the same time. His capture leads to defense efforts to win his release and the surfacing of survivors of the RAM network to form the Afrikan People’s Party (APP).



Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt, Vietnam War veteran and Black Panther leader, began a 27-year sentence for the alleged kidnap and murder of a schoolteacher. Ji-Jaga is released from prison in 1997 after it is discovered that the prosecution withheld evidence during the trial.

1973

In two different shooting incidents in New Orleans on December 31, 1972, and January 7, 1973, a Black sniper kills 9 people, including 5 police officers, and wounds 13 others. The sniper is AWOL GI Mark Essex. From elevated position on New Orleans’s Howard Johnson Hotel, Essex is eventually killed by police shooting from a helicopter.



Black Power activists began organizing the Sixth Pan-African Congress, a reprisal of W. E. B. Du Bois’s earlier work on Pan-Africanism.



Maynard Jackson is elected the first African American mayor of Atlanta and of any major city in the South.



The National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) is founded in May by radical activists, including Michelle Wallace, Flo Kennedy, Margaret Sloan, Doris Wright, and Faith Ringold. The NBFO is established “to address ourselves to the particular and specific needs of the larger, but almost cast-aside half of the Black race in Amerikkka, the Black woman.”



New Jersey police ambush Black Panthers Zayd Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, and Assata Shakur on the New Jersey Turnpike on May 2, resulting in the deaths of Zayd Shakur and police officer Werner Foerster. Assata Shakur and Sundiata Acoli are subsequently captured.



Thousands attend International African Prisoner of War Solidarity Day organized in Jackson, Mississippi, to respond to repression of the Black Power Movement, including the Republic of New Afrika 11, H. Rap Brown, Muhammad Ahmad, Ruchell Magee, and BLA political prisoners, among others.

1974

Faced with an ever-lengthening criminal record, Huey Newton jumps bail and arrives in Cuba on Thanksgiving.



The future of Black Power becomes a series of bitter struggles, illuminated at the National Black Political Convention in Little Rock, Arkansas. The convention’s refusal to support the construction of an independent political party angers Harold Cruse and others, who advo-

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cate the idea as the culmination of the Black militant potential built up during the 1960s.

In August, Elaine Brown is appointed chairman of the Black Panther Party. She is the first and only woman to hold this position.



The African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) hosts the conference “Which Way Forward in the Black Liberation Movement?” in which the debate between Marxist-Leninists and Black nationalists intensifies, leading to division in the ALSC and African Liberation Day mobilizations. Amiri Baraka announces his embrace of Marxism.



The Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” is published. The statement defines radical Black feminism and critiques the predominately white feminist movement and the male-dominant Black freedom movement.



The Sixth Pan-African Congress takes place in Tanzania. Convener C. L. R. James boycotts the congress, since Caribbean states ban grassroots movements and organizations from attending. Ideological conflicts between Marxist-Leninists and Black nationalists characterize the gathering.



A Senate committee chaired by Frank Church exposes widespread abuse of federal power, including the Watergate Scandal, the FBI, and COINTELPRO’s clandestine role in the destruction of Black Power, New Left, and antiwar movements.



Joan Little murders prison guard during an attempted rape. Her case unified Black Power activists, feminists, and anti-death penalty activists.

1975

The National Council of Black Studies is founded.



Under the leadership of Elaine Brown, the BPP officially settles into its new role as a local political organization.



In November, Eldridge Cleaver surrenders to U.S. authorities after seven years in exile.

1979

Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman by Michelle Wallace is published. This controversial book challenges the marginalization and stereotypes of Black women, especially those engaged in Black liberation politics.



BLA member Assata Shakur is “liberated” from prison by BLA members and white allies and ultimately gains political asylum in Cuba.

1982

The BPP closes the doors of its community school in Oakland.

1984

The New Afrikan People’s Organization is founded by former members of the PGRNA, RAM, and the House of Umoja.

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1986

The FBI arrests Mutulu Shakur for violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Shakur evades capture for six years. The specific charges include supporting the prison break of Assata Shakur and robbing a Brinks truck in New York.

1989

On August 22, Newton is shot three times near a crack house in Oakland. Conservative politicians use the inglorious demise as a blanket indictment of the BPP’s work as well as Black Power activism.

1998

Stokely Carmichael dies as Kwame Ture in Guinea on November 15, but Black Power continues to influence African American social, political, and cultural life.

Armed Resistance in the Black Power Movement

Armed resistance is the individual or collective use of force for protection, protest, or other goals of insurgent political action and in defense of human rights. One element that distinguishes the Black Power Movement from the Civil Rights Movement is the question of armed resistance. While armed resistance was advocated and practiced in the Civil Rights Movement, activists debated its use and viability. During the Black Power Movement, armed resistance was nearly universally accepted. Armed resistance emerged in different forms during the Black Power Movement. These forms included armed self-defense, retaliatory violence, enforcer coercion, spontaneous uprisings, and guerrilla warfare. The emergence of the Black Power Movement constituted an ideological shift in the politics of the Black freedom struggle. One ideological shift was the emphasis on the advocacy of armed resistance as opposed to the Civil Rights Movement’s primary rhetoric of nonviolence. The pervasive practice of armed self-defense is also one of the key distinguishing aspects of Black Power from the Civil Rights Movement. The “Black Power” slogan was popularized during the 1966 March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. Unlike with previous national Civil Rights protests, national media outlets highlighted the role of the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense and Justice protecting the march. The decision by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to concede to demands by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activists to include the armed Deacons represent a significant political shift in the Black freedom struggle. Activists also debated the efficacy of nonviolence and armed resistance during the march. Black people seeking freedom in North America since the 16th century had historically practiced armed resistance. Particularly in the southern freedom struggle armed resistance was practiced, while nonviolence was projected during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Two major critics of the hegemony of nonviolence in the Black freedom struggle during this period were Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams. Malcolm emerged in national attention after becoming a national spokesman for the Nation of Islam. He was known for his

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Two members of the Black Panther Party are met on the steps of the State Capitol in Sacramento, May 2, 1967, by Police Lt. Ernest Holloway, who informs them they will be allowed to keep their weapons as long as they cause no trouble and do not disturb the peace. (Bettmann/Getty)

advocacy of armed resistance. Malcolm stated that “I don’t even call it violence when its self-defense. I call it intelligence” (Malcolm X 1964). Williams was forced into exile in Cuba, China, and Tanzania after building an armed resistance group in Monroe, North Carolina. Williams argued that “We must defend ourselves. We must fight back. . . . Not only must we defend ourselves violently, we must do it collectively” (Williams 1964). Both Malcolm X and Williams became icons of the Black Power Movement.

Paramilitary Organization Several Black Power Movement groups were or had paramilitary organizations as part of their structure. Paramilitary groups can be distinguished from informal associations set up to provide security for southern Black communities during the Civil Rights Movement in part by their specific chain of command. Paramilitary groups were composed of civilians, not professional military personnel, but were organized and operated like formal military or law enforcement groups.



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Before the emergence of the Black Power Movement, Robert Williams established a paramilitary group in Monroe called the Black Guard in 1957. Unlike previous informal defense networks in the southern Civil Rights Movement, the Deacons for Defense and Justice were organized with a clear chain of command and viewed themselves as filling the vacuum left in the African American community by federal, state, and local law enforcement that was either sympathetic or neutral to white supremacist violence. Deacons for Defense and Justice is an important transitional organization from Civil Rights to Black Power. The Deacons were a response to an increase of white supremacist terrorism in reaction to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The first Deacons group was formed in the northern Louisiana town of Jonesboro in 1964 as a response to Ku Klux Klan harassment. A paramilitary organization in the southern Louisiana city of Bogalusa was formed to protect Black leadership, voter registration activists, and the local Black community. The Bogalusa group became a chapter of the Deacons and would receive national media attention due to its role in a desegregation campaign in the city. The Deacons also received national attention due to their role in guarding the Meredith March and its spokespersons, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael. The Deacons were an inspiration to Black youths around the United States and an influence on the Black Power Movement. Inspired by the Deacons for Defense in the Mississippi Delta and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was formed in Oakland, California, in October 1966. The Black Panthers were the most popular expression of armed self-defense. The BPP first gained attention because of its armed patrols of the Oakland Police Department to curb harassment. Several Black Power Movement organizations had paramilitary organs of their organizations. The Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) spoke of the Deacons in its literature and reached out to the Louisiana-based group for collaboration. With Robert Williams as its international chairman, RAM organized a youth and paramilitary wing, the Black Guard, in New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit. The cultural nationalist Us organization and its kawaida affiliates had the Simba Wachanga (Young Lions) as a youth and paramilitary formation. The Black Legion, first organized in Dayton, Ohio, was the military force of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA). In 1971, the New African Security Force (NASF) replaced the Black Legion as the defense wing of the PGRNA.

Different Forms in the Same Struggle There were several forms of armed resistance in the Black Power Movement. We will discuss and provide examples during the 1960s and 1970s for armed

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self-defense, retaliatory violence, spontaneous rebellions, guerrilla warfare, and armed struggle. These terms are not mutually exclusive, as varying forms of armed resistance occurred within the same event.

Armed Self-Defense The most pervasive form of armed resistance in the Black Power Movement was the advocacy and practice of armed self-defense. Armed self-defense is the protection of life, persons, and property from aggressive assault, applying the use of force necessary to thwart or neutralize attack. There were numerous examples of armed self-defense in the Black Power Movement. One notable occurrence was the defense of the African American community of Cairo, Illinois, in the late 1960s and the 1970s. In 1969 activist groups and street organizations organized the Cairo United Front (CUF), formed particularly in response to intimidation and racially motivated violence from the White Hats, a 600-member white vigilante group deputized by the Alexander County sheriff. Cairo Blacks complained of being harassed by the White Hats at sporting events and other assemblies. A crucial turning point in Cairo came when white vigilantes fired rounds into the predominately Black Pyramid Courts housing project for over an hour. Pyramid Courts residents returned fire in self-defense. The attack on Pyramid Courts and subsequent resistance was the precipitating event in the creation of the CUF as an umbrella organization, with former SNCC activist theologian Charles Koen serving as its spokesperson. Violence increased after the CUF issued demands to the local government, initiating demonstrations and a decade-long boycott of white businesses to challenge employment discrimination. In response to vigilante attacks on their community, Cairo Blacks organized self-defense for protection and to repel attacks from white vigilantes and law enforcement. Between 1969 and 1972, gunfire and arson were “almost daily occurrences” in the southern Illinois city. Cairo experienced approximately 150 evenings of gunfire in the 1970s. The Black community had little faith they could receive protection from law enforcement, as evidence was produced that gunfire into the CUF office came from the dome on top of the police station located across the street from the activist headquarters. Blacks also viewed state police sent to bring order as an “occupational army” (Seng 1982). The lack of intervention and the possible involvement of police strengthened the argument for Black armed self-defense. The CUF established the United Front Liberators (UFL) as its own paramilitary organization. The UFL engaged in a “survival patrol” for the protection of the African American community from white racists. In the Black nationalist tradition of Black Power, the CUF organized security for residents of Pyramid Courts,



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called for the exclusion of local and state law enforcement from the development, positioned “barricades and check points” at the complex entrance, and asked residents to participate in an internal process to handle disputes and criminal behavior. Armed self-defense was also reinforced through the organization symbol of a revolver lying on top of a handgun (Pimblott 2017).

Retaliatory Violence Retaliatory violence is physical reprisal for attacks on people or institutions associated with a movement. An example of retaliatory violence occurred in West Point, Mississippi, on January 25, 1970. The small Mississippi town was engaged in a hostile school desegregation process in early 1970. On January 23, Blacks assembled at the historically African American Mary Holmes College to organize a boycott demanding the establishment of an advisory panel appointed by the Black community for the local school board. The office of the Clay County Community Development Corporation (CCCDC), located on the Mary Holmes campus, was firebombed on January 24. Along with the damage to the office, CCCDC leader John Buffington declared that the firebombing was intended to destroy petitions containing 1,200 signatures of Blacks protesting the recent decisions of the local school board. The firebombing of the CCCDC received a swift response to what was perceived as an attack from local white supremacists. A dynamite bomb was detonated at the Clay County Courthouse at 9:50 p.m. the following day, 18 hours after the fire at Mary Holmes. The explosion blew a hole in the concrete foundation of the courthouse, shattering all the windows and glass doors on the north side of the two-story building. Glass doors and windows in at least 10 offices within a two-block perimeter of the courthouse were also smashed from the impact of the bombing. No deaths or casualties resulted from the explosion. A local white store owner, Billy Wilson, was wounded by gunfire five minutes after the bombing of the courthouse. According to witnesses, a 1965 Chevrolet with three African American males drove by Wilson’s store, nearly a half mile from the county courthouse. Wilson had come outside of his store after the explosion to see what had happened. He was in front of his store as a vehicle approached. One of the vehicle’s passengers suddenly fired several shots from a handgun at Wilson. He was wounded in his right thigh and was taken to a local hospital. Rumors circulated prior to the shooting that Wilson bragged about participating in the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till and was married to the former wife of Roy Bryant, one of the acknowledged murderers of Till. Historian Akinyele Umoja argues that a unit of former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members including Ralph Featherstone and William “Che” Payne carried out this act of retaliation.

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Spontaneous Rebellion Spontaneous rebellion is an unplanned, unorganized, politically motivated collective violence with the intention of redressing injustice. Due to the numerous occurrences of urban rebellion frequently labeled “riots” by corporate media and the power structure, in the summer of 1966 and 1967 journalists coined the term “the long hot summer.” Often a precipitating event (generally an act of actual or perceived police misconduct) sparked mass anger against and resistance to police from street forces (aka gangs), working and poor people. The expropriation of commodities and the destruction of particularly white entrepreneurs and whiteowned firms located in predominately African American communities also demonstrate the intentional character of urban uprisings. The spontaneous rebellions often became symbols of resistance and preceded increased organized Black Power political activity. Scholar activist Maulana Karenga argues that the Watts Rebellion of 1965 was a seminal event that ushered in the Black Power Movement. While spontaneous rebellions occurred in the 1960s prior to it in places such as Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 and Harlem, New York, and McComb, Mississippi in 1964, Watts surpassed its predecessors during the decade in terms of loss of life, property damage, and impact on the Black freedom struggle. The Watts Rebellion was sparked after the August 11 arrest of an intoxicated African American motorist, 21-year-old Marquette Frye, by a white police officer. A melee ensued after Frye’s mother appeared on the scene and was manhandled and ultimately arrested along with her sons. Six days of unrest resulted in 34 deaths, over 3,400 arrests, and $40 million in damages. Calls for calm from traditional Black leadership, including Civil Rights spokespersons such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were rejected by Black rebels in the streets. Los Angeles police battled with Black snipers, engaging in guerrilla tactics. The slogan “Burn, baby, burn” was chanted in the streets, representing the rage of Black residents against enterprises owned by nonBlacks in low-income Black neighborhoods. Black entrepreneurs posted “soul brother” signs in their businesses to avoid looting and arson of their businesses. With local police unable to control the uprising, it was necessary to mobilize 14,000 national guardsmen to restore order. California governor Edmund Brown empaneled the McCone Commission to investigate the cause of the uprising. The commission reported that the rebellion was caused by long-standing charges of injustice and inequality, particularly substandard housing, unemployment, and lack of educational opportunities in the Black community of Los Angeles. The Watts Rebellion provided an inspiration to Black Power militants. From political exile in Cuba, Robert Williams issued a statement indicating that the uprising represented “the beginning of a ferrous and devastating firestorm. . . . We are living in an age . . . of revolution.” He exhorted the encouraged Black people



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to “resist, resist, resist, burn, burn, burn. . . . [F]reedom now or death” (Williams 2005). In its journal Black America, RAM issued a statement titled “On the Eve of Black Revolution: Los Angeles Proves We Will Win” contextualizing the uprising as a part of Black people’s “struggle for national liberation” (“On the Eve of Black Revolution” n.d.). After the revolt, Los Angeles activist and intellectual Maulana Karenga would form the Black nationalist Us organization. Us would annually commemorate the Watts Rebellion on August 11 as Uhuru Day (Kiswahili for “freedom”). Newark, New Jersey, exploded on July 12, 1967, in response to police violence. Newark was a Black majority city with little Black political representation. An Italian American minority controlled City Hall and administration of the police department. While Blacks were 54 percent of the city’s population, only 11 percent of its police officers were African American. The disturbance was initiated after 2 white police officers severely beat a Black cab driver, John Smith, arrested on routine traffic violations. Residents observed the badly beaten Smith being brought into Newark’s Fourth Precinct, located across from a predominately African American housing project. The local CORE chapter mobilized hundreds of people to the precinct to protest the violent arrest of Smith. The CORE rally was attacked by Newark police and sparked a spontaneous response by Black youths, who hurled “bricks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails” at the police precinct (Woodard 1999, 80). This reaction to police violence escalated as Black youths fought police with stones and firebombs and destroyed property during six days of unrest. The National Guard was mobilized and deployed to Newark on the second day of the uprising. Ultimately 26 people were killed, with $10 million in property loss. Newark activist Larry Hamm described the Newark Rebellion as a “political awakening” that “changed the course of history in the city” (Hamm 2007). Like Watts, the Newark Rebellion had a political impact on the local and national Black Power Movement. Activist and renowned author Amiri Baraka emerged as a national leader and spokesperson of the Black Power Movement after being arrested and beaten unconscious by police officers on the second day of the uprising. Baraka was a significant organizer of a grassroots Black Power Movement in Newark that would elect the city’s first Black mayor and achieve Black political representation in the Black majority city. A national Black Power Convention was convened in Newark eight days after the beating of John Smith. Historian Komozi Woodard describes the decision by convention organizers to not postpone or move the previously planned Newark gathering to another location in response to the unrest as “a bold act of defiance” (Woodard 1999). Weeks following the Newark Rebellion, the Detroit Rebellion of 1967 was precipitated after a police raid of an unlicensed after-hours nightclub in a predominately Black neighborhood on the morning of July 23. Hundreds of residents immediately assembled in response to reports of police misconduct on the scene.

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The conflict between the police and the crowd escalated into four days of violence, including sniping attacks on police officers and looting of white-owned enterprises. The violence resulted in 43 deaths (33 Blacks and 10 whites), 7,200 arrests, and a $1 billion impact on the economy, including property damage to over 2,000 buildings. To quell the rebellion, Michigan governor George Romney ordered in the Michigan Nation Guard, and U.S. president Lyndon Johnson mobilized the U.S. Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. Like Watts, militant Black activists were inspired by the Detroit Rebellion. An editorial in the northern California Black Power proclaimed that the Detroit uprising represented “the biggest battles in this latest stage of the war between white America and Black America.” The Black Power editorial went on to state that “Black America showed the world . . . in the Battle of Detroit that Black People can and will take what is rightfully ours: our freedom from white oppression. We are on the road to national liberation” (“The Battle of Detroit” 1967). Detroit activist General Baker, who was detained at the onset of the disturbance and incarcerated for 15 days for curfew violation, called the rebellion “the defining moment in this city’s history” (Baker n.d.). Out of the Detroit Riot grew the militant consciousness that birthed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, which organized a 1968 wildcat strike that interrupted production at the Dodge Main auto factory. Disturbances across the United States following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, constituted what historian Peter B. Levy (2011) called “the greatest wave of social unrest since the Civil War.” From April 4 through April 14, 43 people killed and 27,000 were arrested in over 125 local disturbances in 36 states (and the District of Columbia). Major rebellions took place in Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas City, and Washington, D.C., and 58,000 National Guard and U.S. military personnel were deployed to U.S. cities to control the uprising during this period (Levy 2011, 5–6). Some credit the militant spirit of Black youths after the King assassination with the transition of the BPP from a regional into a national organization. Prior to the King assassination, the BPP was only in the California Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Seattle. After the April 1968 uprising, the BPP expanded to New York, Chicago, Boston, Kansas City, New Orleans, and several other urban centers across the United States.

Guerrilla Warfare Guerrilla warfare is irregular military tactics efforts utilized by small groups to harass, attack, and strike a larger, more resourced opponent. One of the most dynamic examples of guerrilla warfare was the “liberation” or escape of Assata Shakur from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey in November 1979. Shakur was a political prisoner held in the Clinton penitentiary

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serving a life plus 35-year sentence for the deaths of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster and Black Panther Zayd Malik Shakur. Assata Shakur’s attorneys argued that she was innocent due to the fact she was paralyzed from the onset of the gun battle after being shot twice in the back with her hands up in a surrender position. Nonetheless, in separate trials Assata Shakur and Sundiata Acoli were convicted for the murder of Foerster and their comrade Zayd Shakur. Shakur escaped incarceration after three Black males entered the Clinton facility with concealed weapons. After meeting Shakur inside the visiting room, the armed men took two correctional officers hostage, commandeered a prison van and drove to a nearby educational facility, and then fled in another vehicle. It is believed that the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and a collective of white allies were responsible for this revolutionary act. In fact, a BLA communiqué took responsibility for Assata’s “liberation” from the Clinton facility. Shakur eventually emerged in Cuba with political asylum. New York Black Panther leader Sekou Odinga, PGRNA worker Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Italian national Sylvia Baraldini, and radical white activist Marilyn Buck were tried and convicted on charges related to the escape of Assata Shakur (Umoja 1999, 148–149).

Armed Struggle Within the Black Power Movement groups also advocated armed struggle, the revolutionary seizing of state power through military means. Urban guerrilla warfare was often the means of armed struggle proposed. Guerrilla or irregular warfare is the use of deception and nonconventional fighting tactics against a traditional military foe. Robert Williams began to articulate a strategy for armed struggle for Black Power while in exile in Cuba. In “Urban Guerilla Warfare,” an article published in RAM’s organ Black America in 1965, Williams asserted that We prefer peaceful negotiations, but our oppressors have proved to us that they are not susceptible to such mild pressures for reform and they will use massive violence to contain our struggle. When massive violence comes, the USA will become a bedlam of chaos and confusion. . . . The new concept of revolution defies military science and tactics. The new concept is lightning campaigns conducted in highly sensitive urban communities. . . . Such a campaign will bring about the end to oppression and social justice in the USA . . . and create the basis for the implementation of the U.S. Constitution with justice and equality for all people. (Williams n.d.) This articulation of armed struggle to seize power differed from Williams’s previous advocacy of armed resistance for “survival and self-defense.” Young Black Power activists were inspired by William’s vision of Black freedom fighters organizing major military campaigns of urban guerrilla warfare to tackle the white power structure.

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RAM is an example of a Black Power organization inspired by Williams’s concept of armed struggle. RAM envisioned engaging in a revolutionary war against U.S. capitalism and imperialism. Because of the insurgent character of RAM, it maintained its posture as a clandestine organization. In a document titled “On the Organization of Ghetto Youth,” RAM argued for the necessity of training Black youths for “the ultimate stage, protracted war for national liberation.” The vehicle of organization that RAM proposed was a “Black Liberation Army” (Revolutionary Action Movement 1969). The BLA was an underground network to fight for the interests of the Black freedom struggle. The BLA provides a prime example of the advocacy of armed struggle to end oppression and secure liberation through state power. While the BLA originally represented a decentralized network of armed collectives in the Black Power Movement, the BLA Coordinating Committee (BLA-CC) was established in the 1970s to unite the various units. The BLA-CC saw protracted armed struggle as the central vehicle to usher in Black liberation. The BLA-CC argued that We maintain, on the military level, urban guerilla war, based on the principles of protracted struggle[,] can succeed in the aim of creating a crisis of the capitalist system of oppression. And that urban guerilla struggle serves as a dialectical and necessary element in the fight for national black self-determination. (Black Liberation Army Coordinating Committee n.d.) Besides the November 2, 1979, “liberation” of Assata Shakur from a New Jersey prison, the BLA claimed involvement in or was suspected of other escapes from incarceration, the expropriation of funds from several financial institutions, and retaliatory acts of resistance to political repression and law enforcement abuse in the Black community. Black Power advocates of armed struggle were the focus of political repression due to their potential for disrupting the status quo. RAM was targeted by federal grand juries on conspiracy charges. The BLA was the focus of federal and local task forces and counterinsurgency efforts, leaving several members incarcerated or forced into exile outside of the United States.

Women and Armed Resistance in the Black Power Movement Black men and women have been engaged in the armed response to terrorist violence against Black communities. Black women have historically participated in the practice and advocacy of armed resistance. Harriet Tubman was known to carry a handgun on her plantation raids to help other enslaved Africans escape captivity. Ida Wells articulated that “The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.” Gloria Richardson, Ella Baker, and Ethel Azalea Johnson were among militant Civil

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Rights activists whose advocacy of armed self-defense contributed to Black Power. New York Black nationalist Queen Mother Audley Moore supported armed movements in the South and gave examples of the effective use of armed resistance in her oratory on reparations. Ethel Azalea Johnson was a key organizer of the Monroe Movement, particularly serving as a contributor to Robert and Mabel Williams’s newsletter The Crusader. Another New York activist, Mae Mallory, was a key participant in the solidarity network to support the Monroe Movement through fund-raising and the transport of weapons and ammunition to the Monroe Black Guard. In southern communities, women clearly participated in informal self-defense networks in the southern Civil Rights Movement. The rise of paramilitary organizations like the the Deacons for Defense meant a more masculinist orientation associated with armed resistance in the Black freedom struggle. Most Deacons groups were exclusively male. Women participated in Black Power paramilitary groups despite the development of the masculinist orientation. Women such as Tarika Lewis joined the BPP armed patrols of the police in Oakland, California. The Us organization would form an all-female armed defense unit called Matamba, named after the 17th-century West African state formed by warrior queen Nzinga. Boston Black nationalist Alajo Adegbolola organized the PGRNA’s NASF as the official paramilitary organ of the New African republic in 1971. The NASF required all New African government workers, male and female, to participate in military training and in the NASF chain of command. Adegbolola’s daughter Fulani Sunni-Ali was a respected lieutenant in the chain of command. Women were key participants in the Black underground. One such underground activist, Saundra Pratt (aka Nsondi ji-Jaga), was found dead in 1971, believed to be murdered in internecine conflict in the BPP. In memorial, Pratt’s husband and comrade Geronimo ji-Jaga praised her as “High Commander of the Amazonian Army. . . . Symbol of the Black Guerilla Woman of the 21st Century” (Pratt n.d.). Harlem BPP member Assata Shakur was forced underground and hunted by law enforcement, who referred to her as the “Soul of the Black Liberation Army.”

Black Power Battles Gun battles between Black Power activists and police officers, who were perceived as authority of the white power structure, were significant flashpoints of the movement. We will review a few of these occurrences to demonstrate the nature of combat between Black Power forces and organs of political repression.

Glenville, Cleveland, July 23–28, 1968 A four-hour gun battle between Cleveland police and a Black Power organization, the Black nationalists of New Libya, ensued the evening of July 23, 1968. The

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Black nationalists of New Libya were a Cleveland-based organization led by a U.S. military veteran, 37-year-old Fred Ahmed Evans. Reports of Cleveland Blacks stockpiling weapons led to an increase of police surveillance on Evans and the New Libyans, which was perceived as harassment. Shooting ensued after a verbal conflict between police and Evans and the New Libyans over the increased surveillance. The conflict resulted in the deaths of three Black Power activists, three police officers, and a bystander. Fifteen others, including New Libya combatants, police officers, and observers, were wounded. The shooting stopped after an unarmed Evans surrendered to police officers. An uprising and four more days of insurgency followed Evans’s surrender. Evans was ultimately convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Later his sentence was commuted to life. Evans died of cancer while incarcerated in 1978.

New Bethel, Detroit, March 29, 1969 The second annual convention of the PGRNA abruptly concluded after hostility emerged between Detroit police officers and PGRNA security on March 29, 1969. The PGRNA was established the previous year in Detroit as 500 Black nationalists convened and declared their independence from the United States, demanded reparations, and established a provisional government. The second annual meeting was at the New Bethel Baptist Church, pastored by Reverend C. L. Franklin (the father of singer Aretha Franklin). The conflict began after the adjournment of the evening’s activities around midnight. Shooting was set in motion after Detroit police officers Michael Czapski and Richard Worobec attempted to stop a delegation of New African officials including PGRNA vice president Gaidi Obadele (aka attorney Milton Henry) and reparations pioneer Queen Mother Moore. Czapski was immediately killed, and Worobec fled the scene and signaled for reinforcements. A contingent of 50 Detroit police officers responded to New Bethel, breaking down the door of the sanctuary. The invading police came under sniper fire but responded with overwhelming force, taking control of Bethel. While the police discharged over 800 rounds of ammunition, no New Africans were killed, and only 4 were wounded. Over 142 conference participants were arrested after quelling the resistance of the NASF. Reverend Franklin and local political activists contacted Wayne County Recorder’s Court judge George Crockett. Crockett immediately set up temporary court at the police headquarters and released 130 of the arrested New Africans. Three members of the NASF, Chaka Fuller, Rafael Viera, and Alfred 2X Hibbits, were charged and tried for the murder of Officer Czapski but were subsequently acquitted. Fuller was mysteriously murdered months after the acquittal (Davenport 2015).



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41st and Central, Los Angeles, December 8, 1969 In 1968, Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover declared the BPP the greatest internal threat to U.S. security, which signaled an increased repressive counterinsurgency operation to neutralize the organization. The BPP was victim to 13 raids by law enforcement the year following Hoover’s statement. Of course, the Chicago police assassination of Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark during their raid of the Illinois chapter of the BPP is one of the most horrific events of the Black Power Movement. On the other hand, the resistance of members of the BPP in South Central Los Angeles to a predawn raid by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) of their office was noted as an inspirational moment by movement activists and supporters. One of the remarkable elements of this event was that the Los Angeles BPP office was primarily staffed by teenagers, who had been trained by former U.S. Army ranger Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt. In contrast, the LAPD mobilized its SWAT team against the BPP, the first time in U.S. history that this elite unit was deployed. The BPP traded gunfire with the LAPD and SWAT force for five hours before surrendering. For his role in training the Los Angeles BPP group, Geronimo ji-Jaga (who was not at the scene of the conflict) saw his reputation as a military leader increase to heroic status in the ranks of the organization.

Legacy of Armed Resistance in the Black Power Movement Armed resistance was a key feature of the Black Power Movement. The advocacy and practice of armed self-defense was virtually universal within the movement, and spontaneous rebellion demonstrated the mass rejection of the nonviolence that was promoted during the Civil Rights Movement. Armed resistance also exemplifies the level of hostility, conflict, and upheaval during the period. Battles in Cairo (Illinois), Cleveland, Detroit, and Los Angeles occurred in urban centers across the United States as armed militants and Black communities were under siege by police. The continued incarceration and exile of combatants of the Black Power Movement represents a negative residue of the period and an example of continued hostility between Black Power advocates and the U.S. government. Akinyele Umoja See also: Assassinations; Black Liberation Army; Black Panther Party; Deacons for Defense and Justice; Koen, Charles E., Jr.; Malcolm X; Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley; Pratt, Geronimo ji-Jaga; Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa; Revolutionary Action Movement; Shakur, Assata; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Us Organization; Williams, Robert F.

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Further Reading Afoh, Kwame, Chokwe Lumumba, Imari Obadele, and Ahmed Obafemi. 1991. A Brief History of Black Struggle in America. Baton Rouge, LA: House of Songhay. Austin, Curtis. 2008. Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas. Baker, General. n.d. “General Baker Speaks: Rebellion, Detroit 1967.” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCkMz70QP8Q. “The Battle of Detroit: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet Baby!” 1967. Black Power 1(8) (September 1967): 1, https://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/BPP _Nocal/513.BPPNC.BlackPower.Sept.1967.pdf. Black Liberation Army Coordinating Committee. n.d. “Message to the Black Movement: A Political Statement from the Black Underground.” Michigan State University, https://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/messageblackmovement.pdf. Brown, Scot. 2005. Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization and Black Cultural Nationalism. New York: New York University Press. Cleaver, Kathleen, and George Katsiaficus. 2014. Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. New York: Routledge. Davenport, Christian. 2015. How Social Movements Die: Repression and De-Mobilization of the Republic of New Africa. Boston: Cambridge University Press. Hamm, Larry. 2007. “On 40th Anniversary of Newark Rebellion, a Look Back at Historic Unrest That Changed the Nation.” Democracy Now, July 13, https://www.democ racynow.org/2007/7/13/on_40th_anniversary_of_newark_rebellion. Hill, Lance. 2006. Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. Levy, Peter. 2011. “The Dream Deferred: The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Holy Week Uprisings of 1968.” In Baltimore ’68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City, edited by Jessica I. Elfenbein, Thomas L. Hollowak, and Elizabeth M. Nix, 5–6. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Malcolm X. 1964. “Speech to Peace Corps Workers.” Malcolm X, December 12, http:// malcolmxfiles.blogspot.com/2013/07/speech-to-peace-corps-workers-december.html. “On the Eve of Black Revolution: Los Angeles Proves We Will Win.” n.d. Black America, 3, in Max Stanford History Vault, Papers of the Revolutionary Action Movement 1962–1996 (microfiche), UPA Collections, Lexis-Nexis. Pimblott, Kerry. 2017. Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Pratt, Geronimo (Ji-Jaga). n.d. “Death of a Freedom Fighter: Saundra Pratt.” In AfroAmerican Liberation Army, Humanity, Freedom, and Peace, Freedom Archives, https:// www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC32_scans/32.Various.BLM.Humanity FreedomPeace.pdf. Revolutionary Action Movement. 1969. “On the Organization of Black Ghetto Youth.” In Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations United States Senate, Ninety-First Congress, First Session, Riots, Civil, and Criminal Disorder, June 26 and 30, 1969, 4221–4224. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.



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Seng, Michael P. 1982. “The Cairo Experience: Civil Rights Litigation in a Racial Powder Keg.” John Marshall Law School Fair and Affordable Housing Commentary, 61 Or. L. Rev. 285, 6–10. Shakur, Assata. 2001. Assata: An Autobiography. New York: Lawrence Hill Books. Umoja, Akinyele. 1999. “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party.” New Political Science 21: 2. Umoja, Akinyele. 2014. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: New York University Press. Williams, Robert F. n.d. “Urban Guerilla Warfare,” Max Stanford History Vault, 7. Williams, Robert F. 1964. “On Black Self-Defense.” Black America 8 (Fall), in Max Stanford History Vault, Publications-Black America file. Williams, Robert F. 2005. “The Age of Revolution and Urban Rebellion.” SelfDetermination, Self-Respect, and Self-defense: An Audio Documentary as told by Mabel Williams. Audio CD. Chico, CA: Ak Press Audio. Woodard, Komozi. 1999. A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Black Power, Red Power, and the Potential of Red-Black Unity

The forging of alliances between American Indians and imported Africans for the common purpose of opposing white supremacy traces back to the late 17th century, when both were commodified as chattel slaves by the English in what is now the southeastern United States. Indeed, such unity was in many cases not only inevitable but also intrinsic, the circumstances of bondage having shortly resulted in the emergence of numerous Red-Black and triracial peoples along the Eastern Seaboard from Maryland to Florida and along the Gulf Coast as far west as present-day Texas. These offered the most effective resistance to Anglophone colonialism in the Southeast throughout the 18th century and two-thirds of the 19th century. An early example is that of the Yamasees, a Red-Black people in what is now South Carolina who assembled a multinational military coalition to wage a war in 1715 that effectively ended the colony’s trade in American Indian slaves. Better remembered today are the Seminoles, a people whose very name derives from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning “runaway” or “free” and who first began to cohere in northern Florida during the 1770s as an amalgam composed in roughly equal parts of Hitchiti/Mikísuúkî-speaking Yamasees, Guales, and Apalachees; Maskóki-speaking Upper Creeks and Yuchis; and Afro-Seminole Creole–speaking Estelustis (Black Seminoles). Beginning in 1815, the latter played a crucial role in fighting the United States to a stalemate in three separate wars, the last of them not ending until 1858. While similar pockets of politically conscious unity among racially hybridized indigenous peoples have persisted in other locales as well, in view of credible estimates that at least one in three contemporary African Americans is of Red-Black or triracial admixture, it might be reasonably expected that the pattern would be far more pervasive today. That it isn’t is due mainly to the corrosive effects of settler policies specifically designed to divide Red from Black during the last third of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Tellingly, this was the period in which the number of American Indians acknowledged as such by the federal government, typically by applying a “standard” of half or a greater “degree of Indian blood” (i.e., “blood quantum”) for identification

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purposes, was reduced to its nadir of barely over 237,000.1 Concomitantly, under the “one-drop rule” all persons of Red-Black or triracial descent were officially designated Black or “colored.” Hence, both the conceptual structure of white racism and the manner in which it was applied increasingly undermined prospects of maintaining Red-Black unity. Indeed, the oppression of American Indians went all but entirely unmentioned by Black liberationists and vice versa.

Black Power, Red Power, and Renewed Potential During the mid-1960s, Malcolm X declared that “When I say Black, I mean nonwhite—black, brown, red or yellow” (Malcolm X 1994, 64, my emphasis). Observing that “the real black revolution . . . has already swept white supremacy out of Africa [and] Asia . . . is sweeping it out of Latin America . . . and is even now manifesting itself right here among the black masses of this country” (Malcolm X 1989, 130, 138–139, emphasis in the original), Malcolm X repeated on several occasions that his conception of “the black masses” included all nonwhites, “the red man” no less than others (50). Following Malcolm’s lead, both Stokely Carmichael, chair of the militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and his successor, H. Rap Brown, increasingly defined the liberation struggle in the United States in terms of not only Blacks but also, to quote Brown, “the Mexican-American, the Puerto Rican, the American Indian, the Japanese-American [and even] poor whites” (Brown 1969, 143). Symbolic of this multinational impetus, in October 1967 a six-member SNCC delegation participated along with Hopi leaders David Monongye and Thomas Banyacya in a land rights conference in Albuquerque organized by Mexican American activist Reies Lopez Tijerina, which concluded with the signing of a Red-Black-Brown treaty of unity. The younger generation of indigenous activists had been tracking these developments as they occurred. Indeed, Clyde Warrior, a 21-year-old Ponca and selfdescribed “academic aborigine” who cofounded the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) in 1961—a year after SNCC was formed—gained his initial experience as an organizer during SNCC’s first voter registration drive in Mississippi, while Karen Rickard (Seneca) and other NIYC members participated in the 1963 March on Washington. At its third annual meeting, convened shortly after the march, the NIYC debated whether it should officially join the Civil Rights Movement. In the end, it was decided that because “Indians had no desire to integrate with white society” and were instead committed to asserting their treaty rights and corresponding national sovereignty, such a move would be confusing and thus counterproductive for all concerned. Commonalities were nonetheless acknowledged. Recognizing resemblances between their brand of “separatism” and that attributed to the Nation of Islam



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(NOI), or “Black Muslims” as they were routinely described in the mainstream media, NIYC members gave a wink to Malcolm’s lengthy stint as the NOI’s most visible spokesperson by billing themselves as “Red Muslims.” Similarly, by middecade Warrior, the council’s most uncompromising spokesperson and probably its most effective, was often characterized as “the Indian Stokely Carmichael.” While the comparison was in many respects unfair to both men, it was seemingly concretized when shortly after Carmichael’s highly publicized “Black Power” speech in June 1966 Warrior, together with NIYC cofounder Mel Thom (Paiute), forced their way into a Fourth of July parade in Oklahoma City, driving a car emblazoned with the slogan “Red Power!” In addition, in 1964 the NIYC—Hank Adams (Assiniboine Sioux) and Bruce Wilkie (Makah) in particular—adapted SNCC’s direct-action tactics to the indigenous context by organizing fish-ins to assert the treaty-guaranteed rights of Salish-speaking Puyallup, Nisqually, and Muckleshoot peoples on Puget Sound to garner their shares of the annual harvest of fish in their respective locales. While the fish-ins quickly took hold among the three peoples, the tactic spread to others and became a key factor in the 1974 Boldt decision affirming American Indian fishing rights in Washington state. While the armed security mounted by the Skagits, Yakamas, and other indigenous peoples to protect those engaged in fishing was based firmly in their own traditions, they were perhaps influenced as well by the routing of the Ku Klux Klan by armed members of Robert F. Williams’s “renegade” Monroe, North Carolina, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter in December 1957, and a similar action by the Red-Black Lumbees in nearby Robeson County little more than a month later. In any case, the Indians’ position had much in common with those adopted by the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1964 and both the Congress of Racial Equality and SNCC the following year. It also accorded quite well with that of the Oaklandbased Black Panther Party (BPP), the Seattle chapter of which was by 1968 quietly augmenting the local Indians’ security teams with its own personnel. Such concrete expressions of solidarity resonated deeply and immediately with indigenous activists across the United States. Hence, despite the Panthers having never established a branch in the so-called Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, a small group of urbanized Chippewas (Anishinabes) including Dennis Banks, Mary Jane Wilson, George Mitchell, and Clyde Bellecourt founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) there in July 1968. AIM consciously emulated the approach pioneered by the BPP in 1966. Members of AIM organized street patrols to “police the police” and thereby curtailed the cops’ rampant violence against and bogus arrests of residents of the local “Indian ghetto” spawned by the federal relocation program of the 1950s and early 1960s. Since such relocation-induced ghettos had emerged in most major metropolitan areas, AIM’s initiative in Minneapolis–St. Paul was widely applauded and, as with

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that of the Panthers before it, resulted in a rapid proliferation of chapters in a number of cities. The Panthers’ influence on AIM extended much further than “policing the police,” however, and within a year the original Twin Cities chapter and others were emulating the party’s various “serve the people programs” by establishing “survival schools” to provide indigenous youngsters with culturally appropriate alternatives to the racist indoctrination they received in both the public school system and church-sponsored institutions. This was followed by clinics, legal aid offices, affordable housing, job training and placement centers, the organization of food co-ops and nutritional assistance, alternative media, and a range of similar enterprises, all of them geared to attaining a greater degree of community self-sufficiency and self-control. In Chicago, the AIM chapter’s aspirational enthusiasm for the community service model developed by the BPP in that city led to its seldom remembered participation in the Rainbow Coalition organized by Panthers Bob Lee, Henry “Poison” Gaddis, Ruby Smith, and the party’s Illinois state chairman Fred Hampton during the spring of 1969. AIM was also integral in such efforts in a number of other cities. In Denver, for instance, a loose coalition of Lauren Watson’s branch of the BPP, the AIM chapter headed by Joe Locust (Cherokee) and Rod Skenadore (Blackfoot/Oneida), and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s Crusade for Justice prevailed until in 1970 the local Panthers succumbed to a combination of police repression and BPP purging of members. In Des Moines, to give another example, the BPP branch formed by Mary Rhem and Charles Knox made common cause with Anishinabe activist Harvey Major’s AIM chapter until the branch dissolved in 1970, after its leadership was jailed for several months on contempt charges. Similar alliances were evident in Milwaukee, Omaha, Cleveland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

Red-Black Solidarity in the Long 1970s One of the most significant advocates of Red-Black solidarity was the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), the provisional government of which was established in March 1968 under sponsorship of the Detroit-based Malcolm X Society. Headed by the brothers Gaidi and Imari Obadele, its stated goal was to actualize a fully independent Black nation with a clearly defined territory “encompass[ing] the Deep South states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.” The Obadeles employed tactics spanning the gamut from community education and organizing to litigation and diplomacy, physical occupations, and guerrilla warfare to accomplish that goal. The RNA failed to address the issue of indigenous land rights in either its declaration of independence or its constitution, both formulated in 1968. However, when the defect was pointed out by Stokely Carmichael and others during the early 1970s, the RNA entered into a lengthy series of discussions both with



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representatives of AIM and with people representing native communities situated in the five states. While complexities involving demarcation of specific territories and how to solve the “Red-Black identity question” were by no means fully resolved, “by the 1980s, the RNA had acknowledged indigenous land [rights] and sought to craft a land-based strategy” to accommodate them. This effort was in itself sufficient for AIM to view the RNA as an ally, a matter reflected in the declaration of unity by AIM’s Bob Robideau (Anishinabe-Dakota) published in the December 1983 issue of the New African (Robideau 1983). In May 1984 the New Afrikan People’s Organization was cofounded and headed by the RNA’s minister of justice Chokwe Lumumba to do the practical work involved in pursuing the provisional government’s policy objectives. During this period, the RNA declared that it “supports the struggles for sovereignty and independence of Red nations over their lands in North America [and is] absolutely aligned with the Native American, Chicano-Mexican, and Puerto Rican revolutionary organizations in their resolve to dismantle the illegal U.S. empire” (“New Afrikan Declaration of Independence” n.d., IV). Indeed, it was clear that solidarity had already been manifested in a far more concrete manner; an unknown number of New African citizens had joined former Panthers in the Black Liberation Army and had been conducting armed operations in part to support “the struggle for Native American sovereignty rights” (U.S. v. Mutulu Shakur). Meanwhile, solidarity with the American Indian liberation struggle was forcefully displayed by Stokely Carmichael and his All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) during AIM’s November 1972 occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) headquarters building in Washington, D.C. Barely three months later in early March 1973, Carmichael was in Rapid City, South Dakota, engaged in a strategy meeting with several AIM leaders on how the AAPRP might best support AIM’s armed standoff with federal forces at the Wounded Knee massacre site on the nearby Pine Ridge (Oglala Lakota) Reservation. Envisioned as the opening round of an intensive and sustained effort by AIM, in collaboration with grassroots Oglala Lakota residents, to reclaim the rights guaranteed to them in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, the Siege of Wounded Knee ultimately lasted 71 days. During the siege about 200 Indians, defending a hastily constructed perimeter, exchanged well over half a million gunshots with a considerably larger militarily equipped array of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Marshal Service special operations personnel. These special forces were augmented by a hefty contingent of BIA police (many of whom doubled during their off-duty hours as a reservation goon squad).2 All the while, Carmichael was periodically meeting with AIM representatives in unlikely locations for purposes of coordinating support activities. The siege finally ended on May 8, 1973, after receipt of a letter signed by White House special counsel Leonard Garment agreeing to the dispatch of a presidential

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commission within 60 days to discuss U.S. violations of the 1868 treaty with the traditional Oglala leadership council. By then, 562 AIM members and supporters were facing federal charges arising from Wounded Knee, the most serious lodged against those targeted as leaders, especially AIM’s 2 most prominent figures, Dennis Banks and Russell Means (Oglala Lakota). In response, AIM seized the opportunity to challenge U.S. jurisdiction over Pine Ridge or any other “Sioux” reservation on the basis that they were collectively recognized as a separate nation under the 1868 treaty (and the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty as well). Nearly a year before the issue of jurisdiction was addressed during the so-called Sioux Sovereignty Hearing convened by the federal district court in Lincoln, Nebraska, in December 1974, the Wounded Knee leadership trials had begun. The opening act for the trials was the prosecution of Banks and Means in St. Paul. By then, Black Power icon Angela Davis, publicly described by Richard Nixon as “a dangerous terrorist” and denied entry to Wounded Knee by U.S. marshals during the siege, had long since declared mustering support for the Wounded Knee defendants to be a top priority of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR) that she and radical Black Chicagoan Charlene Mitchell had cofounded in mid-May 1973. The NAARPR’s unstinting emphasis on building consciousness around the political nature of the AIM prosecutions continued into early 1975, by which point the 10-month Banks-Means show trial had been ended by the judge’s dismissal with prejudice of all charges on grounds of gross misconduct by both the prosecutors and the FBI. Only 6 of the 153 Wounded Knee cases brought into court had resulted in convictions—3 more were obtained on June 5, 1975—while all but a handful of the remaining 32 were quietly dropped. Meanwhile, the government’s prosecutorial offensive against AIM had been augmented by an equally intensive but less visible counterinsurgency campaign by the FBI on Pine Ridge. Described even by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights as a “reign of terror” (Muldrow 1975), the FBI’s operations on the reservation claimed a terrible toll, with scores of those engaged in the liberation struggle killed and well over 300 suffering serious physical assaults over a three-year period beginning in midMarch 1973. That AIM fought back is amply illustrated by a firefight near the town of Oglala on June 26, 1975, that left 3 dead: a pair of FBI agents and AIM member Joe Stuntz (a Coeur D’Alene also known as Killsright). At that point, plainly frustrated at the movement’s perseverance despite years of low-intensity warfare waged against it, the FBI escalated dramatically, immediately launching an invasion of the reservation by some 200 agents, militarily clad and equipped, intended to break the back of the resistance once and for all. An international manhunt was also initiated for three members of Northwest AIM—Bob Robideau, his cousin Leonard Peltier (also Anishinabe/Dakota), and Dino Butler (Tuni)—who, although a number of others were identified as having



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also participated in the firefight, were targeted as the key activists involved. While Butler and Robideau were shortly captured in the United States, Peltier wasn’t found until February 1976, in Canada, and it took until December of that year for federal officials to secure his extradition. Hence, his prosecution was severed from that of his codefendants. The Butler-Robideau trial was scheduled to occur first, before federal district judge Edward McManus in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This brought Angela Davis and the NAARPR, who had turned to other issues as the Wounded Knee trials were wrapping up, right back into the picture. The public attention they drew to the FBI’s role in creating the lethal backdrop to the firefight undoubtedly figured in an all-white jury finding Butler and Robideau not guilty on grounds of self-defense. Peltier’s case was assigned an even higher priority by the NAARPR after prosecutors contrived to have his case moved to Fargo, North Dakota, where the judge, Paul Benson, severely restricted the range of evidence that could be introduced by the defense and thereby its ability to crossexamine the government’s witnesses. With defense attorneys thus hamstrung, the prosecution was free to present a whole new set of “facts,” many of them directly contradicting those sworn to during the Butler-Robideau trial (the entire transcript of which was ruled inadmissible by the judge). As was later revealed, ballistics evidence was also manipulated and/ or fabricated by FBI technicians, while exculpatory evidence was deliberately withheld from the defense. Unsurprisingly given these circumstances, Peltier was convicted in April 1977 of murdering both agents and sentenced to consecutive life terms in prison. Still less surprising, shortly after Peltier’s first appeal was denied in September 1978 (Matthiessen 1980), the NAARPR joined the National Conference on Black Lawyers in filing a petition in his behalf with the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Rights and continues to manifest its solidarity in efforts to free him.

A Fourth World Comes into View In early June 1974, AIM convened the first International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) near Wakpala, on the Standing Rock Reservation (South Dakota), to consider strategies for asserting the treaty rights of all indigenous nations (Dunbar Ortiz 1984; Means and Wolf 1995). The assembly was attended by more than 5,000 people, including representatives of 97 indigenous nations throughout the Western Hemisphere and Hawaii, as well as the AAPRP and several African liberation movements, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and elders of each of the traditional Sioux (Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota) governing councils. The participants issued a Declaration of Continuing Independence affirming establishment of an Independent Oglala Nation at Wounded Knee on March 11, 1973, and extended it to encompass indigenous peoples more generally.

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The declaration also mandated that the IITC assume concrete organizational form so as to “make application to the United Nations for recognition and membership of the sovereign Native Nations” of the Americas and “pledge[d] support to any similar application by an aboriginal people,” treatied or not, anywhere on the planet (Dunbar Ortiz 1974, 200–205; Dunbar-Ortiz 1985, 33–35; Deloria 1985, 266–270). Charged by the elders with the responsibility of actualizing their audacious agenda while the council was still in process, Russell Means was named as the IITC’s permanent trustee and, in an especially astute move, immediately enlisted Jimmie Durham to direct AIM’s international diplomatic arm. In May 1977 the IITC became the first indigenous organization formally accorded consultative status by the UN Economic and Social Council. That same year, the Sub-Committee on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Apartheid, and Colonialism of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Special Committee on Human Rights, based in the UN’s Palace of Nations in Geneva, agreed to sponsor an IITC-organized International Conference on Discrimination against Indigenous Peoples of the Americas at that location on September 20–23. With 165 delegates from indigenous nations throughout the hemisphere participating and representatives of 38 UN member states and 50 NGOs officially observing, the 1977 “Indian Summer in Geneva” was truly a watershed event in terms of drawing global attention to indigenous issues. By 1981, the long-denied but nonetheless ongoing existence of what Shuswap leader George Manuel described as the “Fourth World” was revealed for all to see. The Fourth World is made up of the 3,000–5,000 indigenous nations upon whose lands and with whose resources the fewer than 200 statist entities comprising the First, Second, and Third Worlds had all constructed and sustained themselves (Neitschmann 1987; 1994). The UN Commission on Human Rights officially acknowledged that “indigenous peoples are separate peoples, unlike other national populations, defined by unique criteria, and have been denied their rights in ways others have been spared,” therefore requiring “not just protection of their rights, but active promotion of those rights” (Washinawatoc 1998, 47). Correspondingly, a Working Group on Indigenous Populations was established under commission auspices in March 1982, with the mandate of gathering information to draft a formal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (it was finally adopted by the General Assembly in 2007).

Aftermath For the distinguished African American activist/historian Vincent Harding, the National Black Political Convention in 1972, often framed as a benchmark in the realization of Black Power, actually marked the end of any meaningful struggle



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for Black liberation in the United States. Despite the uncompromisingly militant tone of its declarations, Harding observed, many—or most—of the 3,000 delegates quickly “turned away [from] the most fundamentally challenging calls of the convention’s black agenda[,] back to politics-as-usual [and] the demands of self-interest. Even some attendees later wandered off into unclear, necessarily solitary ways” of avoiding the risks entailed in seriously confronting the status quo (Harding 1980, 216–217). As for Red Power, movement historians Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) and Robert Allen Warrior (Osage), citing bitter factionalism and sparse attendance at AIM’s national membership conferences hold that the movement crested with the defense of Wounded Knee during the spring of 1973 and rapidly subsided thereafter. The impact of even the most action-oriented among the NIYC’s early roster of “academic aborigines” had plainly been eclipsed by AIM’s “shock troops of Indian sovereignty” well before Wounded Knee (Banks 2011, 58). Gerald Wilkinson (Cherokee), director of the increasingly “moderate” Youth Council after 1969, offered a similar assessment while attributing the movement’s swift decline to its having become “terribly anti-intellectual” (Chaat Smith and Warrior 1996, 275). A variety of factors figured in both movements’ decline. For starters, the essentially spontaneous ghetto revolts that had both backdropped and lent potency to the late SNCC/early Panther style of politics from the outset had run their course by 1970. This outcome was facilitated by a series of co-optive governmental concessions such as the 1968 Fair Housing Act that conned a large sector of African Americans—and others as well—into believing that the system was actually getting better. Similarly, the withdrawal of the last U.S. combat troops from Vietnam in 1973 and the near-simultaneous ending of the draft eliminated a second source of mass discontent and consequent sociopolitical instability. To succeed, the Black, Red, and other liberation movements would necessarily have had to adjust to the demands of a protracted struggle, a prospect holding far less popular appeal than that of imminent victory. The movements’ attractiveness to potential recruits, and often to those actively involved, was further diminished by fear. By all accounts, the hammer blows of state repression had much to do with the dissipation of liberatory spearheads such as the BPP and AIM, as hundreds of committed activists and key organizers were killed, imprisoned, or otherwise “neutralized” by the FBI and collaborating police units between 1967 and 1975. Meanwhile, agent provocateurs were systematically employed to exacerbate intra- and intergroup tensions, and relentless propaganda campaigns were mounted through the mass media to discredit targeted organizations and individuals, thereby eroding their base of popular support. Such harsh realities precipitated what commentator Todd Gitlin has aptly described as a wholesale “failure of nerve” and consequent “liberal turn” by the radical Left.

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Although Black Power’s “confrontational era” ended in the expansion of a Black elite, the material gains made by Afro-America as a whole had been rolled back by the early 1980s and by the end of that decade had been effectively reversed (Marable 1984; Massey and Denton 1993). By 2011, the average accumulated wealth of a Black family in the United States was $5,677, while that of a white family was $113,149, with the gap widening steadily. The political battlefield was now restricted to the fighting of endless intellectual “culture wars” from academic stations (Kochar, Fry, and Taylor 2011). Most, however, secured a place under the protective umbrella of state sanctions by simply withdrawing from “subversive” modes of activism and championing the notion that “people’s power” could be attained only within the electoral arena. For both African Americans and American Indians, the scuttling of bona fide national liberation movements marking the end of the long 1960s proved disastrous. The shift to working exclusively within the system yielded a still-growing proliferation of Black elected officials and governmental employees. For American Indians the story is essentially the same, although the number of elected officials and the size of the elite are both far smaller. The tangible gains made during the early 1970s simply evaporated once the pressure was off. According to 2000 census data, the rate of extreme poverty—officially defined as a per capita annual income of less than $3,000—on the country’s 334 reservations stood at six times the national average,3 while the most destitute community in the United States, with a per capita income of only $1,594 per year, is the town of Allen, on Pine Ridge. By all indications, things will only continue to get worse absent a genuinely radical change in the relations of power. That being true for African Americans as well, it is perhaps time that a new generation reassesses the lessons of Black Power, Red Power, and the potential of Red-Black unity. Ward Churchill See also: Police Brutality; Political Prisoners and Exiles Notes 1. Had traditional indigenous methods of determining group membership been employed, the count would have been substantially higher. The effects of using federal procedures have increased over time. As Jack Forbes demonstrated with regard to the 1980 census, the upshot was that an indigenous population in the United States numbering at least 15 million at that point was officially tallied at just over 1.4 million. A large segment of the “missing” 90+ percent were of either Red-Black or triracial admixture and typically counted as Black, while a substantial number of others were designated “Hispanic” (a classification based entirely on surnames). See Forbes (1990). 2. For one of the earliest and still among the best accounts of the siege, see Anderson (1973, 97), in which there is a photo of Angela Davis shortly after she was prevented by U.S. marshals from entering the AIM perimeter on March 23. On page 51 there is a photo of Ralph Abernathy arriving in Wounded Knee on March 7.



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3. As examples, on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona, one in four people try to subsist on that pittance, while on the Tohono O’odam Reservation, also in Arizona, one in five are forced to do the same.

Further Reading American Friends Service Committee. 1970. Uncommon Controversy: Fishing Rights of the Muckleshoot, Puyallup, and Nisqually Indians. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Anderson, Robert, Joanna Brown, Jonny Lerner, and Barbara Lou Shafer, eds. 1973. Voices from Wounded Knee: The People Are Standing Up. Rooseveltown, NY: Akwesasne Notes. Banks, Dennis. 2011. Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Berger, Dan. 2009. “‘The Malcolm X Doctrine’: The Republic of New Africa and the Decolonization of the United States.” In New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, 46–55. Toronto: Between the Lines. Berger, Dan, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. 2010. “‘The Struggle Is for Land’: Race, Territory, and National Liberation.” In The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, edited by Dan Berger, 57–76. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. B.I.A., I’m Not Your Indian Anymore: The Trail of Broken Treaties. 1973. Rooseveltown, NY: Akwesasne Notes. Brown, H. Rap. 1969. Die Nigger Die! New York: Dial. Carmichael, Stokely. 1970. “A Declaration of War.” In The Movement toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution, edited by Mitchell Goodman, 180–184. New York: Knopf. Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. 1967. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Random House. Carson, Clayborne. 1981. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chaat Smith, Paul, and Robert Allen Warrior. 1996. Like a Hurricane: The American Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press. Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. 2002a. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. 2002b. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars against Dissent in the United States. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Daniel, G. Reginald. 1992. “Passers and Pluralists: Subverting the Racial Divide.” In Racially Mixed People in America, edited by Marla P. P. Root, 91–107. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1969. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan. Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1970. We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf. New York: Macmillan.

lxxii | Black Power, Red Power, and the Potential of Red-Black Unity Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1974. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence. New York: Delacorte. Dixon, Anthony E. 2014. Florida’s Negro War: Black Seminoles and the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842. Tallahassee: Archival and Historical Research Associates. Dunbar Ortiz, Roxanne, ed. 1977. The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America. San Francisco: Moon Books/American Treaty Council Information Center. Dunbar Ortiz, Roxanne. 1984. Indians of the Americas: Self-Determination and Human Rights. London: Zed Books. Dunbar Ortiz, Roxanne. 2010. “How Indigenous People Wound Up at the United Nations.” In The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, edited by Dan Berger, 115–134. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Forbes, Jack D. 1990. “Undercounting Native Americans: The 1980 Census and Mani­ pulation of Racial Identity in the United States.” Wicazo Sa Review 6 (1) (Spring): 2–26. Forbes, Jack D. 1993. Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gitlin, Todd. 1980. The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media and the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gonzales, Angela A. 2009. “Race Legibility: The Federal Census and the (Trans)Formation of ‘Black’ and ‘Indian’ Identity, 1790–1920.” In IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas, edited by Gabrielle Tayak, 57–67. Washington, DC: Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Harding, Vincent. 1980. The Other American Revolution. Los Angeles/Atlanta: UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies/Institute of the Black World. Hill, Lance. 2004. The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Karolczyk, Paul. 2014. “Subjugated Territory: The New Afrikan Independence Movement and the Space of Black Power.” PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University. Kochar, Rakesh, Richard Fry, and Paul Taylor. 2011. “Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics.” Pew Research Center, July 12, 2011, http:// www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites -blacks-hispanics/. MacLaughlin, Malcolm. 2014. The Long, Hot Summer of 1967: Urban Rebellion in America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Malcolm X. 1964. “The Black Revolution (April 8).” In Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, edited by George Breitman, 59–72. New York: Pathfinder. Malcolm X. 1971. “God’s Judgment on White America (The Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost) (December 3, 1963).” In The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X, edited by Benjamin Goodman, 121–148. New York: Merlin House. Malcolm X. 1989. The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X. New York: Arcade. Malcolm X. 1994. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. Edited by George Breitman. New York: Grove.



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Manuel, George, and Michael Posluns. 1974. The Fourth World: An Indian Reality. New York: Macmillan. Marable, Manning. 1984. Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1982. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Matthiessen, Peter. 1980. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. New York: Viking. Means, Russell, and Marvin J. Wolf. 1995. Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means. New York: St. Martin’s. Muldrow, William F. 1975. Monitoring of Events Related to the Shooting of Two FBI Agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Denver: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Rocky Mountain Regional Office, July 9. National Center for Educational Statistics. “Median Family Income by Race/Ethnicity of Head of Household: 1950–1993.” National Center for Educational Statistics, https:// nces.ed.gov/pubs98/yi/yi16.pdf. Neitschmann, Bernard. 1987. “Militarization and Indigenous Peoples: The Third World War.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 11(3) (Summer): 1–16. Neitschmann, Bernard. 1994. “Fourth World Nations versus States.” In Reordering the World: Perspectives for the Twenty-first Century, edited by George J. Demko and William B. Wood, 225–242. Boulder, CO: Westview. “New Afrikan Declaration of Independence.” n.d. The Freedom Archives, https://www .freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/NAPO/513.NAPO.New AfrikanDec.pdf. Obadele, Imari Amubakri. 1968. War in America: The Malcolm X Doctrine. Detroit: Malcolm X Society. Porter, Kenneth W. 1996. The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People. 2nd rev. ed. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Ramsey, William L. 2010. The Yamasee War: Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Robideau, Bob. 1983. “Native Americans Call for Alliance with the Republic of New Afrika.” New Afrikan (December): 12. Shreve, Bradley G. 2011. Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Smith, Sherry L. 2012. Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power. New York: Oxford University Press. Twyman, Bruce Edward. 1996. Black Seminoles and North American Politics, 1693– 1845. Cincinnati: Research Press. Tyson, Timothy B. 1999. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Umoja, Akinyele Omowale. 2013. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: New York University Press. U.S. v. Mutulu Shakur (No. 82-CR-312-CSH, U.S. Dist. Ct., Southern Dist., NY, Oct. 31, 1987). Washinawatoc, Ingrid. 1998. “International Emergence: Twenty-One Years at the United Nations.” New York Law Review 3(1) (Spring): 41–57.

Black Power Studies

Black Power Studies: The Initiation of a Subfield During the first decade of the 21st century, the Black Power Movement emerged as a permanent fixture among the course offerings at colleges and universities. The once scholarly void is now filled with a litany of monographs, journal articles, book chapters, and multimedia materials. African American studies scholar Judson L. Jeffries’s lament that “the Black Power era is one of the most important, yet most understudied, periods in American history” references a bygone era (2006, 2). This essay illuminates the central propositions, precepts, and features of Black Power studies, a burgeoning subfield. In addition to providing extensive bibliographical citations of recent Black Power scholarship, we offer a reassessment of the new subfield. In 2001, historian Peniel E. Joseph penned the concept of Black Power studies while serving as guest editor of two special issues of Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research that proposed the new interpretative framework (2001, 2–20; 2002). He subsequently published extensively on the Black Power studies subfield, in particular (Joseph 2006a; 2006b, 1–26; 2006c; 2007a; 2008a; 2009a; 2010a, 1–20) and the Black Power Movement in general (2003, 2006c, 2007b, 2008b, 2009b, 2010b, 2014). Joseph authored the award-winning overarching historical narrative Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (2006c) and edited two anthologies, The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era (2006a) and Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level (2010a). His most recent work, Stokely Carmichael: A Life (2014), is a political biography of one of the era’s major icons. Joseph elucidates the core propositions and features of the Black Power studies subfield in the lead article of the initial Black Scholar special issue Black Liberation without Apology: Reconceptualizing the Black Power Movement (2001, 2–20). He further amplifies the key elements of the subfield in several other writings (2002; 2006b, 1–26; 2007a; 2008a; 2009a; 2010b). Black Power studies, according to Joseph, challenges “the master narrative of the Civil Rights era, which portrays

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the Black Power Movement as the Civil Rights Movement’s evil twin” (2010b, 1). A central precept of the subfield suggests that the Black freedom struggle embodies simultaneous Civil Rights and Black Power activism (Joseph 2008a, 5). Joseph contends that “Black Power Studies transform Civil Rights scholarship by placing militant organizers side-by-side with nonviolent moderates” (2006a, 8). He also notes that the subfield incorporates critical interdisciplinary approaches and “documents both the iconic and unglamorous” activist (Joseph 2008a, 5). The latter feature is particularly noteworthy in that it facilitates the broader inclusion of often ignored dynamics and actors that contribute to developing a comprehensive portrait of the Black Power era. The most provocative paradigmatic aspect of Black Power studies centers on its call to “stretch the borders of standard periodization” regarding the Black Power Movement. Joseph proposes a periodization scheme at odds with the general consensus among observers (Allen 1970, 21–89; Brisbane 1974, 125–148; Marable 1984; Cha-Jua and Lang 2007, 280) who designate either 1965 or 1966 as the genesis of the Black Power era. Specifically, Joseph argues that the subfield correctly “reperiodizes the Civil Rights–Black Power era by pushing the chronology of Black radicalism back to the 1950s and forward into the 1970s” (2006b, 8). Conversely, we contend that radical inclinations alone do not constitute a social movement. While we fully acknowledge the scholarly utility of this exciting new subfield, we nonetheless assert that the periodization scheme underpinning Black Power studies lacks sufficient analytic clarity. The following synopsis of the proposed four stages underscores our contention.

Different Historiographic Approaches Black Power studies is undergirded by a classificatory scheme that delineates relevant literature among four stages based on origins, knowledge production, and overall conclusions (Joseph 2001, 3–10). The first stage (1955–1962) begins in the mid-1950s, a period that Joseph states “originated in the Cold War political repression of the 1950s” (2001, 3). Joseph’s designation of mid-1950s Black radical activism, informed by anticolonial movements and Cold War global politics, signaled a sharp departure from the 1965/1966 ascription denoting the crystallization of the Black Power Movement. Joseph cites the writings of Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Robert Williams, and literature published in Black progressive periodicals as evidence of the need to reassess our conceptualization of the Black Power era (2001, 3–4). In a later book titled Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level (2010a), Joseph authored “Malcolm X and Early Black Power Activism” in which he offers additional evidence of early Black Power manifestations that necessitate the need for the reperiodization of the era.



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The subsequent and second stage commences in the mid-1960s and extends to the early 1970s. Although this phase includes several classic studies pertaining to the Black Power Movement (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967; Cruse 1967; Allen 1970), autobiographies and memoirs interrogating the Black Power strategy dominate intellectual production during the second stage of Black Power studies (Joseph 2001, 4–8). By contrast, while autobiographies continue to remain prevalent among the scholarship of the subfield’s third stage—beginning with the demise of Black radical insurgency in the mid-1970s and extending to the mid-1990s—they took on a decidedly pessimistic tone. Joseph notes that “even relatively sympathetic works cast the era as hapless and hopeless history of black American radicalism” (2001, 8). Joseph identifies the fourth and final stage of Black Power studies—the mid-1990s to the present—as “the most rigorous, sustained, and in-depth historical analysis of the periods” (2001, 8). This stage is furthered defined by increased scholarly attention to a myriad of Black Power dynamics (Joseph 2006a, 20). In short, the Black Power studies subfield has lent critical academic legitimacy to the scholarly investigation of the Black freedom struggle’s highest moment of radical insurgency. The upshot has been a volley of scholarship furthering our understanding of the Black Power era. However, since sentiments of Black Power activism—self-determination, armed resistance, economic self-sufficiency, and Black nationalism—have long existed in African American political life, it is imperative that scholars clearly differentiate disjointed radical proclivities from enduring insurgent activities. This important task is facilitated by drawing from social movement theory and a more interdisciplinary approach. Sociologists tend to treat the social movement phenomenon with greater precision and theoretical clarity than do their historian counterparts. Our proposed periodization scheme that differs from that put forth by Joseph emanates from the following working definition of a social movement: a collective, sustained, political activity using nontraditional means that confronts and challenges the status quo. In this light, a social movement is distinguished from radical ideological expressions and occasional acts of insurgency. Both insurgent ideologies and radical Black activism can exist without engaging in sustained activity that confronts and challenges the state. For example, Joseph provides that Malcolm X led protests in New York City during the early 1950s, evidence of the need to reperiodize the Black Power era. However, this Malcolm X/Nation of Islam (NOI)–inspired insurgency in New York City was at best episodic and thus does not meet a key attribute of a social movement. One can recall that Elijah Muhammad and the NOI national hierarchy cautioned Malcolm X to stay away from political activity and rhetoric and confine himself to religious speech and activity, particularly that of an insurgent or revolutionary content. This prevented Malcolm from developing a sustained campaign against police terror in

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New York that would present a significant challenge to the system of oppression. Moreover, the prointegrationist Civil Rights Movement clearly dominated political discourse and activism during the 1950s and early 1960s. We contextualize the activism of Malcolm X and Harlem NOI as part of a larger Black nationalist/Pan-Africanist trend centered in New York, which we view as antecedents contributing to the genesis of a Black Power Movement that crystallized in the mid-1960s. Additional Black Power precursors include militant Civil Rights activism, the influence of African nationalism in the United States, and the impact of anticolonial national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (for more information, see this volume’s introduction). The political activity in the 1950s and early 1960s noted by Joseph better represents antecedents rather than evidence of an early Black Power Movement. We argue that Black Power emerged as a significant social movement in 1965 that became the primary ideological thrust challenging the dominant racial order in the United States over the course of the next decade (1965–1975). Our periodization scheme is grounded in social movement theory in which the Black Power Movement is viewed as all social movements, which undergo the following cycles: emergence, peak, and decline. The genesis period of the Black Power Movement (1965–1966) is defined by the 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles, the organization of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and the Black Panther movement, and the initiation of the Black Arts Movement. The peak of the Black Power Movement was 1967 through the early 1970s, when Black Power became the central social force in the Black freedom struggle. During this period in 1968, the Black Power Movement was so dynamic that Black Power, what the Federal Bureau of Investigation labeled “black nationalist hate groups,” became the primary obsession of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counterintelligence Program, which is evidence of the Black radical insurgency’s perceived threat to the status quo. The Black Power Movement declined during the mid-1970s due to internal contradictions and political repression. Hopefully, the discourse on the periodization of Black Power will continue as the literature and research expand and consider interdisciplinary methodological approaches. We also hope that there is consideration for what constitutes a movement while clearly understanding the ideological and political influences of predecessors to the genesis of insurgency. These distinctions are important to aid future generations on the tools of movement building.

Categories of Black Power Studies Literature The recent proliferation of Black Power scholarship includes several important anthologies (Glaude 2002; Jeffries 2006; Joseph 2006a, 2010a), insightful historiographies (Cha-Jua and Lang 2007; Garrow 2007; Joseph 2001, 2008a, 2009a),



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perceptive historical narratives (Bush 1999; Joseph 2006c; Fergus 2009; R. Williams 2015), and illuminating critiques (Fenderson 2013). Moreover, this newfound academic inquiry focuses attention on a wide breadth of previously understudied dynamics that contribute to building a comprehensive portrait of the Black Power era: • Antecedents (Harley 2001; Hill 2004; Horne 1995; Jeffries 2009; Levy 2003, 2005; Rucker 2006; Stephens 2010; Strain 2005, 2006; Theoharis 2006; Tyson 1998, 1999; Umoja 2013b) • Black Arts Movement (Bracey, Sanchez, and Smethurst 2014; Boyd 2003; Collins and Crawford 2006; Joseph 2003; Michna 2011; Sell 2001; Smethurst 2005; Thompson 1999; Widener 2010) • Black student activism (Biondi 2012; Bradley 2003, 2009; Glasker 2002; Rogers 2013; Williamson 2003) • Black studies and research institutes (Benson 2015; Fuller and Page 2014; Rickford 2016; Rojas 2007; Rooks 2006; Ward 2001; White 2011) • Labor and business (Gillian 2011; Goldberg and Griffey 2010; Hill and Rabig 2012) • Electoral politics (Brown 2014; Fergus 2009; Johnson 2007; Johnson 2012; Moore 2002; Smith 1996) • Gender (Anderson-Bricker 1999; Collier-Thomas and Franklin 2001; Farmer 2014; Gore, Theoharis, and Woodard 2009; Guy 2004; LeBlancErnest 1998; Lumsden 2009; James 2009, 1999; Jeffries 2012, 2014; Jennings 1998; Knapper 1996; Matthews 1998; Perkins 2001; Neville and Hammer 2006; Phillips 2014, 2015; Randolph 2015; Rogers 2006; Roth 2004; Rucker and Abron 1996; Spencer 2008, 2016; Springer 1999, 2005; Taylor 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 1999, 2003; Valk 2010; Ward 2006; Williams 2012; R. Williams 2001, 2006, 2008) • Global (Angelo 2009; Austin 2007; Botchway 2014; Cleaver 1998; Clemons and Jones 2001; Frankel 2012; Frazier 2015; Gaines 2006; Johnson 2003; Malloy 2013; Meeks 2009; Quinn 2014; Reitan 1999; Rodriguez 2006; Rucker 2006; Shilliam 2012; Slate 2012a; Slate 2012b; Singh 2005; Smith 1999; Spencer 2009; Stastny and Orr 2014; Swan 2009; Teelucksing 2014; Von Eschen 1997; Walters 1997; Wilkens 2007, 2010; Wu 2007) • Leadership (Al-Amin 1994; Asante 2009; Ball and Borroughs 2012; Boyd, Daniels, Karenga, and Madhubuti 2012; Carmichael and Thelwell 2003; Cleaver 2006; Clegg 1998; Dyson 1995; Edozie and Stokes 2015; Ferguson 2011; Hilliard, Zimmerman, and Zimmerman 2006; Hughey 2005, 2007; Jeffries 2002; Joseph 2007b, 2014; Marable 2012; Umoja 2008; Ward 2011; Watts 2001)

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• Local settings (Anderson 2005, 2010; Burke and Jeffries 2016; Countryman 2006; Dixon 2012; Dyson 2014; Grady-Willis 2006; Hopkins 2005; Hornsby 2009; Janken 2015; Jeffries 2007, 2010, 2018; Jolly 2006; Jones 2010, 2018; Jones 2005; Lang 2009, 2010; Marable 2012; McCutchen 2008; Rahman 2008; Rice 2005; Widell 2008, 2013; Williams 2013; R. Williams 2010; Williams 2000; Williams and Lazerow 2008; Woodard 2003, 2005, 2006b) • Organizations (Abu-Jamal 2004; Ahmad 2007; Alkebulan 2007; Arend 2009; Austin 2006; Bloom and Martin 2013; Brown 1997, Brown 2003a, 2003b, 2008; Cleaver and Katsiaficas 2001; Cromartie 2013; Cunnigen 2006; Davenport 2015; Forbes 2006; Franklin 2007; Frazier 2006; Geschwender and Jeffries 2006; Hamlin 2013; Hayes and Jeffries 2006; Hinton 2011; Howard 2004; Huggins and Leblanc-Ernest 2009; Hughey 2009; Johnson 1998; Jones 1998a, 1998b, 1998c; Jones and Gayles 2008; Jones and Jeffries 1998; Joseph 2012; Kelly and Esch 1999; Lazerow and Williams 2006; Marsh 1984; Murch 2010; Nelson 2011; Pearson 1994; Phar 2014; Rhodes 2007; Spencer 2005, 2012, 2016; Simanga 2015; Taylor 2003; Vincent 2013; Woodard 2006a, 1999; Williams 2013; Williamson 2005; Witt 2007) • Political ideologies (Austin 2006; Dawson 2001; Glaude 2002; Ogbar 2004; Robinson 2001; Taylor 2014; Umoja 2005) • Political prisoners (Abu-Jamal 2000; Anderson and Medina 1996; Balagoon 2001; Berger 2014; Brent 1996; Bukhari 2010; Committee to End Marion Lockdown 2002; Conway 2009; Conway and Stevenson 2011; Day and Whitehorn 2001; Mueller and Ellis 2009; Ho and Saul 2013; James 2003; King 2009; Lynch 2011; Meyer 2008; Olsen 2000; Penn 2013; Rolando 1997; Rudman and Marks 2000; Stiner and Brown 2007; Umoja 1998, 2015; Vittoria 2013; Washington 2002) • Political repression (Churchill and Vander Wall 2002; Davenport 2005, 2010, 2015; Haas 2010; Newton 1996) • Popular culture (Bass 2002; Guillory and Green 1998; Hartmann 2003; Ongiri 2010; Young 2006) • Racial coalitions (Araiza 2009, 2014; Bethune-Griffin 1995; Douzet 2012; Fujino 2005, 2012; Jeffries, Dyson, and Jones 2010; Madea 2005; Marks and Rudman 2002; Melendez 2011; Ogbar 2006, 2011; Pulido 2006; WanzerSerrona 2015; Williams 2016) • Self-defense and political violence (Cobb 2014; Crosby 2011; Dirks 2007; Strain 2005; Umoja 2013a, 2003, 2002, 1999a, 1999b; Wendt 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2010).



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Summary Black Power studies has exploded since its introduction by Peniel Joseph. To date, a rich and diverse foundation of scholarship has been laid for deepening our understanding of Black radical insurgency. We expect the future expansion of the subfield to unearth more local studies as well as the testimonies of rank-and-file members of the Black Power Movement. Digital media and documentaries also offer significant potential for teaching the Black Power era to future generations. Be assured that additional contributions are forthcoming. Charles E. Jones and Akinyele Umoja See also: Black Bookstores; Black Student Activism; Black Student Alliance; Black Studies Further Reading Abu-Jamal, Mumia. 2000. All Things Censored. New York: Seven Stories. Abu-Jamal, Mumia. 2004. We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Ahmad, Muhammad. 2006. “RAM: The Revolutionary Action Movement.” In Black Power: In the Belly of the Beast, edited by Judson L. Jeffries, 252–280. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ahmad, Muhammad. 2007. We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960–1971. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing. Al-Amin, Jamil Imam. 1994. Revolution by the Book (The Rap Is Live). Beltsville, MD: Writer’s Inc. Alkebulan, Paul. 2007. Surving Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Allen, Robert. 1970. Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Anderson, Reynaldo. 2005. “Practical Internationalists: The Story of the Des Moines, Iowa, Black Panther Party.” In Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, 282–299. New York: New York University Press. Anderson, Reynaldo. 2010. “The Kansas City Black Panther Party and the Repression of the Black Revolution.” In On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities across America, edited by Judson L. Jeffries, 96–125. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Anderson, S. E., and Tony Medina, eds. 1996. In Defense of Mumia. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing. Anderson-Bricker, Kristen. 1999. “‘Triple Jeopardy’: Black Women and the Growth of Feminist Consciousness in SNCC, 1964–1975.” In Still Lifting, Still Climbing: African American Women’s Contemporary Activism, edited by Kimberly Springer, 49–69. New York: New York University Press.

lxxxii | Black Power Studies Angelo, Ann Marie. 2009. “The Black Panthers in London, 1967–1972: A Diasporic Struggle Navigates the Black Atlantic.” Radical History Review 103 (Winter): 17–35. Araiza, Lauren. 2009. “‘In Common Struggle against a Common Oppression’: The United Farm Workers and the Black Panther Party, 1968–1973.” Journal of African American History 94(2): 200–223. Araiza, Lauren. 2014. To March for Others: The Black Freedom Struggle and the United Farm Workers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Arend, Orissa. 2009. Showdown in Desire: The Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Asante, Molefi Kete. 2009. Maulana Karenga: An Intellectual Portrait. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Austin, Curtis J. 2006. Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Austin, David. 2007. “All Roads Led to Montreal: Black Power, the Caribbean, and the Black Radical Tradition in Canada.” Journal of African American History 92(4): 516–539. Balagoon, Kuwasi. 2001. A Soldier’s Story: Writings by a Revolutionary New Afrikan Anarchist. Montreal, Canada: Kersplebedeb Publishing. Balagoon, Kuwasi, et al. 1971. Look for Me in the Whirlwind: The Collective Autobiography of the New York 21. New York: Random House. Ball, Jared A., and Todd Steven Burroughs, eds. 2012. A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Bass, Amy. 2002. Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bass, Paul, and Douglas W. Rae. 2006. Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer. New York: Basic Books. Benson, Richard D., II. 2015. Fighting for Our Place in the Sun: Malcolm and the Radicalization of the Black Student Movement 1960–1973. New York: Peter Lang. Berger, Dan. 2014. Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bethune-Griffin, Winnifred. 1995. Ibo: The Untold Story behind Mark Clyde Bethune/ Ibo Omar. Detroit: Bethune Publishing. Bin-Wihad, Dhoruba, Jamal Joseph, and Sekou Odinga. 2017. Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From New York 21 to 21st Century Revolutions. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Biondi, Martha. 2012. The Black Revolution on Campus. Berkeley: University California Press. Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. 2013. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press. Botchway, De-Valera N. Y. M. 2014. “Fela ‘The Black President’ as Grist to the Mill of the Black Power Movement in Africa.” Black Diaspora Review 14(1): 3–35. Boyd, Herb, Ron Daniels, Maulana Karenga, and Haki R. Madhubuti, eds. 2012. By Any Means Necessary: Malcolm X; Real, Not Reinvented, Critical Conversations on Manning Marable’s Biography of Malcolm X. Chicago: Third World Press.



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Boyd, Melba Joyce. 2003. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press. New York: Columbia University Press. Bracey, John H., and Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst, eds. 2014. SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Bradley, Stefan. 2003. “‘Gym Crow Must Go!’: Black Student Activism at Columbia University, 1967–1968.” Journal of African American History 88(2): 163–198. Bradley, Stefan M. 2009. Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Brent, William Lee. 1996. Long Time Gone. New York: Times Books. Brisbane, Robert H. 1974. Black Activism: Racial Revolution in the United States, 1954–1970. Valley Forge, PA: Judson. Brown, Nadia E. 2014. Sisters in the Statehouse: Black Women and Legislative Decision Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Scot. 1997. “The Us Organization, Maulana Karenga, and Conflict with the Black Panther Party: A Critique of Sectarian Influences on Historical Discourse.” Journal of Black Studies 28(2): 157–170. Brown, Scot. 2001. “The US Organization Black Power Vanguard Politics, and the United Front Ideal: Los Angeles and Beyond.” Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 31(3–4): 21–30. Brown, Scot. 2003a. Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism. New York: New York University Press. Brown, Scot. 2003b. “The Politics of Culture: The Us Organization of Quest for Black Unity.” In Freedom North: Black Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980, edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, 223–253. New York: New York University Press. Brown, Scot. 2008. “‘To Unbrainwash an Entire People’: Malcolm X, Cultural Nationalism and the Us Organization in the Era of Black Power.” In Malcolm X: A Historical Reader, edited by James Conyers and Andrew Smallwood, 73–88. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Bukhari, Safiya. 2010. The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison & Fighting for Those Left Behind. New York: Feminist Press. Burke, Lucas N., and Judson L. Jeffries. 2016. The Portland Black Panthers: Empowering Albina and Remaking a City. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Bush, Rod. 1999. We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century. New York: New York University Press. Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. 1967. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage Books. Carmichael, Stokely, with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. 2003. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). New York: Scribner. Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita, and Clarence Lang. 2007. “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies.” Journal of American History 92(2): 265–288.

lxxxiv | Black Power Studies Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall, eds. 2002. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars against Dissent in the United States. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Cleaver, Kathleen. 1998. “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969–1972).” In Black Panther Party Reconsidered, edited by Charles E. Jones, 211–254. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Cleaver, Kathleen, ed. 2006. Target Zero: A Life in Writing: Eldridge Cleaver. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cleaver, Kathleen, and George Katsiaficas, eds. 2001. Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy. New York: Routledge. Clegg, Claude Andrew. 1998. An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad. New York: St. Martin’s. Clemons, Michael L., and Charles E. Jones. 2001. “Global Solidarity: The Black Panther Party in the International Arena.” New Political Science 21(2): 177–203. Cobb, Charles E. 2014. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. New York: Basic Books. Collier-Thomas, Bettye, and V. P. Franklin, eds. 2001. Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Struggle in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement. New York: New York University Press. Collins, Lisa Gail, and Margo Natalie Crawford, eds. 2006. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Committee to End the Marion Lockdown. 2002. Can’t Jail the Spirit: Political Prisoners in the U.S.; A Collection of Biographies. Chicago: Committee to End the Marion Lockdown. Conway, Marshall Edward. 2009. The Great Threat: COINTELPRO and the Black Panther Party. Baltimore: iAMWE Publications. Conway, Marshall, and Dominque Stevenson. 2011. Marshall Law: The Life & Times of a Baltimore Black Panther. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Corrigan, Lisa M. 2009. “Sacrifice, Love, and Resistance: The Hip Hop Legacy of Assata Shakur.” Women and Language 32(2): 2–13. Countryman, Matthew J. 2006. Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Covington, Shanta. 2010. “‘Black August’: New Film Puts Spotlight on ‘Political Prisoners’ in US.” TheGrio, August 26, http://thegrio.com/2010/08/26/black-august-new -film-puts-spotlight-on-political-prisoners-in-us/. Cromartie, J. Vern. 2013. Reappraisal of the Black Panther Party: Selected Essays for the 21st Century. Oakland, CA: Geechee. Crosby, Emily. 2011. “‘It Wasn’t the Wild West’: Keeping Local Studies in Self-Defense Historiography.” In Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement, edited by Emily Crosby, 194–256. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Cruse, Harold. 1967. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: William Morrow.



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Cunnigen, Donald. 2006. “The Republic of New Africa in Mississippi.” In Black Power in the Belly of the Beast, edited by Judson J. Jeffries, 93–115. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Davenport, Christian. 2005. “Understanding Covert Repression Action: The Case of the US Government against the Republic of New Africa.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49(1): 120–140. Davenport, Christian. 2010. Media Bias, Perspective, and State Repression: The Black Panther Party. New York: Cambridge University Press. Davenport, Christian. 2015. How Social Movements Die: Repression and Demobilization of the Republic of New Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dawson, Michael C. 2001. Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Day, Susie, and Laura Whitehorn. 2001. “Human Rights in the United States: The Unfinished Story of Political Prisoners and COINTELPRO.” New Political Science 23(2): 285–297. Dirks, Annelieke. 2007. “Between Threat and Reality: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Emergence of Armed Self-Defense in Clarksdale, and Natchez, Mississippi, 1960–1965.” Journal of the Study of Radicalism 1(1): 71–79. Dixon, Aaron. 2012. My People Are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Captain. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Douzet, Frederick. 2012. The Color of Power: Racial Coalitions and Political Power in Oakland. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Dyson, Michael Eric. 1995. Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X. New York: Oxford University Press. Dyson, Michael Eric. 2002. Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip Hop. New York: Basic Civitas Books. Dyson, Omari L. 2014. The Black Panther Party and Transformative Pedagogy: PlaceBased Education in Philadelphia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Edozie, Rita Kiki, and Curtis Stokes, eds. 2015. Malcolm X’s Michigan Worldview: An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies. Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Farmer, Ashley. 2014. “Renegotiating the ‘African Woman’: Women’s Cultural Nationalist Theorizing in the Us Organization and the Congress of African People, 1965–1975.” Black Diaspora Review 14(1): 76–112. Fenderson, Jonathan. 2013. “Towards the Gentrification of Black Power?” Race and Class 55(1): 1–22. Fergus, Devin. 2009. Liberalism, Black Power and the Making of American Politics. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Ferguson, Herman. 2011. An Unlikely Warrior: The Evolution of a Black Nationalist Revolutionary. Holly Springs, NC: Ferguson-Swan Publications. Forbes, Flores A. 2006. Will You Die with Me? My Life and the Black Panther Party. New York: Atria Books. Forman, James. 1997. The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

lxxxvi | Black Power Studies Frankel, Oz. 2012. “The Black Panthers of Israel and the Politics of the Radical Analogy.” In Black Power beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement, edited by Nico Slate, 81–106. New York: Palgrave. Franklin, V. P. 2007. “Jackanapes: Reflections on the Legacy of the Black Panther Party for the Hip Hop Generation.” Journal of African American Studies 92(4): 553–560. Frazier, Robeson Taj P. 2006. “The Congress of African People: Baraka, Brother Mao, and the Year ’74.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 8(3): 142–159. Frazier, Robeson Taj P. 2015. The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fujino, Diane C. 2005. Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary of Yuri Kochiyama. Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press. Fujino, Diane C. 2012. Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance and a Paradoxical Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fuller, Howard, and Lisa Frazier Page. 2014. No Struggle, No Progress: A Warriors Life, From Black Power to Education Reform. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Gaines, Kevin K. 2006. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Garrow, David J. 2007. “Picking Up the Books: The Historiography of the Black Panther Party.” Reviews in American History 35(4): 650–670. Geschwender, James A., and Judson L. Jeffries. 2006. “The League of Revolutionary Black Workers.” In Black Power in the Belly in the Beast, edited by Judson L. Jeffries, 135–162. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gillian, Zachary. 2011. “‘Black Is Beautiful but So Is Green’: Capitalism, Black Power, and Politics in Floyd McKissick’s Soul City.” In The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction, edited by Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kia Hinton, 267–286. New York: Palgrave. Glasker, Wayne C. 2002. Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967–1990. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Glaude, Eddie S., ed. 2002. Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, David, and Trevor Griffey, eds. 2010. Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action, and the Construction Industry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gore, Dayo F., Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodward, eds. 2009. Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: New York University Press. Grady-Willis, Winston A. 2006. Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960–1977. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Guillory, Monique, and Richard C. Green. 1998. Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure. New York: New York University Press. Guy, Jasmine. 2004. Afeni Shakur: Evolution of a Revolutionary. New York: Atria Books.



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Haas, Jeffrey. 2010. The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. Hamlin, Michael C. 2013. A Black Revolutionary’s Life in Labor: Black Workers Power in Detroit. Detroit: Against the Tide Books. Harley, Sharon. 2001. “Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Gloria Richardson, the Cambridge Movement, and the Radical Black Activist Tradition.” In Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement, edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, 174–196. New York: New York University Press. Hartmann, Douglas. 2003. Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayes, Floyd W., III, and Judson L. Jeffries. 2006. “Us Does Not Stand for United Slaves!” In Black Power in the Belly of the Beast, edited by Judson L. Jeffries, 67–92. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hill, Lance. 2004. The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hill, Laura Warren, and Julia Rabig, eds. 2012. The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Hilliard, David, Keith Zimmerman, and Kent Zimmerman. 2006. Huey: Spirit of the Panther. New York: Thunder’s Mouth. Hinton, Elizabeth Kai. 2011. “The Black Bolshevik: Detroit Revolutionary Union Movements and Shop Floor Organizing.” In The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction, edited by Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kia Hinton, 211–228. New York: Palgrave. Ho, Fred, and Quincy Saul. 2013. Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Hopkins, Evans D. 2005. Life after Life: A Story of Rage and Redemption. New York: Free Press. Horne, Gerald. 1995. Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hornsby, Alton. 2009. Black Power in Dixie: A Political History of African Americans in Atlanta. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Howard, Elbert. 2004. Panther on the Prowl. n.p.: Self-published. Huggins, Ericka, and Angela D. Leblanc-Ernest. 2009. “Revolutionary Women, Revolutionary Education: The Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School.” In Want to Start a Revolution: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, edited by Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, 161–184. New York: New York University Press. Hughey, Matthew. 2005. “The Sociology, Pedagogy, and Theology of Huey P. Newton: Toward a Radical Democratic Utopia.” Western Journal of Black Studies 29(3): 639–655. Hughey, Matthew. 2007. “The Pedagogy of Huey P. Newton: Critical Reflections on Education in His Writings and Speeches.” Journal of Black Studies 38(2): 209–231. Hughey, Matthew. 2009. “Black Aesthetics and Panther Rhetoric: A Critical Decoding of Black Masculinity in The Black Panther, 1967–1980.” Critical Sociology 35(1): 29–56.

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xcvi | Black Power Studies Umoja, Akinyele O. 1999a. “Ballots and Bullets: A Comparative Analysis of Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of Black Studies 29(4): 558–578. Umoja, Akinyele O. 1999b. “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Legacy of the Black Panther Party.” New Political Science 21(2): 131–155. Umoja, Akinyele O. 2002. “‘We Will Shoot Back’: The Natchez Model and ParaMilitary Organization in the Mississippi Freedom Movement.” Journal of Black Studies 32(3): 267–290. Umoja, Akinyele O. 2003. “1964: The Beginning of the End of Nonviolence in the Mississippi Freedom Movement.” Radical History Review 85 (Winter): 201–226. Umoja, Akinyele O. 2005. “Searching for Place: Nationalism, Separatism, and PanAfricanism.” In Blackwell Companion to African-American History, edited by Alton Hornsby Jr., 529–544. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Umoja, Akinyele O. 2008. “From Malcolm X to Omowale Malik Shabazz: The Transformation and Its Impact on the Black Liberation Struggle.” In Malcolm X: Historical Reader, edited by James Conyers and Andrew Smallwood, 31–54. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Umoja, Akinyele O. 2013a. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: New York University Press. Umoja, Akinyele O. 2013b. “‘Time for Black Men . . .’: The Deacons for Defense and the Mississippi Movement.” In The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, edited by Ted Ownby, 204–229. Oxford: University of Mississippi. Umoja, Akinyele O. 2013c. “From One Generation to the Next: Armed Self Defense, Revolutionary Nationalism, and the Southern Black Freedom Struggle.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 15(3–4): 218–240. Umoja, Akinyele O. 2015. “Maroon: Kuwasi Balagoon and the Evolution of Revolutionary New Afrikan Anarchism.” Science and Society 79(2): 196–220. Valk, Anne M. 2010. Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Vincent, Ricky. 2013. Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers’ Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. Vittoria, Stephen. 2013. Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia AbuJamal. First Run Features. Von Eschen, Penny. 1997. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wallace, Michele. 1978. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Dial. Walters, Ronald W. 1997. Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of the Modern Afrocentric Political Movements. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Walton, Sidney F. 1969. The Black Curriculum: Developing a Program in Afro-American Studies. East Palo, CA: Black Liberation Publishers. Wanzer-Serrano, Darrel. 2015. The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ward, Stephen. 2001. “‘Scholarship in the Context of Struggle’: Activists Intellectuals, the Institute of the Black World (IBW), and the Contours of Black Radicalism.” Black Scholar 31(3–4): 42–53.



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Ward, Stephen. 2006. “The Third World Women’s Alliance.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era, edited by Peniel E. Joseph, 119–144. New York: Routledge. Ward, Stephen, ed. 2011. Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Washington, Albert Nuh. 2002. All Power to the People. Toronto: Arm the Spirit. Watkins, Rychetta. 2012. Black Power, Yellow Power and the Making of Revolutionary Identities. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Watts, Jerry G. 2001. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press. Wendt, Simon. 2006. “The Roots of Black Power? Armed Resistance and Radicalization of the Civil Rights Movement.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era, edited by Peniel E. Joseph, 145–166. New York: Routledge. Wendt, Simon. 2007a. The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Wendt, Simon. 2007b. “‘Protection or Path Toward?’: Black Power and Self-Defense.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 9(4): 320–332. Wendt, Simon. 2010. “‘We Were Going to Fight Fire with Fire’: Black Power in the South.” In Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level, edited by Peniel E. Joseph, 131–148. New York: Routledge. White, Derrick E. 2011. The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Widell, Robert W. 2008. “‘The Power Belong to Us and We Belong to the Revolutionary Age’: The Alabama Black Liberation Front and Long Reach of the Black Panther Party.” In Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party, edited by Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazerow, 136–180. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Widell, Robert W. 2013. Birmingham and the Long Black Freedom Struggle. New York: Palgrave. Widener, Daniel. 2010. Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wilkins, Fanon Che. 2007. “The Making of Black Internationalists: SNCC and Africa Before the Launching of Black Power.” Journal of African American History 92(4): 468–491. Wilkins, Fanon Che. 2010. “‘A Line of Steel’: The Organization of the Sixth Pan African Congress and the Struggle for International Black Power, 1969–1974.” In The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, edited by Dan Berger, 97–114. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Williams, Jakobi. 2012. “‘Don’t Know Woman Have to Do Nothing She Don’t Want to Do’: Gender, Activism and the Illinois Black Panther Party.” Black Women Gender and Families 6(2): 29–54. Williams, Jakobi. 2013. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

xcviii | Black Power Studies Williams, Jakobi. 2016. “‘We Need to Unite with as Many People as Possible’: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Organization in Chicago.” In Civil Rights and Beyond: African American and Latino/a Activism in the Twentieth-Century United States, edited by Brian D. Behnken, 105–126. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Williams, Rhonda Y. 2001. “‘We’re Tired of Being Treated Like Dogs’: Poor Women and Power Politics in Black Baltimore.” Black Scholar 31(3–4): 31–41. Williams, Rhonda Y. 2006. “Black Women, Urban Politics, and Engendering Black Power.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era, edited Peniel E. Joseph, 79–104. New York: Routledge. Williams, Rhonda Y. 2008. “Envisioning ‘The Black Woman’ and Analyzing Voices of Protest.” Magazine of History 22(3): 39–40. Williams, Rhonda Y. 2010. “The Pursuit of Audacious Power: Rebel Reformers and Neighborhood Politics in Baltimore, 1966–1968.” In Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level, edited by Peniel E. Joseph, 215–242. New York: Palgrave. Williams, Rhonda Y. 2015. Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century. New York: Routledge. Williams, Robert F. 1962. Negroes with Guns. New York: Marzani and Munsell. Williams, Yohuru. 2000. Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven. New York: Brandywine. Williams, Yohuru. 2008. “Was Thomas Jefferson a Black Panther?” Magazine of History 22(3): 34–38. Williams, Yohuru, and Jama Lazerow, eds. 2008. Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panthers Party. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Williamson, Joy Ann. 2003. Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965– 1975. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Williamson, Joy Ann. 2005. “Community Control with a Black Nationalist Twist: The Black Panther Party’s Educational Programs.” In Black Protest Thought and Education, edited by William H. Watkins, 137–158. New York: Peter Lang. Windsor, Morgan. 2014. “Eric Garner Protests across the Nation Were Peaceful but Powerful.” International Business Times, December 8, www.ibtimes.com/eric-garner -protests-across-nation-were-peaceful-powerful-1733592. Winograd, Morley, and Michael Hais. 2011. Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation Is Changing America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Witt, Andrew. 2007. The Black Panthers in the Midwest: The Community Programs and Services of the Black Panther Party in Milwaukee, 1966–1977. New York: Routledge. Wolfe, Alan. 1973. The Seamy Side of Democracy: Repression in America. New York: David McKay. Woodard, Komozi. 1999. A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Woodard, Komozi. 2003. “It’s Nation Time in NewArk: Amiri Baraka and the Black Power Experiments in Newark, New Jersey.” In Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980, edited by Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, 287– 312. New York: New York University Press.



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Woodard, Komozi. 2005. “Message from the Grassroots: The Black Power Experiment in Newark, New Jersey.” In Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, 77–96. New York: New York University Press. Woodard, Komozi. 2006a. “Amiri Baraka, the Congress of African People, and Black Power Politics from the 1961 United Nations Protest to the 1972 Gary Convention.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era, edited by Peniel E. Joseph, 55–79. New York: Routledge. Woodard, Komozi. 2006b. “Imamu Baraka, the Newark Congress of African People and Black Power Politics.” In Black Power in the Belly of the Beast, edited by Judson L. Jeffries, 43–66. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Wright, Nathan. 1967. Black Power and Urban Unrest. New York: Hawthorn Books. Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. 2007. “An African-Vietnamese American: Robert S. Browne, the Antiwar Movement, and the Personal/Political Dimensions of Black Internationalism.” Journal of African American History 92(4): 492–515. Yan, Holly, and Steve Almasy. 2014. “Protesters Fill Streets across Country as Ferguson Protests Spread Coast to Coast.” CNN, November 26, http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/26 /us/national-ferguson-protests/. Young, Cynthia. 2006. Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Gender, Black Women, and Black Power

The Black Power era is widely perceived as an “all-boys club.” The phrase “Black Power!” typically evokes images of Black men in the late 1960s—afro wearing, dashiki sporting, black berets cocked to the side, slick leather coats, with a commanding disposition—a strong Black man! Such powerful images dominate the public memory but do not reflect the realities of the Black Power Movement and the litany of women who helped to shape its contours, envision its mission, and formulate its ideologies. Such an enthralling masculine image does more to obscure the rich history of the movement than it does to reveal its complexities, its diversity, and its contributions.

Black Women and Nationalism It is nearly impossible to understand the Black Power Movement without an appreciation for its connection to Black nationalism. As a broad philosophy with several limbs, Black nationalism’s key principles affirm Black people’s humanity, right to bodily integrity, and right to determine their destiny. Black nationalism represents a variety of ideas and concepts that arose in response to institutional and individual racism as well as a desire for self-determination. At its core, Black nationalism is about racial solidarity whereby Blacks united together pursued social change. In the public memory, Black women rarely come to mind when thinking about Black nationalism; they are underappreciated despite their significant contribution to the history of Black nationalist ideology. In terms of revolutionary nationalists, who sought to achieve complete Black liberation by overthrowing the white capitalist economic system and establishing a people’s government, one would be remiss not to mention the contributions of women such as Assata Shakur, Frances Beale, and the women of the Third World Women’s Alliance. Women’s involvement in the Congress of African People and the African Liberation Support Committee and poets such as Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez all helped to shape the ideology of cultural nationalism, which emphasized cultural unity as a vehicle for Black liberation. And women such as

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Audley “Queen Mother” Moore and Dara Abubakari (Virginia Collins), members of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), helped to lead the efforts in territorial separatism. Black nationalist expressions during the Black Power Movement were plentiful and abundant. And while women experienced Black nationalist ideology’s liberating capacity, they also were faced with confining notions of womanhood and family. Perhaps the most confining of these tropes suggested that women belonged in the background of the political sphere, dominating the private sphere and family life—essential to the construction and maintenance of the Black nation but not its leaders. Undergirding this trope was the idea that men were natural leaders and women were naturally supportive helpmates. Women who pushed against these types of confines or offered a feminist agenda were viewed as being at odds with Black liberation. Many nationalists, both male and female, were openly hostile to any feminist agenda. But women who put forth a feminist agenda bucked at the notion that Black nationalism was inherently incompatible with feminist thought. They worked against sexism within Black nationalist organizations and helped to shape them during the Black Power Movement.

Black Feminists Organizations and Organizing Several women-only or women-centered groups emerged during the Black Power era. They formed in part to address the glaring omission of their concerns in Black liberation organizations and predominately white feminist organizations. They realized that as Black women they lacked the luxury of separating race from gender and that a fight for liberation must be waged on all fronts including class and sexual orientation. Black women further developed the movement’s militant rhetoric to focus on bread-and-butter issues such as better welfare rights, social services, quality education, improved schools, employment, and decent housing. For instance, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), founded in 1966, was composed of several welfare rights groups from across the country that fought for the dignity of low-income women, for jobs, and for better welfare services. The NWRO was led by vocal Black women, although it was a multiracial organization of welfare recipients. The National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) began as an idea cultivated by lawyer-activist Florynce “Flo” Kennedy. In May 1973, 30 Black women gathered together to discuss problems impacting the lives of Black women—this was the first meeting of the NBFO. At this meeting, they determined that their concerns as Black women were being marginalized within mainstream Black liberation groups and white feminist organizations and by their Black male counterparts. Thus, the NBFO was founded to speak directly for Black women. It focused on



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child care, reproductive freedom and other health care concerns, welfare rights and reform, domestic workers’ rights, and unemployment. The NBFO formed task forces to tackle the concerns more directly. One task force on media was charged with counteracting negative press about women’s liberation movements and poor depictions of Black women. Other task forces focused on drug addiction, rape, women in prison, and sexuality, which dealt with Black lesbian concerns. Finally, the group stressed the inclusion of all classes of women. Birthed from the NBFO was the Combahee River Collective, formed by a group of Black feminists in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1974. Finding their vision for social change even more radical than that of the NBFO, the women formed a local organization committed to Black feminism as a political movement to combat multiple interlocking systems of oppression including racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression. They opted to form a collective rather than a hierarchical organization, which was antithetical to their beliefs about democracy. Typically referred to as a Black feminist lesbian organization (a significant number of its members were lesbians but not all of them), the collective did craft a radical anal­ ysis of sexuality. Among its activist work in Boston was its concentration on women’s rights and sex workers’ bodily integrity and safety. Several intellectual contributions came from this organization including “A Black Feminist State­ ment,” a critical document of Black feminist thought in the conceptualization of intersectionality.

Black Power Text Black women generated a commanding cannon of Black Power text, some of which helped to establish the genre of Black women’s studies. Beginning in the mid to late 1960s and continuing well into the 1980s, Black women asserted their right to have their own narrative and speak for themselves. This was a major theme in the literary work of Black Power women. In 1970, novelist and writer Toni Cade Bambara published The Black Woman. The edited anthology offered a rich historical, cultural, and political commentary from a wide variety of contributors on the experiences of Black women in society. One article written by Bambara focused on the issue of birth control pills—a hot topic of the day. Within the Black Power Movement, some male leaders encouraged women to abstain from using birth control because they considered it a “tool of the oppressor,” meant to propel genocide on the Black community; instead, they suggested that women should have babies for the revolution. Bambara’s essay responded to these claims. On one hand, she agreed that there was something sinister about the state telling anyone not to have a child, and on the other hand she highlighted the glaring contradiction of Black women having more children when so many were left uncared for or living in poverty. She argued that women needed better health and living options so

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that when they were ready (emotionally, economically, physically) they could have the choice to reproduce. This was reproductive freedom. The anthology was filled with essays that touched on the most pressing issues impacting the lives of Black women and laid the foundation for Black women’s studies. Much of the writing produced by Black women addressed taboo subjects and encouraged social dialogue to engage those matters. Among the most thought provoking and controversial were Michelle Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978) and Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Feminist author Michelle Wallace tackled the issue of power relations between Black men and women in a capitalist society where white people have power. Her assessments of these issues laid the groundwork for her Black feminist text Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. According to Wallace, Black men’s frustration over their lack of power manifested in their oppression of Black women. In part Wallace was responding to the 1965 Moynihan Report written by Senator Patrick Moynihan in which he uses Black women as the scapegoat for the plight of Black people. Wallace wrote against two ideas implicitly offered in Moynihan’s report: first, that Black women were to blame for the race’s failures to overcome racism, and second, that Black women were responsible for Black male “castration,” or effeminization. Wallace’s critique of Moynihan and Black patriarchy caused a firestorm. A year after the publication, scholars responded to Wallace in the Black Scholars special issue Black Sexism Debate. Robert Staples, a Black studies scholar, penned “a response to angry black feminists” in which he denied that Black women experienced sexism. Staples also critiqued Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls” in his article. Shange’s choreopoem appeared on Broadway at the New Federal Theatre in 1976 shortly before Wallace’s book was published. It was a collection of pieces delivered by seven Black women, named after the colors in the rainbow. Each woman delivered a monologue about her experiences living in a whitedominated society and interactions with Black men. The production was criticized for being anti–Black male by several individuals including Staples. Why did Black women’s writing cause so much trouble? Woman’s assessment of patriarchy was viewed by some Black people (Staples as well as others) as divisive and distracting from the “bigger” issue of fighting white supremacy. Others, both men and women, viewed feminism as a European ideology that was antithetical to the Black community and its issues. Finally, Shange and Wallace were unapologetically Black feminists; Wallace had been a founding member of the NBFO. Both Wallace and Shange were critical of the racism within the white feminist movement and sexism within Black society. The issues that Wallace and Shange brought up in their writing were particularly pressing concerns for Black women. In 1978, the Combahee River Collective issued a riveting statement on Black feminism. The “Black Feminist Statement” affirmed the group’s commitment to



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an antiracist and antisexist position rooted in a critique of heterosexism and economic oppression under capitalism. They acknowledged how sexual politics under patriarchy was as pervasive in Black women’s lives as the politics of class and race. Perhaps anticipating the pushback from their male counterparts, they explicitly stated their love for Black men, writing that “We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism” (Combahee River Collective 1977). Nonetheless, they understood their position as the most oppressed segment of society as a site for revolutionary action. They wrote that “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Combahee River Collective 1977). The collective also understood the need to produce more work by Black women on feminism, liberation, and revolution. These efforts produced an offspring of texts that became the bedrock of Black women’s studies. Five years after the statement appeared, in conjunction with other feminist writers including Audre Lorde, the Combahee River Collective came together to address another concern of Black feminist writers—a lack of publishing options for their work. Along with writer Cherrie Moraga, they established the Kitchen Table Women of Color Press. Their first manuscript, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, was edited by Barbara Smith. This manuscript was the direct result of the Collective’s efforts. The publication and the press continued the work of Black Power women initiated at the peak of the Black Power Movement.

Black Women’s Leadership While Black men led some of the most prominent Black Power organizations, Black women took on multiple leadership roles. Certainly in their own organizations such as those aforementioned, women took leading roles as theoreticians and strategists. But even in male-led organizations women often set the agenda, made proposals, challenged patriarchy, and used their ingenuity to advance a vision of Black empowerment. Women offered leadership at every level of the movement. Some women held public and notable positions in prominent organizations, while others gave advising, resources, and direction to the movement at the local level. One of the most extraordinary organizations to arise during the movement was the Black Panther Party (BPP), and women were a large part of the membership, representing the organization from the rank and file to the National Central Committee. In 1967 Kathleen Cleaver joined the party and was the first woman to hold a national leadership position, as the communications secretary from 1967 to 1971. Her work in this capacity helped to grow national support for the party and its leaders. Several years later in 1974, Elaine Brown was appointed chairman of the BPP; she was the

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only woman to hold this position and served in this capacity from 1974 to 1977. Under Brown’s leadership, women in the BPP took on greater roles, gaining access to positions on the Central Committee, with three women serving at one time. Both Cleaver and Brown sat on the Central Committee of the organization but held vastly different positions, and their experiences with sexism, misogyny, and gender discrimination varied based on a number of determining factors including decision-making power, marital status, and external influences such as the Counterintelligence Program. But even more diverse in terms of leadership were the experiences of women within local chapters. For instance, 4 of 10 of the Illinois chapter of the BPP core leaders were women at its inception. The community programs of the party were often staffed and run by women, including the free breakfast program, free transportation to visit relatives in prison and for senior citizens, free medical care, and political education classes. In fact, the Oakland Community School was directed by Ericka Huggins from 1973 to 1981. Women also held leadership positions within paramilitary organizations. Safiya Bukhari initially joined the New York chapter of the BPP in 1969. She worked with all the BPP’s projects—the Free Breakfast for Children program, political education classes, and the health clinic to screen for sickle-cell anemia—and sold the Panther newspaper. She worked her way up the Panthers’ chain of command, and her responsibilities included organizing and politicizing the various Black folks living in Harlem and politically educating the community. In 1971 Bukhari joined the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and was responsible for its information and communications, including holding press conferences and releasing communiqués from the BLA. Within two years Bukhari became a unit coordinator of the Amistad Collective of the BLA, an armed guerrilla unit designed to wage revolutionary warfare. As a leader of a paramilitary organization, Bukhari could set the tone and standards for how other women were treated in the unit. While she admitted that there were strong concerns about sexism, gender roles, and the division of labor, she ensured as a unit leader that other positions of leadership were selected based on qualifications, not gender. She also recalled political education classes being an important factor in combating sexism for unit members. In other arenas of the Black Power Movement, Black women joined their male peers in the struggle to empower their communities. This was particularly evident in the battles to establish Africana (Black studies) programs on college campuses across the country. In the midst of campus unrest, Black women (as students, faculty, and community activists) provided critical leadership and direction to the emergence of these programs, which from the onset were committed to both academic excellence and community empowerment. These academic units helped to address the blatant disregard for Black brilliance and the absence of the Black experience within curriculum. The demand for Black studies programs was high



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on a list that included employing more Black faculty and administrators, increasing the enrollment of Black students, and reformulating admissions processes. Black women had an active role in the initiation and development of Black studies. At their institutions, women were founders and served as program directors and department chairmen. Finally, women helped to lead the efforts to professionalize the field, including the establishment of the National Council of Black Studies in 1975. Throughout U.S. history Black women have always participated in political movements within their communities. In these efforts, they have provided critical leadership. Despite men holding visible and official positions within organizations such as the BPP, the critical leadership that women gave must be acknowledged. Scholarship in this area is constantly growing as academics begin to rethink the boundaries and meaning of leadership. Jasmin A. Young See also: Black Liberation Army; Black Panther Party; Brown, Elaine; Cleaver, Kathleen Neal; Combahee River Collective; Davis, Angela Yvonne; Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley; National Welfare Rights Organization; Revolutionary Nationalism; Shakur, Assata; Smith, Barbara; Sunni-Ali, Fulani Further Reading Beale, Frances. 1995. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” In Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, 146–155. New York: New Press. Brown, Elaine. 2015. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. New York: Anchor. Bukhari, Safiya. 2010. The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY. Cade, Toni, and Toni Cade Bambara, eds. 1970. The Black Woman: An Anthology, Vol. 1433. New York: Signet. Collier-Thomas, Bettye, and Vincent P. Franklin, eds. 2001. Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement. New York: NYU Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2002. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Combahee River Collective. 1977. “A Black Feminist Statement.” Farmer, Ashley. 2014. “Renegotiating the ‘African Woman’: Women’s Cultural Nationalist Theorizing in the Us Organization and the Congress of African People, 1965–1975.” Black Diaspora Review 4(1): 76–112. Giddings, Paula. 1984. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Race and Sex in America. New York: William Morrow. Gore, Dayo F., Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds. 2009. Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: NYU Press.

cviii | Gender, Black Women, and Black Power King, Deborah K. 1988. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14(1): 42–72. McDuffie, Erik S., and Komozi Woodard. 2013. “‘If You’re in a Country That’s Progressive, the Woman Is Progressive’: Black Women Radicals and the Making of the Politics and Legacy of Malcolm X.” Biography 36(3): 507–539. Shakur, Assata. 2016. Assata: An Autobiography. London: Zed Books. Shange, Ntozake. 2010. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. New York: Simon and Schuster. Smith, Barbara, ed. 1983. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Spencer, Robyn Ceanne. 2008. “Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California.” Journal of Women’s History 20(1): 90–113. Springer, Kimberly. 2005. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Springer, Kimberly. 2006. “Black Feminists Respond to Black Power Masculinism.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, 105–118. New York: CRC Press. Ward, Stephen. 2006. “The Third World Women’s Alliance: Black Feminist Radicalism and Black Power Politics.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights– Black Power Era, 119–44. New York: CRC Press. Williams, Rhonda Y. 2006. “Black Women, Urban Politics, and Engendering Black Power.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era, 79–103. New York: CRC Press. Williams, Rhonda Y. 2008. “Black Women and Black Power.” OAH Magazine of History 22(3): 22–26.

Urban Rebellions

Psychologist Kenneth Clark issued his statement on the cusp of the eruption of the 1960s-era “long hot summers.” For more than a decade African Americans annually rose to violently challenge racial oppression. From the Black working-class response to the fire hosing and the unleashing of police dogs on children during the 1963 Birmingham Campaign into the mid-1970s, African Americans initiated yearly uprisings in small and medium-size cities and suburbs as well as metropolises in every region of the United States. Using the criteria of at least 30 individuals engaged in the appropriation of commodities, the destruction of property, and clashes with law enforcement, estimates range from 329 to 750 conflagrations during the Black Power period. Clark offered his observation before these explosions of Black rage were routinized into annual events. Most of the journalistic and scholarly literature refers to these events as riots, as senseless disorganized destructive episodes. Indeed, despite noting differences, several scholars have treated the 1960s uprisings as continuations of the nadir-era race riots, hence the use of the same term. However, an expanding group of scholars conceive of these incidents as rebellions. Caught off guard and shocked by the urban rebellions of the Black Power era, many scholars became interested in uncovering the roots of violent Black resistance. Ironically, the rebellions of the 1960s sparked the serious study of slave revolts and armed self-defense during nadir-era race riots and of that era’s insurrections. The term “riot” is broadly defined by liberal and conservative scholars as “any group of twelve or more people attempting to assert their will immediately through the use of force outside the normal bounds of law” (Gilje 1996, 4). This contemporary mainstream definition is at odds with the consensus definition from the early 20th century and the interpretation of contemporary radical scholar activists. To distinguish racially motivated conflagrations from issueless riots such as those that occur after sporting events, these scholars and activists define a riot as involving “at least one group publicly, and with little or no attempt at concealment, illegally assaulting at least one other group or illegally attacking or invading property . . . in ways that suggest that the authorities have lost control” (Halle and Rafter

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A Detroit police armored vehicle drives through Detroit on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in a show of force after violence erupted throughout the city. (AP Photo)

Thrifty’s Drug Store, located on Central Avenue in Watts, California, was damaged during the 1965 uprising. The 5 days of unrest left 34 people dead, thousands arrested, and millions of dollars in damages. (Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at Calif­ ornia State University, Northridge)



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2003, 347). Historically, this definition would locate race riots as expressions of white American social control. From the Cincinnati Riot of 1829 to the Detroit Riot of 1943, whites launched violent incursions into Black communities with the intent of maiming, robbing, raping, and murdering African Americans and destroying Black-owned property and social institutions. The 1866 Memphis Riot is illustrative. After Congress passed the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which defined U.S. citizenship and affirmed equal protection for all citizens, over President Andrew Johnson’s veto, race riots erupted in Memphis and New Orleans. The official Freedman’s Bureau report submitted by Colonel Charles F. Johnson, inspector general of the states of Kentucky and Tennessee, and Major T. W. Gilbert, aide-de-camp to General Oliver O. Howard, identified the “remote” or long-term cause of the Memphis Riot as “a bitterness of feeling which has always existed between the low whites & blacks” and “an especial hatred among the city police for the Colored Soldiers” that resulted in daily minor confrontations (Johnson and Gilbreth 1866). The immediate cause or what sociologists call the “triggering incident” stemmed from two separate instances. On April 30, a white policeman forced an African American off the sidewalk. As a result the Black man “stumbled” into the officer, and in response four white policemen pistol-whipped an entire group of Black men. The next day, May 1, the police attempted to arrest two members of an intoxicated “crowd of colored men, principally discharged soldiers” (Johnson and Gilbreth 1866). The men resisted and attempted to “rescue their comrades.” After the Black soldiers were ordered back to Fort Pickering on the outskirts of town, the police “fired upon unoffending Negroes remote from the riotous quarter” (Johnson and Gilbreth 1866). Soon John C. Creighton, the city recorder arrived and in an inflammatory speech urged “everyone of the citizens” to “get arms, organize and go through the Negro districts,” stating, “Boys, I want you to go ahead and kill every damned one of the nigger race and burn up the cradle” (Ash 2014, 213, 113). Unleashed, the maddened mob of 70–90 whites composed heavily of Irishmen attacked the Black community with murderous intent. The mob consisted of nearly 35 percent police and firemen and nearly 30 percent of the white middle class (entrepreneurs, mainly saloon keepers and grocers). The mob burned 91 homes, 3 or 4 Black churches, and between 8 and 12 schools including 5 owned by the government and murdered 30–46 African Americans, including burning 16-year-old Rachael Hatcher alive, and injured another 285 and may have raped as any as 6 Black women. Johnson and Gilbert calculated the financial loss to Blacks and the government at $98,319.55 but estimated that the final total would be over $120,000. While the initial confrontation between white police and Black soldiers was spontaneous, Creighton and Pendergast organized the mob and converted the riot into a pogrom, that is, a violent assault aimed at massacring a subordinate race or ethnicity, an intentional act of ethnic cleansing. What occurred in Memphis

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established the purpose and pattern for future racial pogroms and eventual Black urban rebellions. Unlawful police action would become the trigger event launching scores of subsequent race riots and the initiating incident for almost all Black urban rebellions. In addition to often sparking pogroms and rebellions, police usually acted sympathetically toward whites and hostilely toward Blacks. Sometimes as in Memphis they were the aggressors, while other times they passively refused to enforce the law and allowed Blacks to be indiscriminately assaulted by white mobs, as in East St. Louis in 1917. From Memphis 1866 through the 1960s-era rebellions to the 2015 Baltimore uprising, police action would become the most critical factor starting large-scale racial conflagrations.

Rebellions in the Era of Black Power A large body of new research has revealed that Black urban rebellions occurred at a much greater frequency than Clark imagined. African American urban rebellions, like the sit-ins, have occurred in clusters: the late 1960s; Miami in 1980, 1982, 1983 and 1989; Cincinnati in the 2000s; and recently, since the murder of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Judged against an abstract standard in which revolts are not understood as part of a broader continuum of repertoires of resistance, Black urban rebellions seem rare. But when examined in the context of the broad range of resistance strategies deployed by African Americans, urban rebellions seem regular if not frequent occurrences. It is difficult to determine the exact number of urban rebellions that took place during the turbulent decade, but it is more likely closer to 750 than 329, as indicated by Virginia Postrel. Scholars estimate that between 1965 and 1968 urban rebellions occurred in 257 American cities. The official record indicates nearly 300 deaths, nearly 13,000 injuries, 60,000 arrests, and hundreds of millions of dollars in property loss resulting from the rebellions. A plurality of the uprisings occurred in the Midwest, at 36 percent, and they most frequently occurred in medium-size cities, not metropolises. The year 1967, the year Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee executive director James Forman termed the “Year of Rebellion,” led with 163 rebellions, 45 percent of which took place in cities with populations under 100,000, while 28 percent transpired in cities with populations under 50,000. The most deadly clashes between African Americans and the police, National Guard, and the U.S. Army took place in Newark and Detroit. In Newark, 34 people died in a weeklong disturbance that laid waste to large parts of the city’s Central Ward. Over five days of rebellion in Detroit 43 people were killed, 33 (nearly 77 percent) of whom were Black. Nearly 1,200 people were injured and over 7,000 were arrested, and property destruction was estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It is important to highlight the differences between racial pogroms such as that in Memphis in 1866 and the Black Power–era conflagrations that the masses of



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working-class Blacks and radical scholars refer to as urban rebellions. The conflagrations occurring in Harlem in 1935 and the 1960s, Miami in the 1980s, Los Angeles in 1992, Cincinnati in the 2000s, Ferguson in 2014, and Baltimore in 2015 are rebellions, not riots or pogroms, because they did not include large-scale conflict between white and Black civilians; rather, they are characterized by conflict between Black rebels and the agents of state repression (police, the National Guard, and the military). In addition, these conflagrations represent efforts by racially oppressed African Americans to appropriate and redistribute property and to punish capitalists who disrespected them, charged exorbitant prices, sold secondrate merchandise, and rented substandard housing. Largely due to the increasing apartheid spatial character of American cities, confrontations between Black and white civilians declined over time. The race riots of the 19th and early 20th centuries decreased after the explosion in suburbanization that relocated most whites far from African American communities. By the end of the 1950s, it was less common for whites and Blacks to live in the same municipalities. And when they did reside in the same city, urban renewal programs and zoning regulations had created new physical barriers such as highways, parks, and shopping malls that further divided cities into racial enclaves. Therefore, instead of clashes between civilians, Black urban rebellions are characterized by sustained conflicts, at least two days of fighting between largely working-class African Americans and white agents of repression (i.e., police, the National Guard, and the military). The 1965 Watts Rebellion illuminates this attribute. Around 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, August 11, 1965, highway patrol officer Lee Minikus stopped Marquette Frye, a 21-year-old Black motorist, for either dangerous driving or speeding. Unknowingly, Minikus pulled Frye over by the corner of Avalon Boulevard and 116th Street, near his home. After Frye failed a sobriety test, the officer prepared to arrest him and tow his car. To prevent the car from being towed, Frye’s stepbrother Ronald, a passenger in the car, brought his mother, Rena, to the scene. Upon seeing his mother, a drunken Frye began to cuss and berate the officers. According to witnesses and the state’s investigation, Rena Frye scolded her son and urged him to calm down. Newly arriving patrolman John Wilson, allegedly fearing for his fellow officers, decided to act aggressively. Fearing the growing crowd, another Los Angeles Police Department officer drew his gun. Seeing the weapon and fearing that the officer was going to shoot her son, Mrs. Frye leapt on the officer’s back, tearing his shirt. Meanwhile, Wilson hit Marquette Frye in the head with his nightstick, causing him to bleed. Mrs. Frye was thrown into a paddy wagon along with her two sons. Her arrest angered the crowd. One onlooker screamed “We’ve got no rights at all—It’s just like Selma!” (Conot 1970, 81). Another declared that the police did not belong there. Implicit in his declaration was the idea of the police as an occupying colonial army.

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The crowd was now shouting profanities at the police. In the confusion, an officer claimed that someone spit on him. Seeing Joyce Ann Gaines, a 20-year-old, leaving, he grabbed and dragged her screaming and kicking to the middle of the street, where she was tossed into another police van. The crowd grew to hundreds as more police converged on the area. Witnesses to the Fryes’ arrest claim they heard the police use racial slurs. One woman who said she witnessed the Fryes’ arrest told the Los Angeles Times that “My husband and I saw 10 cops beating one man. My husband told the officers, ‘You’ve got him handcuffed,’ to which ‘One of the officers answered ‘Get out of here, [expletive]. Get out of here all you [expletives]’” (Queally 2015). As the police drove off with Gaines and the Fryes, African Americans began throwing bricks at them and passing white motorists. The next night the pattern repeated itself. The following day, crowds moved the attack to the Watts business district. By noon, rebels were firebombing whiteowned businesses. Tommy Jacquette, a lifelong South Central resident and rebellion participant, justifies these actions, stating that “We had a revolt against those people who were in here trying to exploit and oppress us” (Rietman and Landsberg 2005). Their goal was to “drive white exploiters” out of the community. Lieutenant Governor Glenn M. Anderson, acting on behalf of the vacationing Governor Edmund G. Brown, imposed an 8:00 p.m. curfew on the 46.5-square-mile Watts community. Ultimately, it took nearly 14,000 national guardsmen and 2,000 LA police and county deputies to quell the insurrection. Approximately 35,000 active rebels opposed them. After 36 hours of revolt, 34 people lay dead, 1,000 were injured, and nearly 4,000 were persons arrested, and $200 million worth of property was damaged or destroyed. Of the 261 buildings destroyed, few were homes, churches, or libraries. This pattern of destruction suggests a consciousness of purpose. Nonetheless, the initial journalism and scholarship, overwhelmingly written by white scholars, portrayed the rebellions through what political scientist Daryl B. Harris calls the “black inferiority/white superiority mythology” paradigm. This paradigm offered three interpretative frames: (1) the “riffraff” or criminality thesis; (2) the failure to assimilate thesis, which argues that the “rioters” were new southern migrants who were not assimilating to the urban North; and (3) the “rabblerouser” or Black militant conspiracy. The riffraff theory viewed the conflagrations as riots and claimed that the alleged participants constituted a meager proportion of the community, 1–2 percent who were largely unemployed criminals, deviants, mentally disturbed persons, and often drug addicts. Categorizing rebellious Blacks in this way evaded critiquing systematic institutional racism or, as Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton called it, “colonialism” (Carmichael and Hamilton 1992, 5). The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) central finding that “White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II”



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thoroughly discredited the riffraff theory (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders USA n.d.). David O. Sears and T. M. Tomlinson’s study of the 1965 Watts Rebellion provided empirical evidence of the theory’s wrongheadedness. Sear and Tomlinson reveal that few of the arrestees were career criminals. In fact, a majority, 55 percent, had never been convicted of a crime, including 26 percent who had never been arrested. Only 11 of the arrestees had previously served time in prison. Moreover, scholars discovered that most arrestees involved in urban rebellions were employed, albeit in menial low-paying jobs. Thomas J. Sugrue and Andrew P. Goodman found similar patterns in the 1967 rebellion in the suburb of Plainfield, New Jersey. There Sugrue and Goodman found that 92 percent of African American arrestees were local residents and were overwhelmingly northern-born, albeit first-generation children of southern migrants. And as Sears and Tomlinson found in Los Angeles, most arrestees and self-identified participants were either born in or at an early age migrated to the cities in which they rebelled. This was the case in metropolises, small cities, and suburban communities. Scholars also discovered widespread community participation in the rebellions. In a survey of six cities that experienced rebellions in 1967, Robert Fogelson and Robert B. Hill discovered a participation rate of 15 percent, the same as what Sears and Tomilson found in Watts. In their contribution to the Kerner Commission report, Nathan Caplan and J. M. Paige found that 11 percent of Detroit’s ghetto residents joined in the rebellion. And perhaps most alarming to the corporate and governmental elite, Sears and Tomlinson found that 58 percent of Watts residents believed that the “riot” would have “predominately beneficial effects,” compared to only 26 percent who anticipated “predominately unfavorable effects.” Indeed, national surveys placed sympathy for the rebellions and Blacks who “[b]elieve the riots are helpful” at 50 percent (Sears and Tomilson 1968, 490). Finally, research revealed that the “rabble-rouser” thesis was as fictitious as the riffraff theory. There was no national conspiracy to foment rebellions by activists, as they were products of both local conditions and the national environment. Using the appearance of nationally known militants, Sears and Tomlinson discovered that well-known militants Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture and H. Rap Brown/ Jamil Al-Amin only visited 6 of 46 cities that experienced a rebellion between 1966 and 1969. The Kerner Commission summed it up best when it described the typical rebel as “a teenager or young adult, a lifelong resident of the city in which he rioted, a high school dropout; he was, nevertheless, somewhat better educated than his nonrioting Negro neighbor, and was usually underemployed or employed in a menial job. He was proud of his race, extremely hostile to both whites and middle-class Negroes and, although informed about politics, highly distrustful of the political system” (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders USA n.d.).

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The pattern of rebellion and the purposive action of the rebels, whether in the large 46.5-square-mile Watts section of Los Angeles or in the small suburb of Plainfield, New Jersey, give credence to Ashley Howard’s quite persuasive argument that urban rebellion is a protest tactic of the Black working class, part of African Americans’ repertoire of resistance. She identifies five traits that mark the 1960s-era Black urban rebellions as African American “working class activism” (Howard 2012, 1). The data from arrest records, media investigations, and participant’s remembrances reveal that the socioeconomic status of the majority of participants were part of the working poor. The participants in these actions were mainly subproletarians, not lumpen proletarians or “riffraff” but rather menial laborers who frequently experienced periods of unemployment. The urban rebellions of the 1960s and since represent efforts to make audible the unheard anguish of the majority class in the African American community. Rebellion is both a cry for relief and a call for a more robust resistance. As such, rebellions are struggles to democratize the political and economic decisions that determine the quality of life of the working-class Black majority. For the Black working class, rebellions are acts aimed at acquiring the power to determine their own destiny. Howard found that this class sector of the Black community was effectively disfranchised due to gerrymandering and other voter suppression tactics that diluted Black voting power. The minuscule number of Black elected officials were widely seen as practitioners of plantation politics by their working-class constituencies. In a 15-city survey of African American “political workers,” a group of urban sociologists discovered deep alienation among African Americans. Fiftyone percent claimed that the community viewed their city councilpersons as representatives of local government, not the community, who “must be asked continually and repeatedly [asked] in order to get things done” (Howard 2012, 25). The crux of this critique extended beyond the meager number of Black elected officials to encompass the entirety of the African American middle class. Among the more startling findings of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was the antipathy with which the Black working class held middle-class Blacks. As a consequence, they developed a culturally based critique of the rising Black middle class. During the Detroit Rebellion, one activist put it this way: “When he [the middle-class Black] gets into the system he become whiter than Whitey” (Howard 2012, 27). In sum, their oppression was overdetermined by the intertwining of racial oppression, class exploitation, and consumer-based economic discrimination. For all of these reasons, institutional politics did not work for them. Obviously, institutional politics did not solve the day-to-day problems plaguing African Americans, which is evidenced by their attribution as causes for the rebellions. In the minds of African Americans, the rebellions were a product of



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overdetermination, that is, a consequence of complex multiple causes even though any one factor on its own could cause a rebellion. In A. Campbell and H. Schuman’s 1968 supplement on political attitudes to the Kerner Commission, they asked Blacks what they thought were the primary causes of the rebellions. The respondents attributed them to five major causes: lack of progress toward equality (72 percent), lack of jobs (67 percent), lack of decent housing (67 percent), lack of quality education (61 percent), and police brutality (49 percent). Interestingly, Blacks viewed the long-term social conditions as more important than the trigger incidents of police brutality as causes of the rebellions. Impoverished, brutalized, and marginalized from institutional politics, working-class African Americans came to believe that political violence was instrumental and justified and would deliver “tangible results.” Sizable percentages of African American ghetto residents participated in and supported the rebellions. Studies show that about 15 percent of those residing in urban ghettos participated in the rebellions. A 1966 Harris Poll question asked African Americans if rankand-file Negroes supported the racial revolt. Ninety-one percent responded positively. Martin Luther King Jr. observed that the 1965 Watts Rebellion was “the beginning of a stirring of those people in our society who have been bypassed by the progress of the past decade” (Carson 1998, 292). Black support for the rebellions transcended class and gender. This suggests that a legitimacy crisis existed in the African American community, that working-class Blacks were breaking free of the moral and intellectual leadership of American liberalism and the U.S. state. Howard found that local ghetto residents focused their wrath on outsiders, agents of repression, absentee landlords, and exploitive ghetto merchants who robbed the community and took their profits elsewhere. Another major finding of the Kerner Commission was that appropriation (looting) and destruction of property were not random but that rebels targeted abusive white business owners who reputedly disrespected Blacks and charged exorbitant prices. Contrary to media images, most of the small number of clashes with white civilians were a result of white vigilante incursions into Black communities. Agents of state repression and exploitative entrepreneurs were overwhelmingly the targets of Black violence.

Seminal Analyses of the Black Power Era Two quite different African American journalists wrote the best analyses of the urban rebellions during the Black Power era. At the beginning of the 1970s, Samuel F. Yette and Robert Allen published startling assessments of the “decisive decade.” Yette, then a professor of journalism at Howard University, had worked for mainstream publications. He was a former associate editor of Ebony and an ex-correspondent for Newsweek and had even been the executive secretary of the Peace Corps. In his shocking book The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in

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America, he alleges that government officials were unleashing massive governmental repression against Black militants and radicals, using unconstitutional tactics to eliminate them, and were ushering in “a substantial police state” (Yette 1975, 201). According to Yette, the Richard Nixon administration was working to close legal loopholes in the emerging police state. Not surprisingly, along with Black militants and radicals, African Americans in general and radicals of all racial groups were the immediate victims of the institutionalization of political and police repression. The decision to unleash massive violence against Black militants and radicals, according to Yette, flowed from American elites’ conclusion that “black Americans are obsolete people.” According to Yette, automation and deindustrialization were forcing African Americans out of the labor force. Commenting on this trend, Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz observed that “the nation’s economy is piling up a human scrap heap of 300,000 young men” (Yette 1975, 13). A disproportionate percentage of this growing group of disposable people was Black, and given labor force trends, Yette concluded, the marginalization of Blacks from work represented the future. Therefore, it was an inescapable conclusion: Blacks had become superfluous. And with Black labor no longer essential to the U.S. economy and African Americans posing a threat to the country’s “peace and tranquility,” Yette argued that the phrase “law and order” was a “euphemism . . . for the total repression and possible extermination of those in the society who cry for justice where little justice can be found” (Yette 1975, 15). Yette foresaw a future characterized by political assassinations, mass incarceration, and genocide. Robert L. Allen, who differed from Yette in that throughout his career he had been associated with radical political causes, sketched a different future. Allen had worked for The Guardian, described as “America’s oldest independent radical newspaper.” After the publication of Black Awakening in Capitalist America, he joined the staff of the Black Scholar, then a radical African American journal. In Black Awakening, Allen contends that in response to the urban rebellions, elites had decided to implement the strategy of corporate liberalism. When applied to Afro-America, corporate liberalism manifested itself in Allen’s terms as “domestic neocolonialism.” The elites were prepared to incorporate a meager sector of the African American community into mainstream occupations and to cede scores of cities to African American political leaders, provided they would adopt what were then called progrowth economic development strategies. The transformative aspects of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements meant that the corporate liberal-domestic colonialist strategy could not simply recast the old “Negro” middle class or empower the small strata of traditional “Negro” conservatives but instead needed to generate a new Black petty bourgeoisie. For this strategy to succeed, this new Black middle class needed to look like



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the militants; they needed to articulate the militant rhetoric of Black Power but subscribe to the protoideology’s most moderate and conservative aspects. According to Allen, the strategy of “domestic neocolonialism” mainly entails the creation of a new strata of managers, technicians, and dependent entrepreneurs who facilitate the rise of moderate politicians from this moderate stratum. The success of a strategy of domestic neocolonialism depended on the U.S. capitalist system’s capacity to cultivate a new Black leadership. This new African American leadership was being built through the expansion and transformation of the Black middle class. The possibility of such a reconstruction of African American leadership was dependent on the incorporation of younger Blacks into the technological-managerial sector of the emerging global capitalist economy. Expanding access to higher education had been a central aim and strategy of the Civil Rights Movement, and the transformation of higher education was a core goal and strategy of the Black Power Movement. The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements pried open the door to higher education such that the percentage of Africans obtaining a college degree nearly tripled between 1960 and 1975, from 4 percent to 11 percent. Subsequently, median Black family income rose precipitously in the midst of the rebellions, rising from 53 percent that of whites’ in 1963 to 64 percent by 1970. The substantial increase in African American college graduates created a pool from which a new Black leadership class could be sculpted. The pioneering Black mayors of the first wave, 1967–1975, were often local activists, generally Civil Rightsers, but many had worked aspects of the rhetoric and style of Black Power into their political persona, and thus they met the expectations of both the Black community and the corporate liberals. Beginning with Carl Stokes’s election in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1967, by 1973 African Americans had acquired leadership of 48 towns and cities.

Government Response: Contain, Crush, and Incorporate The repression option included two aspects: containment and judicious repression. These distinct but related approaches represented tactical responses to two different groups: rebels (the alleged ghetto rioters) and revolutionaries. The initial target was the rebellions. Given the Black community’s high levels of support for the rebellions, the Lyndon B. Johnson administration opposed massive repression and opted instead for a policy of containment and analysis. During the early phases of the Detroit Rebellion on July 23, 1967, Johnson met with a group of senior advisers before sending them to Detroit to gather information. Roger Wilkins, at the time the executive director of the Department of Justice’s Community Services Division, recounts this meeting. According to Wilkins, Johnson emphatically told his advisers “I don’t want bullets in those guns. I don’t want our troops to have

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bullets in those guns. . . . I don’t want anybody to say that my troops shot a pregnant ni—” (Wilkins n.d.). Subsequently, on July 29, 1967, Johnson issued Executive Order 11365 establishing the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. He charged the commission with answering three questions: “(1) What happened? (2) Why did it happen? and (3) What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders USA n.d.). In the 1967 Newark Rebellion 26 people were killed, most shot indiscriminately by the National Guard. Six days later in Detroit at least 33 Black people were killed, again mainly shot by police and national guardsmen. However, by April 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the federal government’s policy of containment had gained dominance. Deaths were down dramatically, and national guardsmen and U.S. Army troops showed force, used nonlethal procedures to suppress the rioters, and imposed curfews but rarely killed anyone. Consequently, only 46 people were killed during the 120 April uprisings. Local police forces were not pleased with this policy. However, the federal government found a way to gain their support. The federal government used the rebellions to transform municipal police departments into instruments of federal policy. The 1970 District of Columbia Court Reform and Criminal Procedure Act authorized “preventive detention,” “no knock search and seizure” provisions without a search warrant, and wiretapping with a court order and gave the police the right to fingerprint or take samples of hair, blood, voice imprints, etc., even if they did not have enough evidence to make an arrest. Under this bill, local law enforcement agencies not only got wider latitude, but additionally, the Justice Department offered states $435 million as part of the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act to upgrade police equipment and manpower, create SWAT units, and enhance cooperation with other regional police departments. Congress also resurrected the 1952 McCarran Act. The Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB), the investigatory instrument of the McCarran Act, added six new provisions: (1) the SACB must initiate proceedings on at least one new case before December 31, 1968, or close down; (2) the “communist front” organization definition was amended so that the U.S. attorney general could declare virtually any organization a communist front; (3) a fine of $500 to $5,000 was imposed for “disrupting” a SACB meeting; 4) the U.S. attorney general was mandated to file the names of subversive groups with the SACB; (5) Fifth Amendment privileges were revoked although the SACB can grant immunity to all witnesses who appear; and 6) no affirmative legal action could be brought against the SACB either to halt or interfere with its proceeding. Through the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) as well as state and local initiatives, the federal government opted for a heavier hand. The rebels were to be hounded, harassed, discredited, and even assassinated. The elimination of

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the radicals cleared the way for the other strategies to work. The central aim was to create new leaders for the Black community. COINTELPRO had five goals: 1. Prevent the coalition of militant Black nationalist groups. 2. Prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist movement. 3. Prevent violence on the part of Black nationalist groups. 4. Prevent militant Black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability. 5. Prevent the long-range growth of militant Black nationalist organizations, especially among youths. By July 1969, the Black Panther Party (BPP) had become Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover’s primary focus. He declared the BPP “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Thus, the BPP was the target of 233 of about 295 authorized “black nationalist” COINTELPRO actions (Russonelo 2016). Containment of the rebellions and the crushing of the militants and radicals enabled the incorporative aspects of the domestic neocolonialist strategy. It operated on two levels: economic and political. Economically, corporate elites and the state managers sought to create a capitalist class. The Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) were the vehicle through which this class was manufactured. In 1967, the SBA enacted Section 8(a), which authorized the SBA to establish a separate pool for some contracts from which only “disadvantaged” companies could bid. The Nixon administration established the OMBE and low-cost loans for minority entrepreneurial ventures. Section 8(a) was augmented in 1977 by the Public Works Employment Act, which mandated that federal contractors set aside 10 percent of all contracts for minority subcontractors. John Sibley Butler reports that in 1987, 47 percent of African American enterprises listed in Black Enterprise’s top 100 Black businesses were started in the 1970s, and 21 percent were started in the 1980s. Federal support was critical to the development of the new Black business class. With the elections of Carl Stokes in Cleveland, Ohio, and Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana, in November 1967, Black mayors took control of the lives of a significant percentage of African America. Once in power, Black mayors, as managers of institutions of public authority, had an interest in weakening opportunities for new or expanding social movements that might complicate their tenures. Therefore, much of the radicalism at the heart of the Black Power Movement dissipated into reformist and regressive policies such as urban renewal and Black

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capitalism, which facilitated the demobilization of the movement and eventually distanced the Black urban regimes (BURs) from the very Black working-class constituencies that created them. Political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. identifies BURs not simply as African American–dominated municipal governments but instead as complex structures that disempower the material interests of their majority Black working-class constituencies and demobilize social movements. According to Reed, BURs operate on the following three frameworks that demobilize calls for structural change: (1) BURs subdue their Black working-class voter base through a discourse of “racial collectivity” that confuse Black control with community control, thus promoting the idea that a benefit to one member of the race is a benefit to all; (2) BURs support progrowth platforms (economic restructuring, greater funding for social programs), offering potential material gain to Black capitalists and centralizing white business growth in the city; and (3) they revitalize the brokerage model of Black politics that thwarts popular political participation and results in elite interests and policies supplanting constituents’ issues of livable wages, decent affordable housing, quality schools, and humane policing. Amid the shift of capital accumulation toward neoliberalism, the new neocolonialist Black leadership class intensified intraracial class divisions, de­ industrialization, and the dismantling of public welfare social programs.

Conclusion In response to the Black rebellions of the Black Power era, the state and corporate America initiated a combined strategy of judicious repression and corporate liberalism, or contain, crush, and incorporate, as they converted the African American community from a domestic colony to a domestic neocolony presided over by an elite of Black capitalists and politicians. The community was contained, the militants and radials were crushed, and state and corporations incorporated a small but important segment in order to construct a new Black middle class as part of the emerging technical-managerial and capitalist classes. Ultimately, the state and corporate America would make the neoliberal turn and marginalize the Black working class and drastically reduce or abolish the programs that allowed them to reconfigure the Black middle class. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua See also: Attica Prison Rebellion; Police Brutality Further Reading Abu-Lughod, Janet. 2012. Race, Space and Riots in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Allen, Robert L. 1992. Black Awakening in Capitalist America. 1969; reprint, Trenton, NJ: African World Press.



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Allen, Vernon. 1970. “Toward Understanding Riots: Some Perspectives.” Journal of Social Issues 26(1): 1–18. Ash, Steven. 2014. A Massacre in Memphis. New York: Hill and Wang. Brophy, Alfred, and Randall Kennedy. 2003. Reconstructing the Dreamland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, Angus, and Howard Schuman. 1968. Racial Attitudes in Fifteen American Cities. Supplemental Studies for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. New York: Praeger. Capeci, Dominic, Jr. 2007. “Foreword: American Race Rioting in Historical Perspective.” In Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, edited by Walter Rucker and James Nathaniel Upton, xix–xlii. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Caplan, Nathan S. 1970. “The New Ghetto Man: A Review of Recent Empirical Studies.” Journal of Social Issues 26(1): 59–73. Caplan, Nathan S., and Jeffery M. Paige. 1968. “A Study of Ghetto Rioters.” Scientific American 219(2): 15–21. Carmichel, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. 1992. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. 1967; reprint, New York: Vintage Books. Carson, Calybourne, ed. 1998. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Warner Books. Clark, Kenneth B. 1970. “The Wonder Is There Have Been So Few Riots.” In Black Protest in the Sixties, edited by August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, 107–115. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Conot, Robert. 1970. “A Crowd Becomes a Riot: Watts 1965; The Stranger in the City.” In Perspectives on Black America, edited by Russell Endo and William Strawbridge, 73–88. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Fogelson, Robert, and Robert B. Hill. 1968. “Who Riots? A Study in Participation in the 1967 Riots.” In Supplemental Studies for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 241–248. Washington, DC: National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Gilje, Paul. 1996. Rioting in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Halle, David, and Kevin Rafter. 2003. “Riots in New York and Los Angeles, 1935– 2002.” In New York and Los Angeles: Politics, Society and Culture: A Comparative View, edited by David Halle and Kevin Rafter, 341–366. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harris, Daryl B. 1998. “The Logic of Black Urban Rebellions.” Journal of Black Studies 28(3) (January): 368–385. Howard, Ashley. 2012. “Prairie Fires: Urban Rebellions as Black Working Class Politics in Three Midwestern Cities.” PhD dissertation, University of Illinois. Johnson, Charles F., and T. W. Gilbreth. 1866. “The Freedmen’s Bureau Report on the Memphis Race Riots of 1866.” Teaching American History, http://teachingamericanhis tory.org/library/document/the-freedmens-bureau-report-on-the-memphis-race-riots-of -1866/. Lumpkins, Charles. 2008. American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics. Athens: Ohio University Press.

cxxiv | Urban Rebellions Marx, Gary T. 1970. “Civil Disorders and Agents of Social Control.” Journal of Social Issues 26(1): 19–57. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders USA. n.d. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Summary, Introduction. National Criminal Justice Reference Service, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/8073NCJRS.pdf. Postrel, Virginia. 2004. “The Consequences of the 1960’s Race Riots Come into View.” New York Times, December 30. Queally, James. 2015. “Watts Riots: Traffic Stop Was the Spark That Ignited Days of Destruction in L.A.” Los Angeles Times, July 29, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la -me-ln-watts-riots-explainer-20150715-htmlstory.html. “Report of an Investigation of the Cause, Origin, and Results of the Late Riots in the City of Memphis Made by Col. Charles F. Johnson, Inspector General States of Ky. And Tennessee and Major T. W. Gilbreth, A.D.C. to Maj. Genl. Howard, Commissioner Bureau R. F. & A. Lands.” n.d. The Freedmen’s Bureau Online, http://www.freedmensbureau.com /tennessee/outrages/memphisriot.htm. Rietman, Valerie, and Michell Landsberg. 2005. “From the Archives: Watts Riots 40 Years Later; Tommy Jacquette: ‘We had a Revolt.’” Los Angeles Times, August 11, http:// www.latimes.com/local/la-me-watts-riots-40-years-later-20050811-htmlstory.html. Russonelo, Giovanni. 2016. “Fascination and Fear: Covering the Black Panthers.” New York Times, October 15, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/us/black-panthers-50-years .html. Sears, David O., and T. M. Tomilson. 1968. “Riot Ideology in Los Angeles: A Study of Negro Attitudes.” Black America, special issue of Social Science Quarterly 49(3) (December 1968): 485–503. Sugrue, Thomas J., and Andrew P. Goodman. 2007. “Plainfield Burning Black Rebellion in the Suburban North.” Journal of Urban History 33(4) (May): 568–601. United States Kerner Commission. 1968. “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders: Summary of Report.” The Eisenhower Foundation, http://www .eisenhowerfoundation.org/docs/kerner.pdf. Voogd, Jan. 2007. Race Riots and Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919. New York: Peter Lang. Wenger, Morton. 1980. “State Responses to Afro-American Rebellion: Internal Colonialism and the Rise of a New Black Bourgeoisie.” Critical Sociology 10: 71–72. Wilkins, Roger. n.d. “Interview.” Washington University Digital Gateway, http://digital .wustl.edu/e/eii/eiiweb/wil5427.0886.174rogerwilkins.html. Yette, Samuel. 1975. The Choice: The Issue of Black Extermination in America. New York: Putnam.

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Primary Document Urban Riots, 1968 The riots of 1965–1967 captured the attention of the nation and its leaders. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, on July 28, 1967, while the Detroit Rebellion was ongoing. The group included a governor, the mayor of New York City, four members of Congress, and the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The commission report found that segregation, discrimination, and a lack of economic opportunity were at the root of Black frustration leading up to the rebellions. While the report condemned violence, it called on the nation to inject massive resources into disadvantaged communities. Increasing spending on social services, changing housing patterns, and improving the quality and diversity of police forces were a few of its recommendation to reverse conditions that could lead to more violent disturbances. The commission warned that without such reforms, the United States was heading toward two societies: one white and one Black. The commission report also indicated that those who participated in the uprisings targeted symbols of authority, not white people. Even still, white people are an important part of the problem, as they are responsible for creating and sustaining ghettos. INTRODUCTION The summer of 1967 again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock, fear and bewilderment to the nation. The worst came during a two-week period in July, first in Newark and then in Detroit. Each set off a chain reaction in neighboring communities. On July 28, 1967, the President of the United States established this Commission and directed us to answer three basic questions: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again? To respond to these questions, we have undertaken a broad range of studies and investigations. We have visited the riot cities; we have heard many wit­ nesses; we have sought the counsel of experts across the country. This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.

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Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deep­ ened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American. This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution. To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values. The alternative is not blind repression or capitulation to lawlessness. It is the realization of common opportunities for all within a single society. This alternative will require a commitment to national action—compassion­ ate, massive and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth. From every American it will require new atti­ tudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will. The vital needs of the nation must be met; hard choices must be made, and, if necessary, new taxes enacted. Violence cannot build a better society. Disruption and disorder nourish repression, not justice. They strike at the freedom of every citizen. The com­ munity cannot—it will not—tolerate coercion and mob rule. Violence and destruction must be ended—in the streets of the ghetto1 and in the lives of people. Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive envi­ ronment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White in­ stitutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it. It is time now to turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of this nation. It is time to adopt strategies for action that will produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens—urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group. Our recommendations embrace three basic principles: To mount programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems; To aim these programs for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance; To undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society.

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These programs will require unprecedented levels of funding and perfor­ mance, but they neither probe deeper nor demand more than the problems which called them forth. There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation’s conscience. . . . PART I—WHAT HAPPENED? Chapter 1—Profiles of Disorder The report contains profiles of a selection of the disorders that took place dur­ ing the summer of 1967. These profiles are designed to indicate how the disor­ ders happened, who participated in them, and how local officials, police forces, and the National Guard responded. Illustrative excerpts follow: NEWARK . . . On Saturday, July 15, [Director of Police Dominick] Spina received a report of snipers in a housing project. When he arrived he saw approximately 100 National Guardsmen and police officers crouching behind vehicles, hiding in corners and lying on the ground around the edge of the courtyard. Since everything appeared quiet and it was broad daylight, Spina walked directly down the middle of the street. Nothing happened. As he came to the last building of the complex, he heard a shot. All around him the troopers jumped, believing themselves to be under sniper fire. A moment later a young Guardsman ran from behind a building. The Director of Police went over and asked him if he had fired the shot. The soldier said yes, he had fired to scare a man away from a window; that his or­ ders were to keep everyone away from windows. Spina said he told the soldier: “Do you know what you just did? You have now created a state of hysteria. Every Guardsman up and down this street and every state policeman and every city policeman that is present thinks that somebody just fired a shot and that it is probably a sniper.” A short time later more “gunshots” were heard. Investigating, Spina came upon a Puerto Rican sitting on a wall. In reply to a question as to whether he knew “where the firing is coming from?” the man said: “That’s no firing. That’s fireworks. If you look up to the fourth floor, you will see the people who are throwing down these cherry bombs.” By this time four truckloads of National Guardsmen had arrived and troop­ ers and policemen were again crouched everywhere looking for a sniper. The

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Director of Police remained at the scene for three hours, and the only shot fired was the one by the Guardsmen. Nevertheless, at six o’clock that evening two columns of National Guardsmen and state troopers were directing mass fire at the Hayes Housing Project in response to what they believed were snipers. . . . DETROIT . . . A spirit of carefree nihilism was taking hold. To riot and destroy appeared more and more to become ends in themselves. Late Sunday afternoon it ap­ peared to one observer that the young people were “dancing amidst the flames.” A Negro plainclothes officer was standing at an intersection when a man threw a Molotov cocktail into a business establishment at the corner. In the heat of the afternoon, fanned by the 20 to 25 m.p.h. winds of both Sunday and Monday, the fire reached the home next door within minutes. As residents use­ lessly sprayed the flames with garden hoses, the fire jumped from roof to roof of adjacent two- and three-story buildings. Within the hour the entire block was in flames. The ninth house in the burning row belonged to the arsonist who had thrown the Molotov cocktail. . . . *** . . . Employed as a private guard, 55-year-old Julius L. Dorsey, a Negro, was standing in front of a market when accosted by two Negro men and a woman. They demanded he permit them to loot the market. He ignored their demands. They began to berate him. He asked a neighbor to call the police. As the argu­ ment grew more heated, Dorsey fired three shots from his pistol into the air. The police radio reported: “Looters, they have rifles.” A patrol car driven by a police officer and carrying three National Guardsmen arrived. As the looters fled, the law enforcement personnel opened fire. When the firing ceased, one person lay dead. He was Julius L. Dorsey. . . . *** . . . As the riot alternatively waxed and waned, one area of the ghetto remained insulated. On the northeast side the residents of some 150 square blocks in­ habited by 21,000 persons had, in 1966, banded together in the Positive

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Neighborhood Action Committee (PNAC). With professional help from the Institute of Urban Dynamics, they had organized block clubs and made plans for the improvement of the neighborhood. . . . When the riot broke out, the residents, through the block clubs, were able to organize quickly. Youngsters, agreeing to stay in the neighborhood, partici­ pated in detouring traffic. While many persons reportedly sympathized with the idea of a rebellion against the “system,” only two small fires were set—one in an empty building. *** . . . According to Lt. Gen. Throckmorton and Col. Bolling, the city, at this time, was saturated with fear. The National Guardsmen were afraid, the residents were afraid, and the police were afraid. Numerous persons, the majority of them Negroes, were being injured by gunshots of undetermined origin. The general and his staff felt that the major task of the troops was to reduce the fear and restore an air of normalcy. In order to accomplish this, every effort was made to establish contact and rapport between the troops and the residents. The soldiers—20 percent of whom were Negro—began helping to clean up the streets, collect gar­ bage, and trace persons who had disappeared in the confusion. Residents in the neighborhoods responded with soup and sandwiches for the troops. In areas where the National Guard tried to establish rapport with the citizens, there was a smaller response. . . . Chapter 2—Patterns of Disorder The “typical” riot did not take place. The disorders of 1967 were unusual, ir­ regular, complex and unpredictable social processes. Like most human events, they did not unfold in an orderly sequence. However, an analysis of our survey information leads to some conclusions about the riot process. In general: The civil disorders of 1967 involved Negroes acting against local symbols of white American society, authority and property in Negro neighborhoods— rather than against white persons. Of 164 disorders reported during the first nine months of 1967, eight (5 percent) were major in terms of violence and damage; 33 (20 percent) were

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serious but not major; 123 (75 percent) were minor and undoubtedly would not have received national attention as “riots” had the nation not been sensi­ tized by the more serous outbreaks. In the 75 disorders studied by a Senate subcommittee, 83 deaths were re­ ported. Eighty-two percent of the deaths and more than half the injuries oc­ curred in Newark and Detroit. About 10 percent of the dead and 38 percent of the injured were public employees, primarily law officers and firemen. The overwhelming majority of the persons killed or injured in all the disorders were Negro civilians. Initial damage estimates were greatly exaggerated. In Detroit, newspaper damage estimates at first ranged from $200 million to $500 million; the highest recent estimate is $45 million. In Newark, early estimates ranged from $15 to $25 million. A month later damage was estimated at $10.2 mil­ lion, over 80 percent in inventory losses. In the 24 disorders in 23 cities which we surveyed: The final incident before the outbreak of disorder, and the initial violence itself, generally took place in the evening or at night at a place in which it was normal for many people to be on the streets. Violence usually occurred almost immediately following the occurrence of the final precipitating incident, and then escalated rapidly. With but few excep­ tions, violence subsided during the day, and flared rapidly again at night. The night-day cycles continued through the early period of the major disorders. Disorder generally began with rock and bottle throwing and window break­ ing. Once store windows were broken, looting usually followed. Disorder did not erupt as a result of a single “triggering” or “precipitating” incident. Instead, it was generated out of an increasingly disturbed social atmo­ sphere, in which typically a series of tension-heightening incidents over a period of weeks or months became linked in the minds of many in the Negro commu­ nity with a reservoir of underlying grievances. At some point in the mounting tension, a further incident—in itself often routine or trivial—became the breaking point and the tension spilled over into violence. “Prior” incidents, which increased tensions and ultimately led to violence, were police actions in almost half the cases; police actions were “final” inci­ dents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders. No particular control tactic was successful in every situation. The varied effec­ tiveness of control techniques emphasizes the need for advance training, plan­ ning, adequate intelligence systems, and knowledge of the ghetto community. Negotiations between Negroes—including your militants as well as older Negro leaders—and white officials concerning “terms of peace” occurred



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during virtually all the disorders surveyed. In many cases, these negotiations involved discussion of underlying grievances as well as the handling of the disorder by control authorities. The typical rioter was a teenager or young adult, a lifelong resident of the city in which he rioted, a high school dropout; he was, nevertheless, somewhat better educated than his nonrioting Negro neighbor, and was usually underem­ ployed or employed in a menial job. He was proud of his race, extremely hostile to both whites and middle-class Negroes and, although informed about politics, highly distrustful of the political system. A Detroit survey revealed that approximately 11 percent of the total resi­ dents of two riot areas admitted participation in the rioting, 20 to 25 percent identified themselves as “bystanders,” over 16 percent identified themselves as “counter-rioters” who urged rioters to “cool it,” and the remaining 48 to 53 percent said they were at home or elsewhere and did not participate. In a survey of Negro males between the ages of 15 and 35 residing in the distur­ bance area in Newark, about 45 percent identified themselves as rioters, and about 55 percent as “noninvolved.” Most rioters were young Negro males. Nearly 53 percent of arrestees were between 15 and 24 years of age; nearly 81 percent between 15 and 35. In Detroit and Newark about 74 percent of the rioters were brought up in the North. In contrast, of the noninvolved, 36 percent in Detroit and 52 percent in Newark were brought up in the North. What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens. Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it. Numerous Negro counter-rioters walked the streets urging rioters to “cool it.” The typical counter-rioter was better educated and had higher income than either the rioter or the noninvolved. The proportion of Negroes in local government was substantially smaller than the Negro proportion of population. Only three of the 20 cities studied had more than one Negro legislator; none had ever had a Negro mayor or city manager. In only four cities did Negroes hold other important policy-making positions or serve as heads of municipal departments. Although almost all cities had some sort of formal grievance mechanism for handling citizen complaints, this typically was regarded by Negroes as ineffec­ tive and was generally ignored. Although specific grievances varied from city to city, at least 12 deeply held grievances can be identified and ranked into three levels of relative intensity:

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First Level of Intensity 1. Police practices 2. Unemployment and underemployment 3. Inadequate housing Second Level of Intensity 4. Inadequate education 5. Poor recreation facilities and programs 6. Ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms Third Level of Intensity 7. Disrespectful white attitudes 8. Discriminatory administration of justice 9. Inadequacy of federal programs 10. Inadequacy of municipal services 11. Discriminatory consumer and credit practices 12. Inadequate welfare programs The results of a three-city survey of various federal programs—manpower, edu­ cation, housing, welfare and community action—indicate that, despite sub­ stantial expenditures, the number of persons assisted constituted only a fraction of those in need. The background of disorder is often as complex and difficult to analyze as the disorder itself. But we find that certain general conclusions can be drawn: Social and economic conditions in the riot cities constituted a clear pattern of severe disadvantage for Negroes compared with whites, whether the Negroes lived in the area where the riot took place or outside it. Negroes had com­ pleted fewer years of education and fewer had attended high school. Negroes were twice as likely to be unemployed and three times as likely to be in un­ skilled and service jobs. Negroes averaged 70 percent of the income earned by whites and were more than twice as likely to be living in poverty. Although housing cost Negroes relatively more, they had worse housing—three times as likely to be overcrowded and substandard. When compared to white suburbs, the relative disadvantage is even more pronounced. A study of the aftermath of disorder leads to disturbing conclusions. We find that, despite the institution of some post-riot programs:

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Little basic change in the conditions underlying the outbreak of disorder has taken place. Actions to ameliorate Negro grievances have been limited and sporadic; with but few exceptions, they have not significantly reduced tensions. In several cities, the principal official response has been to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons. In several cities, increasing polarization is evident, with continuing break­ down of inter-racial communication, and growth of white segregationist or black separatist groups. . . . PART II—WHY DID IT HAPPEN? Chapter 4—The Basic Causes In addressing the question “Why did it happen?” we shift our focus from the local to the national scene, from the particular events of the summer of 1967 to the factors within the society at large that created a mood of violence among many urban Negroes. These factors are complex and interacting; they vary significantly in their effect from city to city and from year to year; and the consequences of one disorder, generating new grievances and new demands, become the causes of the next. Thus was created the “thicket of tension, conflicting evidence and extreme opinions” cited by the President. Despite these complexities, certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans. Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively; it now threatens to affect our future. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II. Among the in­ gredients of this mixture are: Pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education and housing, which have resulted in the continuing exclusion of great numbers of Negroes from the benefits of economic progress. Black in-migration and white exodus, which have produced the massive and growing concentrations of impoverished Negroes in our major cities, creating a growing crisis of deteriorating facilities and services and unmet human needs. The black ghettos where segregation and poverty converge on the young to destroy opportunity and enforce failure. Crime, drug addiction, dependency

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on welfare, and bitterness and resentment against society in general and white society in particular are the result. At the same time, most whites and some Negroes outside the ghetto have prospered to a degree unparalleled in the history of civilization. Through tele­ vision and other media, this affluence has been flaunted before the eyes of the Negro poor and the jobless ghetto youth. Yet these facts alone cannot be said to have caused the disorders. Recently, other powerful ingredients have begun to catalyze the mixture: Frustrated hopes are the residue of the unfulfilled expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic struggle for equal rights in the South. A climate that tends toward approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest has been created by white terrorism directed against nonvio­ lent protest; by the open defiance of law and federal authority by state and local officials resisting desegregation; and by some protest groups engaging in civil disobedience who turn their backs on nonviolence, go beyond the con­ stitutionally protected rights of petition and free assembly, and resort to vio­ lence to attempt to compel alteration of laws and policies with which they disagree. The frustrations of powerlessness have led some Negroes to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of achieving redress of grievances, and of “moving the system.” These frustrations are reflected in alienation and hostility toward the institutions of law and government and the white society which controls them, and in the reach toward racial conscious­ ness and solidarity reflected in the slogan “Black Power.” A new mood has sprung up among Negroes, particularly among the young, in which self-esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and sub­ mission to “the system.” The police are not merely a “spark” factor. To some Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmo­ sphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a “double standard” of jus­ tice and protection—one for Negroes and one for whites. To this point, we have attempted to identify the prime components of the “explosive mixture.” In the chapters that follow we seek to analyze them in the perspective of history. Their meaning, however, is clear: In the summer of 1967, we have seen in our cities a chain reaction of racial violence. If we are heedless, none of us shall escape the consequences.



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[1] The term “ghetto” as used in this report refers to an area within a city char­ acterized by poverty and acute social disorganization, and inhabited by mem­ bers of a racial or ethnic group under conditions of involuntary segregation. Source: Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).

A Abubakari, Dara (Virginia Collins) (1915–2011) Dara Salamuga Abubakari was born Virginia Evalena Young on March 4, 1915, in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. “Mama Dara,” as she was affectionately referred to by her community, was a beloved teacher, nurse, and grassroots activist who until her death on July 20, 2011, uncompromisingly engaged in the protracted struggle for Black liberation. Growing up in Jim Crow Louisiana, Abubakari was no stranger to racial segregation and class discrimination. At the same time, due to her parents’ communityengaged activism she was also exposed to grassroots organizing as a method of strategically combating oppression. Mama Dara’s father, Reverend William Arthur Young, a follower of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, was a minister at Prince of Peace Baptist Church, which he founded in the neighborhood where he and his family lived. Reverend Young also sold insurance and used this profession to educate and galvanize those he met. As a member of the National Negro Insurance League, one of the affiliated bodies of the National Negro Business League of which Booker T. Washington was president, Reverend Young was often recognized and awarded for his success as a businessman and community fixture. Abubakari’s mother, Izama Carriere Young, played a major role in ensuring that the family was selfsufficient. Mrs. Young was a homemaker and agriculturalist who cultivated the family garden and raised livestock to feed her and Reverend Young’s abundant family of 14 children, of whom Abubakari was the eldest. Mrs. Young was also heavily involved in her husband’s church. She taught Sunday school and managed the church steward board and local missions. In the film Look for Me in the Whirlwind, which chronicles the life, experiences, and mission of Garvey and his Back-to-Africa movement, Abubakari discusses her firsthand experience of being a Garveyite. With a smile that typically accompanies the conjuring of fond memories, she describes the energy of “fire, lightning, like something that went through everybody at the same time” when Garvey would enter a room and speak. In her unique griot style she recounted the experience of standing on a New Orleans levee with adults and children “crying and waving” at Garvey’s final sailing ship on November 18, 1927. Her childhood and young adult experiences no doubt ignited her passion for race, class, and gender equity and provided a context for the social justice campaigns she would go on to wage. In 1932, Abubakari became one of the first in her community to finish

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high school. Upon graduating from McDonough 35, the first Black public high school in the city of New Orleans, she was accepted into the normal school, through which she became a certified teacher. She taught at an elementary school in Lafayette, Louisiana, until she met fellow teacher James Collins, whom she married in 1934. When their first child was two years old they moved to Bayougoula in Iberville Parish, Louisiana. While her husband taught adult education classes, Abubakari, through a state-sponsored program, taught farmers, sharecroppers, and families how to can and preserve their crops for the winter. After a few years Mr. Collins secured a higher-paying position at the New Orleans Agricultural Research Laboratory, and the growing family moved back to New Orleans. As a resident of the infamously impoverished New Orleans Hollygrove neighborhood, Abubakari engaged in various forms of activism. Concerned with the intellectual, physical, and social well-being of children in her neighborhood, she demanded educational and recreational resources for their schools and community centers. She would organize and lead protests at the local city hall with her children and other school students. Abubakari petitioned the mayor to build what is now known as Conrad Playground. She worked in the New Orleans city recreation department and sewed boys’ sports uniforms by hand. She taught Sunday school at Nazareth Baptist Church and for more than 10 years occupied the role of ParentTeacher Association (PTA) president at her alma mater. For decades Abubakari also played an active role in the PTA at the neighborhood Paul Laurence Dunbar elementary and middle school where most of the community children, including her children and grandchildren, attended school. She wanted her children to reach their full potential and to utilize their skills to their fullest ability. Abubakari taught her children that education was important and that it was something that no one could take from them. She also taught them to be concerned with what was happening in the world and to work to open up doors for those to come. At work, Mr. Collins was often the target of harassment and threats due to his wife’s activism. He was specifically told by his coworkers and superiors that he needed to control her. While Mr. Collins did not engage in the type of activism that Abubakari performed, he took pride in his role as breadwinner and had a keen awareness that his work within the system enabled her to perform both paid and unpaid work in the community. Along with combating inequities within the local school system, Abubakari was committed to transforming the overall lived experience of the disenfranchised. From the late 1930s to the 1940s, Mama Dara joined and was often on the payroll of state, local, and grassroots organizations such as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and the Social Welfare Planning Council. In addition to teaching and community organizing, Abubakari was a trained nurse. After graduating from the Louisiana Medard Nelson School of Nursing, she worked at Charity Hospital in the nursery



Abubakari, Dara (Virginia Collins) (1915–2011) | 3

for premature infants. Years of watching babies die due to undeveloped medical technology caused her emotional pain that became too difficult to bear. Abubakari went on to work in different departments within the hospital where she witnessed health care disparities and was expected to participate in the unfair treatment of Black patients. As a way to counter these disparities, she would often give her address to Black patients who were turned away, expropriate medicinal drugs from the hospital, and use her home to administer shots and medicine to those in need. This practice was in part an actualizing of her belief that every oppressed community needed its own health clinic. Enacting the Kiswahili term and Black nationalist principle kujichagulia (self-determination), Abubakari left her job at the hospital and began to find work as a private nurse for individuals and families who needed health care. She was sought out and well paid by wealthy whites who needed a wet nurse for their babies. She also worked with some whites who canceled their contracts shortly after learning of Abubakari’s social and political activism. In addition to whites, many Black New Orleanians began to distance themselves from her out of fear that she was becoming too radical. Abubakari was not easily intimidated or swayed. Her dedication and revolutionary love for her people was a constant motivation for her work. In the late 1950s Mama Dara met and began to work alongside Queen Mother Audley Moore, an internationally active revolutionary who was also from New Orleans. Moore was a descendant of enslaved Blacks and, like Abubakari, had been introduced to “the glories of Africa” and Africa’s sons and daughters through Garvey. Abubakari worked closely with Queen Mother Moore to develop and lead a number of organizations, committees, and networks, including the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women and the Reparations Committee of the United States Slaves, Inc. As pioneers of Black nationalism in the South and the modern reparations movement, Mama Dara and Queen Mother Moore served as mentors for younger activists, educated grassroots communities about reparations, promoted African pride and unity, protested racism and sexism, and worked within the legal system to halt a significant number of state-sanctioned executions of innocent Black men. In the early 1960s Mama Dara worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, became a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and actively participated in several major Civil Rights Movement events. She participated in the March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery March, and she joined the Assembly of Unrepresented People who gathered in Washington, D.C., to oppose the Vietnam War. Abubakari was also a voting rights organizer with the Citizens Council of Greater New Orleans, through which she worked to eliminate discriminatory prerequisites for voting. Under her leadership, the Youth Voter Crusader Corps registered more than 1,000 Black people to vote. In her community and throughout the city she advocated for voter registration and provided

4 | Abubakari, Dara (Virginia Collins) (1915–2011)

instruction for passing the voting literacy test. The living room of Abubakari’s three-room house served as a voter registration information site where she would have people memorize sections of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and complete other tasks to prepare them for the intentional bias and hostility they would encounter as Black people attempting to engage in the voting process. Abubakari’s house also operated as the neighborhood library. As a person who deplored ignorance, she collected books on varied subjects and encouraged anyone who came by, particularly young people, to read and learn something new. By the late 1960s Abubakari began to feel that nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience were not working for Black people. She instead believed in selfdefense and was an advocate of radical revolution rather than reform. Abubakari, along with Imari Obadele, Gaidi Obadele (aka Milton Henry), Nana Oserjiman Adefumi, Queen Mother Moore, and Betty Shabazz, was instrumental in the 1968 formation of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA), a proposed independent Black nation-state within the United States. The PGRNA’s mission included demanding billions of dollars in reparations from the U.S. government, holding a plebiscite through which Black people could determine their own citizenship, and sovereignty over five states in the Black Belt South claimed as its national territory: Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Within the PGRNA Abubakari served as vice president and as acting president (during the years of president and founding citizen Imari Abubakhari Obadele’s imprisonment). During this time she strategically led the organization and worked to recruit citizens, including her own grandchildren, whom she gave African names. Mama Dara worked with the Venceremos Brigade along with her son Carlice Collins, who with her help successfully sued Louisiana State University for its discriminatory practices, becoming one of the first seven Black people to attend the university. Mama Dara spoke out about Black resistance to the war after another one of her sons, Walter Collins, began serving a five-year sentence at Texacana Prison for draft evasion in mid-1971. Although her son received a pardon in 1977 from U.S. president Jimmy Carter, Mama Dara continued her active resistance against Blacks being accomplices to American wars. As an elder, Mama Dara’s activism took new shape. In the early 1980s she became the primary caregiver for her husband, who had fallen ill. After his death, which provided space for her to reflect on decades of constant travel and activist work, she decided to further ground herself in family and in the church. She became the guardian of several of her grandchildren, provided care for neighborhood youths, and returned to teaching Sunday School. She continued to serve as a mentor for younger activists and often offered space in her home to comrades seeking refuge. Small in physical stature yet giant in revolutionary spirit, Mama Dara continues to be honored for exemplary womanhood by numerous women’s



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organizations around the world. Her vital contributions to the Black liberation movement are innumerable and reverberating. Asantewa Sunni-Ali See also: Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley; Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry); Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa Further Reading Farmer, Ashley D. 2016. “Mothers of Pan-Africanism: Audley Moore and Dara Abubakari.” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 4(2): 274–295.

African Liberation Support Committee Founded in 1972, the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) was a Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist united front organization composed of Black students, Black workers, politicians, intellectuals, community organizers, and political activists. The ALSC was established as an anti-imperialist, multinational organization aimed at building material support for African and Third World liberation struggles. The mass-based organization brought together the eclectic intersections of Black nationalist, Pan-Africanist, Kawaidist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and revolutionary-nationalist ideological practices. In the early to mid-1970s, the ALSC was most notable for its coordination of African Liberation Day and monthlong activities that focused on raising monetary support for African continental liberation movements and for raising the global political awareness of imperialism and global colonial manifestations. By the mid-1970s, the ALSC became the leading national Pan-Africanist organization, with an anti-imperialist, anticolonial, and antiracist focus. As the 1970s ushered in the developments and shifting expressions of the Black Power Movement, the political protests and organizing among Black activists became more radicalized in practice and ideological expression. Suffering from political backlash for opposing the Vietnam War and for supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ended its post as the leading radical political organization. At the same time the Black Panther Party (BPP) faced continuous state repression, and its leadership was either incarcerated or neutralized by both local and federal agencies. Even still, the Black freedom movement continued to evolve and produce various organizational expression intending to build mass-based organizational participation that intersected with Black students, workers, and seasoned activists. Organizations such as the Congress of African People, the Republic of New Africa, and the Student Organization for Black Unity expanded the membership and presence of their

6 | African Liberation Support Committee

respective organizations. And as the political education efforts of the Black Power Movement advanced, many activists evoked protest strategies that centered on both domestic protest and transnational awareness of liberation struggles throughout the diaspora. Black student activists from the areas of Raleigh-Durham, Greensboro, and Fayetteville, North Carolina, seized the momentum from the 1969 Duke University protests and established the independent Black nationalist/Pan-Africanist educational institution, Malcolm X Liberation University (MXLU). Founded in 1969 to provide Black students around the nation with an alternative for educational and community activist praxis, MXLU became an epicenter for Black protest strategy and support in the southern states and much of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. MXLU operated with the dual emphasis of providing an African-centered educational experience and training students in technical and agricultural skills in the United States and assisting various countries in Africa. Subsequently, MXLU’s leadership developed relationships with African heads of state and anticolonial guerrilla movements actively struggling for independence throughout the African continent with an expressed focus in the southern region of Africa. In August 1971, the National Committee of Black Churchmen (NCBC) recruited Howard Fuller (now Owusu Sadaukai), the head of institutional operations for MXLU, to attend a conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Sponsored by the Tanzanian Consultative Committee and the NCBC, the conference was developed for the purpose of coordinating efforts of African clergymen on the continent. While at the conference, Sadaukai received an opportunity to tour the liberated areas of Mozambique as a guest of the Portuguese Frente de Libertação de Moçam­ bique (Mozambique Liberation Front, FRELIMO). He met documentarian Robert Van Lierop, who had been planning to do a film on anticolonial struggles on the African continent. During Sadaukai’s monthlong experience with FRELIMO, the leadership of the rebel front spoke candidly of the critical need for global awareness and worldwide support to aid the efforts of the African liberation struggles. In expression of this significant need for global support, none were more vociferous than Samora Machel, leader of FRELIMO and eventual president of Mozambique upon FRELIMO’s defeat of the Portuguese. Machel informed Sadaukai that the African continent was exhausted with the physical presence of people and that their greatest point of struggle was the intrusive presence of the U.S. government in their support of imperialist powers. Machel stated that FRELIMO and liberation fronts throughout the continent needed a voice inside the United States, and this could be one of the most significant roles of support that Blacks could play in liberation of the African continent. Candid yet sincere, Machel’s charge to Sadaukai provided an action plan that activists in the United States could utilize to provide political education about African liberation struggles and raise material support. And upon Sadaukai’s return



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to the United States, he initiated a national call for activists to begin a campaign for Black Americans to support African liberation movements through a mass demonstration that became known as African Liberation Day. In January 1972 a planning meeting was held in Greensboro, North Carolina, at MXLU, and the steering committee became known as the African Liberation Day Coordinating Committee (ALDCC), which was composed of nationalists and Pan-Africanists from across the nation. The ALDCC decided that the national demonstration would be held on May 25, 1972, in commemoration of the Organization of African Unity’s (OAU) annual date of worldwide solidarity of African liberation. The ALDCC brought together activists and revolutionaries from diverse political and organizational backgrounds to include the likes of Congressman Charles Diggs, Bobby Seale of the BPP, Angela Davis of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. With the assortment of activists, youths, and political figures, African Liberation Day 1972 was a major success, with approximately 60,000 participants of African descent turning out to demonstrate in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Toronto; and various sites throughout the Caribbean. Due to the success of the African Liberation Day event, the participants of the ALDCC and complementary forces identified the need to fully establish a united front organization to continue the work of transnational African liberation throughout the progression of the 1970s and beyond. Thus, an initial meeting commenced at MXLU on July 26, 1972, to report the findings from the African Liberation Day gathering and to discuss plans for African Liberation Day and the ALDCC. Chaired by MXLU president Sadaukai, the group decided to dissolve the ALDCC and adopt an updated set of organizational objectives. The collective decided to take the name African Liberation Support Committee and complete the following tasks by the close of the session: discuss the aims and general objectives of the new organization, establish the ALSC Statement of Purpose, and provide updates of post–African Liberation Day occurrences up until the meeting. A few months later in September, an additional meeting was conducted in Detroit, Michigan, and after intense debate and compromise, the united front organization constructed and implemented a national structure, governing principles, and objectives. A critical task of business established by the new organization was to plan for African Liberation Day 1973. The ALSC moved to adopt the political stance of cooperative mobilizations based on community organizing efforts. After additional debate and dialogue the ALSC decided that the African Liberation Day demonstrations should evolve to reflect local participation, with demonstrations held throughout the United States. This tactic was undertaken by the new organization to better establish the local committees in their own indigenous spaces. On May 26, 1973, the African Liberation Day demonstrations ensued around the nation in over 30 cities in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. The ALSC

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ensured that general demonstrations gave attention to the anticolonial struggles being waged by FRELIMO of Mozambique, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde of Guinea-Bissau, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, the Zimbabwe African National Union, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) of South Africa. African Liberation Day 1973 proved to be a success, with the implementation of local demonstrations on a mass scale. More than 100,000 people were mobilized and their efforts raised $42,000 to support liberation movements. As the ALSC further developed, the organization enacted a basic program that focused on seven basic principles: raising funds for liberation movements and its programs of political social reconstruction, conducting educational seminars and programs on racism and imperialism, developing and disseminating materials on racism and imperialism, participating in and aiding the Black community and Black workers, engaging in efforts to influence and transform U.S. imperialism, engaging in mass actions against the U.S. government and corporations aligned with imperialist regimes, and supporting and spearheading annual African Liber­ ation Day demonstrations in conjunction with the OAU’s International African Solidarity Day. During the remainder of 1973 and into 1974, the ALSC emerged as the vanguard organization intent on providing support and awareness on the critical issues of colonialism, imperialism, and racism. After the success of African Liberation Day 1973, ALSC chapters resumed their political activist work to bring about awareness and heighten protest efforts about the racist atrocities in Southern Africa. Various ALSC chapters in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., provided material support through gallant fund-raising efforts and/or protest activities. In Baltimore, ALSC members protested the importation of Rhodesian chrome into the United States at major port destinations. The ALSC also brought critical attention to the 1971 Byrd Amendment that violated United Nations sanctions by allowing trade with Rhodesia. The ALSC efforts resulted in a full-fledged national and international campaign to have the unjust amendment repealed. By 1974, political and ideological conflicts in addition to other factors related to class and regional disparities debilitated the growth of the organization. Members of the ALSC from Black nationalist factions struggled against Marxist-Leninists. Much of the internal conflict stemmed from the opposing ALSC factions’ inability to come to a consensus on the ALSC statement of principles. Members of the nationalist faction critiqued the document, stating that it was “Soviet inspired.” To support the statement of principles, ALSC members of the Marxist-Leninist faction provided a supplemental document to bolster the initial positions stated by the statement of principles. This action caused further sectarianism and deepened the effects of the struggle. As a result, 13 chapters from the states of Ohio, Indiana,



African Liberation Support Committee | 9

New York, Texas, Illinois, and Michigan departed the ALSC due to the ideological rifts. Nevertheless, by the late spring of 1974, the ALSC grew to more than 50 chapters throughout the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. And thus, the organization established the national steering committee, regional chairs, and a research and development committee. Reeling from the success of African Liberation Day 1974, the local ALSC raised $75,000 to support African liberation movements. The organization also established a news organization—Finally Got the News—to disseminate sociopolitical ideology and provide an educational source for activists, workers, and laypersons with interest in the Black freedom movement during the 1970s. The publication was also foreseen as a tool to stimulate dialogue around theoretical and practical issues of the ALSC. During June 3–13, 1974, approximately 200 North American delegates traveled to Africa to attend the Sixth Pan-African Congress (6PAC) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Activists and revolutionaries arrived from throughout the African world to participate in the historic event. Many ALSC delegates attending the 6PAC arrived with their concretized ideological positions in tow. The fervor of ideological debate was reignited upon their arrival at the historic summit, which proved to be the ideal stage for hashing out issues of the two-line struggle. The conflicts of the ALSC factions that originated in the United States held the attention of supporting audiences representing various sectors of the African diaspora. The leftist forces of the ALSC, including Owusu Sadaukai and Amiri Baraka, gained total support for their Marxist positions especially from conference delegates representing the Portuguese colonies. The conference proved to be a momentous undertaking for the advancements of anti-imperialist struggle and set the stage for greater heights of the ALSC ideological struggle. A month later during the summer of 1974, the ALSC assembled a major twoday conference in Washington, D.C., to tease out several political and ideological conflicts that plagued the organization for the better part of a year. The conflicts caused ALSC chapters to disaffiliate themselves from the national organization, and further internal developments prompted discussion about the future direction of the ALSC and the general state of the Black liberation movement. Thus, the ALSC summit was titled the Conference on Racism and Imperialism, which represented the two-line struggle festering at all levels of the ALSC. The conference drew representation from a diverse array of activists and revolutionaries from across the nation. Participants who provided theoretical position statements for dialogue and debate included Muhammad Ahmad of the African People’s Party; Abdul Alkalimat of the People’s College; Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party; Kwadwo Akpan of the Pan-African Congress; Owusu Sadaukai, former chairman of the ALSC; and Amiri Baraka of the Congress of African People. The intense two days of debate, inquiry, and political workshops provided some benefit for those in attendance due to the rigor

10 | African Liberation Support Committee

of the discussions. However, beyond the national steering committee that was composed mainly of Marxist-Leninist devotees, many of the national members not identifying with the Left were unfulfilled in their pursuit to resolve issues of the two-line struggle. Due to the lack of resolution for the ideological concerns at the conference, many of the delegates and attendees from the local ALSC chapters remained discontented with the future of the general organization. By the start of 1975, the Marxist-Leninist factions of the ALSC were fully ensconced in the leadership roles of the organization, and the ALSC moved to increase the public consciousness around issues of anti-imperialism. A significant challenge to the intended plans of the ALSC during this period was the decline of local and regional ALSC chapter support due to the unresolved ideological conflict. This eventually led to discussions of decentralizing the ALSC and providing more emphasis and support to the local and regional ALSC chapters. By this period local chapters were also suffering, and the notion of semiautonomous factions surfaced; as a result, dialogue was initiated to decide whether the ALSC should continue to exist as a national organization or be totally dismantled. On March 1, 1975, members of the ALSC National Secretariat met in Washington, D.C., to discuss plans for African Liberation Day 1975. Approximately 50 delegates from 16 local chapters attended the meeting to flesh out the direction of African Liberation Day and come to a consensus on the role and activities of its local chapters. After much deliberation, the delegates agreed that the local chapters would have the responsibility of determining the distinct character of the demonstrations. The ALSC delegates also decided on several slogans that the local chapters would adopt for African Liberation Day 1975 such as “Fight the Rockefellers not the Vietnamese,” “End Unemployment of the United States & Exploitation of African Labor,” and “Jobs at Home, Not the Battlefield.” Covering several issues for African Liberation Day 1975, the local ALSC chapters demonstrated around domestic issues of inflated food costs, unemployment, the murder charges of JoAnne Little, and the international strife of U.S. interventions in Southeast Asia. However, a great majority of ALSC chapters provided significant attention to the role of domestic workers and the need to fight the ruling class, as they were identified as the root cause of national oppression. The total estimate of the combined national chapter participation for African Liberation Day activities was 15,000 people. Meanwhile, the ALSC’s national structure began to bear the significant brunt of decentralization, and the continued influence of leftist forces inside the ALSC placed many of the national chapters in a state of inactivity that was absent national leadership, thus causing deeper schisms in the remaining constitution of the organization. By the fall of 1975, the leftist factions were suggesting that the ALSC dismantle and continue to work among the number of diverse national organizations for the liberation of Africa and to improve conditions for Black workers domestically.



Afro Set Black Nationalist Party for Self-Defense (1967–1973) | 11

Toward the end of 1975 as organizational decline progressed, eight proposals were presented from various ALSC chapters. From the proposals, three points proved to be most prominent: to maintain the ALSC with a principle focus on Africa, to conserve the ALSC with a primary emphasis on domestic matters, and to disband the ALSC as a national organization and continue political activism and programs on Africa and other international affairs on an impromptu basis. By the end of 1975, sectarianism and the lack of unanimity of national leadership of the ALSC ensured the full decline of the united front organization. The final official meeting of the ALSC National Secretariat was held on April 16–17, 1976. Local ALSC remnants of the national organization continued to hold African Liberation Day demonstrations up to 1979, with slogans and programs directed at the antiapartheid struggles of South Africa and support of the Soweto 11. As a Black united front organization, the ALSC provided the second phase of the Black liberation movement with a medium to address and protest imperialist developments for a significant portion of the 1970s. Richard D. Benson II See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Congress of African People; Johnson, Nelson; Malcolm X Liberation University; Pan-Africanism; Sadaukai, Owusu (Howard Fuller); Sixth Pan-African Congress Further Reading Benson, Richard. 2015. Fighting for Our Place in the Sun: Malcolm X and the Radicalization of the Black Student Movement, 1960–1973. New York: Peter Lang. Bush, Roderick. 2009. The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Johnson, Cedric. 2007. Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marable, Manning. 2007. Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Waller, Signe. 2002. Love and Revolution: A Political Memoir; People’s History of the Greensboro. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Afro Set Black Nationalist Party for Self-Defense (1967–1973) The Afro Set Black Nationalist Party for Self-Defense was one of the primary Black Power organizations in the Midwest in the 1960s. Known as the Afro Set, the organization began in 1967 and existed until 1973. Afro Set is often associated with Cleveland’s urban rebellions of the 1960s.

12 | Afro Set Black Nationalist Party for Self-Defense (1967–1973)

The Afro Set emerged onto the stage following a tumultuous year of 1966 in which an array of forces—leftist, Civil Rights activist, white religious and Black activists—waged an all-out struggle against racism, police brutality, and discrimination in education, housing, and employment in Cleveland. In 1966 the JFK House (Jomo Freedom Kenyatta) was founded as a youth center, sponsored by community residents to provide an outlet for young people in the Superior area of Cleveland, which lacked public-funded social and recreational centers due to official disregard by the local government. The JFK House’s demise followed the bloody 1966 Hough Rebellion that exploded on July 18, when a Black patron of a white-owned bar at 79th and Hough requested a glass of water and was told by the proprietor that they didn’t serve “niggers.” That single spark started an urban prairie fire that lasted for six days and saw the National Guard deployed, with tanks stationed in the heart of Hough, guard sentries stationed in front of white-owned businesses, and guardsmen’s patrolling the community with .50-caliber machine guns mounted on jeeps. The police and city officials blamed the JFK House, branding it a “firebomb factory,” and worked to dismantle support for it. The officials ultimately succeeded in forcing its closure. Harllel Jones, a coadult leader of the JFK House, rented a storefront approximately eight blocks west of the previous JFK building and began organizing a new vehicle. Some of the first meetings held in the new location consisted of many local Cleveland activists. Debates ensued about the direction of the new vehicle. Many opted for a united front–style structure; in fact, a call was made at the first meeting for the creation of “The Circle of Afro American Unity.” The meetings consisted of an eclectic group of Black socialists, communists, Trotskyists, and astrologists. While Jones diplomatically facilitated the more diverse meetings, after each gathering he, Sababa Akili, and Omar Majied would meet and plan the founding of a Black nationalist organization. The trio often stayed overnight at their soon-to-be official headquarters, discussing everything about their new organization, including its name. There was never any question that the word “Afro” would be included. At some point the word “Settlement” became one of the final proposed choices for the name. However, it was deemed too clunky and not reflective of how the group saw their new organization and was shortened to “Set,” and hence the Afro Set was born.

Structure and Activities The Afro Set was founded and led by Harllel Jones (prime minister), Sababa Akili (second-in-command), and Omarr Majied (minister of information). Its leadership structure also featured a minister of defense, a queen mother, and a minister of culture. The Afro Set also opened a chapter in Columbus, Ohio, led by Minister Nommo X.



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The organization’s first headquarters was located at 8127 Superior Avenue. It would open several other Cleveland-area facilities called “shops,” which principally meant “a place where the advocates conduct the work of the people.” After the Superior Avenue location was closed, a main headquarters opened at 86th and Hough Avenue. This shop featured a double storefront, with one side hosting the Soul of Hough Revolutionary Black Arts Theatre, which was used for its community meetings, social events, plays, and skits. From its inception, the organization attracted numerous young people; many were runaways and junior high and high school dropouts. The leadership did its best to encourage youths to return home but was surprised to learn that many of their parents preferred that they be involved in the Afro Set rather than roaming the streets. The organization endeavored to put the talents of these youths to work in serving the Black community. Youths who had artistic skills were assigned to propaganda. Those demonstrating leadership abilities commanded the drill team or became community organizers. Others with musical or other artistic talents became drummers, poets, or actors. And everyone became soldiers for freedom, as the Afro Set was an armed Black nationalist organization for self-defense. It wasn’t until a trip to the West Coast in early 1968 that the leadership began to put all the pieces for the organization together. A key California activist and associate of Malcolm X, Obaba Owolo, served as a point of contact for their introduction to activists in and around Los Angeles. They met with West Coast leaders of the Black Panther Party, John Huggins and Bunchy Carter; visited the Malcolm X Foundation, led by Hakim Jamal, and the Black Congress; and participated in the Us organization’s “Soul Session.” They heard Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) speak at a Black Panther rally in the park and attended a political house party featuring would-be mayoral prospect Tom Bradley. The Afro Set leadership borrowed heavily from the ideas, style, manners, and actions of their West Coast hosts. They liked the apparent discipline of the Us organization, and they liked certain aspects of the Panthers. Upon their return to Cleveland, the Afro Set worked hard at what became known as the largest, most influential Black nationalist organization in the Midwest. This growth and progress continued until the early 1970s, which saw the departure of some key principals. The Afro Set found itself bogged down in internal conflicts, alcohol, and drugs. These and other weaknesses began to nip away at the discipline that once had been its hallmark.

Demise The Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) would bring the final blow, with the false imprisonment of its leader and key cadres jailed for crimes that reflected a lack of knowledgeable leadership. The Federal Bureau of Investigation

14 | Alabama Black Liberation Front

(FBI) also tried but failed to pit the Cleveland Panthers into a fratricidal war with the Afro Set, and by June 1973, Harllel X, prime minster of the once proud Afro Set, was forced to issue a decree from a prison cell that he was disbanding the organization. Harllel was freed after a six-year prison stint, when it was proven in federal court that the FBI COINTELPRO had used a paid informer to conspire to railroad him into prison. Marcus Greenwood See also: Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Carter, Alprentice “Bunchy” Further Reading Jeffries, L. Judson. 2007. Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moore, N. Leonard. 2002. Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Robinson, G. Lewis. 1970. The Making of a Man: An Autobiography. Cleveland, OH: Green and Sons.

Alabama Black Liberation Front The Alabama Black Liberation Front (ABLF) was an organization that emerged in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1970. The ABLF modeled itself after the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) and implemented many of the BPP’s programs and strategies in an effort to address persistent poverty and police brutality in Birmingham’s Black community. The ABLF provides a window onto the historical dynamics that characterized the Black Power moment and the tangible ways in which African Americans articulated Black Power at the local level. Frustrated by the limited impact of the Civil Rights Movement but simultaneously inspired by the example of the BPP and the resurgent Black radicalism it represented, members of the ABLF embraced Black Power as the most effective means of improving the everyday lives of African Americans. Almost as soon as the organization began its work, though, Birmingham-area law enforcement agencies targeted the group and its members. Like Black Power organizations across the country, the ABLF was unable to withstand this coordinated campaign to undermine and disrupt its work. By 1974, the cumulative impact of arrests, trials, and imprisonment meant that the ABLF ceased to exist as an organization. Although its organizational life was brief, the ABLF’s story is nevertheless crucial to understanding the Black Power moment in the United States. In 1963, the sight of police dogs and fire hoses being used against schoolchildren in Birmingham shocked the country and provided the final impetus for



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President John F. Kennedy to propose what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Seven years later, though, Birmingham’s Black community continued to grapple with persistent problems despite the city’s celebrated role in the Civil Rights Movement. As a result, over the course of the late 1960s and into the 1970s, African Americans in Birmingham continued to organize for full and equal access to housing, employment, health care, and city services. Welfare recipients, public housing residents, steelworkers, and medical center and nursing home employees were among those at the forefront of efforts to continue Birmingham’s local freedom struggle even as the country’s attention turned elsewhere. This new phase of Black activism was one that recognized the need to expand and intensify Birmingham’s local freedom struggle in order to secure more substantive changes than those brought about by the 1963 campaign. It was into this context that Wayland “Doc” Bryant and Michael Reese arrived in 1970 to organize what would become the ABLF. Bryant and Reese met initially in Atlanta, Georgia, where they were part of the Georgia Black Liberation Front that operated out of the Vine City neighborhood, a section of that city known for its connection to Black Power, having been home to a Black Power ideological challenge within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Bryant had come to Atlanta from Greensboro, North Carolina, where he operated a Black bookstore and participated in BPP activities. Reese was a native of Birmingham and was in Atlanta following service in Vietnam. In May 1970 the two men traveled to Reese’s hometown and began organizing a cadre of like-minded individuals into the ABLF. Among those who joined the ABLF were a number of Vietnam veterans, many of whom cited their experiences in Vietnam as the basis for their radicalization. In this way they had much in common with many others who found appeal in the idea of Black Power upon returning to the United States. Throughout the late spring and summer of 1970, the ABLF initiated a variety of programs in Birmingham along the lines of the BPP. The ABLF patrolled the streets of the city to “police the police” and published its own newsletter while also distributing copies of the BPP newspaper that were shipped from California. The ABLF organized free clothing drives and free breakfast programs in Black neighborhoods and public housing projects and also engaged in political education, studying many of the classic works associated with Black Power including Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and the speeches of Malcolm X. Members also participated in selfdefense classes that included firearms and target practice but also training in how to handle encounters with the police. In all of these activities, the ABLF illuminated the operation of Black Power at the grassroots level. An emphasis on preventing police brutality, a dedication to community control of resources and institutions within Black neighborhoods, a desire to promote Black consciousness and pride, and a sense of urgency that stemmed from the belief that racial change had thus far been too slow and difficult were all embedded within the ABLF’s work.

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As its access to the BPP newspaper would suggest, members of the ABLF also established connections with the national BPP. The ABLF hoped to eventually become an official affiliate of the party and even sent representatives to California for training and guidance. These ABLF efforts came at a time when the BPP was concentrating more exclusively on its California base, so no official affiliation was ever established. The desire to emulate and align with the BPP, though, demonstrated the enormous impact of the BPP on the Black Power historical moment. For members of the ABLF as well as numerous others around the country, the BPP represented the most authentic and accessible articulation of Black Power. The image of the BPP as what one ABLF member described as “some cool, brave, tough dudes standing up to the police” but also the work that the BPP did in the community attracted many young Black men and women to Black Power. In addition, the existence of a group such as the ABLF in a Deep South city such as Birmingham challenges the notion that Black Power was a phenomenon confined exclusively to the northern and western regions of the United States. In fact, the ABLF was part of a wave of Black Power activism across the American South. “Doc” Bryant established the ABLF following his experience with the BPP in North Carolina, and he and Michael Reese had begun their work in Georgia. BPP chapters emerged in southern states such as Kentucky, Louisiana, and Texas. In southern cities such as Memphis, Charleston, and Houston, groups of what police officers lumped together as Black “militants” were part of the racial landscape of the late 1960s and the 1970s. The Republic of New Africa, a Black Power organization that called for the establishment of an independent Black country in the Deep South, was another national group that made strong inroads across the region. Black southerners’ long-standing commitment to self-defense, community control, and independent politics, of course, meant that the region was fertile ground for Black Power. Indeed, many scholars trace the roots of Black Power to the South, whether through figures such as Robert F. Williams or the original BPP in Lowndes County, Alabama. Black Power was also more than an urban phenomenon; ABLF members reported that when they ventured out into Alabama’s rural Black Belt, their message and ideas were well received. As the ABLF became a more prominent part of Birmingham’s political landscape, law enforcement initiated a campaign to neutralize and eventually eliminate the organization. This campaign followed the blueprint of others around the country as Black Power organizations increasingly found themselves targeted. Much like their counterparts around the country, law enforcement officials were unable to see Black Power organizations such as the ABLF as anything other than a threat. In Birmingham, a coordinated effort between the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Birmingham Police Department, and the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office included efforts to undermine the group in the local press, the use of informants and agents provocateur, and the harassment of ABLF members,



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with arrests for minor offenses such as selling newspapers without a license. In September 1970, though, that effort escalated, and two ABLF members found themselves imprisoned on the much more serious charge of assault with intent to murder. The charges stemmed from a “shootout” at a home in the Tarrant section of Birmingham that involved several members of the ABLF and sheriff’s deputies attempting to evict Bernice Turner, a Black woman, from the house. Following what their supporters described as more of a “shoot-in,” given that all of the shots fired came from outside the home, Bryant and fellow ABLF member Ronnie Williams were arrested and taken to jail. Law enforcement officials, again consistent with the response to Black Power nationwide, took advantage of the opportunity to paint a picture of the ABLF as a group of armed and dangerous Black men intent on attacking the police. Local media outlets featured stories that echoed this portrayal. The incident in Tarrant thus marked a turning point in the history of the ABLF as it ushered in a period during which members found themselves arrested and charged with more than just misdemeanor offenses. Michael Reese would spend time in prison on weapons charges, Bryant and Williams were convicted of assault, and Charles Cannon spent several years in prison on dubious murder charges before being released on appeal. The effort to defend and support Bryant, Reese, and the others led to the formation of fruitful alliances with other activists in Birmingham, including many white leftists and progressives, and groups such as the Southern Conference Educational Fund. The impact of such connections was seen in the outpouring of support for Williams when he fled Alabama while out on bond during appeal. Not only had local supporters raised the funds for his bond, but they had let it be known that they would support his decision to refuse a return to prison. Indeed, Williams successfully avoided extradition from Oregon in part because its governor, Tom McCall, received letters from across the country on Williams’s behalf. Defense committee work, though, demanded attention and resources that would have ordinarily gone to support the ABLF’s actual community work. Unable to sustain itself, by 1974 the ABLF no longer existed as an identifiable organization. In its brief history, though, it articulated an agenda that spoke to the concerns of Birmingham’s Black community and was an essential part of that community’s continuing freedom struggle. Robert W. Widell Jr. See also: Black Panther Party; Fanon, Frantz; Malcolm X; Parks, Rosa; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. 2009. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. New York: New York University Press.

18 | Ali, Muhammad (1942–2016) Kelley, Robin D. G. 1993. “The Black Poor and the Politics of Opposition in a New South City, 1929–1970.” In The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History, edited by Michael Katz, 293–333. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tyson, Timothy B. 1999. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Umoja, Akinyele Omawale. 2013. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: New York University Press. Widell, Robert W., Jr. 2013. Birmingham and the Long Black Freedom Struggle. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Williams, Yohuru, and Jama Lazerow. 2008. Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ali, Muhammad (1942–2016) Muhammad Ali is arguably the most iconic sports figure associated with the topic of Black Power. As well known for his boastful rhetoric as his pugilistic skills, Ali broke the mold of the African American athlete who was expected to be seen rather than heard. He epitomized Black pride through his declaration of himself as “the greatest of all time.” Moreover, his religious beliefs and his self-conscious

Prizefighter Muhammad Ali was a well-celebrated icon of the Black Power era. His refusal to be drafted or serve in the Vietnam War exemplified self-determination, Black pride, and Black Power. (Library of Congress)



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identification with Black America, exemplified by his membership in the Nation of Islam (NOI) and his refusal of the Vietnam War draft, made him an antiestablishment figure and earned the enmity of much of white America. As a symbol of self-determination, Black pride, and the anti–Vietnam War movement, Ali emerged as a folk hero who was firmly rooted both politically and culturally in the African American experience of the 1960s and 1970s. Ali, who would come to be one of the most recognized personalities in the world, was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. on January 17, 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky. After winning the gold medal in the 1960 Olympic Games, he entered the ranks of professional boxing as a heavyweight. Having a gift for self-promotion, he masterfully garnered both media and public attention through flamboyant boasting, featuring poetic predictions of victory. While a considerable number of people were put off by the contender’s vociferous behavior, viewing it as unsportsmanlike, sports fans and the general public found him entertaining. The majority of African American fans found him endearing largely because of verbal acumen—a feature highly respected in African American culture. Initially unbeknown to the general public, Clay was a member of the NOI. He became familiar with the NOI during his stint as an amateur boxer in 1958 and secretly joined three years later. Immediately after defeating Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight championship, Clay publicly declared his membership in the NOI. Shortly thereafter he received the name Muhammad (“worthy of praises”) Ali (“most high”) from NOI leader Elijah Muhammad. Ali’s overt identification with African Americans through his practice of verbal rituals (i.e., boasting, the “dozens,” rapping, etc.) and his affiliation with a Black nationalist religious organization contributed to his emergence as a folk hero among Black people long before his widespread acceptance among the American mainstream. As an athlete turned folk hero, Ali followed a legacy established by the first and second African American world heavyweight boxing champions Jack Johnson (1878–1946) and Joe Louis (1914–1981), Olympic track star Jesse Owens (1913– 1980), and Jackie Robinson (1919–1972), who officially broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball. As would be the case with Ali, the athletic achievement of these heroes symbolically fulfilled the collective aspirations of African American people to transcend the boundaries of white supremacist society. Ali’s distinction from his heroic predecessors was his Black nationalist orientation, which fostered a conscious self-identification as a representative of Black people, initially at the cost of his acceptance by the American mainstream. Malcolm X, comparing young Cassius Clay to his most immediate heroic predecessor, accurately foresaw the significant impact that Ali would have as a hero for the African American masses: Cassius will mean more to his people than any athlete before him. He’s more than Jackie Robinson was, because Robinson is the white man’s hero. But Cassius is the black man’s hero. (qtd. in Horn 1964, 57)

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After winning the heavyweight championship, Ali declared himself “the People’s Champion.” This self-declaration was influenced by his identification as NOI Muslim and particularly by his tutelage under the NOI’s lead minister, Malcolm X. One of Ali’s first public acts as champion was to visit the United Nations, where Malcolm introduced him to representatives of African nations. Ali would ultimately gain unprecedented international popularity, particularly among the darker-skinned nations. His appeal and his sense of identification arguably make him the first and only truly world champion among those who bore the title. The transitioning of Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali was shaped by the NOI’s organizational shift brought on by the internal conflict between its leader Elijah Muhammad and national spokesman Malcolm X. Their divergent perceptions of Ali’s symbolic potential reflected the two leaders’ disparate political worldviews. Malcolm X recognized Ali’s value as a representative of African people throughout the world, whereas Elijah Muhammad was more interested in Ali as a representative of Islam. Ali was a valued prize in the power struggle between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, both of whom could benefit politically from an ally who could access the masses the way the fighter could. For Elijah Muhammad, Ali’s mass appeal would make him an ideal replacement for Malcolm X, especially as an attraction for new membership. For Malcolm X, the champion could have been the boon he needed to reestablish an organizational base. As time would reveal, Ali amassed a following in the Pan-African world rivaling that of Malcolm X with relatively no effort and earned acceptability among African Americans and the world at large that Elijah Muhammad would never realize. Cassius Clay’s place in the midst of the conflict between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad set the circumstances under which Clay came to be Muhammad Ali. Typically, a follower of Elijah Muhammad was given an “original” Arabic name only after years of devoted service. However, Elijah Muhammad named Cassius Clay Muhammad Ali within weeks of his championship victory, even though he had been a member, and a “closeted” member at that, for a little more than three years. Malcolm X saw the naming as an obvious ploy to keep the champion from leaving the NOI. Ali’s embrace and defense of this new name were most vividly dramatized in his fights with Ernie Terrell and Floyd Patterson, both of whom refused to call Ali by his chosen name. Evidenced when Jack Johnson and Joe Louis reigned as world champions, boxing match-ups provide analogies to racial polarization and would do so during the 1960s, even when most bouts were between two African American fighters. For Ali, his ring battles sometimes reflected clashes of cultural and political identity among African Americans. For instance, the fight between Floyd Patterson, who publicly declared his intent to “take the championship from the Black Muslims,”



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and Muhammad Ali represented a clash between the assimilationist and nationalist political orientations. The rise of the nationalist Ali and his eclipsing of the patriotic African American athlete of Patterson’s ilk paralleled the nonviolent integrationist movement of the old guard, giving way to a newer generation advocating self-defense and Black Power. Ali’s affirmation of identity, vividly dramatized by his insistence on being called by his adopted name, was analogous to the concern for self-definition held by Black Power advocates and sympathizers. Ali’s assertion of identity through the defense of his name metaphorically expressed African America’s effort to define itself by its own terms. In 1967 after three years of successfully defending his championship, Muhammad Ali was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army. He refused induction, famously declaring that “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong” while claiming conscientious objector status. In June Ali was convicted of draft evasion, fined $10,000, and stripped of his boxing license and championship. Convinced that his boxing career was over, he earned money by lecturing at colleges and universities and making guest appearances on television. While banned from the ring Ali also continued in his role as “the People’s Champion,” seeking “freedom, justice, and equality for black folks” by teaching African Americans “the knowledge of their true selves.” While much of his lectures involved the message of Elijah Muhammad, Ali defended his opposition to participate in the Vietnam War as an expression of his commitment to his religious beliefs and to his people. Ali returned to his boxing career following the reversal of his conviction by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 28, 1971. His climb to regain his championship title following his return from a forced hiatus was not only a personal quest to retake what was wrongfully taken from him but also symbolized the affirmation of Black Power, as his persecution was seen as a backlash for his unapologetic identification with African Americans as much as it was for his antiwar stance. Many of Ali’s opponents were largely favored by those who supported the Vietnam War. Thus, when he defeated George Foreman to win the championship in 1974, it was seen as a symbolic vindication of the Black Power and antiwar movements over the Establishment. The setting of the fight in an African nation (Kinshasa, Zaire) added greater symbolic potency. During the 1960s and 1970s, Ali was recognized as the most visible symbol of the anti–Vietnam War movement, an example of indomitable self-determination, and the epitome of Black pride. The impact of Ali on that era could be felt in the mantra “Black is Beautiful” and more clearly in 1968 when the reinstatement of his boxing license and championship became part of a list of demands by a group of African American athletes who threatened to boycott the Summer Olympics. Indeed, Ali’s symbolic potency was in evidence as early as 1965, when the Lowndes County Black Panther Freedom Democratic Party (not to be confused

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with the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale) paraphrased his most famous slogan in its bumper stickers, which bore the image of a panther and the phrase “We are the Greatest.” Further, the lambasting of Ali in a white college newspaper editorial became the catalyst that instigated a confrontation between the Black Student Union and San Francisco State University, a conflict that ultimately led to the university’s establishment of a Black studies department and a diversity recruitment program. Ali’s transformation of boxing, particularly regarding the power relations between boxers and management (a direct result of the management of Elijah’s son, Herbert Muhammad), parallels the transformation of predominantly white universities such as San Francisco State during the Black Power Movement that introduced Black studies in the late 1960s. That movement was carried out by Black nationalists who sought to carve out a piece of the university for their own control. It was a convergence of the integrationists’ struggle to gain access to white-controlled resources and the nationalists’ emphasis on the promotion of African culture, group solidarity, and the exclusion of Euro-American input in defining interests. Similarly, Ali utilized space within the white-controlled sports industry to create for himself a public platform to represent the interests of African American people. In the postmovement era of the mid-1970s, Ali’s appeal grew among the American mainstream. He retired from boxing in 1979 and later made two unsuccessful attempts to return to the ring. In 1984 Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which ultimately stripped him of the verbosity for which he was so well known. Mainstream America’s endearment for Ali escalated when he visibly struggled to subdue the effects of his disease to light the torch during the opening ceremony for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. Muhammad Ali died on June 3, 2016, at the age of 74. Shawn L. Williams See also: Lowndes County Freedom Organization; Malcolm X; Nation of Islam; Vietnam War Further Reading “The Black Scholar Interviews: Muhammad Ali (June 1970).” 2012. Black Scholar 42(2) (Summer): 14–21. Hauser, Thomas. 1991. Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times. New York: Simon and Schuster. Horn, Huston. 1964. “The First Days in the New Life of the Champion.” Sports Illustrated (March 9): 26–27. Marqusee, Mike. 1999. Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties. New York: Verso. Williams, Shawn. 2007. “I’m a Bad Man”: African American Vernacular Culture and the Making of Muhammad Ali. Morrisville, NC: Lulu.



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All-African People’s Revolutionary Party Beginnings and Background The idea for the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) was published by Pan-Africanist and former president of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah in 1968. As the leader of the first African colony to win independence from white rule, Nkrumah was well positioned to advocate for the creation of a Pan-Africanist party designed to end all vestiges of European domination and neocolonialism. The motto of the AAPRP is Nkrumah’s definition of Pan-Africanism—the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism. Nkrumah proposed the formation of the AAPRP in his book Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, published in 1968. At the time Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique were in the midst of fighting to expel the Portuguese colonizers from 500 years of occupation; South Africa was being ruled by the undemocratic and racist white minority regime; Namibia was being illegally occupied by the apartheid regime in South Africa; and Africans of Zimbabwe were being crushed under the weight of the illegitimate white minority–ruled Rhodesian government. Other African nations were beset with the phenomenon of neocolonialism, which Nkrumah described as “A state . . . independent de jure and dependent de facto. It is a state where political power lies in the conservative forces of the former colony and where economic power remains under the control of international finance capital.” As written in Revolutionary Warfare, the purpose of the AAPRP was to coordinate policies and to direct action to rid Africa of the remnants of European colonialism and control. The politics of Pan-Africanism accelerated and became tangible after the Fifth Pan-African Congress occurring in 1945. Nkrumah and many other Africans from the continent and the African diaspora discussed strategies of self-determination and decolonization. The Africans in attendance affirmed their right and commitment to achieve independence and self-determination by all means, including force if necessary. There was also serious consideration given and plans discussed to unify Africa politically after independence.

Origins In February 1966, President Nkrumah was deposed in a coup launched by elements of Ghana’s military and police forces while he was on a trip to North Vietnam as a guest of its president, Ho Chi Minh. Nkrumah immediately returned to Africa but not to Ghana. At the invitation of President Ahmed Sékou Touré, a fellow Pan-Africanist and socialist, Nkrumah traveled to the People’s Revolutionary Republic of Guinea. In a gesture of respect for Ghana’s president and in a

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symbolic display of Pan-Africanism, President Touré named Nkrumah both head of state of Guinea and secretary-general of the Democratic Party of Guinea. While writing the book Revolutionary Warfare, Nkrumah called for the formation of an All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, which would work with the proposed All-African People’s Revolutionary Army to liberate Africa from foreign control and neocolonialism. The first manifestation of the AAPRP appeared in Conakry, Republic of Guinea, in 1968 as Nkrumah established the first cells. The purpose of the AAPRP was to free Africa from all foreign domination and advance revolutionary Pan-Africanism that would result in a United States of Africa under scientific socialism (African socialism). Prominent personalities within the early days of the AAPRP were President Touré, President Nkrumah, and Kwame Ture. Throughout its existence, the AAPRP maintained ties and solidarity with revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and socialist movements, organizations, and nations from around the world. This included African organizations and movements such as the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, the Southwest Africa People’s Organi­ zation, the Republic of Northern Ireland, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Kwame Ture After the deaths of Nkrumah in 1972 and President Touré in 1984, Kwame Ture became the most prominent personality of the AAPRP. Until his move to Africa, Ture was best known internationally as militant Civil Rights activist and organizer Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael was born in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and as a child moved to the Black metropolis of Harlem in New York City. In the 1960s he was an early organizer and eventual national chair for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). His organizing efforts extended to the Lowndes County Freedom Party in Alabama, which used the infamous leaping panther as its symbol. Carmichael popularized the “Black Power” slogan that fellow SNCC activist and future AAPRP member Willie Ricks (Baba Mukasa) had reported as a demand from Black field-workers in Alabama. As Stokely Carmichael, Ture was recruited as honorary prime minister for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) based out of Oakland, California, in 1967. After separating from the BPP, Carmichael moved to Conakry, Guinea, where he became secretary to Kwame Nkrumah and an aide to President Touré. In 1969 Ture joined the AAPRP and began to help organize the group within the United States and elsewhere in the African diaspora. Ture was committed to the mission and organization of the AAPRP until his death in 1998 (“Kwame Ture’s Pan-Africanist Mission” 1998),

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AAPRP Political Philosophy The Pan-Africanist philosophy of the AAPRP can be summed up with the words of Nkrumah: The total liberation and unification of Africa under an All-African Socialist Government must be the primary objective of all Black revolutionaries throughout the world. It is an objective which, when achieved, will bring about the fulfillment of the aspirations of African and people of African descent everywhere. It will at the same time advance the triumph of the international socialist revolution, and the onward progress towards world communism, under which, every society is ordered on the principle of—from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. (Nkrumah 1970, 88) Since its inception, the AAPRP advocated for the political unification of Africa with an economic system based on socialism. Kwame Ture introduced the idea that the AAPRP should not be limited to Africans on the continent but should include the diaspora as well. As a result, the AAPRP established a presence in the United States, Great Britain, and other places in the diaspora (“Kwame Ture’s Pan-Africanist Mission” 1998).

Economic Philosophy The AAPRP explains its desire for socialism as follows: Under a socialist system, the wealth of Africa will not be dominated by large corporations and a handful of wealthy families. Instead, the wealth will be placed in the hands of the African masses. This will ensure that when the people need medicine, we will have it. When we need education, we will get schools. When we need housing, it will be available. (All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. n.d.) The AAPRP opposed capitalism based on its negative effects, including the misery visited on Africa by the slave trade, European colonialism, and neocolonialism that kept the majority of Africans peasants and working-class people at an oppressive economic disadvantage. This oppression allowed African elites to become extremely rich by selling and profiting from the overabundance of Africa’s natural resources, especially mineral riches and cash crops such as tobacco and coffee, to benefit the few at the expense of the health and development of the vast majority of people. This problem of capitalism, imperialism, and neocolonialism was seen as a problem for Africans who were in poverty worldwide. In addition to fighting against economic inequality, the AAPRP opposed gender oppression. In 1980, the AAPRP established the All-African Women’s

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Revolutionary Union to fight the “triple oppression” of African women—class, racial, and gender oppression, which also included some African traditions. With branches throughout the globe, the AAPRP continues to promote the unification of Africa under scientific socialism as defined by President Kwame Nkrumah. James M. Simmons See also: Black Internationalism; Black Power Abroad; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Pan-Africanism; United Front, The Further Reading All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. http://www.aaprp-intl.org. All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. n.d. “Imagine a Different Kind of Social Reality . . .” All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, http://aaprp-intl.org/drupal/sites /default/files/PDFs/socialism.pdf. All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (GC). http://www.a-aprp-gc.org. Biney, Ama. 2009. “The Development of Kwame Nkrumah’s Political Thought in Exile, 1966–1972.” Journal of African History 50(1): 81–100. “Kwame Ture’s Pan-Africanist Mission: A Life Devoted to Winning Our Freedom; Official Obituary Issued by the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party.” 1998. Michigan Citizen, B1. Nkrumah, Kwame. 1968. Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare: A Guide to the Armed Phase of the African Revolution. New York: International Publishers. Nkrumah, Kwame. 1970. Class Struggle in Africa. New York: International Publishers.

Assassinations The assassination of Black activists and leaders remained a constant threat during the slavery and Reconstruction eras after the American Civil War, thru the Black Power Movement, and beyond. Assassinations during the Black Power era brought the tactic of murdering activists, leaders, and other symbols of resistance and dissent to new levels. While efforts to repress Africans continued in the United States by white terrorists, the targets and aggressors became much more wide ranging than they had been previously. The term “assassination” generally refers to the murder of prominent people for political reasons. This does not include lynching, random violence, massacres, and destruction of entire Black towns by white mobs, race rioters, and rapists. Assassinations are thought to be targeted killings. The use of assassination against Black people who challenged white domination can be traceable to the era of slavery and demonstrated by the mysterious death of abolitionist David Walker, who had a bounty on him in 1830 at the time of his death. After the Civil War the

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intrinsic violence of Black enslavement was joined with assassinations, lynchings, mass murders by white mobs and terrorist organizations, and governmental violence perpetrated by law enforcement, courts, and the penal system. The militancy of the Black Power Movement can be explained in large part as a response to the terrorism inflicted on the Civil Rights activists and other Black people in the South. “You be Black and biggern a minute, they just blow you away” is a sentiment long held by African Americans (Jordan 1972, 47). Up until the Black Power era, that statement meant expected murder attempts by white supremacist organizations and individuals dedicated to enforcing the tradition of white supremacy. The threat of assassination widened as conflict between Black organizations increased, eventually including assassinations and other acts of political violence. Prior to the Black Power era, white supremacists used assassination as a tool to discourage African Americans in the South from asserting their rights and participating in the Civil Rights Movement. Numerous Black activists were assassinated, and attempts were made on others during the Civil Rights Movement (1950–1968), including the following: • Former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Florida executive secretary Harry T. Moore and his activist wife Harriet Moore (December 25, 1951). The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) detonated a bomb under their bed in Mims, Florida. • James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman of the Congress of Racial Equality (June 21, 1964). They were killed in a joint operation by members of the White Knights of the KKK, deputies of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office, and officers of the Philadelphia and Mississippi police departments. • Medgar Evers was the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi and had survived two prior assassination attempts before he was shot to death by KKK sniper Byron de la Beckwith on June 12, 1963. • Viola Liuzzo (March 25, 1965). The Civil Rights worker from Detroit, Michigan, was assassinated in Lowndesboro, Alabama, by a KKK hit team that included KKK security chief Gary Thomas Rowe, who was also a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asset. • Deputy Oneal Moore (June 2, 1965). He was killed in a drive-by shooting for being one of the first two Black police officers in Bogalusa, Louisiana. • Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer (January 10, 1966). Dahmer was a voting rights activist in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, when his home was firebombed. As he traded gunfire with his attackers from the KKK, Dahmer’s family escaped and survived the attack. He died from burns sustained from the bombing.

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Terrorism inflicted on Black people and their allies in the segregationist South led many in the Civil Rights Movement to abandon nonviolence and reliance on government protection and embrace armed self-defense and Black Power.

African American Response to Terrorism The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Deacons for Defense and Justice, and other southern organizations followed the example of North Carolina NAACP leader Robert F. Williams. He had led an armed Black Guard unit to protect the Black residents of Monroe, North Carolina, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He established organized armed self-defense efforts in the South to protect Civil Rights activists and the Black community from terrorism. Terrorism and assassination in the South had a great impact on the psyche of Blacks around the country. What many people had considered a southern problem, racist terrorism, was now being taken up by Black Power advocates from other parts of the country. In 1964, Malcolm X spoke to Mississippi youths and gave a promise of training and support to deal with racist violence. The use of assassination as a tool of white supremacist organizations such as the KKK decreased drastically as Black revolutionaries and proponents of armed resistance promised and sometimes carried out violent responses to attacks on Black people and Civil Rights activists.

Assassinations Malcolm X, George Jackson, and others advocated building a counterterrorist capability to add the element of reciprocity beyond simple self-defense measures in order to counter the ongoing legacy of racist violence against Blacks. During the Black Power era some Black revolutionaries sought to use violence to bring about revolutionary change, eliminate social ills such as narcotics trafficking, and push political agendas. A haunting legacy of the volatile energy of the Black Power Movement’s embracing violence as a tool for change was the spectacle of Blacks being targeted for assassination by other Black activists even as assassinations by white terrorists and government continued.

War on the Black Liberation Movement The Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was a wide-ranging illegal operation that the FBI initiated in the 1950s to spy on and disrupt those whom the federal government perceived to be enemies within the United States. Starting in the 1950s, these “enemies” included Civil Rights and Black Power Movement leaders, communists, socialists, and nominally the KKK. Campaigns of assassination

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by proxy against the Black liberation movement included coordinating federal and local police actions against targets as well as provoking violent disagreements between armed militant groups and individuals and also provoking violent splits within organizations with campaigns of lies and manipulation. Victims of the FBI’s COINTELPRO were assassinated throughout the country. One FBI memorandum expressed satisfaction for successfully provoking killings between rival Black Power organizations. The late 1960s thru the early 1970s was a very violent time for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). The revolutionary organization was beset by violence from various police agencies that sought to destroy it.

Assassination Chronology The following is a partial list of Civil Rights and Black Power activists who were assassinated, organized by date from 1965 thru 1975. The assassinations of Civil Rights activists are included to put into context the near abandonment of nonviolence by the Black Power Movement. Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz), born Malcolm Little (assassinated February 22, 1965). Malcolm X was a revolutionary thinker, human rights activist, organizer, and orator whose uncompromising efforts on behalf of Black people gained respect and influence in the United States and internationally. He enraged former colleagues after a bitter public break from the Nation of Islam (NOI) and caused concern for the U.S. government, as he challenged its record of human rights abuses nationally and internationally while promoting the necessity of revolutionary social, political, and economic independence. He was assassinated as he prepared to speak at a meeting of his Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, New York. Three assassins emptied a shotgun and two pistols into the iconic revolutionary leader. After his family narrowly survived a firebomb attack at their home on February 14, 1965, Malcolm X initially blamed Elijah Muhammad and the NOI, lamenting that “The only thing I regret in all of this is that two Black groups have to fight and kill each other off” (Breitman 1994, 137–146). Eventually, Malcolm X and others began to suspect that the U.S. government was behind efforts to cause his demise. There is evidence that the rift between Malcolm X and the NOI was fueled by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, and suspicions linger about direct government involvement in the assassination. A 1969 memorandum highlighted the success of COIN­ TELPRO operations against the NOI and Malcolm X: Over the years considerable thought has been given, and action taken with Bureau approval, relating to methods through which the NOI could be discredited in the eyes of the general black populace or through which factionalism among the leadership could be created. . . . Factional disputes have

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been developed—the most notable being MALCOLM X LITTLE. (“Malcolm X and the FBI” 1969) NOI members Talmadge Hayer (also known as Thomas Hagan and Mujahid Abdul Halim), Norman 3X Butler, and Thomas 15X were convicted of the assassination. Hayer later professed that his codefendants were not involved in the murder and named William Bradley, Leon Davis, Benjamin Thomas, and Wilbur McKinley as his confederates in the killing. McKinley explicitly denied involvement in the assassination. Wharlest Jackson (February 27, 1967). Jackson was the treasurer of the NAACP chapter in Natchez, Mississippi, and had received threats due to his activities. He was killed when a bomb planted in his car exploded. Martin Luther King Jr. (April 4, 1968). Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by a single bullet fired from a sniper’s rifle as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. A symbol of nonviolent resistance to racial oppression, King had become a vocal opponent to the U.S. war in Vietnam 1967 and a champion of economic justice for working people. The FBI considered King a potential “messiah” for Black revolutionaries and stated that he “could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.” White racist James Earl Ray confessed to the killing and was convicted of murder in 1969. In 1999 a federal civil court jury found that state and federal governmental agencies and others were responsible for King’s assassination. King had survived two previous assassination attempts: on January 30, 1956, when his home was bombed, and on September 20, 1958, when he was stabbed in the chest in New York. King’s assassination sealed the end of nonviolence as the prevailing philosophy guiding the Black freedom struggle. Black outrage at King’s murder led to immediate violence nationwide, as mass disorder, firebombings, and sniper fire were seen in dozens of cities across the country. The mass uprisings following King’s murder pushed the philosophies of Black Power and revolutionary struggle past the reformist tendencies of the Civil Rights Movement. Frank Diggs (June 1968). Known as Captain Franco in the Southern California chapter of the BPP, Diggs was killed by an unknown person or persons. However, widespread rumors suggest that he was assassinated by a member of the BPP for Self-Defense because his confrontational stance and open defiance of law enforcement led to increased scrutiny of party activities. Unfounded suspicions prompted by Franco’s release without charges after a high-speed chase by police following an alleged robbery led some Panthers to believe that he was an informant. While the belief was that Diggs was murdered by police, fellow Panther Wayne Pharr felt differently. When Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) ballistics reported that a bullet in Diggs’s body matched a gun found in a raid on Panther headquarters, Pharr expressed that he was not surprised:

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I had already concluded that the police had not murdered Captain Franco. It was an inside job, and I felt that it was a dirty deed. I wasn’t sure who had given the order, nor did I know how high up the chain of command the matter had gone. Was it a directive from the leadership of the Southern California chapter, or was the Central Committee in Oakland involved? (Pharr 2014, 104) Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, John Huggins, John Savage, and Sylvester Bell (January 1969). While all BPP chapters were under attack by local, state, and federal authorities, the Southern California chapter lost more members to violence than any other. Southern California founder and leader Carter was a victim of COINTELPRO’s campaign to create a “violent vendetta” between the organization Us and the BPP. Us members killed BPP deputy minister of defense Carter and his security captain Huggins after a confrontation at the University of California, Los Angeles. Southern California Panthers Savage and Bell were also killed by Us members in San Diego in 1969. Panthers retaliated with their own targeted attacks on Us members. Alex Rackley (May 21, 1969). BPP member Rackley was 24 years old when he was tortured and killed in New Haven, Connecticut, on suspicion of being a police informant. Although Panther Warren Kimbro admitted to firing the shot that killed Rackley, he said that he did it on orders from national BPP leaders. BPP chairman Bobby Seale and Los Angeles Panther Erika Huggins were tried for Rackley’s murder but were not convicted. Panther Lonnie McLucas was found guilty of conspiracy to kill Rackley and sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison. Kimbro and Panther George Sams cooperated with the prosecution and received light sentences for their part in the killing. Clarence 13X (June 12, 1969). The founder of the Five Percenters was murdered in Harlem, New York, by unknown assassins for unknown reasons. The Five Percenters was a group that followed its own interpretation of the teachings of the NOI. After the death of Clarence 13X (also known as Allah), his teachings continued in both the Five Percenters and the Nation of Gods and Earths. Decades after his assassination, the Five Percenter philosophy of Clarence 13 X continues in the lyrics and world of East Coast hip-hop music. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (December 4, 1969). BPP deputy chair Fred Hampton was assassinated in a joint operation of the Chicago Police Department, the Illinois state attorney’s office, and the FBI. Informant William O’Neal received a cash bonus from the FBI for supplying the map to police and possibly drugging the 22-year-old Panther, known affectionately as “Chairman Fred.” Chicago police officers used the map during the predawn raid during which Clark was killed as he tried to repel the military-style assault on the BPP apartment. The Chicago Police Department, the state attorney’s office, and the FBI were not prosecuted in criminal court but were found in a civil trial to have conspired to assassinate Hampton.

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W. L. Nolen, Cleveland Edwards, and Alvin “Jugs” Miller (January 13, 1970). A prison guard opened fire on three Black inmates who had been fighting with a group of white inmates in the yard of Soledad State Prison in California. The Black inmates killed were revolutionary activists Nolen, Edwards, and Miller—comrades of revolutionary writer and BPP field marshal George Jackson. Jackson credited Nolen with introducing him to radical political philosophy. None of the white inmates involved in the fight were targeted by the prison guard, although one was hit in the groin by a ricocheting bullet. Ralph Featherstone and William “Che” Payne (March 9, 1970). Featherstone and Payne were killed when a bomb exploded in their car in Bel Air, Maryland. The two SNCC leaders were acting in support of chairman H. Rap Brown, who was on trial for inciting a riot. Melvin “X” Bishop Williams (Fall 1970). By the time of his execution-style murder at 22 years of age, Melvin X was a cofounder of the East Los Angeles College Black Student Union. In 1968 he had led a massive Black and Chicano student strike at the college, which led to Black studies and brown studies being added to the curriculum at the college and the establishment of the studentpublished newspapers Black Guard and La Villa Nueva. Melvin also cofounded the Black Student Alliance, composed of Black student unions from around southern California. In June 1970, the body of Melvin X was found in San Bernardino with a gunshot wound to his head. His murder remains unsolved. Robert Webb (March 8, 1971). Black Liberation Army (BLA) member Robert Webb was shot to death as COINTELPRO-fueled fighting between Black Panthers loyal to founder Huey P. Newton and those Panthers who defected to the BLA became increasingly violent. George Lester Jackson (August 21, 1971). George L. Jackson, celebrated and influential field marshal of the BPP and author of two best-selling books on revolution, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson and Blood in My Eye, was shot through the head by prison guards after he stepped into the courtyard of San Quentin State Prison in California during an uprising in which six guards and two white inmates were killed. Three Soledad Brothers—John Cluchette, Fleeta Drumgo, and Jackson—were charged with the murder of a prison guard in retaliation for the murders of W. L. Nolen, Cleveland Edwards, and Alvin “Jugs” Miller and the subsequent exoneration of the prison guard who shot them. On August 7, 1970, Jackson’s 17-year-old brother and radical activist Jonathan Jackson and revolutionary prisoners William Christmas and John McClain were killed by prison guards in an armed action to free the Soledad Brothers at the Marin County Courthouse in California. James Carr (April 6, 1972). A longtime comrade of BPP field marshal George Jackson, Carr continued to work with the BPP and engage in Black militant underground work after his release from prison. He was killed in front of his mother-inlaw’s house in San Jose, California, after communications between Carr and

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Jackson relating to an escape plan were found in his clothes by a dry cleaner and turned over to police. Two Panthers from Los Angeles—Lloyd Mims and Richard Rodriguez—were convicted for Carr’s murder. Rahman Uddein Khaalis (age 10 years), Khadyja Khaalis (age 2 years), Abdullah Khaalis (age 3 years), Bibi Khaalis (age 1 year), Abdul Tasibur (age 9 days), Daud Khaalis (age 26 years), and Abdul Nur (age 23 years) (January 18, 1973). Two adults with five children ranging in age from 9 days to 10 years old were shot to death or drowned in Washington, D.C. Hamaas Khaalis was not home at the time of the attack. Hamaas Khaalis’s wife, Bibi, and adult daughter, Amina, survived the massacre, even while suffering several gunshots to their heads. The apparent target was Hamaas Khaalis—a Hanafi Muslim minister, former national secretary for the NOI, confidant of Malcolm X, and vocal critic of the NOI and its leader Elijah Muhammad. Survivors of the attack testified that the killers admonished their victims about Hamaas Khaalis’s criticism of Muhammad and the NOI as they executed them. All but two of those killed were Khaalis’s children, the youngest victim being his 9-day-old grandchild. During a Black Family Day speech in January 1973, NOI national spokesman Louis Farrakhan denied that the NOI was responsible for the murders: “What man in his right mind, over some silly statement of a foolish man, would go and murder a man’s women and children? That’s a very bizarre, that’s a very ugly and fiendish act!” (“Louis Farrakhan: Black Family Day” 1974) Convicted for the murders were John Clark, William Christian, John Griffin, Ronald Harvey, and Theodore Moody, described as being members of the NOI and the Black Mafia. Defendant James Price was convicted and then murdered in 1975 in a Philadelphia prison after briefly cooperating with the government in the Hanafi murder case. In March 1977, Hamaas Khaalis and 11 of his followers simultaneously took over three buildings in Washington, D.C., taking more than 100 hostages and killing a Howard University reporter in the process. Hamaas Khaalis and his followers demanded that the killers of the seven in the Hanafi home and the assassins of Malcolm X be brought to them for justice. Hakim A. Jamal (May 1, 1973). Jamal was leader of De Mau Mau in Boston, president of the International Malcolm X Society, author of the autobiographical From the Dead Level: Malcolm X and Me, and a former member of the NOI. He was killed during an apparent split in De Mau Mau. Four members of De Mau Mau and a member of the NOI were convicted and imprisoned for assassinating Jamal. Marcus Foster (November 6, 1973). Foster, who was superintendent of Oakland Schools, was shot and killed after being hit with several cyanide-tipped bullets. Deputy Superintendent Robert Blackburn was seriously wounded by a shotgun blast fired by assassins Joseph Remiro and Russell Little of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Foster, an African American, was targeted for his support

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of identification cards for students in Oakland. The SLA was multiracial in character and headed by General Field Marshal Cinque, née Donald Defreeze, a Black man. Remiro and Little, who were white, were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The SLA was best known for kidnapping Patricia Hearst, daughter of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, and for a televised shootout with an LAPD SWAT team that killed Cinque and five other SLA members and led to the fiery destruction of their hideout. Twymon Meyers (November 14, 1973). Meyers was killed in an ambush by members of the Joint Terrorist Task Force of the New York Police Department and the FBI. He was a feared militant, also known as Kakuyan of the Olugbala tribe of the BLA. Alberta Christine Williams King (June 30, 1974). The mother of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Alberta was 70 years old when she was shot while playing organ at the Atlanta church pastored by her husband, Martin Luther King Sr., the assassin’s original target. Marcus Wayne Chenault Jr. was convicted of both King’s murder and that of church deacon Edward Boykin, who was also killed in the attack. Chenault was initially given the death penalty, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison at the behest of the King family. James M. Simmons See also: Counterintelligence Program; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X Further Reading Breitman, George, ed. 1994. Malcolm X Speaks. New York: Grove. Bukhari, Safiya. 2010. The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY. “Byte Out of History: The Case of the 1966 KKK Firebombing.” 2006. Federal Bureau of Investigations, January 9, https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2006/january/kkk_dahmer 010906. Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. 2002. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Brooklyn, NJ: South End Press Classics. Evanzz, Karl. 1993. The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder’s Mouth. Griffin, Sean Patrick. 2005. Black Brothers, Inc.: The Violent Rise and Fall of Philadelphia’s Black Mafia. Preston, UK: Milo Books. Jordan, June. 1972. Dry Victories. New York: Henry Holt. “Louis Farrakhan: Black Family Day.” 1974. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=ui7xsRzOvTY. “Malcolm X and the FBI.” 1969. Nation of Islam, January 22, http://www.noi.org /fbi_01_22_1969/.

Assassinations | 35 May, Gary. 2008. The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pharr, Wayne. 2014. Nine Lives of a Black Panther: A Story of Survival. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.

Primary Document Robert F. Kennedy, Speech on the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., 1968 On April 4, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, brother of deceased president John F. Kennedy, spoke to a crowd of supporters in Indianapolis, Indiana, and told them of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Kennedy used the tragic event to speak out against racial divisions and hatred, using King’s struggle for peace as a model for living. Ladies and Gentlemen—I’m only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening. Because I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black—considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible—you can be filled with bitter­ ness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization—black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love. For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a mem­ ber of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

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But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an ef­ fort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own de­ spair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder. But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much. Source: Robert F. Kennedy, “Statement on the Assassination of Martin Luther King,” April 4, 1968, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/RFK -Speeches/Statement-on-the-Assassination-of-Martin-Luther-King.aspx.

Attica Prison Rebellion The Attica Prison Rebellion is considered the most significant prison rebellion in 20th-century America. In an official report of the events that occurred at the Attica Correctional Facility, in Attica, New York, the McKay Commission called it the “bloodiest one day encounter between Americans since the Civil War” (Oswald 1972). From September 9 to 13, 1971, inmates took control of Attica in protest of degrading living conditions, inhumane and abusive treatment, and lack of diversity among correctional staff. During that period, the inmates held 39 guards and



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employees as hostages. After four days of negotiations, state officials retook the prison by lethal force, killing 39 unarmed citizens, 10 of whom were hostages, and severely wounding more than 80 (Attica 1972). The Attica Correctional Facility is a maximum security New York state prison and is operated by the New York State Department of Correctional Services. Built in 1931, the prison was designed and built to be one of the most secure New York prisons, with barred cells 6 feet wide, 9 feet long, and 7 feet high, surrounded by a 30-foot-high gray stone wall that is 2 feet thick. In many aspects, the institutional structure of Attica in 1971 was still functioning under the outdated theories of early 19th-century penology whereby the primary objectives of the American prison system were detention and confinement, with no claims to rehabilitate. By September 1971, Attica was considered average in comparison with other maximum security prisons in the state of New York. What the correction officers considered security and corrections was the prevailing theme that created the environment of degradation and dehumanizing living conditions. Although the prison was built to house 1,600 inmates, typical life for roughly 2,243 inmates consisted of 14 to 16 hours a day in overcrowded cells (Thompson 2016). A major complaint of inmates was that they had limited access to fresh air. Regarding work conditions, inmates received minimal working wages of 30 cents a day with no further employment training. When it came to hygiene, inmates had no privacy when using toilet areas and were given only one roll of toilet paper to last one month, and commode needs were insufficient. Inmates were permitted a bucket shower once a week (Thompson 2016). Meals did not meet nutritional standards, so the inmates were often underfed. Clothing was poor and scanty, and medical services were nonexistent, with illnesses and broken bones untreated. Visitation was extremely strict, preceded and followed by strenuous strip searches of the inmates, and family and friends were seen through mesh screens. Other grievances included overregulated activities, censored reading and media materials, and the right to free choice was nonexistent. In addition, there was no significant programming to prepare inmates for society; Attica did not offer drug rehabilitation, career training, or psychological and mental assistance. The inhumane conditions, already difficult, became unbearable because of the institutional and social racism that minorities experienced. The Attica prison population in 1971 was 54 percent Black, 37 percent white, and approximately 9 percent Latino, with an all-white correctional staff (Thompson 2016). Racism was prevalent, as job assignments were based on skin color, and discipline was unfair between prisoners and the officers. Partly because the correctional staff instigated racial hostility, self-segregation among inmates was customary. Inmates commonly felt that the correctional officers treated them with hostility, distrust, and prejudice. White officers from rural areas of New York had only three weeks of training and minimal contact with Blacks and Latinos from urban areas prior to

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working inside of the correctional facility. Most of the $8 million spent to run the prison in the fiscal year of 1971–1972 was used for correctional officers’ pay (Thompson 2016). For the inmates, the oppressive system of racism in the United States was cyclical for life in and outside the walls of the penitentiary (Attica 1972). With a shift from the Jim Crow institution of the 1960s and a new liberalized commissioner of corrections in New York, Russell G. Oswald, some would argue that regulations and corrective discipline became slightly lenient. Also, during this period Attica began to house a new population of Blacks and Latinos who were young, socially conscious, and aware of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in the United States as well as liberation movements occurring around the world. As the nation was undergoing civil unrest, the spirit of reformation and political radicalism began to permeate the Attica Correctional Facility. The inmates were inspired by leaders such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis and began to see the correctional facility as a symbol of authoritarianism and white supremacy. Slowly the correctional staff began to lose control of the incoming inmates, some of whom were already members of the Nation of Islam (NOI), the Black Panther Party (BPP), and the Young Lords. As the inmates began to grow in number, they formed organized groups. During the summer of 1971 inmates founded the Attica Liberation Faction (ALF), which further contributed to their political consciousness. Following the model of study and discussion groups such as those associated with the NOI and the BPP, the ALF developed a peer-led sociology class that read the works of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Perhaps the most influential reading was Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, published in 1970. George Jackson (1941–1971), an inmate who had become field marshal of the BPP, was an important figure in the Black Power Movement. His letters in particular were important reading for how prisons affected people of color and highlighted the lack of support that former inmates received in prison and when they attempted to reintegrate back into society. Putting their knowledge into action, the ALF sent the “Attica Manifesto” to Commissioner Russell Oswald and Governor Nelson Rockefeller in July 1971. The “Attica Manifesto” demanded constitutional rights, including legal representation before a parole board, the right to peaceful dissent, an end to political and racial persecution, properly trained medical staff, and the prosecution of correctional officers for cruel and unusual punishment. In response to their demands, the warden of Attica, Vincent Mancusi, increased cell searches, censored materials referencing prison conditions, and canceled recreational activities. Despite the harsh treatment received, the inmates continued pressuring officials for better conditions. By August 1971, they had begun demanding higher wages and lower commissary prices. A petition and prison-work strike led to a transfer of several alleged



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leaders to other prisons and the confinement of men in one cell block in their cells for two weeks. However, the pressure from the inmates garnered some slight success; for instance, commissary prices were lowered, and shortly thereafter a small increase in wages occurred. Then on August 22, inmates began a hunger strike in protest of the death of George Jackson by correctional officers at San Quentin State Prison on August 21. One week later on August 30, 300 prisoners signed up for sick call and occupied the prison’s medical area to bring attention to the substandard health facilities. By early September, Commissioner Oswald had visited Attica and promised to implement the demands made by the ALF. But only minimal progress occurred, and isolation of participants involved in organizing the strike continued. As time passed and promises were unfulfilled, friction at Attica began to escalate (Attica 1972). The frustrations and growing hostility among inmates across the nation resulted in the one of the most notorious prison riots in American history. Beginning on Thursday, September 9, after breakfast, an inmate involved in a previous conflict with another inmate reported that he had been attacked by a correctional officer after being taken to an isolation cell. Confrontations escalated between the prisoners and the guards. Unexpectedly, chaos broke out as inmates of A Block began resisting and gaining control of their block and moved into taking over the center square of the prison, known as Times Square. As demonstrators gained more access, others joined and began to take correctional officers and staff as hostages. Correctional officers were beaten with pipes, chains, and bats, one being fatally injured. With a slow response from New York state authorities and no preventative or control measures in place, inmates were able to obtain keys, and 1,281 inmates took over a total of four cell blocks, all the tunnels, and the yard within a couple of hours (Attica 1972). The inmates worked together to create internal order. By the end of September 9, inmates gathered in D Yard and created a governing system based on informed consensus. The ALF became responsible for organizing the riot into a politically minded prison reform movement and uprising against the current state of the prison. With approximately 40 hostage lives at stake, the inmates released a list of five demands that were preconditions to end the occupation and seizure. The five demands were eventually expanded to 15 practical proposals. Many of the demands were based on the Folsom prisoners’ manifesto, which was crafted approximately one year earlier. It included the following demands: a statewide minimum wage for penal labor, religious and political freedom; the end of segregation; more recreational time; modernization of the prison’s education system; rehabilitation programs in accordance with each prisoner’s offense and needs; expansion of Spanish-language books in the library; a healthier diet; recruitment and employment of Black and Spanish-speaking officers; amnesty from any form of reprisals; safe transportation to a nonimperialist country; and, most important, negotiation

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of their terms through intermediaries. Although the inmates had requested many well-known Black revolutionary leaders to participate in the negotiations, such as BPP cofounder Huey P. Newton and the NOI’s leader Louis Farrakhan, neither participated. However, their request to get William Kunstler, a well-known defense lawyer, was permitted. Kunstler helped to create a reform program from the inmates’ demands and also served with others, such as Congressman Herman Badillo and Milton Haynes, on the citizens’ committee that mediated between the prisoners and the State of New York to resolve the conflict. Throughout the negotiations, the hostages were guarded and protected against abuse by Black Muslims. From Friday, September 10, through the early morning of Saturday, September 11, Kunstler and the other observers stayed in D Yard with a television news crew. Inmates as well as observers made speeches that addressed not only the people within the prison but also the larger audience they were now able to reach. The earlier demands were eventually expanded to a 28-point proposal, which was accepted by Commissioner Oswald. However, the inmates asserted that they could not accept the proposal without amnesty. Bobby Seale, chairman of the BPP, spoke to the inmates but did not take a position on the demands (Thompson 2016). Over the five days following the overthrow of the facility, inmates created a community in the yard that crossed over color lines. Black, whites, and Latinos all took part in the revolt to leverage their demands and gain amnesty. Families and friends of the victims as well as the public pleaded that Governor Nelson Rockefeller meet with the inmates in order to bargain and end the rebellion. Rockefeller refused to visit or give amnesty to the inmates despite reaching a set of acceptable demands between the parties, even though the public, prisoners, and negotiators requested amnesty (Oswald 1972). Instead, Rockefeller sanctioned an immediate military takeover in order for the state to regain control of the prison. Within 15 minutes of a “last call to surrender” the National Guard, local police, and prison guards used tear gas and firearms in warlike tactics to force an end to the inmates’ control of the prison. However, with rushed and minimal planning, the state failed in ensuring the safety of the hostages and the prisoners. On Monday, September 13, 39 unarmed American citizens were killed due to the forceful retake of the prison, 10 of whom were hostages. Overall, 43 people were killed and 89 were wounded, with injuries that varied from bruises, cuts, and tear gas burns to severe gashes, concussions, and broken bones (Ferretti 1971). Because of poor planning, the state failed to provide proper medical arrangements prior to the attack, and medical attention was delayed for those injured. False reports from the media and the State of New York stated that inmates had killed the hostages by slicing their throats with knives. However, after further investigation including autopsies, it was found that all 39 deaths, including the hostages who died, were a result of the gunfire used after the rebellion ended—vengeful guards tortured the



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inmates. They were stripped of clothing and brutally beaten for days by officials in the retake of the prison (Farrell 1971). There were several reasons for the disaster. In particular, little instruction was given to the National Guard about when it should begin shooting and, just as pertinent, when to stop. In addition, those sent to retake Attica had no radio or a sense of hierarchy so that they understood who was in charge of each unit. Finally, there was no communication with prisoners to a surrender protocol and what to do with prisoners once the uprising had ended. Yet as part of their strike against the prisoners in D Yard, the officers and guards removed all badges, leaving prisoners unable to identify their attackers in case of any violations. In the aftermath of the uprising and the government attempt to take back control of the prison, a myriad of views were publicly expressed. Angela Davis wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times arguing that the inmates needed additional support during their effort to have their grievances addressed. John Lennon’s powerful ballad “Attica State” placed the deaths during the uprising on Governor Rockefeller’s decision to violently retake the prison. Protests occurred throughout New York, including bomb threats and harassing phone calls to Commissioner Oswald and Governor Rockefeller. One of the most telling images was a picket line outside of a gala bestowing Rockefeller a humanitarian award for his work in New York City. On the other side, prisoners were blamed for the problems that occurred within the prison, and law enforcement and correctional officers held rallies in support of the governor. After Attica, infamous for being the worst prison riot in United States history, prison rebellions begin to occur across the nation. Three years later in 1974, inmates filed a $2.8 billion lawsuit against Attica Correctional Facility and New York state officials for the harsh, dehumanizing treatment by correctional officers during and in the aftermath of the riot. It was not until 2000 that New York settled, with $8 million for inmates and an additional $4 million in attorney fees. Some hostages and families received $12 million to settle their case in 2005. Other families received workers’ compensation and therefore could no longer participate in any settlements. The Attica Prison Rebellion remains an important part of prison reform history and the prison abolition movement for several reasons. First, the “Attica Manifesto” revealed that before the uprising and throughout the conflict, the rehabilitative services were most important to the inmates. Their demand for better education services, the hiring of African Americans and Latinos, and improved medical services suggests that the prisoners wanted the prison to work under the auspices of its mandate of rehabilitation. Indeed, the proposals put forth by Attica’s prisoners are now seen as important elements of prison reform and abolition. Second, with inmates facing reprehensible conditions, the sense of order created by members of the ALF demonstrates that the prisoners were capable of managing themselves and that the brutal measures that had been used to control them were unnecessary

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and racist in their implementation. It thus stood that instead of trying to escape, the prisoners were willing to work under extreme circumstances to establish a sense of equity. Finally, the inability to use the existing system to gain reforms reveals how thoroughly the prison officials ignored the concerns of the people they were supposed to help and rehabilitate. This ironically placed prisoners in a position of trying to claim their rights as inmates and as Americans. The infamous Attica Prison Rebellion of September 1971 details the kind of disaster that can occur when prisoners are oppressed and their rights as human beings are ignored. It remains a symbol for the reform movement for prison reformers and abolitionists. Years later, Attica Correctional Facility houses nearly 2,000 inmates. But unfortunately systematic racism continues to exist, noted by racial disparities in arrests, sentencing, and punishments. The fight and support for prisoners’ rights and criminal justice continues (Attica 1972). Paul J. Edwards and Miriam K. Young See also: Davis, Angela Yvonne; Jackson, George L.; Malcolm X; Newton, Huey P. Further Reading Associated Press. 2005. “State and Prison Workers Settle Attica Riot Claims.” New York Times, January 14, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/14/nyregion/state-and-prison -workers-settle-attica-riot-claims.html. Attica: The Official Report of the New York State Special Commission on Attica. 1972. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Farrell, William E. 1971. “Rockefeller Lays Hostages’ Deaths to Troopers’ Fire.” New York Times, September 17, http://www.nytimes.com/1971/09/17/archives/rockefeller-lays -hostages-deaths-to-troopers-fire-but-fischer-at-at.html?_r=1. Ferretti, Fred. 1971. “Autopsies Show Shots Killed 9 Attica Hostages, Not Knives; State Official Admits Mistake.” New York Times, September 15, http://www.nytimes .com/1971/09/15/archives/autopsies-show-shots-killed-9-attica-hostages-not-knives -state.html. Fried, Joseph P. 2005. “To Victim of Attica, Settlement in an Apology.” New York Times, May 22, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/nyregion/to-victim-of-attica-settlement-is -apology.html. Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer. 1991. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Bantam. Langum, David J. 1999. William M. Kunstler: The Most Hated Lawyer in America. New York: NYU Press. Oswald, Russell G. 1972. Attica: My Story. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Thompson, Heather Ann. 2016. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. New York: Pantheon. Wicker, Tom. 1994. A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

B Baker, General Gordon, Jr. (1941–2014) General Gordon Baker Jr. was a revolutionary activist, organic intellectual, labor leader, and one of the most effective organizers of his generation. He was a militant student activist who became the leading organizer of two significant labor organizations of the Black Power Movement, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). In addition, Baker was the first activist in U.S. history to take a public stand to destroy the draft during the Vietnam War. The life of General Baker (September 6, 1941–May 14, 2014) was shaped at birth by resistance to oppression. In 1925, the obstetrician Dr. Ossian Sweet challenged segregated housing and fascist elements on the east side of Detroit. His vindicated use of armed self-defense of his home and family resulted in the death of a white mobster. Sweet, whose hands fired arms against racist aggression, delivered Baker into life. African liberation revolutionary leaders such as Robert Franklin Williams, Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba, Dr. Frantz Fanon, and Medgar Evers were born in 1925. These luminaries, in addition to Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Muhammad Babu, among others, shaped the revolutionary political consciousness of Baker and other developing leaders who entered adulthood during the 1960s. During the massive northern exodus of African Americans seeking to escape southern racist terrorism that permeated every aspect of their lives, the Baker family, led by Baker Jr.’s father, General Baker Sr., left Sharon, Georgia (located southeast of Atlanta), which offered $5 a week in the early 1940s, to work in Detroit’s $5-a-day automobile factories. Like so many southern-born Blacks, Baker Jr.’s parents sought to build a strong family and religious life and desired to educate their children in a nurturing environment. Baker’s maternal grandfather was a Christian Methodist Episcopal pastor. The family aligned with his religious affiliation in Detroit. Baker was the eldest child and only son. He was raised with three sisters and one cousin who lived with them as their brother. Work and church were the twin pillars of their family life. Justice, hard work, education, and respect for all were the family values emphasized. These values were fused into Baker’s character and guided his life directions. In the 1930s, the Detroit Times described the African American community as a “black colony.” Its inhabitants were relegated to the area known as Black Bottom,

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located adjacent to Paradise Valley—the nationally renowned entertainment district. This is where Baker and his family relocated. Black Bottom, located southeast of Gratiot Avenue, was a close-knit community with its own cultural, educational, and economic ecosystem. The construction of the U.S. freeway I-75 in a curvature route was designed to break up the cohesive Black community and provide a faster route for suburban whites to the inner core of the city. This freeway cut through the heart of Detroit. High-rise apartments touted as “urban renewal” displaced cohesive neighborhoods. Baker’s father worked at the Midland-Ross Steel Plant and later Chrysler Corporation, which allowed his family the economic basis to move to a largely African American working-class community in southwest Detroit. During Baker’s early teenage years his self-determinative sense of direction would conflict with racist-imposed worldviews of the educational system designed to create a Black workforce to serve capitalist industrial interests. As in Malcolm’s case, teachers offered low expectations for course work and menial occupational goals. Wood shop and simple math were commonly encouraged as course work. Initially, these limiting expectations were internalized. During this same period, Jet magazine published the shocking and horrifying pictures of the mutilation and lynching of Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941–August 28, 1955) in Mississippi. This racist lynching of their contemporary resonated for Baker and his generation, just as the racist murders of 17-year-old Trayvon Benjamin Martin (Sanford, Florida), 12-year-old Tamir Rice (Cleveland, Ohio), 23-year-old Oscar Grant III (Oakland, California), 18-year-old Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri), 19-yearold Renisha McBride (Dearborn Heights, Michigan), and 25-year-old Freddie Carlos Gray Jr. (Baltimore, Maryland) awakened the consciousness of youths of the Black Lives Matter generation, causing them to critically assess the failing of this society and take corrective action. Baker developed an unquenchable thirst for knowledge during his early teenage years that persisted throughout his life. He recounted “the catechism,” as he called his parental instruction, during their family car trips to Georgia. It was expressed that submissive behavior would safeguard them from the horrifying fate of Emmett Till. This case had a profound impact on the development of Baker’s consciousness and along with the Montgomery Bus Boycott helped usher in the civil and human rights movements. Baker’s curiosity for learning was forged through his literary explorations and praxis. The conditions of Black life brought into sharp focus his need to understand the root causes of injustice, race, and class exploitation and oppression. He became and remained a voracious reader and an activist primarily through Black nationalist organizations and later amalgamated a race/ class analysis. Baker regularly attended meetings with the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey; the youth wing of the National Association



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for the Advancement of Colored People; Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and the Nation of Islam, founded by Elijah Muhammad and rapidly developed by Malcolm X, who would remain a catalyst and guiding light for revolutionary activism. Baker played football and basketball at Southwestern High School, where he witnessed wide disparities in the quality of equipment, facilities, and uniforms between Black and white schools. He graduated in 1958, a year of cyclical depression and high unemployment. The Dwight D. Eisenhower administration and the Korean War were in full swing while he was in school. Baker and his father sought employment on the docks but were consistently overlooked while they witnessed the hiring of whites. This period of unemployment and unjust hiring practices had a significant impact on Baker’s political development. By 1960 Baker enrolled in Highland Park Community College, where he played basketball and studied drafting with aspirations of becoming an architect. He also began his political activism during the Civil Rights Movement through active participation in the sit-ins at the Woolworth stores in downtown Detroit. In 1963, Baker was a leading member of the Afro-American Student Movement and helped launch two publications for political propaganda and (later) agitation: The Razor for students at Highland Park Community College and Wayne State University and the Black Vanguard designed for workers at Detroit auto plants. This multiple tactical approach of engaging different segments of the community would be expanded in his later political formations. Intellectual explorations led Baker to the home of theoretical revolutionaries Jimmy (James) and Grace Boggs on 3061 Field Street, known as Field Street University. This was a meeting ground for Black militants in Detroit and throughout the country, including Malcolm X. It was here that Baker was exposed to the international context of the anticapitalist liberation struggle that characterized the late 1950s and the 1960s. The Boggses exposed Baker to Présence Africaine and Frantz Fanon’s Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth). The Bandung Conference (popularized by Malcolm X), the lives and work of Robert Franklin and Mabel Williams, and national liberation movements in Cuba, Africa and Asia deeply influenced Baker. Luke Tripp, John Watson, John Williams, Gwen Kemp, Charles Simmons, Baker, and others formed UHURU, a Black nationalist youth organization (the Swahili term uhuru means “freedom”). UHURU emerged as the most significant activist organization during the Black Power era in Detroit, the nation’s largest predominantly Black city, by directly confronting police violence in 1963 with the Cynthia Scott case, involving a Black sex worker shot five times in the back by a white policeman. UHURU challenged racist housing practices by disrupting the campaign designed to bring the 1968 Olympic Games to Detroit. In 1964 UHURU was invited with other U.S. student groups to visit U.S.banned Cuba, led by revered revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The recently established revolutionary Cuban government had provided

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political asylum to the revolutionary Black nationalist leader Robert Franklin Williams along with his wife Mabel and two sons, Robert Jr. and John. Maxwell Stanford Jr. (Muhammad Ahmad) was visiting Williams in Cuba when the UHURU delegation arrived in Havana. The Cuban visit was Baker’s second major catechism that deepened and expanded his revolutionary commitment. Under the direction of Williams, Baker and his cohorts informed foreign consulates and global revolutionaries of the unjust plight of African Americans. Their goal was to counteract the U.S. propaganda circulated by the Voice of America and U.S. print media that democracy and constitutional freedom existed for Blacks in America. Witnessing the site where a military plane with clear U.S. markings was shot down and subsequently reading a New York Times article that refuted these facts forced Baker to restructure his thinking. Thereafter, he no longer relied on the U.S. media or literature to determine his analysis. During this transformative visit he played baseball with Castro and, more significant, had two extended meetings with Guevara and met with Muhammad Babu, Juan Almeida, and other Africandescendant Cuban revolutionary leaders, all of whom Baker held in high regard. On September 4 and 5, 1965, a Black Power Conference was hosted by James and Grace Boggs and the Organization for Black Power (OBP) at the Boggs home and later at the Freedom Now Party headquarters. Participants included Maxwell C. Stanford Jr. (RAM, New York City), Don Freeman (RAM, Cleveland), General Baker (RAM, Detroit), Jesse Gray (OBP, New York City), Julius Hobson (OBP, Washington, D.C.), James Boggs (OBP, Detroit), Nahaz Rogers (OBP, Chicago), William Davis (OBP, Philadelphia), and Ernest Thomas and Thomas and George Merritt (Deacons for Defense and Justice, Jonesboro, Louisiana). They discussed the war in Vietnam, Black self-defense, and the president’s conference with Civil Rights leaders. The impact of the Cuban visit and the 1965 Black Power Conference is revealed in Baker’s 1965 historic and powerful letter to the U.S. Army Draft Board where he rejected the draft notice he received on internationalist revolutionary, anticolonial, and anti-imperialist principles. Penned at age 24, his letter is one of the most powerful polemics of the Black Power era. The following excerpt demonstrates Baker’s powerful communication skills: You stand before me with the dried blood of Patrice Lumumba on your hands, the blood of defenseless Panamanian students, shot down by U.S. marines, the blood of my Black brothers in Angola and South Africa who are being tortured by the Portuguese and South African whites (whom you resolutely support) respectively; the dead people of Japan, Korea, and now Vietnam, in Asia; the blood of Medgar Evers, six Birmingham babies, the blood of one million Algerians slaughtered by the French (whom you supported); the fresh blood of ten thousand Congolese patriots dead from your

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ruthless rape and plunder of the Congo—the defenseless women and children burned in villages from Napalm jelly bombs. . . . With all of this blood of my non-white brothers dripping from your fangs, you have the damned AUDACITY to ask me if I am “qualified.” White man listen to me for I am talking to you! His powerful letter to the Draft Board along with his organized agitation and leaflet campaign throughout Detroit just days after the Watts Rebellion for 50,000 supporters to come to the Fort Wayne Induction Center, known as the September 10th Movement, exemplified through Baker the new and fearless voice of Black militancy. Baker was the first American to successfully resist the draft for political reasons through organizing the September 10th Movement in 1965 to destroy the draft. His letter to the Draft Board embodied the new and fearless voice of Black militancy. Baker was not arrested but was rejected as a security risk. Baker attended all of Malcolm’s speaking engagements in Detroit and Lansing, Michigan, during the 1960s and served as an armed security guard with the Fruit of Islam during those speeches. During Malcolm’s landmark speech in Detroit “Message to the Grass Roots” when he emphasized the difference between a Black revolution and a Negro revolution—the potentiality for bloodshed—and that Black Americans were afraid to bleed in domestic warfare for their liberation and land, Baker and his cohorts can be heard on this historic recording shouting “We will bleed, Malcolm! We will bleed!” In 1966, Baker and Glanton Dowdell (b. 1923), a renowned artist who was considered the “George Jackson” of the Michigan prison system, were driving to Kercheval Street on the east side of Detroit to aid in ushering in a rebellion against police violence. Informants alerted the police to Baker and Glanton, and they were arrested. According the Senate hearing records, Confiscated from their vehicle were: One .30 caliber carbine One .45 caliber Colt automatic pistol (containing one live round in the chamber and six live rounds in the clip) One hunting knife (4½-inch blade, in case) One green zipper bag containing 215 spent carbine cartridges and 10 live carbine cartridges Five loaded cartridge cases Eighteen cartridge clips Nine cherry bombs One plaid plastic bag containing miscellaneous gun cleaning equipment One .30 caliber carbine loaded with a clip containing 15 live rounds of ammunition

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Baker and Dowdell were charged with carrying a dangerous weapon in a motor vehicle. On March 6, 1967, both were found guilty and sentenced to five years’ probation and $500 in court costs. Milton Henry (Gaidi Obadele), who was the friend and attorney for Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams and an ally of Baker and Glanton, was also Baker and Dowdell’s attorney. During the 1967 Detroit Riot, Baker lived a few blocks from the sparked location, 12th and Clairmont. He and Glanton were targeted and arrested for breaking curfew and were transported to Ionia Correctional Facility in Michigan. Under the direction of Edward Vaughn—the first Black bookstore owner in Detroit and a member of Albert Cleage’s (Jaramogi Achebe) church—Baker held the scaffolding as Glanton painted the 18-foot-high Black Madonna Mural in Cleage’s historic church that would be known as the Shrine of the Black Madonna. Baker witnessed that only automobile workers and medical staff were allowed to work after curfew hours. Therefore, he began organizing around the assembly line, “the point of production.” On April 4, 1968, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Army intelligence, the Memphis Police Department, and the Mafia were coconspirators in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. One month later, DRUM was founded and became one of the most important expressions of Black Power in U.S. history. Blacks were concentrated on the assembly lines and in the foundries. These were the lowest-paying and most dangerous jobs. Understanding the historic shift from a racist exploitative southern agrarian postslavery capitalist system to a racist exploitative northern industrial assembly-based capitalist system, Baker became a powerfully effective organizer and the founding member and “soul” of DRUM. Nine months after the founding of DRUM Baker organized and led one of the most important wildcat strikes in U.S. history, which catapulted him as a target of U.S. Army intelligence. In effect, he organized workers to shut down the Hamtramck Assembly Plant, known as Dodge Main, the largest automobile company in the United States, with 10,000 workers, after management sped up the assembly line to increase profits over human safety and lives. The work stoppage disrupted the production cycles of five associated operations. The reaction of state and corporation repression was targeted at Baker and his comrades. Baker understood the auto plants. He labored in Detroit auto plants for over 30 years and in the foundry for over 20 years, where melting steel constantly generated 120 degree heat. The burns on his hands and body were visible proof of the physical suffering he endured, not to mention the constant banging of steel that resulted in hearing loss and numerous health conditions to which he would later succumb. An avid proponent of armed self-defense, Baker led the Revolutionary Action Movement in Detroit. RAM was a political and paramilitary formation founded by Don Freeman and Maxwell Curtis Sanford Jr. (Muhammad Ahmad) and included John H. Bracey and Glanton Dowdell. Baker also led the Black Guard in Detroit that was conceptualized and activated by Robert F. Williams in Monroe, North Carolina. Baker, with others, listened religiously to Williams’s Radio Free



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Dixie, a banned broadcast from Cuba, on shortwave radios and traveled to Toronto, Canada, to pick up Williams’s U.S.-banned Crusader newsletter to distribute throughout Detroit. Williams’s three-part Crusader article titled “USA: The Potentiality for a Minority Revolution in America” deeply inspired Baker. Strategically, Baker orchestrated the founding Detroit chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) under the leadership of Luke Tripp and Marian Kramer. They oriented the BPP in Detroit toward their effort to support the LRBW. Baker also supported the work of Chokwe Lumumba and aligned strategically around common enemies with members of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa. General Gordon Baker Jr.’s lifelong commitment to the revolutionary struggle of the working class, the unemployed, and the unorganized poor, particularly those of African descent, is evident in his leadership in Black Men in Union and his chairmanship of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America. Like all great revolutionaries, Baker consistently exhibited a warm humility, a deep compassion for the least among us and an unbound love for his wife and fellow revolutionary human rights activist Marian Kramer and his family. Baker’s lifelong quest for knowledge, his sharp critical analysis, and fearless fight for social, political, economic, and environmental justice have solidified his legacy and continued relevance for future generations. Charles Ezra Ferrell See also: Black Marxism (Book); Boggs, James and Grace Lee; League of Rev­ olutionary Black Workers; Lumumba, Chokwe; Revolutionary Action Movement; Revolutionary Nationalism; Stanford, Max (Muhammad Ahmad); UHURU; Wil­ liams, Robert F. Further Reading Ahmad, Muhammad. 2007. We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960–1975. Chicago: Charles Kerr Publishing. Bracey, John A., Jr., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds. 1971. Black Workers and Organized Labor, California. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement) Newsletter. n.d. Detroit, Michigan, Vol. 1, Nos. 2, 9, 13. Ferrell, Charles Ezra. 2014. “A Tribute to General Baker by Charles Ferrell.” The Black Scholar, October 11, www.theblackscholar.org/a-tribute-to-william-bill-watkins-by-w-f -santiago-valles/. Georgakas, Dan, and Marvin Surkin. 1975. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. New York: St. Martin’s. Gershwender, James. 1977. Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Boston: Cambridge University Press. Goldberg, David. n.d. “Detroit’s Radical.” Jacobin, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014 /05/detroit-s-radical-general-baker/.

50 | Baker, General Gordon, Jr. (1941–2014) Killens, John Oliver. 1970. “Black Labor and the Black Liberation Movement.” Black Scholar 2 (October): 33–39. Perkins, Eric. 1971. “The League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Coming of Revolution.” Radical America 5(2) (March–April): 53. Tripp, Luke. 1969. “DRUM: Vanguard of the Black Revolution.” South End 27(62) (January 23). U.S. Government. 1967–1970. Riots, Civil, and Criminal Disorders: Hearing before the Permanent Subcommittee on Government Operations, United States Senate, Ninetieth Congress, Second Session, March 21 and 22, 1968, Part 6. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Primary Document General Gordon Baker Jr., Open Letter to the Chrysler Corporation, May 5, 1968 General Gordon Baker Jr. was a prominent activist and labor organizer during the 1960s who cofounded the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Baker spent over three decades working as a laborer in Detroit auto plants. He had a keen perspective on the inner workings of the plants and was known for voicing his opinions and standing up for the rights of Black laborers. In the open letter below, Baker challenged the Chrysler Corporation after it initiated disciplinary action against him for organizing a worker’s strike. Dear Sirs: In response to my discharge on May 5, 1968 for violation of the 5th section of the agreement between Chrysler Corporation and the UAW, dated Nov. 10, 1967, which reads “No Strike or Lockout” Strike prohibited (etc.) In discharging me you have falsely placed the banner of leadership upon my shoulders. And in so doing you have denied two main things. Number one, you have denied me the right to receive any justice from this corporation. And number two, you have nullified the possibility of the real issues which caused the walkout of ever being aired. Even though you have falsely placed the ban­ ner of leadership of a wildcat strike upon my shoulders I shall wear it proudly. For what more nobler banner could a black working man bear. In this day and age under the brutal oppression reaped from the backs of black workers, the

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leadership of a wildcat strike is a badge of honor and courage. In discharging me you have attempted to belittle the racial overtones in this affair which will prove to be an impossible task on your behalf. Any confrontation between black and white men in this racist decadent society is a racial and therefore a political question. Let it be further understood in the wildcat strike that the harshest discipline was issued against black workers attributing further to your blatant racism. Also, Hamtramck Assembly Plant (old Dodge Main) has a long history of trampling upon the rights of black people. It was as late as 1952 while black men were shedding their blood in the dirty unjust war of aggres­ sion against the Korean people that black men were allowed to work on the assembly lines, in the trim shop, and final assembly. And even then, many white workers stormed off of the line refusing to work next to black men. Some of the same outright white racist policy makers of this corporation are still in control of this racist corporation today. Black people are expected by the Chrysler Corporation to purchase Chrysler finished products, but are brutally oppressed and overworked and harassed on the production lines. Yes, the struggle between black workers and white racist Corporation owners and operators is the most vicious of all existing struggles in the world today. It is sometimes opened and sometimes closed, it is sometimes hot and sometimes cold. It is, nevertheless, in the final sense a vicious struggle. Let it be further understood that by taking the course of disciplining the strikers you have opened that struggle to a new and higher level and for this I sincerely THANK YOU. You have made the decision to do battle with me and therefore to do battle with the entire black community in this city, this state, this country, and in this world of which I am a part. Black people of the world are united in a common struggle which had its beginning with the exploitation of non-white people on a world wide scale. To quote from W. E. B. DuBois, “The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, and black.” You have made the decision to do battle, and that is the only decision that you will make. WE shall decide the arena and the time. You will also be held completely responsible for all of the grave consequences arising from your racist actions. Thank you again General G. Baker, Jr. 0290-170 p.s. You have lit the unquenchable spark. Source: Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 21–22. Reprinted with permission.

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Bambara, Toni Cade (1939–1995) Toni Cade Bambara was a writer, novelist, filmmaker, cultural worker, and critic who made an important intervention in the Black Power Movement with the publication of her edited book The Black Woman in 1970. As a political/cultural worker, she was a member, director, and/or adviser for several programs, organizations, and institutions such as the Theater of the Black Experience; The Paper, Obsidian, and Onyx magazines; the Harambee Dancers; the Malcolm Players; Sisters in Consciousness; the Southern Collective of African American Writers; the Neighborhood Cultural Arts Center; the Conference Committee on Black South Literature and Art; and the Institute of the Black World. Bambara assisted in establishing Black studies programs on various campuses and was an integral part of the Black Arts Movement. Bambara was born to Helen and Walter Cade II in New York City in 1939. They named her Miltona Mirkin Cade. She attended both public and private schools in New York and New Jersey. She received a bachelor’s degree from Queens College in 1959, majoring in theater arts and English, and a master of arts degree in modern American literature from City College in New York in 1965. Bambara was named after her father’s employer; however, she later settled on a shortened version, “Toni,” once she entered college. In 1970 while searching for a name for her unborn child, Karma Bene, she chose Bambara as a surname. Reflecting on this decision, she said that “The minute I said it I immediately inhabited it, felt very at home in the world. This was my name.” Her decision to change her name was a reflection of the times, when many artists and activists during the movement opted to choose their own names. Bambara credits her writing to her mother’s encouragement. Helen Cade came of age during the Harlem Renaissance—a cultural/artistic precursor to the Black Power Movement—during the 1920s. She encouraged the “life of the mind.” Bambara saw her writing as political, and that work was complemented by numerous positions professionally and as a volunteer in the Black community. During the Black Power Movement she taught courses at City College of New York, Rutgers University, Livingston, and Spelman College. In 1970 Bambara published The Black Woman, which provided important historical, cultural, and political interventions that in part reflected the ethos of the Black Power Movement and her Black feminists politics, including the book’s price, design, style, and contents. Bambara was adamant that the book not cost more than $1 and that it be able to fit in a pants pocket. Deeply committed to creating and promoting Black beauty, she insisted that a brown-skinned Black woman with a large Afro appear on the book’s cover. Through a diverse set of voices, The Black Woman illuminated the thoughts and analyses of Black women on a range of subjects. Contributors included Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall,



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Alice Walker, Abbey Lincoln, Frances Beale, and Shirley Williams. In the preface Bambara described the context in which the anthology was born: “For the most part, the work grew out of impatience: an impatience with the all too few and toosoon-defunct Afro-American women’s magazines that were rarely seen outside of the immediate circle of the staff’s and contributors’ friends. It grew out of impatience with the half-hearted go-along attempts of Black women caught up in the white women’s liberation groups around the country. Especially out of impatience with all the ‘experts’ zealously hustling us folks for their doctoral theses or government appointments.” More important, Bambara helped to establish a Black feminist literary genre and contributed to Black women’s studies. The contributions, which ranged from poems, stories, and essays, “reflect[ed] the preoccupations of the contemporary Black woman in this country.” The collection included professional writers as well as nonprofessionals. The contributors were a diverse set of women: “Some are mothers. Others are students. Some are both. All are alive, are Black, are women. And that, I should think, is credentials enough to address themselves to issues that seem to be relevant to the sisterhood.” Bambara was a Black nationalist feminist. She was very much concerned with the experiences and the plight of Black women as well as the overall Black community. The Black Woman, while covering a range of issues and topics of importance to the Black community, intentionally gave unfettered space to the voices and views of Black women on those subjects. Bambara includes three of her own essays in the book: “On the Issue of Roles,” “The Pill: Genocide or Liberation,” and “Thinking about the Play The Great White Hope.” Each essay reflects a particular set of issues that impacted the lives of Black women during the Black Power Movement. Bambara’s essay on the issue of gender roles explicitly rejected the thesis of Daniel Patrick Moynihan that was prevalent at the time and adopted by numerous individuals in the Black Power Movement. Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, published in 1965, placed the blame of poverty and pathology in the Black community on a family structure that was, in the words of the report, matriarchal in a society that was patriarchal. The report did little to find fault in that patriarchal society, which also happened to be white supremacist at its core. Bambara’s essay reiterates the matriarchal, equalitarian, and cooperative nature of precapitalist and pre-Christian societies, particularly in Africa. Bambara wrote that “I have always, I think, opposed the stereotypic definitions of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine,’ not only because I thought it was a lot of merchandising nonsense, but rather because I always found the either/or implicit in those definitions antithetical to what I was all about—and what revolution for self is all about—the whole person.” She argued that the binary of gender was a hindrance to political development, liberation, and Black nationhood, writing that “The job then regarding ‘roles’ is to submerge all breezy definitions of manhood/womanhood (or reject them out of hand if you’re not squeamish about being called

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‘neuter’) until realistic definitions emerge through a commitment to Blackhood.” Black feminists—Bambara among them—offered a similar critique of patriarchy and gender during the Black Power Movement. In her essay “The Pill: Genocide or Liberation,” Bambara tackled the issue of birth control. The birth control pill became commercially available in the mid-1960s. Many critics called this form of birth control, promoted as an effective aid to family planning, genocide against the Black community; the most vocal concerns came from Black men. Bambara feminist’s essay offered a critique of white supremacist capitalism, in part agreeing with the criticism. Nonetheless, she did not see the pill as a form of genocide. Instead, she urged better health and living options for Black women, which would undeniably prepare them for child rearing. Bambara’s position on birth control reflected the intersectional analysis offered by Black feminists during the Black Power Movement, which took into account race, class, and sex oppression experienced by Black women. Her concern for Black women’s health and reproductive options was aligned with other Black feminist organizations such as the Combahee River Collective and the National Black Feminist Organization. As a cultural critic, Bambara analyzed the The Great White Hope, which starred James Earl Jones loosely portraying turn-of-the-century heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. More than a simple fan or theatergoer, Bambara approached the play through the lens of an artist-as-organizer. Like many artists of the Black Arts Movement, Bambara was not content to merely produce art for art’s sake. She believed that art should reflect Black life and further Black liberation. Bambara’s literary works helped to shape the ideologies of the Black Power Movement. Her work as editor of the Black Women ensured that Black women’s voices were heard during the movement. Moreover, her work helped to advance a Black feminists agenda. She promoted and encouraged other writers by founding the Pamoja Writer’s Collective and hosting potluck dinners at her home in Atlanta. Bambara’s dedication to the Black community continued to influence her writing during this period as she balanced themes of social change and community healing in her second collection of short stories, The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977), and in her first novel, The Salt Eaters (1980), which received the American Book Award in 1981. Thandisizwe Chimurenga See also: Black Arts Movement; Black Studies; Combahee River Collective; Giovanni, Nikki; Institute of the Black World; National Black Feminist Organization; Smith, Barbara Further Reading Bambara, Toni Cade. 1973. Gorilla, My Love. New York: Pocket. Bambara, Toni Cade. 1980. The Salt Eaters. New York: Vintage. Bambara, Toni Cade. 1982. The Sea Birds Are Still Alive: Stories. New York: Vintage.



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Cade, Toni. 1971. Tales and Stories for Black Folks. New York: Zenith Books. Cade, Toni, and Toni Cade Bambara, eds. 1970. The Black Woman: An Anthology, Vol. 1433. New York: Signet. Deck, Alice A. 1999. “Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays and Conversations.” African American Review 33(1): 170–173. Hine, Darlene Clark, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. 1993. Black Women in America. New York: Carlson Publishing. Holmes, Linda J., and Cheryl A. Wall. 2007. Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones) (1934–2014) Amiri Baraka stood at the crossroads of the Black Power Movement, the Black Studies Movement, and the Black Arts Movement; he was an architect in designing several bridges linking those three powerful movements. At each point in his adult life, Baraka employed a series of cultural and political leaders as paradigms: Langston Hughes, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Robert F. Williams, Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Maulana Karenga, Ho Chi Minh, Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, Nelson Mandela, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Baraka was born in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934, to Anna Lois and Colt Leverette Jones. His parents named him Everett LeRoi Jones. As an undergraduate at Howard University he studied philosophy and religion. He also attended the New School for Social Research and Columbia University prior to joining the U.S. Air Force. It was his time in the military and his stationing in Puerto Rico that inspired him as a poet. Baraka was one of the most important writers of the 20th century. He produced numerous plays and volumes of nonfiction and fiction, music history, music criticism, and poetry. In 1963 when he still had the name LeRoi Jones, he published Blues People: Negro Music in White America. The following year, his critically acclaimed play Dutchman premiered in 1964, for which he won an Obie Award for Best American play. As a young poet, playwright, director, producer, editor, and jazz critic, Baraka galvanized the Second Black Renaissance with the Black Arts Movement, dedicated to continuing the Black cultural revolution inspired by Malcolm X. Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka at this time. After he initiated the Harlem Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) in March 1965, his poetic protégés anointed him the “father of the Black Arts Movement,” and Baraka mentored countless young poets, actors, and artists such as Haki Madhubuti, Gil Scott-Heron, Danny Glover, Felipe Luciano, and numerous hiphop artists.

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Amiri Baraka was a central figure in the Black Arts Movement, producing a prolific body of literature including poetry, plays, and works of fiction and nonfiction. In addition, he also helped to usher in the Black Studies Movement and was an instrumental voice in the Black Power Movement. (AP Photo/Julian C. Wilson)

The short-lived creative experiments in the Harlem BARTS inspired a national Black Arts Movement. The New York theater collapsed after a violent political coup, leaving Larry Neal wounded, many artists terrorized, and Baraka in retreat in Newark. Then Sonia Sanchez and Baraka joined with Jimmy Garrett and the Black Student Union at San Francisco State to build Black Arts West and Black studies in San Francisco; however, that experiment ended when Eldridge Cleaver evicted Ed Bullins and Marvin X from the Black House. During the July 1967 Newark Riot, Baraka was savagely beaten by the police, and many leaders came to his defense when he was charged with starting the Black uprising with his poetry. Soon after the uprising, the National Black Power Conference opened to more than 1,000 leaders in Newark to define the meaning of the Black Power slogan. Successive waves of leaders offered Baraka support in the Newark Black Power experiment, including Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Phil Hutchins, Julian Bond, Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Fannie Lou Hamer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. King proposed a united front between Civil Rights and Black Power activists. Baraka developed Black Power organizations inspired by Malcolm X, including the United Brothers, the Congress of African People, and the Committee for a



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United Newark (CFUN). An important alliance developed between Baraka and Maulana Karenga of the Us organization in Los Angeles. After his failure in organizing in Harlem, Baraka was inspired by the successful political experiments on the West Coast, with Maulana Karenga at the helm of the Los Angeles organization Us, and in Oakland with Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, founders of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Remarkably, Baraka transformed himself into a successful political leader in Newark’s Black Power experiment, and Maulana Karenga anointed him Imamu Amiri Baraka. By 1974 Baraka was building a Black nation headquartered in Newark, and by 1969 he had developed a Puerto Rican and Black political alliance, including a treaty with the Young Lords and Felipe Luciano that paved the way for the Black and Puerto Rican Political Convention and Baraka’s Bandung West strategy, an antiracist program parallel to Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition. By 1970 Baraka’s CFUN led a successful mass movement to seize municipal power, electing Kenneth Gibson, the first Black mayor in a major northeastern city. By Labor Day weekend of 1970 Baraka led a federation of Black Power groups to establish the Congress of African People at an international summit in Atlanta, Georgia. Baraka’s CFUN showcased numerous programs and institutions directed by several departments: politics, economics, culture, communications, social development, education, child care, and nurseries. Baraka’s wife Amina Baraka fashioned the successful African Free School programs that garnered important community support. Baraka’s CFUN served as the national and regional headquarters for the Congress of African People, the Black Women’s United Front, the African Liberation Support Committee, and the National Black Political Assembly. During that period, Baraka was successful at turning the turf wars between cultural nationalism and revolutionary nationalism into political conversations and mutual respect at the 1972 Gary Convention and African Liberation Day. Unfortunately, by 1976 he was not as successful in preventing dramatic conflicts between Marxism and Black nationalism, and those stubborn conflicts shattered most of the 1970s federations. In 1977 Amiri Baraka left the center of the Black political arena and returned to his career of writing, music, poetry, and teaching; he directed Black studies at Stony Brook University in Long Island. His Blue Ark music and poetry ensemble traveled the world, spreading the Black cultural revolution. When Baraka retired from Stony Brook, he devoted himself full-time to poetry and art, mentoring countless artists, writers, and activists in both the Black Power generation and the hip-hop generation including his son, Ras Baraka. Amiri Baraka died after surgery on the eve of his son’s election as mayor of Newark. Komozi Woodard See also: Black Arts Movement; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Congress of African People; Karenga, Maulana; Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee); Scott-Heron, Gil; Us Organization

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Further Reading Baraka, Amiri. 1964. Dutchman. Edited by Michael Morris and Svend Aage Larsen. New York: Faber and Faber. Baraka, Amiri. 2012. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Baraka, Imamu Amiri, ed. 1969. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, Vol. 220. New York: William Morrow. Baraka, Imamu Amiri, and Charlie Reilly. 1994. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Farmer, Ashley. 2014. “Renegotiating the ‘African Woman’: Women’s Cultural Nationalist Theorizing in the Us Organization and the Congress of African People, 1965–1975.” Black Diaspora Review 4(1): 76–112. Smethurst, James. 2006. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Woodard, Komozi. 1999. A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Woodard, Komozi. 2003. “It’s Nation Time in NewArk: Amiri Baraka and the Black Power Experiment in Newark, New Jersey.” In Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980, 287–311. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Primary Document Kalamu ya Salaam, A Conversation with Amiri Baraka, 1998 Amiri Baraka was one of the most widely published Black writers and dramatists of the 1960s. On February 17, 1998, Baraka had a poignant conversation with Kalamu ya Salaam, the founder of the Nommo Literary Society in New Orleans. Baraka was filled with insights for budding new authors and heartfelt observations about the life of a writer. ya Salaam: Amiri, was it a conscious decision to write both what academe would call “agit-prop” pieces which have a mass orientation, and also these, for lack of better term, these way out experimental pieces? Baraka: No, I think the culture is that broad. I don’t feel any less Black trying to find out something I don’t know than trying to say something I do know. At one point, you are always trying to find out more which always leaves what you’re saying seemingly more discursive because you are not quite clear on what you’re saying. But you know a lot of things clarify themselves as you get older. When I wrote that play Dutchman, I didn’t know what I had written. I stayed up all night and wrote it, went to sleep at the desk and then woke up,



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and looked at it and said “what the [f---] is this?” And then put it down and went to bed. (Laughter.) Some things you know absolutely what you’re saying, you’re absolutely clear. Bang, it’s an idea you want to express. Sometimes though you can’t limit your mind by what you know. You have to always figure that you can hold on and you just open your mind to where it wants to go to, which you don’t know at the time, but if it’s legitimate, you’ll find out what you’re saying. See, there are levels. Can you understand the levels of what knowledge is? The first level of knowledge is perception. Perception is nothing but a sponge. Everything you are around, you pick it up. You might not even know it, but your mind is just picking up stuff like a blotter. The second level is rationalization, you actually name it. Oh, that was this. But the highest form of knowledge is use. For example, I can say I know about the piano. I know all kind of stuff about the piano, about music, but then they say: can you play? I say, oh, no I can’t play. You can conceive all kinds of things and give them names, but of that myriad of perceptions and rationales, how much of it can you use? A lot of stuff you do that is reaching out is really you trying to clarify stuff for yourself. I always got the feeling that, well, I guess maybe some of it comes from Dumas. You know Henry Dumas’ work? Dumas was a great writer of the Black Arts Movement, murdered by the police. Ark of Bones, those stories, great sto­ ries. I think Toni Morrison cops from him a lot. She really is influenced a lot by Henry Dumas, more than a lot of people know. The whole fascination with the bizarre, with the hidden. Mosely’s first book is like that, Gone Fishin’. Y’all read that book? You should read that. That’s a much heavier book than those detective stories. But that kind book where you walk in the Black community and sud­ denly it’s like you’re opening the door to a whole other world. You step into there and all kinds of wild things happen. Like that Dumas story Fon where these White people stop this brother at night on a road like they going to lynch him or something like that. He leads them to this abandoned city where there’s Black people’s ghosts still living their lives. That never occurred to me that you follow blood down the road and that might lead you to a ghost town and then suddenly an arrow comes out of the night. And when they start messing with him, he says, my brothers are watching you. You better watch out and they don’t believe him, and suddenly this arrow comes—twing through the air and gets them through the neck. Well, that opened up a lot in me because I started thinking about well, yeah, I know some Black people look like they be doing stuff like that. Also, Larry Neal had a story about religion, a weird church. These Black people had a church and they had Jesus up in there beating him. It was like a White Jesus and they had in this storefront church. That’s what they would do every Sunday, they would go to church and whip this White boy up in the

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church, and then they would, I guess, lock him up till the next Sunday. I don’t know what that was. It was the sense of the strange, the bizarre. So, I’ve been writing these stories about these Black inventors. They are just brothers you see in the community, they’re not in the University of Nowhere. They are just in the community and might call you up and say, why don’t you come over and check my stuff out, I got something new. And you go over there and they might have a machine that might do any number of things. I think that idea of the depth and sometimes bizarre quality, sometimes pro­ found quality of Black life, sometimes we miss that when we have to deal with the beast everyday. I’m talking biblically, Revelations. When you have to deal with the beast everyday you forget that there’s John sitting there, John the Revelator. You know everybody didn’t see no stuff flying through the air. You know four horsemen of the apocalypse, everybody didn’t see that. Now John was sitting there looking at all of that, but everybody looking up at the sky didn’t see that. That sense of wonder, of revelations, has always intrigued me about Black people. I guess in our everyday struggles with 666 we sometimes forget that there are some very wonderful, miraculous things that Black people do. I saw this Negro play some spoons with an amplifier on it. Who would think about that? Who would look at a spoon and say, I know what, I’m going to amplify this sucker. That doesn’t seem like an everyday concern. I think it’s that sense of the bizarre, the sense of the wonderful, and also the sense of the comic. In my studies of world Black culture, there still the smile at the bottom of the world. You know the masks of drama, one smiles, one frowns? That geography, that’s aesthetics, that smile at the bottom of the world. That sense of the wonderful, the bizarre, and the comic, I was always intrigued by that. ya Salaam: It’s one thing to have that sense, and it’s another thing to have the technical facility to put that sensibility on the page. Baraka: Practice. Practice. Practice. I think that’s the only thing you can do. Like my grandmother said, practice makes perfect. To do anything you have to practice. You have to do it. If you don’t do it, you won’t do it. You can’t be a writer in your head, just like you can’t play the piano in your head. I’m the meanest piano player I know—in my head. I can play some piano in my head, it’s just when I get to the piano it gets difficult. You have to work at it. And then I think, young writers, you have to get to the point where you start grading your work. At first when you start doing it, everything is great. Everything you write is valuable and you must (mimics holding stuff to his chest), this is my work, this a poem I wrote in nineteen-whatever. That’s normal but you have to work through that and get over that. I’m not saying get to the point where you think your work is expendable, but get to the point where you can grade it.



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You know the worse thing you can do is write a “you-poem.” Nobody can imitate you like you. I can write a hundred poems that I write, but those are “you poems.” Those are poems using the things that you know are you. Once you become practiced in writing then you have certain skills that you can put a poem together, but the point is that it won’t have any substance to it. There won’t be any moving, there won’t be any life in it, any heart in it, cause you can imitate yourself. The whole point of developing the skill is so that the words fly on the rhythm. You feel the rhythm before you know what you’re talking about. If you trust the rhythm and you’ve worked so that you don’t have a lot of dumb stuff in your mind all the time. (Laughter.) No, it’s true, because you might want to write about McDonald’s boxes, I don’t know. That’s why Mao says—and this is very important—when we look at your work we can tell what you love and what you hate, what you celebrate and what you put down, and we can also tell what work you’re doing and what study you’re doing. We can tell what you’re concerned with, we can tell by your writing, what you know and what you don’t know. Now, the lyric poet is, of course, the great hidden personality of our time. They can write about “I”—I feel, I want, I do, I am—and really be hiding the world because all they’re talking about is this great vacuum in my heart that must be filled by, I don’t know, ice cream cones, a walk down the street, an­ other person. You know what I mean, it could be anything? That’s the lyric “I”—I want, I need. But actually to begin to talk about who is I and where is I in the world among all the other I’s, and how that relates to a real objectively existing world that exists independent of us. The world exists independently of us—if you can get that in your mind. The world does not depend on you to exist, it exists independent of you. That’s hard sometimes, because we’re so subjective, especially we great artists, we think the whole world is in our heads. It’s not. The world exists independent of your will. Things will happen you don’t want to happen. How did we get here? That point of writing past the preservation of everything, being able to grade your work—you know what I mean, being able to tell the fake from the true— and of getting past imitating yourself, those are important things. Also, going back to Mao Tse-Tung. You ever read the Yenan Forum written in 1941? Mao was trying to build the communist party and one of the things he was talking about was intellectuals. What is the role of the intellectual? What is the role of artist in making social transformation? Now, if anybody needs to know that it’s us. That is what Yenan is about. The first question he asks: for whom does one write? Who are you writing for? Why are you interested in writing? Is it to titillate your own compulsive personality? What is it for? That’s a good point.

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Think about it sometimes. Once you begin to isolate “for whom” then you also know “what it is.” How do I explain what has gone down in this world for us? So, when people be going up to me and saying Baraka you always political, I say why do you want me to be different from. You want me to be different from Baldwin, you want me to be different from Lorraine Hansberry, you want me to be different from Langston Hughes, or DuBois? Who should I get away from? Our tradition is intensely political. And for this recent group—and I’m not trying to categorize you in age terms—but for this recent little group of buppies that they’re publishing who think that somehow writing is not a politi­ cal act, that always has been around but it’s something that Black people and indeed the people of the world have flogged. Anyway, that’s a very important question—for whom?—because for whom answers why. You want to know for whom, look at your work. Who does it celebrate, who does it put down, who does it think is beautiful, who does it think is ugly, what work are you doing, what study? We can see it in there. We don’t have to ask you nothing, you give me your poetry or literature, I read it and I know a lot about you just from reading that. You could be writing about something you think is totally disguised, don’t have nothing to do with your life, you could be writing about Johnny Jojo way over there in Nobo land, you know, but it bees about you. That’s what it bees about. Why? Because that’s all you know about. It bees about us. That’s another thing, a lot of people get frightened at; once they know that people know that when you write something, it’s about you, Jim, it ain’t about that one, it’s about you, then people get constipated. They don’t want to expose themselves. People be saying, I don’t know how he could write that book, Baraka you . . . hey, what I care. You be dead in a minute, people will read it—I always thought that if you felt strongly about a thing then you would face it. For me, I had come out of a lil petite-bourgeois family, my mother was a social worker, my father was a postman, they always told me: y’all, are the smartest colored kids on the planet. They gave me piano lessons, trumpet les­ sons, drum lessons, piano lessons, painting lessons. I used to sing Ave Maria with my sister. I used to recite the Gettysburg Address every Lincoln’s birth­ day in a Boy Scout suit for about six years—this was my mama. The point is that for them two Negroes right there, they knew what they were going to do, they were going to give us all the information in the world, and they was go­ ing to equip us to go out and fight the White people. That’s where my people were coming from. Why? Because they wanted that. You were fighting for them. I never knew that, I never understood what they had planned for me until one night when the White people came—I had this play, Dutchman,



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and all of these papers, they were calling me names and all kinds of things, stupid, crazy, evil, but I could see that they were going to make me famous. The minute that that came to my mind that they were going to make me famous, I said, now, I’m going to pay your ass back. (Laughter.) Naw, it was very clear. It was like, bump. I could see how my mama had put the shell in there. Click. Right. Oh, you gon make him famous, I got some shit for you. That’s what it was, it was like you had been doctored on by masters. You under­ stand? Every night at dinner, they’d be running it. You’re sitting there eating biscuits and what not, and they would be running it. They would be telling you the history of the south, the history of Black people, the history of Black music and you would be sitting there. They were actually teaching you. But I didn’t know that then. My grandmother would tell me all the time about this Black boy they accused of raping this woman and they cut off his genitals and stuffed them in his mouth and then made all the Black women come there and watch. My grandmother told me that story when I was a little boy. Why would your grandmother tell you that story? Because she wanted you to remember that shit forever. You understand? Sweet little old lady from Alabama would sit you down, give you something to eat, and tell you this horrible story, and then you trying to figure out: why would she tell me that story? Why would she tell you that story? Oh, you still know the story, you still got it in your mind, sixty years later, you still remember that story?—”yeah, I remember it”—in detail?— ”absolutely”—well that’s why she told it to you. I don’t know if y’all still have that in your homes, I can’t speak on that, but I know that is what we as writers have to do, continue that tradition. The only way I can see that tradition being extended is through the role and function of the writer in the community. ya Salaam: You said earlier, practice. Tell us about what you did to practice to prepare yourself to write A System of Dante’s Hell. Baraka: I’ll tell you about that book. Do y’all know Aime Cesaire’s work? If you don’t, you should. That’s the first dictum of writing: to read. For African people hooked up around the world, we have the treasure chest that is bound­ less, boundless! You should never be bored in your life—of literature I’m talk­ ing about, whether you talk about Afro-American literature. That’s what amazing about these folks, these filmmakers, I’m talking about Negroes, they can make all of this garbage, yet the treasure chest lies untouched. You got all of the slave writings for instance, Fred Douglass, Linda Brett, Henry Bibb. Incredible slave narratives, more exciting than anything you see in the movies. Nothing is more exciting or more beautifully written than Fred Douglas, there is no American speech at any higher level than Fred Douglas.

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Anybody who tells you different is crazy. There is no higher level, not no Melville, nobody. You want to know about American language go to Fred Douglas. Tell me somebody can match that, anywhere, anytime. I go to Willie Shakespeare in English, you have to reference that. You need footnotes for that. Read Fred, you don’t need no footnotes. That’s talking about right this minute. “Would you have me argue the profundity of the human soul? Is that a topic for Republicans.” He says, “there is no one who does not understand that slav­ ery is wrong for them.” That statement there, what can you do with that? Unassailable logic. In English there is no literature at no higher level than Fred Douglas. Not Shakespeare, not, not, not, not. Not the Bible. Fred takes the Bible, he takes Shakespeare, when you read Fred’s writing, he already copped the Bible, and he copped Shakespeare, and then he put the Black thing in there just to make it sweet. Read that. How do you practice? You first have to read. You first have to read. You have to read everything. I can say that now, but then again, when I was a kid, when I was in the Air Force, I used to read everything because I didn’t have nothing else to do. I was locked up in the Air Force, I would read for twelve or fourteen hours a day. I mean terrible stuff, Thomas Hardy. Stuff I would never wish on nobody. You know what I mean. ya Salaam: But do you think that helped you? Baraka: Yes, it did. Why? Because all of those things were confirmations. My mama and daddy already had told me, y’all the smartest colored people on the planet or we going to make you that. You see, but I wasn’t sure, because I al­ ways thought that White people, because they had that enormous public rela­ tions outfit saying how hip they is—at seventeen and eighteen I was trying to figure it out. I said, well, let me check them out, they might know something, you know? I wanted to know something, so I checked them out. I was the night librarian at Randy Air Force base and I ran the library. This White woman who ran it found out that I knew the books and loved the books, so she went on a vacation. She went down to the beach and just stayed there and said, you got it. So, I would have my boys in there every night and we educated ourselves in the history of so-called western, i.e. European, culture. That’s what we did, every night. Whether it was Palestrina or Bach, the madrigals, we would sit there and listen to it, and then we would read all that stuff. Tess De’verviel, Thomas Hardy, all of that, Jude the Obscure. Why? Because we thought it might have something of value in it. So we read through it. We would read all of the New York Times Book Review stuff. To say what at the end? There was limited information in it. Although I can not regret any of it, a lot of that time I could have spent trying to get through them ten



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thousand magazine articles DuBois has written. I could have spent my time trying to get through all of DuBois’ works and all of Langston’s work. Just that. You know that DuBois actually wrote ten thousand articles that he published. Now figure that out. How could he write ten thousand magazine articles? Well, first you have to live to be ninety-five. Then you have to write maybe ten articles a month, that’s a hundred a twenty a year, no, that ain’t enough. How many you have to write? About two hundred a year for fifty years. Did I answer the question? ya Salaam: No, you were talking about how you prepared to write A System of Dante’s Hell. Baraka: Oh, yeah, and I asked had anyone read Cesaire, and no one an­ swered? Read Aime Cesaire. His great work is called Notes On A Return To My Native Land. He was one of the founders with Senghor and Damas from Guyana of Negritude, that was the Black consciousness movement that comes out of the thirties and the forties from French speaking peoples. They had a movement in Haiti called Indigismo, it’s the same movement. They had a movement in the Spanish speaking Black countries called Negrismo, same movement. Blackism, Black consciousness. Throughout the West Indies, and through out the world. The reason I say Ceasaire is because when he was a student over at the Sorbonne in Paris, he, Damas and Senghor were writing what they described as French Symbolist imitations. They were imitating the French Symbolists. So one day he got disgusted with this and said, I’ll never write another poem. I’ll only write prose. Well, he lied because the prose that he wrote was Notes On A Return. What does that have to do with Dante, well the Dante is the same thing. I was under the influence of a lot of writers in the Village. I said to myself, I’m not going to do this anymore. Why? Because you’ll find out when you imitate people’s writings, you also imitate their point of view. I wrote a long paper on something called the “content of form.” Forms are a form of content. You understand what I’m saying? When Claude McKay, for instance, chooses the English sonnet form, that’s an aspect of his content. His focus on that English form, tells you something about his philosophy. I began to see that even being influenced by these people, I was being influenced by their content which I didn’t believe in. When I was among the White writers we used to argue all the time about politics not having anything to do with art, that’s what they would tell me and I would say, for whatever reason, say, but it does. Even down there among the beatniks, I would say that it does. Why? Because if you were describing an apple that’s your description of it. You are trying to convince me that that apple is an apple for me as it is for you. What’s the difference between that propaganda and me telling you capitalism ain’t no

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good. Finally, one might have more implications than the other. So anyway, I said, I have to stop being influenced by these people’s form because the form is also making me think some of the things that they think. So, I said I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m not going to try and write poetry anymore. I didn’t know Cesaire had said that till maybe fifteen or twenty years later. So, I said, what will I do? I’m going to write a story in which I do not the story, but write the story that the story makes me think of. And that’s what I tried to do. In other words, I was telling myself a story in my head, and I said, I’m not going to write that story that I’m telling myself in my head. I’m going to write the story that that story makes me think of. You know what I’m saying? ya Salaam: No. Break that [s---] down. Baraka: In other words if I say, I walked into this room and saw a group of writers sitting around a table with books on table. That’s the story, but that ain’t what I think. That’s the story, but what that story makes me think of is something else. I called them association complexes. I would be thinking of something, but I wouldn’t write about what I was thinking, I would write about what thinking about that made me think because there are associations. Because I would say, well, I know the story but I don’t know what the story would make me think. In other words, Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Now, what does that make you think about? That’s the story, but what does that make you think about? Well, I remember Jack when he was downtown last week, he had this funny looking hat on, so forth and so on. Then I saw Jill the other day coming out of this bar. It all had to do with what those associations were more than anything else. I think poets do that a lot and they don’t know it, or they do know it. Also, you’d be surprised if you let your mind run as free as it will, it ain’t gon run that free, cause you going to stop it. (Laugher.) Naw, that’s right, cause you’ll think you’re not making sense. But you’ll be surprised, you’ll be making sense that you don’t know is sense. It’s true. You’ll say something, it’ll come out your mouth—you know you mouth is fast—and then two or three beats later you will say, oh, that’s what that means. You’ve got to trust yourself. It’s just like anything else, like sports, like them basketball players. You’ve got to trust your­ self. Michael Jordan says when he goes up in the air, he don’t know what he’s going to do. He goes up there and creates, that’s what you have to do. You have to create. Now, if you’re crazy, we’ll find out. If you can’t make it, we’ll find out. But, you’ve got to go for it. This might sound peculiar to you, but there’s a lot of stuff in your own life you don’t even know. You don’t know nothing about yourself. You want to know about the world, check out yourself. What was your grandmother talking



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about the last time you saw her? What did she mean? Where did she come from? What her boyfriend look like? How did your grandmother get to the place where you met her. There’s stuff in your life that’s incredible. All kinds of things. I don’t know what they are, you don’t know what they are, but you can find out. If you was to turn detective like Easy Rawlins and try to go down your own life, who are you parents, how did they meet, where they always your sweet parents, who were their parents, where did they live? There’s a lot of se­ cretes, even when you live with somebody, when you married to somebody, you don’t know everything about the person you’re living with. My wife and I been together 31 years, now that’s a long time to be with anybody, but that don’t mean you know everything about them. ’Cause every once in a while you be talking and you said “what??? I never knew that? I never knew you be­ lieved that?[”] Life is very, very complex and it changes all the time. What you want to be today, you might not want to be tomorrow. What you called yourself a few minutes ago, you might not want to call yourself the next time I see you coming around the corner. I don’t mean you’re all like Rodman—Rodman changes his hairstyle, he got purple today, tomorrow he might have yellow—I just mean your mind is subject to all kinds of things. ya Salaam: What did you do in terms of craft. I want you to speak about craft. How would you practice writing? Baraka: How would you practice writing? Read and write. Read and write. Write what? Whatever comes into your head. Whatever. But also have projects. Things that you want to do. I have projects lined up into 27 A.D. that I want to do. A lot of which are done but not done. The reason projects are important is because that’s something you can apply yourself to. How do you do it? You have to do it. You have to write and correct it. You have to write and look at it. I’m not a big one for rewriting. I’m not a big rewrite fan. My rewrite is choome, into the trash can. I don’t mess with it. If it looks like it’s not going to hang out, I’ll throw it away. I’m not going to torture it. Why? That’s arrogance. Like Bill Cosby’s says, I’ll kill you and make another one just like you. I’ll kill you poem and make another one just like you. Don’t have that fear of it. You’ve got to be free and open to write about anything from any point of view that appeals to you but you have to actually study, do that mental gymnastics. You can’t write on an empty brain. Some people does. What do you have to study? The world! What a silly thing to be in the world and not know anything about it. I mean how silly is that to be here everyday and not know nothing about the world, to be walking around just ignorant. That’s a hell of a thing. I’m ashamed of my own ignorance, you know what I mean?—not in anyway that would make me less arrogant—but ashamed of it

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in the sense of there is a lot that you gots to know that you will never know. When I get to something, you know, find out something and then think about how many years I been walking around thinking that I knew something and didn’t really know it, didn’t know nothing about it. Like I was somewhere today and I opened up a book and started reading about the Boer War. Now, I know about the Boer War. I read Conan Doyle’s little jive thing—you know Sherlock Holmes’ man—Doyle wrote a thing about the Boer War so I read it. Why? Cause I wanted to know about the Boer War, but then, I’m reading some more on it and I say, I didn’t know that. I started saying, hey, I better go back and look at the Boer War again. But then you say, why you want to know about the Boer War Baraka that’s some old corny stuff. Because I want to know about it, that’s why. I want to know. It was in South Africa. They were fighting over our land. Why would the Boers and the English fight? What was that about. What were the stakes in that. Who sold out? What niggahs sold out, I know there must have been some who sold out. That’s true. When you look at the Civil War or the destruction of Reconstruction, you start thinking it was all White people, that’s a game. Just like today, if somebody was to tell you, aw, they’re getting rid of Affirmative Action and this and that, and forty years from now, you say it was White people this and White people that. Hey, list all the niggahs that was in it. Who helped them do that. Same way during the Civil War. Yes, they did. Some of the same people we be calling out as the first Negro so and so, look at who they were and why they was that. ya Salaam: When you wrote, you wrote on a typewriter? Baraka: Always. ya Salaam: Manual or electric? Baraka: Well, it was manual until, let’s see, a while back I started writing on an electric typewriter. I’ve had a computer maybe since ninety-something. But always with a typewriter. I didn’t never like to write longhand. ya Salaam: Why? Baraka: My hand hurt. (Laughter.) I could write faster on a typewriter. I was the only boy in typing class in high school. I got a C, but I can type. I’m always grateful for that stroke of revelation that made me take typing. I wasn’t thinking about it for no special reason, but then again, I guess I was thinking about writ­ ing because I had been to a writing class. So I learned to type and I am forever grateful for that. I think typing, computing, that’s the way you have to do it. That longhand, I’m not with that. I do it a lot because I don’t have any choice, travel­ ing all the time, I’ve written a lot of stuff in longhand but I can’t do nothing with it because once I write it out like that I’m disgusted that I had to do that in the first place because that’s just a lot of work.



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ya Salaam: And then you would have to do it again, type it over, because no one can read your writing? Baraka: (Shakes his head yes and smiles. Laughter.) I don’t know why that is. I know my wife says she can’t read it, and, I don’t know, I think she would be suspi­ cious if someone else could, but I know I can’t read it and she can’t read it. It takes a long time for me to read my own handwriting. I don’t know why even bother. ya Salaam: Were you one of those people who had a writing routine or did you write anytime, the morning, at night, or whatever? Baraka: When I was younger I used to like to write late at night and early in the morning. Now I write late at night. ya Salaam: What’s that about? Baraka: Quiet. The rap concerts go off in the house. The little twenty-five year old children stop running up and down the steps. That don’t slow down until about two. About three or four is the best time, four until light is the best time. ya Salaam: If you were absconded as you walked out of the door and they said, tomorrow we do the operation and this operation is going to wipe out all of your books except two and you can tell us what two that would remain—it’s sort of a Sophie’s choice kind of question—what two books would you want to have left behind? Baraka: The ones I’ve still got to write. (Laughter.) I really feel that way. I don’t have no worshipful relationship to my work in that way. I did it. That’s it. It ain’t me, that’s just some books on the shelf, because if you don’t act like that, then that will be you over there on the shelf. You’ve met people who don’t go any further than that. That’s where they at. What they said in 1928, that’s what they say today. Why? Because they worship that fact that hey, I have a book and I said this. A lot of stuff that I have in books, I don’t even agree with that anymore. Somebody’ll say, well, you have it in a book. Yeah, but that book ain’t me. That book was written in 19--, I was a little boy then, I don’t believe that anymore. That’s like Skip [Gates] and them be talking about DuBois and the talented tenth. Hey man, that was 1890-something he wrote that. For you to keep run­ ning that back to a guy who joined the communist party when he was 93 years old, that’s kind of far out. Why do they do it? For obvious reasons. They cannot deal with all of DuBois, so they make believe his life stopped there. The White people do that to me all the time with the downtown stuff, let’s make believe his work stopped there. You can’t allow yourself to be linked to the work as if it were you. You can defend it or cop out about it, but I’m not going to pretend it’s me because that’s death. You become a bookend, a literary figure that’s some­ body’s going to bury. That’s what I loved about Jimmy [Baldwin] finally, when we made our rapprochement. He was a good brother. That was somebody you

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could hang out with. He didn’t think of himself up on a bookshelf and he would burn you in a minute if that’s what you wanted to approach him with. Jimmy had a terrible mouth for those of you that don’t get that inference out of his books, he had the sting of a cobra out of his mouth. He would hurt you. He never took that idea of being “the author” seriously. Now, a thinker, that’s different. He didn’t want you to take him light on the thought side. If you would try to play him cheap in terms of what he thought, then you were in for trouble, but the book thing. You see to be stuck like Ellison on one book and to be there polishing the weapon, polishing the gun so much till you don’t get another shot. That’s what that is. You be there polishing the gun so much till the gang­ ster done went away. And you’re sitting there, well, I’m trying to get it so it’s like this. The thing is to bam, pull it out and shoot it. For me that’s what writing is, you got to pull it out and shoot it. What is in your mind, what is in your feel­ ings, go for it. Nobody’s feelings are more profound than yours. Nobody knows more than you if you know what they are talking about. ya Salaam: What do you mean by that? Baraka: If you know what they are talking about—if they go off in some jargon or linguistic code, that’s different, but if they are talking about the world and you know what they’re talking about, they don’t know no more than you do. They might have more experience which you are then suppose to respect, but there is no such thing as they have an exclusive hold on meaning. ya Salaam: You’ve spent a lot of your time being an editor. Assembling writers, poets, you put together a number of anthologies. You did a press. Put together Totem Press and worked with Corinth Press. You did Kulchur, Floating Bear, all those magazines, you even did that music magazine Cricket for a minute. Tell us about your perception of being an editor as integral to being a writer or do you see it as two different things? Baraka: (right) I see it as a continuation. I also became an editor because I wanted to publish my own work when I was young. I never believed in waiting for anybody to publish me. I never believed I was going to be discovered by nobody. I never believed that somebody was going to say, hey, I want to pub­ lish you. I thought that if anybody was going to publish me it was going to be me. I’m not going to make believe, I’m just going to publish. Why? Because I wrote it. I want it out. That’s it. Why did I do a magazine? Because I thought that there were a lot writers like myself who needed to be published. I think you all, you writers, you publish your stuff. All you need is a mimeograph. You don’t need a whole lot of money and stuff. In this day and age of Kinko’s—we didn’t have that when I was coming up—you can get twenty books published in five minutes. For the next poetry reading you can print twenty or thirty books



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and then sell them. I would do that. You love the poetry, you’re writing the poetry, put it together, charge a couple of dollars for it. You can make the money back you spent and get your work out. To me that’s the best armament for writers. Always have your stuff with you. Always. Mash it on somebody. Sell it. Give it away. You’re a writer, you want people to read your work. Right? That’s what you want. If you want to get rich, get into another field! But if you want to write, you want people to read your writing, well then, write it down and publish it, give it away. People been holding on to their writings talking about, one day, the sun god is going to come down and discover me, and make me chief editor of Playboy. You know that kind of stuff. Whoever discovers you is going to turn you into something you wish you wasn’t, I’ll tell you that. They used to tell me all the time when I was down in the village, so and so sold out, so and so sold out. I would say, well, where’s the office. Ain’t nobody asked me. They was discriminating even in selling out. Don’t wait for anything. Just wait for your own agreement. When you think you’re ready. Two poems. One poem. A broadside. Anything. Get it out. Because if you don’t, you’re constipating yourself. It’s true. You walk around with a whole sheaf of stuff that you’re not publishing, that’s constipation because your mind is fixed on that, and you’re not going to do much until you get that out of you. And once you—even if it’s on Kinko’s paper—do something with it, it’s out of you. That act will get it out of you and then you can go on to your next thing. But you have got to do it. ya Salaam: Talk a bit about poetry specifically and literature in general as sound rather than as text. We’ve been talking about text for the most part. Baraka: First, the music. Always being intensely interested in the music, I always tried to use the music as a catalyst and a kind of object lesson or a paradigm for my own work. It comes from Langston who said, I try to use the forms and content of Black music, of jazz and blues. I was trying to do that. As far as the sounds are concerned I always thought of myself as a saxophone player or a drummer, and a trumpet player I guess, in terms of the poetry. I always thought too that the sound of the voice is important. Just the sound of your voice has an aesthetic quality to it. In order words, it’s tonal. It has timbre to it, it has a sound, and that that sound is useful in terms of poetry. For me it always goes back to musical sounds, how do you replicate musical sounds, how do you replicate the percussive kind of catalyst that our music rides on. ya Salaam: But why music? Baraka: Because poetry is nothing but music. Poetry is words given the musical emphasis. It’s nothing but music. If you don’t like music, then you shouldn’t be no poet. I don’t think you should be a writer, but then that might

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be biased. I know that there were several European writers who hated music. I don’t know how they could make it, because language is musical, rhythmic. ya Salaam: With performance, where did you pick that up? In the early years we can imagine you sitting down and reading your poetry, but by the seventies, no one can imagine you sitting down in a chair and reading It’s Nationtime. Baraka: That’s a combination of things. One, the first person I saw reading poetry to music was Langston Hughes. I had never thought that you were not supposed to. I never came into the world thinking that poetry and music were divorced. I always thought that they should be together. Why did I think that? From the blues, that’s where I took my thing from, the blues. I always liked that. Larry Darnell. The old talking blues, I loved that. Lighting Hopkins. Charles Brown. That’s where I was coming from. And all them “bird” groups: The Orioles, The Ravens, The Flamingos. I used to walk down the halls of high school doing that. I thought it was hip. Also, that’s the activism coming in to it. I read a guy named Brown, I think it was W. W. Brown in England, who said, you can always tell when the activist period is coming in politics because theatre becomes domi­ nant. At the point where words turn to action. When theatre comes in, when real theatre is dominant, then it means that people are getting ready to go to war, getting ready to make revolutionary change. Why? Because it means that they are actually going to do it and not just observe. I began to notice that my poetry be­ gan to have talking in it. Conversations in the poem. With people’s names like in a play except this was before I started writing plays. And then the more I got busy actually, started working in Harlem, went to Cuba six months after the revolution, we were trying to send guns down to Robert Williams. The more I got into activ­ ism, the more the language changed. Then I met people like Askia Toure. Askia always had that singing quality, that kind of epic quality like reciting the work. Larry Neal had that singing quality. Those were influences on my reading style, but it was the music that took it. So I guess, the music in combi­ nation with the activism. ya Salaam: By the time you were doing Black Art, Sabotage, Target Study and some of those books, the poems actually had instructions for gestures in them in parenthesis. Baraka: Right. Right. And that’s just making your way. You don’t know where you’re headed but that’s where it’s headed. First, the poetry is headed up on the stage. It’s going to come out of somebody’s mouth in a minute. You’re writing it as a poem, but in a minute you’re going to put it in somebody’s mouth and they’re going to be up on a stage. With that sound, you could write poetry but have some people say it. It was a much more popular form than theatre. I love theatre, I love it’s results. You have to deal with a lot of nuts, but I still love



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theatre. That’s really a sad thing, that we don’t have a repertory company that you can’t just see the works of an O’Neal, Langston, Zora, Tennessee Williams, that’s horrible, all the great works. Why we don’t have it? Because that stuff is dangerous. If they start doing the historical literature of America: White, Black, Latino, Asian. Hey, it’s so hot, in terms of what it’s saying about this, not just us. Look at O’Neal’s The Hairy Ape or Waiting For Lefty. Those are hell of plays. They don’t want young people to come in and look at that every day. Tennessee Williams, to me, is the greatest of American playwrights. His portrait of America is out to lunch. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Sweet Bird Of Youth, look at that. I’ll tell you the one, Suddenly Last Summer. You want to see something, see that. It’s a portrait of colonialism and a portrait of America. The White thing to Williams was a symbol of craziness and decadence, though White he may be. ya Salaam: Whenever somebody asks you a question about basketball, we end up on a football field with a reference to baseball. I still want to know about the basketball. Your performance style as a poet. Baraka: My performance style came from listening to other people influ­ enced by the music and the political activism, I think. The fact that I was inter­ ested and attached to the music, attached, I mean I used to live over the Five Spot. When Monk and Trane played there, I was there every night. I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean literally. I would go downstairs and Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane would be in there getting ready to play, where was I going to go? It was incredible. I think also that shaped a lot of my ways of seeing things. Like these group of stories I’m writing on the musicians about Sun Ra, and Monk, Walter Davis, Don Pullen, Albert Ayler. People I knew. The way they talked, the music they played, that’s very important. That influenced me a great deal. The performance style is wanting to be a horn but also the activist. Having to speak before people, speaking before hundreds and thousands of people. In the street, trying to move people in the street. And then there was the fact of performing for the people. I’ll tell you, my class, anybody, you think your work is good, read it to some of these brothers on the street, you know the ones who be digging holes in the ground and they have a half hour break and they be sitting there eating them sandwiches on break. Read your stuff to them and see if it interests them. They are not blocks, nor stones, nor worthless, senseless things. They are human beings. See if your work can reach them. Dare that. That’s your people. In that situation of being out in the street having to deal with people on the real side, then you have to come up with the real thing. You have to make your feelings translatable, reachable. You have to move people and not with no “do it baby, do it baby, do it baby.” Not like that.

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But with the kind of depth and profundity you’re really talking about. How do you actually reach the people with a message of profundity and not some kind of artificial garbage that comes out everyday on the hit parade? You know what I mean, you hear the lyrics to them songs, they say the same thing all the time. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the lyrics, it’s (begins pounding monotonously on the table), if I do that your heart’s going to pick it up. Your heart picks up the beat, you can’t help it, and I could be saying: you’re stupid, you’re stupid!, you’re stupid! You need to kill yourself! And you would do it, you will start to say, I’m stupid, I’m stupid, I’m stupid! I need to kill myself. (Laughter.) They do it everyday on television, don’t they. Everyday. And you’ll be walking down the street, if you don’t catch yourself, die, die, die, I’m stupid, I’m stupid, I’m stupid. They know it don’t take nothing but that (beating). Your heart assumes the beat. ya Salaam: It’s like people say, I didn’t understand everything they said, but you could dance to it. Baraka: That’s the point. See? If you notice, now, rap and reggae have gotten intelligible, whereas before—Bob Marley was very clear. Try to understand these people now. See if you can understand what they’re saying. That’s move­ ment into another thing. To me, the point of art is communication. Now, I ain’t saying how or what, but that’s the point of it communication. ya Salaam: Is emotional communication, for you, as valid as intellectual communication? Baraka: I don’t see that kind of separation. I mean I can see it in certain kinds of tortured kinds of definitions, but to me, I would say, what can not feel, can not think. What can not feel, can not think. That’s what I think about that! The whole European thing about thought and emotion being at odds is bizarre. That’s like Wagner and the birth of tragedy talking about emotionalism inter­ feres with his thought; well, your thought is messed up. I mean if you Hitler’s hero, I can see that. That’s always been one definition of that kind of tortured, alienated Euro-sensibility. I’m saying that not so much in terms of nationalism, but rather as an identification of the kind of psychology that has developed out of capitalism, because you can’t feel if you’re going to torture people. You can’t feel if you’re going to have slaves. You have to then find a way to define profun­ dity as alienated from feeling, otherwise you can’t have no slaves. You can’t be whipping people’s ass and doing all kinds of terrible things and celebrating feeling at the same time, you know what a mean? Because otherwise you’d be saying, oh, my god, look at that, oh, no that’s bad. Have you ever been to the slave castles in Africa? If you get a chance, check those out. They’ll do wonders for you in terms of why the people who created slavery, can not feel, or rather, why you must not feel. ya Salaam: And why you must celebrate thinking above feeling.



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Baraka: Right. Why you must elevate the intellectual process above emo­ tions, cause you couldn’t possibly feel because then you couldn’t make that money. For instance, my son Ras and I went up there in Goree. He had just graduated from college and we went over there, and when we went to the slave castle and we sat up there in this dungeon with the door closed and everything, tears started coming out of our eyes. The two of us sitting there, father and son, not saying a word, just sitting there crying. Why? I don’t know. It’s just that feel­ ing is too strong, it’s too strong. You sit in there and there’s a window (pointing towards the twelve-foot high ceiling) about up to where that chandelier is, you have to leap up there just to see the ocean. Imagine fifty Black people in there trying to survive. You just sit there and suddenly, psychologically you begin to feel it on you. It’s something. You don’t want that but you start feeling it. I re­ member we came out of there crying and when we came out in the open, it was a group of French tourists walking towards us, and Ras says to me, Imamu, what they want? What do these White people want? At another point I stood by a wall that had those chains on it and I put my arms in the chains and said, Rashida, take a picture of this. She said, no. I said, Rashida, take a picture of this. She said, no, no, no, and she started crying. She said, no, I’m not taking a picture of that. That thing grips you. When you come into that, when you actu­ ally come close to slavery itself—I don’t mean stories of it, but when you actu­ ally get close to it, it will do something to you. No doubt about it. They got a hole in the wall, the door of no return and if you couldn’t make it they would just kick you aside into the ocean. A lot of the people had never seen the ocean, you know, because they were from inland. They had seen lakes. They might jump out there and think they could swim it, might think it was a lake, but that was the Atlantic ocean and the sharks be circling down in there. Now when you conceive that and conceive that there were people upstairs over the prison, who lived there, who had a little hatch, like that light in the ceiling, a trap door in their floor where they could look through there and check on the slaves, you understand what I’m saying? You’ve got to be a cold mamajamma to do that. People down there (makes screaming sounds) screaming and what not, and you can pick up the door, you have your dinner and [sh--] upstairs and you could pick up the door and look down and see what was happening with that, well, you can’t have no feeling with that. Feeling has to be abolished. That’s why I’m saying they make that separation between the intellectual process and emotion. But I say, if you can’t feel you can’t think. That’s my feeling about that. That’s why we ask philosophers every morning, how you feel? (Laughter.) That’s it. Source: Kalamu ya Salaam, “A Conversation with Amiri Baraka,” University of Illinois English Department, February 17, 1998, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/baraka/salaam.htm.

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Black Aesthetic The Black aesthetic has its beginnings with the cultural continuities that Africans carried with them during the enslavement period. The Black aesthetic prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s was the expression of Black self-determination through cultural outlets such as fashion, hair, music, literature, and art. At its core, it is an expression of Black consciousness and pride. The reemergence of Black artistic expressions fueled by the Black Arts and Black Power Movements, was a powerful medium for visually articulating positive and affirming images of Blackness. During this period, Black people consciously decided to change the way they represented themselves, infusing their dress, music, art, and hair with their political and cultural beliefs. These intersections created the iconic Black aesthetic of the late 20th century. The Black Arts Movement is the literary aspect of the Black Power Movement. Larry Neal posits that “The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America.” He further contends that Maulana Karenga, former Black student activist and founder of the Us organization, developed the cultural ideology of the Black Arts movement, while Amiri Baraka was its chief designer. In addition to Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, figures associated with the Black Arts Movement are Sonia Sanchez, the Watts Writers, Nikki Giovanni, Etheridge Knight, Harold Cruse, Addison Gayle, and others. One of the most enduring fashion trends of the period was the dashiki. The brightly colored sleeveless tunic originated in West Africa and appeared on the American fashion scene as Black Americans looked to Africa to reestablish their African roots and reaffirm Black nationalists’ dreams of a Black nation. Indeed, African style of dress heavily influenced Black women and men. The appearance of African singers such as Miriam Makeba and Fela Kuti as well as Guinean president Sékou Touré in America served as a catalyst for change that incorporated African and American style (Ford 2015, 21). The music and dances of West Africans received significant attention in African American publications. By the mid-1960s, Black women were wearing their hair in a natural style as a rebellion against oppression. Traditionally Black women in the United States had chemically straightened their hair. Because of middle- and upper-class norms, natural hair was viewed as unsophisticated and unattractive. Natural hair, however, represented a connection to Africa. Black people also changed their aesthetic when music became more political. Singers such as Nina Simone and Odetta had strong influences on the Black community. Simone’s music was about the oppression that Black people faced. In



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particular, the song “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” empowered young Black female college students, who saw Black Power as representing freedom and control over one’s body without the politics of respectability (Ford 2015, 43). James Brown’s “Say It Loud” pushed Black pride and the idea that Blackness should not correlate to unattractiveness (Ford 2015, 99–102). The combination of Black style and Black music was an extension of what was happening politically. Expanding the concept of the Black aesthetic and musicians, Etheridge Knight states that “unless the Black artist establishes a ‘Black aesthetic’ he will have no future at all.” He goes on to state that “The Black artist must create authorities, he must create a new history, new symbols, myths, and legends (and purify old ones by fire). And the Black artist, in creating his own aesthetic, must be accountable for it only to the Black People” (Knight 1968, 51). Once the aesthetic began to change in the early 1960s, the slogan “Black is Beautiful” became popular. Publications began to feature dark-skinned women with natural hair. In the beginning, these changes in style were not automatically viewed as Black nationalist or representative of Black liberation. They were associated with viewing African style as being without the influence of Europe. These styles frequently reflected African royalty and a luxurious life. The Black aesthetic looked different for Black people in the North and the South. Southern Black women decided to dress informally, wearing denim and more casual clothes. Northern Black women and Black women on the West Coast wore dashikis and other printed clothes (Ford 2015, 98). Black college students challenged rules and regulations on campuses that were set by school administrations such as dress codes and housing. They blended African styles with their culture, which gave them a style that was uniquely theirs. The difference with earlier youth styles was the incorporation of Black cultural heritage and a new appreciation for their own beauty. This was a part of the “Black is Beautiful” idea, which speaks to the sentiment of dispelling negative connotations associated with being Black. At historically Black colleges and universities, events on campus showcased their support for the concept. The Black aesthetic could also be viewed in Black Power activism. When the Black Panther Party emerged, its uniforms were similar to military uniforms but had an added flair: leather jackets paired with slacks, turtlenecks shirts, and caps. This style appealed to the young Black students. Both high school and college students were drawn to the Panthers’ style because it was different from the style of the perceived Black middle class. As the style continued to grow it became a symbol of pride to Black people. The aesthetic reflected how Black people were beginning to see themselves by the 1970s. Cultural pride along with a resistance to oppression provided the fuel for changes in artistic expression. In the Black aesthetic, the Afro became a central part of the appearance of Black men and Black women. The Afro was associated with having Black pride and also

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fighting discrimination. “The bigger one’s Afro, the better, because, the Afro, more than any other natural hairstyle, became symbolic of one’s black consciousness” (Ford 2015, 104). Afros challenged the standard beauty norms in the United States. During the 1960s there was still debate between having straight or processed hair, but by the time the Afro emerged it was about how big one’s Afro could get. Angela Davis also became a symbol of pride for Black women. Because she received so much media coverage during the 1970s, her image became one that Black women emulated. When Davis was acquitted, Black women felt more empowered to wear an Afro because they felt like justice had been served and a beautiful Black woman had been vindicated. Despite the portrayal of Afros as militant and dangerous, Black people emerged with a new sense of pride and selfworth. They saw the value in their Blackness. Ultimately, the Black aesthetic underscores what W. E. B. Du Bois called truthtelling: “I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty and for Beauty to set the world right. That somehow, somewhere eternal and perfect Beauty sits above Truth and Goodness I can conceive, but here and now in the world in which I work they are for me unseparated and inseparable” (Du Bois 1926, 291). Here the call for the Black aesthetic is that beauty comes from the realities of Black people that tell a corrective history from the cultural perspective of Black people. Lindsey Baker and T. J. Robinson See also: Black Arts Movement; “Black Is Beautiful”; Black Music; Cultural Nationalism; Kawaida; Neal, Larry Further Reading Abioye. 2010. “Politics of the Afro.” Berbigiangriot, March 24, http://abioye-berbi ciangriot.blogspot.com/2010/03/politics-of-afro.html. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1926. “Criteria of Negro Art.” The Crisis 32 (October): 290–297. Ford, Tanisha C. 2015. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Knight, Etheridge. 1968. Negro Digest 87 (January). Ongiri, Amy Abugo. 2010. Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Taylor, Paul C. 2016. Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Black Arts Movement The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was the “most influential U.S. arts movement ever, opening the door to Black Arts cultural groups, writers’ and artists’ workshops,



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theaters, bookstores, study circles, dance companies, schools, journals, small presses, reading series, galleries, museums, and public arts spaces,” wrote James Smethurst in SOS—Calling All Black People (Bracey, Sanchez, and Smethurst 2014, 8). Its reach was unprecedented. The artists involved with this movement were documenting their pain, anger, and brilliance with theater, poetry, music, and the visual arts, acknowledging not just the importance of the movement but also the recovery of the souls of Black people. African Americans handed one another the keys to their destiny, understanding that only through a sweeping embrace and healing of Black identity and the internal and external struggle of a colonized people can a new paradigm of Blackness emerge. Black Arts consisted of a wide range of artistic expressions and connections to social movements. Artist Larry Neal created the phrase “Black Arts Movement” and labeled it the sister of the Black Power Movement (Bracey, Sanchez, and Smethurst 2014, 1). He thought that BAM could address the inequality that many Black Americans were experiencing. In his “Black Arts Movement” manifesto, Neal argued that the Harlem Renaissance—a cultural historical precursor to BAM—was a failure according to what Black Arts should achieve. Neal saw BAM as nationalistic and linked to the Black community, giving voice to the struggles of a colonized people. Most important, BAM was a movement fueled by Black self-determination and nonwhite patrons. The writings of the men and women of BAM represent a literary awakening. Unlike the Harlem Renaissance, which represented an emergent exploration of Blackness, BAM epitomized art, fashion, theater, poetry, dance, and music that spoke clearly about the power of Black self-identity. The era declared loudly that “Black is Beautiful.” Artists of BAM embodied an inner exploration that manifested outwardly as a new Black aesthetic. Afros crowned urban Nubian queens and kings, who dressed in dashikis and clothing from Mother Africa. Blacks looked to Africa for their heritage and identity in response to more than 100 years of Jim Crow segregation and more than 400 years of slavery. Their bodies became road maps, expressing Blackness through dance, music, clothing, hairstyles, literature, and performance. From this, BAM influenced the Asian American and Chicano American movements, cultural studies, gender studies, multiculturalism, and the generation of hip-hop and rap artists. BAM was fulfilling a need within the Black community to socially engage with the concept of Blackness. There was a profound desire to establish community through art. There were many different forms of theater, some of which had West Coast origins at San Francisco State University and Merritt College in Oakland, California, which was also the birthplace of West Coast BAM and the Black Panther Party (BPP). Merritt College was one of the birthplaces for Black theater. Ron Stacker Thompson, an instructor at Merritt College, created the Oakland Ensemble Theatre,

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which existed from 1971 through the late 1990s. Marvin X, a poet, playwright, and essayist, cofounded the West Coast branch of BAM and joined Huey Newton and other Merritt College students in what would become the BPP. When Marvin X moved to San Francisco from Oakland, he established the Black House—a cultural center—with Eldridge Cleaver and Ed Bullins. Some of the most understudied contributions to the larger BAM that paralleled the Black Power Movement in the United States are the contributions by San Francisco Bay Area theater artists and activists. Their socially engaged productions in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, and Richmond bolstered the Black Arts aesthetic with newfound creativity and forms of expression that benefited from and were shaped by the progressive political climate of California. These and other factors such as the founding of the BPP and the creation of Black studies departments led to a unique Bay Area aesthetic that conjoined with BAM across the United States. The movement was about Black Power and the ability of African Americans to use their own terms of identification. Black people were writing, speaking, and celebrating Blackness. Today, no substantive discussion of BAM transpires without citing its founder, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (1934–2014). His words and art represent the beginnings of the movement and a new Black identity. In 1965 Malcolm X was assassinated, and Baraka moved to Harlem in what was seen as the beginnings of BAM, transforming not only African Americans but also the nature and concept of Blackness in North America. From 1965 through 1975, African American writers and artists created a huge outpouring of art that celebrated the Black aesthetic. Baraka’s move to Harlem sparked the creation of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/ School (BARTS), which was similar to the Black House—its West Coast counterpart. Though BARTS was short-lived, it influenced a generation of writers, actors, musicians, and artists. What was more important than the survival of these cultural centers was what they represented, a place where Black Arts, Black literature, and concepts of Black identity were explored.

Black Theater BAM brought awareness of Black culture to North America, which had operated on the premise that Eurocentric theater was the face of American theater. Black people conveyed through arts that “this is our voice and our blackness.” Still, various definitions of African American theater exist within the African American community. On the West Coast, the Oakland Ensemble Theatre performed the plays of Lorraine Hansberry, Charles Gordone, and James Baldwin. What was coming out of BAM were two uniquely African American styles of theater, both addressing African American issues but one that called for a Blackonly audience, while the other examined issues of racism but without the Black



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nationalistic rhetoric. To artists such as Ed Bullins, Baraka, Marvin X, Sonia Sanchez, Abena Joan Brown, Val Gray Ward, and Barbara Ann Teer, this was seen as theater that was meant to empower the African American and Black communities. Some Black nationalists believed in the creation of a separate Black nation that eschewed white culture and all it represented. What Marvin X and other Black nationalists were saying through their work was the idea that Black culture must be built on the tenets of Black empowerment and self-determination. This was the 1960s, and the work and words of these Black nationalists stand as a time capsule for a point in history when African Americans called for social and economic change in a manner that exposed the harsh reality of segregation. Black theater for Black people was seen by many in the movement as an opportunity for Blacks to create in their own image. BAM was an explosion of Black self-affirmation through the arts that forever changed the Black experience in America.

Women, Poetry, and Literature For any colonized people, outside oppression affects their worldview and the ways they regard each other. Those dynamics were explored in the writings of Ed Bullins, Baraka, Eldridge Cleaver, Haki Madhubti, Askia Toure, Marvin X, and other key male figures in both the Black Arts and Black Power Movements. This highly coded language represents the voices of the oppressed singing the beauty of Blackness. In Black Fire, Julia Fields argued for the importance of loving Blackness. Sonia Sanchez raps on the fineness of a Black man, and the poetry of Barbara Simmons fills us with the souls of Black folks. The women of Black Fire consciously address the importance of Black identity as poets and writers telling the stories of Black bodies, Black love, and Black self-determination. Black women demanded to be heard, while the Black men of the movement created idealized versions of Black womanhood that competed with the dominant society’s focus on Black women as angry sexualized creatures. In early literature on BAM, the African American female is often left out of the discourse, merely showcased as a Nubian queen or as a sexualized appendage. African American men consciously and unconsciously marginalized the voices of African American women, foregrounding racial unity over gender equality. This displacement informed the manner in which African American women were allowed to contribute to the movement. This imbalance was represented in the literature that promoted BAM as one of male empowerment. In her essay “Sexual Subversions, Political Inversions: Women’s Poetry and the Politics of the Black Arts Movement,” Cherise A. Pollard discusses female empowerment as it relates to Black Fire, the definitive anthology on BAM edited by Baraka and Larry Neal. Pollard asserts that “Under the control of black male editors, black women’s

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poetry is overshadowed by black manhood in this anthology. However, black female poets published in Black Fire used highly coded language to open up revolutionary possibilities” (Pollard 2006, 174). The early days of BAM were more open culturally to the African American female artists but slowly changed when Maulana Karenga brought a nationalist model based on neo-Africanist principles that posited women as “complementary, not equal,” which led to a rise in “patriarchal ideologies” and “Black Power and Black Arts Feminism” (Bracey, Sanchez, and Smethurst 2014, 2–3). The Black female’s refusal to be marginalized is powerfully shown through art that speaks to the power of Black womanhood and the need to address issues of inequality and sexism in her community. It is in the writings of the African American female that authentic African American womanhood is understood. It is only through the African American female writing herself out of history and into her own personage that she is able to establish any true identity. The historic vision of the African American woman is one built on lies and based on stereotypes by those invested in white and male privilege. It is through BAM that images of the African American female exploded. The African American female finds her voice and establishes her vision in the voice and writings of authors Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sherley Williams, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Adrienne Kennedy, Jayne Cortez, Mari Evans, Lorraine Hansberry, Carolyn Rodgers, Johari Amini, Gloria House, Aisha Rahman, Nayo Watkins, and Margaret Burroughs; the rich performances of Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin; and the art of Dindga McCannon, Kay Brown, Faith Ringgold, and Elizabeth Catlett. A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry showed the world African Americans’ desire for home, family, education, and community. Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Contemplated Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf revealed the raw emotions of Black women, forgotten by society and themselves as they attempted to navigate a world in which Black bodies were not accepted. In For Colored Girls, all the women proclaim “I found god in myself & I loved her.” This is the anthem for all the women of BAM. It was necessary for the women to love themselves “fiercely” in order to write, paint, sing, dance, and validate their existence as Black women. For the first time Black women saw the vision of themselves as goddesses and healers of their race. It is through the poetry of Sonia Sanchez, Carolyn Rodgers, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Nikki Giovanni that we see the richness, the love of the Black female form, and the power of that form to create in a space of affirmation. The Black female is the temple that is being visited and worshipped not as an abstract Nubian queen but instead a living, breathing Black woman who sends her children to school, works 8 to 12 hours a day, and then prepares for the next day. Women of BAM, validating an existence that up until then had not been affirmed in a manner that spoke to the beauty that goes beyond the kink of the hair,



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the Blackness of skin, and the thickness of hips and lips. This is a Blackness that reaches into the soul, a soul on fire with the promise of perfection in those thighs, those lips, that hair, that face, those buttocks shouting “I am African. I am beautiful, and I wear my Africanness as I would a crown.” BAM and the African American woman showcased the beauty of Blackness, and writers such as Maya Angelou captured this perfectly. This is reflective in Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The phrase “I know why the caged bird sings” is from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy,” a poem about the Black experience in America. The iconic line “I know why the cage bird sings” is representative of more than 400 years of African Americans metaphorically singing with bruised wings from beating bars and demanding freedom. Through words and art that speak to the soul, BAM was that freedom. The voice of the African American woman is rich and deep as she sings a freedom song and swings open doors to a rich voice filled with ancestor spirits and knowledge that she holds the power of creation, the voice of her people, and the ability to move past negative, outdated images of what it means to be an African in America. Great art by BAM artists, musicians, poets, and playwrights has flourished into the 21st century so that what may appear short-lived never truly ended. African Americans do not need or crave mainstream America’s continued commodification of Blackness. They are in the process of discovering new identities of Blackness and gender. Perhaps these new discoveries are based on a humanistic approach to race and identity, one that takes into consideration the humanity of Black people and opens the door to true dialogue on what it means to be Black in America. This is not the Blackness that can be gleaned from scholarly writings but instead is an internal code of loving the Black body that seeks to move past Western paradigms on race and gender, seeking an authentic inner voice of Blackness, one of power, equality, and beauty. Kim McMillon See also: Bambara, Toni Cade; Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); “Black Is Beautiful”; Black Music; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Coltrane, John; Cultural Nationalism; Fuller, Hoyt; Giovanni, Nikki; Kawaida; Last Poets; Revolutionary Action Movement; Sanchez, Sonia; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Alexander, Robert, and Harry J. Elam, eds. 2004. The Fire This Time: AfricanAmerican Plays for the 21st Century. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Bambara, Toni Cade. 1970. The Black Woman; An Anthology. New York: New American Library. Baraka, Imamu Amiri, and Larry Neal. 1968. Black Fire: An Anthology of AfricanAmericans Writing. New York: Morrow.

84 | Black Arts Movement Bracey, John H., Sonia Sanchez, and James Edward Smethurst, eds. 2014. “Editors’ Introduction.” In SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader, 1–10. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Brown, Elaine. 1992. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. New York: Pantheon Books. Cliff, Michelle. 1986. “I Found God in Myself and I Loved Her/I Loved Her Fiercely: More Thoughts on the Work of Black Women.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2(1) (Spring): 7–39. Colbert, Soyica Diggs. 2011. The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Lisa Gail, and Margo Natalie Crawford, eds. 2006. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1996. “What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond.” Black Scholar 26(1): 9–17. Dickerson, Glenda. 1988. “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre.” Theatre Journal 40(2) (May): 178–187. Elam, Harry Justin, and David Krasner. 2001. African-American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gates, Henry Louis. 1989. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. 1996. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: Norton. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1994. “Black Creativity: On the Cutting Edge.” Time, October 10. Guillory, Elizabeth. 1988. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood. Guillory, Elizabeth. 1990. Wines in the Wilderness: Plays by African American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood. Guillory, Elizabeth. 2006. Middle Passages and the Healing Place of History: Migration and Identity in Black Women’s Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. 1995. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: New Press. Hansberry, Lorraine. 1994. A Raisin in the Sun. New York: Vintage Books. Hill, Errol. 1980. The Theater of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Errol Hill. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. hooks, bell. 1981. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press. Jackson, Paul K., and Lois More Overbeck. 1992. Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Joseph, Peniel E. 2006. The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era. New York: Routledge. Lester, Neal A., and Ntozake Shange. 1995. Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays. New York: Garland.



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“Marvin X on the Black Arts Movement.” 2012. Arts in the Valley, https://artsinthe valley.wordpress.com/2012/12/. Neal, Larry, Amiri Baraka, Stanley Crouch, Charles Fuller, and Jayne Cortez. 1989. “The Black Arts Movement.” In Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings, 62–78. New York: Thunder’s Mouth. Pollard, Cherise. 2006. “Sexual Subversions, Political Inversions Women’s Poetry and the Politics of the Black Arts Movement.” In New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, edited by Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford, 173–186. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Reed, Ishmael. 2009. The Plays. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive. Sanchez, Sonia, and Jacqueline Wood. 2010. I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shange, Ntozake. 1977. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow Is Enuf: A Choreopoem. New York: Macmillan. Smethurst, James. 2006. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Walker, Alice. 1983. “Looking for Zora.” In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, 93–116. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Black Bookstores During the spirited Black Power era, Black bookstores played significant roles in Black communities throughout the nation. African American bookstores during the 1960s and 1970s helped nurture and stimulate their patrons’ recognition of knowledge pertaining to African, African American, and Afro-diasporic culture; their identity politics and consciousness; and their overall worldviews. The owners of these stores were invested in their patrons and communities, often taking the time to run classes, procure lecturers, and encourage participation in protests. They used their bookstores as protected spaces to engage in critical dialogue and unpretentious learning. Like churches—the Black community’s quintessential movement center—Black bookstores often served as a venerated space for community building and liberation discourse, particularly during the Black Power Movement. During this period the number of Black bookstores increased, especially in major metropolitan areas with large Black populations such as New York, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles. These spaces became targets of surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local police departments; some were even raided or vandalized by police because of the important role they played in the movement as sites of communion and consciousness-raising for Black people.

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The noticeable proliferation of Black bookstores during the Black Power era was a by-product of the new sense of Black consciousness that surfaced during the mid to late 1960s. In spite of the intriguing debates about the long Civil Rights or Black Power Movements, by the latter half of the 1960s there was a conspicuous shift in young African Americans’ approach to the enduring Black freedom struggle. Knowledge of Black history and culture—in a sense a literary culture—was important. Bookstores facilitated practical book learning, a multidimensional Black erudite culture, and forthright exchanges about the meaning of Black life and scholarship. Among the most notable Black bookstores founded during or prior to the Black Power Movement include Ed Vaughn’s bookstore and the Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore and Cultural Center (Detroit), the Drum and Spear Bookstore and Press (Washington, D.C.), Hakim’s Bookstore (Philadelphia), the Aquarian Bookshop (Los Angeles), the Afro-Asia Bookshop (Buffalo), the National Memorial African Bookstore and the Liberation Bookstore (Harlem), and Nikru Books (Brooklyn). What follows is a concise survey of some of the most prominent Black bookstores and bookstore proprietors that were influential during the Black Power era. “Black is beautiful, but knowledge is power,” self-educated, Garveyite entrepreneur Lewis H. Michaux once retorted to some young men when they greeted him in his bookstore with “a closed fist salute” during the spirited Black Power era (Fraser 1976b, 55). Founded in the early years of the Great Depression, Lewis H. Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore in Harlem, New York—also known as the “House of Common Sense and Home of Proper Propaganda” or by Harlemites simply as “Michaux’s”—was one of the most instrumental bookstores in the United States during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. One scholar has even proclaimed that “There was no other Black bookstore in America with Michaux’s influence” (Emblidge 2008, 267). Yet, very little has been published on the compelling man known as “The Professor.” Born into a large family in Newport News, Virginia, on August 4, 1885, Michaux eventually migrated to Harlem and opened his bookstore on 101 West 125th Street, later known as Harlem’s “Main Street.” When he closed the store in 1974, he had amassed somewhere between 200,000 and 225,000 volumes. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Michaux’s bookstore was a popular meeting place and cultural movement center for Black nationalist and Civil Rights activists, selftaught and professionally trained scholars, Harlemites, and those unpretentiously interested in African American, African, and Afro-diasporic history and culture. Michaux took great pride that all of the books in his collection, with the exception of Webster’s Dictionary, were written by or were about those of African descent. Beginning in the late 1950s, the FBI considered Michaux and his store a threat.



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On the corner outside of Michaux’s store, known as Harlem Square, Black leaders, street orators, scholars, radical activists, and Michaux himself routinely lectured to passersby. Malcolm X, a spiritual martyr to young Black Power advocates, had a close relationship with Michaux. While in New York, Malcolm often spoke outside of Michaux’s, looked to his elder for advice and counsel, and used Michaux’s exhaustive collection as a personal library. It has been said that Michaux was a member of Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity. Michaux’s bookstore served many purposes. He called his bookstore “a landmark, an institution of learning” (Emblidge 2008, 274). In addition to Malcolm X, numerous other historical icons frequented and visited the National Memorial African Bookstore, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Joe Louis, Eartha Kitt, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Kwame Nkrumah, and a diverse array of Black Power activists. During the 1960s and early 1970s inside and outside his store, Michaux spoke with and encouraged high school students, City College of New York students, and everyday Harlemites. As historian and Africana studies trailblazer John Henrik Clarke remarked in his eulogy for Michaux, the Harlem bookstore was an “intellectual haven.” Michaux not only firmly rooted his store in the Harlem community by furnishing the general public with a vital Black cultural institution but also routinely “gave away thousands of books for needy children” (Emblidge 2008, 274). Michaux truly believed what he once told one of his coworkers: “If I can get the Negro to read, I can change his life” (Fraser 1976b, 30). After four decades of serving Harlem’s Black community, in the closing years of the Black Power era Michaux willingly closed his bookstore, maintaining that it was too much work for one person. In 1941, Alfred Ligon opened Aquarian Library and Bookshop (later known as Aquarian Bookshop) at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Western Avenue in Los Angeles, California. A migrant from Chicago, Ligon saved much of his earnings for four years until he could open the store with merely $100 worth of books. He would eventually own the longest-running Black bookstore in the nation. Despite his humble beginnings, Ligon was a pioneer and a trailblazer. Before a wide literary interest in Black culture spread across the nation, he was charting new paths in a region far removed from popular Black cultural meccas, such as Harlem. Initially Ligon faced challenges yet he pursued his dream until, by the 1960s, Aquarian Bookshop became an intellectual hot spot revered and frequented by students, scholars, authors, and activists alike. Aquarian Bookshop’s collection was diverse and featured Black history works, fiction by Langston Hughes and Alex Haley, and rare manuscripts that included papers from Marcus Garvey and letters penned by W. E. B. Du Bois. Aquarian Bookshop was a learning community that offered local Blacks a safe space to express themselves. The owners taught history classes and hosted events, such as debates, poetry readings, and lectures sometimes given by famous African

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Americans. For instance, Rosa Parks delivered a well-attended lecture at the bookstore days before it was destroyed. A casualty of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, Aquarian Books was burned to the ground, and Ligon and his wife Bernice lost nearly 7,000 books that they had collected for more than five decades. Dedicated to his cause and with the help of fund-raising by Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and the owners of several independent bookstores, Ligon reopened Aquarian Bookshop within a few months. Just two years later, however, Alfred and Bernice Ligon closed the shop once again due to personal health issues. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, former state representative (D-Michigan, 4th Representative District) and outspoken Civil Rights activist Ed Vaughn opened a bookstore at 12123 Dexter Avenue in Detroit, Michigan. The store initially catered to Black nationalists and leftists and soon became a popular resource for schoolteachers, children, and other Black Detroiters. Vaughn helped raise Black Detroit’s cultural and political consciousness by selling books about Black history and culture and magazines and newspapers such as The Liberator and Muhammad Speaks. The bookstore also carried all of the books published by Detroit’s Broadside Press that was founded by poet Dudley Randall in 1965. Many Black leaders and intellectuals delivered lectures at and visited the bookstore, such as Nikki Giovanni, Rosa Parks, Betty Shabazz, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Don L. Lee, and countless others. It was in Vaughn’s bookstore that a group of nationalists formed Forums 65, 66, and 67, a Black radical discussion group and collective. As the chairman of the forum, Vaughn used his bookstore as a base of operations for the organization’s fight against urban renewal and defense of African Americans’ Civil Rights. The collective included local Black nationalists and activists James and Grace Lee Boggs, Reverend Albert Cleage, Richard Henry, and Milton Henry. Rosa Parks was known to take part in discussions from time to time. Forum 65 sponsored the first Black Arts conference in 1966. The following year from June 29 until July 2, Forum 66 sponsored the Second Annual Black Arts Convention, and many of the events were held at Vaughn’s Bookstore. The theme was “Economic Unity Means Economic Strength,” and keynote speakers included Reverend Albert Cleage, founder of the Shrine of the Black Madonna Church in Detroit, Atlanta, and Houston, and historian Vincent Harding. During the 1967 uprising, the bookstore was not damaged. Instead, revolutionary rhetoric was spray-painted on the building’s facade. Several days later, however, the Detroit Police Department broke into Vaughn’s store and ransacked it in the belief that it was being used to harbor guns. According to Vaughn, they mutilated the artwork and left the water running, which destroyed the majority of books and ruined the infrastructure. As he has attested in multiple interviews several decades later, Vaughn was convinced that the police targeted his store because it posed a threat to the white power structure. Like Michaux and others, Vaughn



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believed that knowledge translated into power and that this self-awareness, renewed sense of identity, and cultural awakening challenged the status quo. A dedication to sharing Black history and culture prompted Dawud Hakim (David Butler) to open Hakim’s House of Knowledge, or simply Hakim’s Bookstore, in the late 1950s in West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A largely self-educated man, Hakim got started in the bookstore business after reading J. A. Rogers’s brief OneHundred Amazing Facts about the Negro with Complete Truth (1934). Rogers was a self-trained historian and largely inspired Hakim’s transformation, which he described as a “revolution of [his] mind.” Hakim devoted himself to maintaining and growing his bookstore, where he offered “Black people a glimpse of their own greatness” (Wallace 1997). Along with rare periodicals and books as well as texts devoted to Black history and the numerous achievements of African Americans, the bookstore’s collection also included books on holistic health care and Islamic culture. This focus was most likely influenced by his conversion to the Nation of Islam (NOI) when he was in his early 20s. Hakim routinely educated the children, teens, and adults who visited his store, highlighting the importance of self-respect, self-awareness, and the monumental accomplishments of Carter G. Woodson, the “father of black history,” and W. E. B. Du Bois because, as he argued, without knowledge of their history, Black people are “like trees without roots.” Because of Hakim’s radical politics and uncompromising approach, by the early 1970s his store was under FBI surveillance. Undeterred, Hakim largely ignored this scrutiny and continued with his mission. Until his death in 1997, Hakim continued to work at his bookstore while occasionally lecturing about various subjects in Black history at colleges and universities. Still in operation, the bookstore is now run by Hakim’s three daughters and granddaughter, who keep Hakim’s legacy of education and inspiration alive. After serving a 12-year prison sentence in the Attica Correctional Facility, former member of the NOI and outspoken Black nationalist Martin Ramirez Sostre opened the Afro-Asian Bookshop on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, New York, in 1964. Growing up in Harlem, Sostre frequented the National Memorial African Bookstore, where he learned the powerful impact that such a space could potentially have on the Black community. Hardened by prison and considering himself too radical for groups such as the local chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other local activist groups, Sostre believed that the only way to liberate the Black community and “awaken and inspire the masses to action” was through the establishment of a “radical book shop” (McLaughlin 2014, 5). In the three short years that the Afro-Asian Bookshop was open, it served as a place where the local Black community, particularly youths, could unite, learn, and critically discuss history, current events, Black nationalism, and international affairs. Inspired by the African, Cuban, and Chinese revolutionary movements, the collection in Sostre’s store was international in scope, containing books about Black

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history and politics, novels written by Africans and African Americans, and classics written by Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, and others. Armed with “a talent for talking with young people in a street-smart manner,” Sostre was able to easily communicate his ideas with many Black youths and SUNY student radicals living in Buffalo (McLaughlin 2014, 9). Drawing them in with music playing out of the store’s speakers, Sostre regularly engaged visitors in political conversation. He also allowed them to read and even borrow his books. His store was in a sense an informal library. During the summer of 1967 when violence between the police and the Black community broke out, the Afro-Asian Bookshop served as a site of refuge for passersby and “freedom fighters,” as Sostre called them. Not only did the Afro-Asian Bookshop offer sanctuary during the violence, but Sostre also used the uprising as a teaching moment. No doubt referencing books from his store, he denounced police brutality and critically analyzed the state of Black America. Because of the Afro-Asian Bookshop’s involvement with the rebellion that summer, the FBI and the local police targeted the store. After being charged with inciting a riot, providing Molotov cocktails from his own basement, and peddling drugs in his shop, Sostre was arrested and his store was destroyed in a police raid. Though one scholar calls the evidence skeptical at best, Sostre was sentenced to four decades in prison and would never open his store again. Much like Vaughn’s and Michaux’s bookstores, the Afro-Asian Bookshop was considered a threat to white supremacy because of its emphasis on Black Power and political consciousness and its space reserved for mobilizing Buffalo’s radical youths. Opened in 1967 by Una Mulzac, Liberation Bookstore served as a Harlem landmark for four decades and was the only store of its type owned and operated by a Black woman. Mulzac, who spent time in Guyana as an activist, returned to the United States determined to bring her revolutionary spirit to the streets of Harlem in the form of a bookstore. With a sign on the door that read “If you don’t know, learn . . . if you know, teach!” and its walls lined with posters and photographs of important Black leaders, Liberation Bookstore, located at West 131st Street, was a repository of knowledge and power for Harlem’s Black community. The bookstore’s shelves were stocked with all types of books, even those by unknown conspiracy theorists and radical Afrocentric thinkers. After the closing of Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore in 1974, Liberation Bookstore served the ensuing generation of Black nationalists and those interested in African American history. Dedicated to her store, Mulzac never left the store during business hours unless she was protesting against police brutality, war, or racism. After serving Harlem’s Black community for 40 years, the store closed after Mulzac died in 2012. Founded in 1968 by former SNCC members in Washington, D.C., near Howard University, the Drum and Spear Bookstore and Press “became a warehouse for Black revolutionary literature, which attempted to challenge the racist representations of Black identity” and a “Pan African site of resistance” (Beckles 1996, 65,



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67). Beyond selling books, the bookstore also served as an autonomous and practical meeting place for community members; a space for political mobilization, radical discourse, and internationalist consciousness; and an informal educational institution. In 1970, the bookstore organized the “First African Liberation Day” (Beckles 1996, 66). Drum and Spear also belonged to a larger international network of Black bookstores that spanned from Europe to the Caribbean. According to the testimonies of the bookstore’s founders, by the early 1970s local authorities, the FBI, and the Internal Revenue Service began targeting Drum and Spear, contributing to its closing its doors before the decline of the Black Power era. Theologian, Civil Rights activist, and Black nationalist Reverend Albert Cleage founded the Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore and Cultural Center in 1970 in Detroit, Michigan. The bookstore was an extension of Cleage’s church, the Shrine of the Black Madonna Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church. As he expressed in his books The Black Messiah (1968) and Black Christian Nationalism: New Directions of the Black Church (1972), Cleage’s main objective was to empower his community by emphasizing Black consciousness and Black liberation through religion. As a Black Christian nationalist, he sought to politicize his congregation. When the Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore opened, it was one of the only places where one could purchase books by and about Africans and African Americans and authentic African artwork and clothing. Its first floor included all the store’s books and knickknacks, while the second floor was an art gallery dedicated to African artifacts and history. The bookstore’s involvement with local schools during Black History Month, in which they would bring suggested readings to teachers, was just one way the Shrine of Black Madonna helped its Detroit community. The Shrine of Black Madonna Bookstore and Cultural Center, with the help of Cleage, empowered the Black community by offering them a safe space to study history and culture, developing a firm sense of self in the face of racial oppression. Economic troubles caused the bookstore and cultural center to close in 2014, but other locations in Atlanta and Houston, opened in 1975 and 1986, respectively, remain in operation today. Several editorials have recently appeared in Ebony magazine lamenting that Black bookstores have been “disappearing from the urban landscape.” Echoing such sentiments, Troy Johnson, the founder of the African American Literature Book Club, has voiced concern about the high number of Black-owned independent bookstores that have closed during the last decade. For Johnson, this phenomenon is partly explained by a pronounced decline in young African Americans’ reading patterns. Notwithstanding such observations, arguably since the antebellum era Black-owned bookstores have played important roles in Black communities throughout the nation by not only selling books focusing on the experiences of African descendants that mainstream bookstores do not offer but also providing a physical space for people to congregate and politically mobilize, discuss issues

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relevant to Black peoples, meet famous Black authors, listen to lectures from a range of scholars and activists, and, simply put, increase their knowledge. Like other Black-owned businesses, Black bookstores have been impactful institutions that have functioned on many different levels. Pero Gaglo Dagbovie and Alyssa Lopez See also: Black Arts Movement; Boggs, James and Grace Lee; Group on Advanced Leadership; Malcolm X; Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry); Obadele, Gaidi (Milton Henry); Parks, Rosa Further Reading Beckles, Colin A. 1996. “Black Bookstores, Black Power, and the FBI: The Case of Drum and Spear.” Western Journal of Black Studies 20: 63–71. Beckles, Colin A. 1998. “‘We Shall Not Be Terrorized’: The Political Legacy of En­ gland’s Black Bookshops.” Journal of Black Studies 29: 51–71. Emblidge, David. 2008. “Rallying Point: Lewis Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore.” Publishing Research Quarterly 24: 267–276. Fraser, Gerald C. 1976a. “Lewis H. Michaux One for the Books.” New York Times, May 23, http://www.nytimes.com/1976/05/23/archives/lewis-h-michauxone-for-the-books.html. Fraser, Gerald C. 1976b. “Lewis Michaux Is Eulogized in Harlem as a Bookseller Who Changed Lives.” New York Times, August 31, http://www.nytimes.com/1976/08/31/archives /lewis-michaux-is-eulogized-in-harlem-as-a-bookseller-who-changed.html?_r=0. Hill, Marc Lamont. 2011. “Black Bookstores as Literacy Counterpublics.” In Urban Literacies: Critical Perspectives on Language, Learning, and Community, edited by Valerie Kinloch, 38–52. New York: Teachers College Press. Lewis-McCoy, L’Heureux. 2012. “Why We Must Save Black Bookstores.” Ebony, July 16, http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/why-we-must-save-Black-bookstores#a xzz3pDpaMK00. Luna, Claire. 2002. “Alfred Ligon, 96; Started Oldest Black Bookstore.” Los Angeles Times, August 16, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/aug/16/local/me-ligon16. McLaughlin, Malcolm. 2014. “Storefront Revolutionary: Martin Sostre’s Afro-Asian Bookshop, Black Liberation Culture, and the New Left, 1964–75.” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture 7(1): 1–27. Nelson, Vaunda Micheaux. 2012. No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller. Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Lab. Smith, Reginald. 2012. “Black Bookstores in the United States: A Short View by the Numbers.” SSRN, December 30, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=218 0044. Spratling, Cassandra. 2014. “Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore’s Future Uncertain with Liquidation Sale This Weekend.” Detroit Free Press, February 5, http://archive .freep.com/article/20140204/NEWS05/302040128/Shrine-Black-Bookstore-Liqui dating-Detroit. Vaughn, Ed. 1989. Interview by Sam Pollard. Washington University Digital Gateway, June 6, http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eii/eiiweb/vau5427.0309.166edvaughn.html.



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Wallace, Andy. 1997. “D. Hakim, Longtime Bookstore Operator.” The Inquirer Daily News, April 27, http://articles.philly.com/1997–04–29/news/25529913_1_books-Black -history-Black-power. White, Ammi. 2011. “Black, Christian, Radical and Beloved.” Blac Detroit, October, http://www.blacdetroit.com/BLAC-Detroit/October-2011/Black-Christian-Radical-and -Beloved/.

Black Churches The year 1966 marked a turning point in the history of the Black church. That summer, James Meredith began his one-man March Against Fear campaign. With a goal of encouraging Mississippi Black residents to exercise their right to vote, Meredith planned to march from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. On the second day of the march, however, he was attacked by a gunman and suffered gunshots to his neck, back, and both legs. While Meredith was in the hospital recovering, leaders from major Civil Rights organizations promised to continue the march in Meredith’s name. Among those leaders were Martin Luther King Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); Floyd McKissick, head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); and Stokely Carmichael and Cleveland Sellers, leaders from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). These leaders and thousands of others continued the march’s route to Jackson in what would become known as the Meredith March. Along the way, the marchers faced several conflicts including clashes with state troopers that forced the marchers off the road and onto the sidewalk. With every conflict, the ideological divisions among the marchers grew. When Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC activists chanted “Freedom,” Carmichael and SNCC activists countered with the more radical “Uhuru,” the Swahili word for “freedom.” On June 16 in Greenwood, Mississippi, and after a few days of marching, Carmichael was arrested for getting in a dispute with authorities over where marches could camp out overnight. After being released, an agitated Carmichael spoke boldly and candidly, saying that “This is the 27th time I have been arrested—I ain’t going to jail no more. I ain’t going to jail no more. What we’re gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power! The white folks in the state of Mississippi ain’t nothing but a bunch of racists” (Carmichael and Thelwell 2003, 507). This was followed by chants from Carmichael demanding “What do we want?” and the crowd responding “Black Power.” The echoes of Carmichael’s call to consciousness were heard around the nation. From Civil Rights organizations and their leaders to Black churches, Carmichael’s message of Black Power was widely discussed. Black clergy held church meetings, released statements, and organized conferences to discuss whether Black

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Power was a viable message they would incorporate into their church theology and practice or was a message they should vehemently reject. While not all churches accepted Black Power’s message, Carmichael’s call lit a fire that was dormant among many churches. Though Black nationalism and Black self-determination had long been pillars of Black churches historically, the term “Black Power” struck a new chord with several institutions. This new tune that the Black churches sang empowered them to speak truth to both the white power structure and establishment Blacks who passively accepted the status quo. A little over a month after Carmichael’s fiery Black Power speech, an informal group of clergy assembled in New York to craft a response to Carmichael’s call. This group, composed of mostly northern Black male clergy, would go on to call themselves the National Council of Negro Churchmen and later the National Committee of Black Churchmen (NCBC), reflecting a change in consciousness inspired by the Black Power Movement, and released a statement in the New York Times supporting Black Power: We realize that neither the term “power” nor the term “Christian Conscience” are easy matters to talk about, and especially in the context of race relations in America. The fundamental distortion facing us in the controversy about “Black Power” is rooted in the gross imbalance of power and conscience between Negroes and white Americans. It is this distortion, mainly, which is responsible for the widespread, though often inarticulate, assumption that white people are justified in getting what they want through the use of power, but that Negro Americans must, either by nature or by circumstances, make their appeal only through conscience. As a result, the power of white men and the conscience of Black men have both been corrupted. The power of white men is corrupted because it meets little meaningful resistance from Negroes to temper it and keep white men from aping God. The conscience of Black men is corrupted because having no power to implement the demands of conscience, concern for justice is transmuted into a distorted form of love which, in the absence of justice, becomes chaotic self-surrender. Powerlessness breeds a race of beggars. We are now faced with a situation where conscience-less power meets powerless conscience, threatening the very foundations of our nation. (Harvey and Goff 2007, 177) The NCBC met and decided that Black Power was not a message contrary to its Christian faith. Rather, it recognized the need for Black people to have real political power instead of appealing for change through moral reasoning. Throughout the rest of the statement, the clergy addressed important groups including America’s political leaders, white clergy and religious leaders, and Black citizens. To the leaders of the nation, the NCBC made it clear that they deplored any acts of violence that the term “Black Power” may have connoted but noted that the



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leaders of the country should shift their focus toward real problems. The real problem was not found in the Black ghettos of America but instead was found in the “silent and covert violence which white middle-class America inflicts upon the victims of the inner city.” Their critique did not stop there and extended to the leaders of the nation and their failure to “use American power to create equal opportunity in life”; this, according to the clergy, “is the real problem and not the anguished cry for ‘Black Power’” (Harvey and Goff 2007, 177). They viewed the call for Black Power as a demand for an authentic American democracy. This group of clergy saw the acquisition of power as something positive—not something that would undermine the gains that the Civil Rights Movement had already made. In fact, as they highlighted, the so-called achievements of the movement were minimal and limited. The NCBC urged America’s political leaders to do more. To white clergy, the NCBC failed to understand white angst over the Black Power concept. Particularly given the history of the church, the NCBC reasoned that it was “Black men who were long ago forced out of the white church to create and wield ‘Black Power.’” To their white colleagues in ministry, they called for a more “honest integration” where Black and white folks “participate with power” together (“Black Power’ Statement by National Committee of Negro Churchmen” 1966). The NCBC also addressed the Black community by calling on it to organize. For them, power lay in community organizing. Rooted in the concept of Black Power, the clergy asked Black folks to be “reconciled” to themselves by having pride in their Blackness. The clergy urged Blacks to not be afraid of Black Power, as Black Power had always existed in Black communities and could be found in “the Negro church, in Negro fraternities and sororities, in our professional associations, and in opportunities afforded to Negroes who make decisions in some of the integrated organizations of our society” (Harvey and Goff 2007, 178). As for the Black church, the clergy argued that “too often the Negro church has stirred its members away from the reign of God in this world to a distorted and complacent view of an other worldly conception of God’s power.” The clergy challenged Black churches to be more accountable to their congregations by fighting against racial injustice. The NCBC was not alone in its endorsement of Black Power. Other church associations and Christian-affiliated organizations joined them. For instance, on September 29, 1966, the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church held a meeting that sought to “correct ‘historic distortions’ about Black Power.” During that meeting, the board urged its Methodist members to read and disseminate the statement about Black Power released by the NCBC. In addition, churches opened up their edifices to discuss Black Power. On October 29, 1966, the Chicago branch of CORE sponsored a conference held at the Chicago United Church of Christ to define the myriad aspects of Black Power. The theme of the conference was “Promise of Black Power.” Other Christian-affiliated organizations commented on

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the importance of Black Power. For example, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, headed by Reverend Fred I. Shuttlesworth who also served as secretary of the SCLC, insisted that “in terms of American democracy today, there is nothing improper about Negro people demanding that they should be able to elect representatives of their own choosing to key political offices, especially in those areas of the South and in the North where they are concentrated and in clear numerical majority” (“SCEF Uphold ‘Black Power’ as Northern Clerics Rap Slogan” 1966). Locally, some church leaders adopted Black Power as their church’s central political worldview. There is perhaps no better example of this than of Detroit’s Reverend Albert Cleage and his church, the Central Congregational Church. Years before Carmichael’s call to consciousness, Cleage became the mouthpiece for the self-described New Guard, a group of radical religious leaders. For Cleage, the white assault on Black people was not just political but was also psychological. White supremacy was so deeply ingrained into the psyche of Black folks that it even affected their religious figures. Cleage’s solution was a Black nationalistic interpretation of the Christian faith and the Bible. This way, not only would his preaching and message provide his congregation with healing power, but they would also give them ammunition to fight for material power here on Earth. Cleage had a gift for speaking, and his oratory skills excited audiences. He transformed the Bible into a book that forced congregations to reimagine biblical stories as commentaries on how to carry out revolution. The reverend believed that Heaven should be fought for on Earth because there was nothing more sacred than the liberation of Black people. He challenged his congregation to imagine Jesus as the Black Messiah who fought battles against political and economic oppression with the help of his disciples. This recasting of Jesus helped Cleage transform his church into a place for political activism that attracted many of Detroit’s Black Power activists. In 1964 he helped found the Michigan branch of the Freedom Now Party and ran for governor. Though he lost, Cleage played an important role in galvanizing Blacks in Detroit for political action. By 1967 with a budding Black Power Movement, Cleage renamed his church the Shrine of the Black Madonna and preached his sermons under a portrait of a Black Mary and a Black Baby Jesus. Finally, the Black Power Movement was a catalyst in the academy as well, particularly in the work of James Cone, a systematic theologian. In 1969 Cone published his first book, Black Theology & Black Power, that combined ideas of Black Power with the Black church’s long tradition of liberation theology. In this work, Cone placed Black Power at the center of the Christian faith and argued that there was no contradiction between Black Power and Christianity: It is my thesis, however, that Black Power, even in its most radical expressions, is not the antithesis of Christianity, nor is it a heretical idea to be tol­ erated with painful forbearance. It is, rather, Christ’s central message to twentieth century America. And unless the empirical denominational makes



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a determined effort to recapture the man Jesus through a total identification with the suffering poor as expressed in Black Power, the church will become exactly what Christ is not. (Cone 1997, 1) For Cone, there was no “irreconcilable conflict” between the church’s central message and Black Power. In regard to the religious critics of Black Power, Cone believed that they could only remain faithful to God by detaching themselves from the racist power structures that bind the church and launch attacks against white supremacy in all its manifestations. If the church did not do that, then according to Cone it was just as guilty and as responsible as the crises that were occurring in the Black ghettos of America. Moreover, Cone recognized that Black Power activists had legitimate criticisms of the Black church. After all, Christianity was a religion that was introduced to Black people in America by way of slavery, and “the oppressor has used it as a means of stifling the oppressed concern for present inequalities. Naturally as the slave questions his existence as a slave, he also questions the religion of the enslaver.” According to Cone, Black Power criticisms of the Christian church were legitimate because theologians, particularly in the academy, had not yet confronted the relationship between the Christian gospel and Black slavery. Cone’s development of Black theology was an attempt to confront the history and to articulate “a theology whose sole purpose is to apply the freeing power of the gospel to Black people under white oppression” (Cone 1997, 22). Cone’s fresh interpretation of the gospel was not without its criticisms, however. Black women such as Delores Williams, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, and Pauli Murray challenged the theological perspectives of Cone and others, arguing that they failed to take the realities of Black women seriously. These Black women called for a deep interrogation of the ways that Black men, in the world and in Black churches, participate in the subjugation of Black women and indicated that any real theological perspective claiming to be liberating must confront its sexism. The Black church’s acceptance of Black Power was by no means universal. For example, on November 4, 1966, a group of about 100 clergy met at the Summit Conference of Negro Religious Leaders. These ministers advocated “law and order” and indicated that “the Black Power quest must not be condoned or followed for it is divisive and is an expression of discrimination from the Negro’s point of view when used as a separatist movement among Negroes against white people” (Parker 1973, 245). While the clergy did denounce the gradual approach to Civil Rights, they argued that Black Power and its separatism had no place in the church. Other criticisms from within the church tended to fear white backlash to Black Power. White backlash would mean that the particular gains made by the Civil Rights Movement such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could be lost. This legislation promised Blacks access into public accommodations that, some reasoned, Black Power seemed to undermine. King appreciated the need for Black Power when it meant instilling pride in Black people. Later in King’s life, he even laid

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out political and economic plans that Black people should follow to move past the legislative gains that the Civil Rights Movement had procured. These plans closely resembled Black Power ideology by calling for Black political leaders in Black communities, for Blacks using their consuming power to boycott large companies that did not equally serve or employ Blacks, and for plans to decrease Black unemployment. Though King become more militant later in his life, he departed from the Black Power Movement largely when it came to violence, as he remained convinced that nonviolence was the best approach. The Black Power Movement certainly had an effect on the religious utterances of the Black church. It changed how Blacks in and out of the church viewed themselves and their freedom struggle. It emboldened many Black churches and Black religious thinkers and leaders to speak to power with an unapologetically Black voice that reflected not only the pain and anger but also the pride and joy felt in Black communities. The Black Power Movement challenged the Black church to be an institution that would fight for the needs and lives of Black people in the present rather than waiting for life after death. Joshua Crutchfield See also: Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Cone, James Hal; Religion and Black Power Further Reading “Black Power’ Statement by National Committee of Negro Churchmen.” 1966. New York Times, July 31. Carmichael, Stokely, and Michael Thelwell. 2003. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). New York: Simon and Schuster. Chapman, Mark L. 1996. Christianity on Trial: African American Religious Thought before and after Black Power. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Cleage, Albert B. 1989. The Black Messiah. Trenton, NJ: Africa World. Cone, James H. 1997. Black Theology and Black Power. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Harvey, Paul, and Philip Goff, eds. 2007. The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press. Parker, J. A. 1973. Angela Davis: The Making of a Revolutionary. n.p.: Arlington House Publishers. Savage, Barbara Dianne. 2008. Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. “SCEF Uphold ‘Black Power’ as Northern Clerics Rap Slogan.” 1966. Chicago Defender, November 12. Warnock, Raphael G. 2014. The Divided Mind of the Black Church. New York: New York University Press. Wilmore, Gayraud S. 1998. Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.



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Black Economic Union While Black Power dominated much of the mid-1960s, numerous Black activists and scholars promoted Green Power, African Americans’ use of capitalism and business development as a means of obtaining freedom, justice, and equality. The Black Economic Union (BEU) was a group that promoted business development within Black communities in an effort to get African Americans involved in the economic infrastructure of the United States. Founded as the Negro Industrial and Economic Union in 1965 and officially incorporated in 1966, the BEU was the brainchild of Jim Brown, former actor and Cleveland Browns running back. Black Los Angeles residents businessman John Daniels and activist Maggie Hathaway, two friends of Brown, helped him develop the concept for the organization. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, many Black male professional athletes addressed social and political issues at the local and national level; they saw themselves connected to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Brown believed

Former professional football player Jim Brown, President of the Black Economic Union, confers with a resident of Holly Springs, Mississippi, February 1970. (AP Photo)

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that Black professional athletes had to play a critical role in the Black freedom struggle. The formation of the BEU was one particular manifestation. Brown served as president of the nonprofit organization headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. His former teammates from the Cleveland Browns and other professional sports teams served as the BEU’s core. In particular, Browns offensive lineman John Wooten was executive vice president, and other members included Browns teammates Sidney Williams and Walter Beach III, Curtis McClinton Jr. of the Kansas City Chiefs, Jim Shorter and Brady Keys of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Brigman Owens and Bobby Mitchell of the Washington Redskins. The BEU also had a broad base of support across the nation. Drawing on their fame and notoriety, BEU members used their influence to garner the support of Black athletes in professional football, basketball, and baseball along with Black politicians, community organizers, and businessmen. Other contributors included Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics, heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali, actors Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier, and Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner. Carl Stokes, the first African American mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, and the first elected Black mayor of a major U.S. city, served as the legal counsel for the BEU and was a great addition to the organization. In May 1968 Stokes enacted a program called “Cleveland: NOW!,” a $1.5 billion effort that was created to rebuild the city by focusing on job opportunities, youth programs, health and welfare assistance, and the improvement of neighborhood infrastructures, particularly around housing. The BEU was aided by the program, as it was able to focus on two particular efforts. The first was the creation of social programs that addressed poverty on local and national levels and also gave Black youths work opportunities. This was achieved through “Project J.I.M.” and “Food First,” two of the BEU’s seminal programs. The second focus involved the BEU assisting Black businessmen with long-term business plans, marketing advice, building networks with other business owners, and financial support. Moreover, the BEU sought to aid African Americans in understanding how to create opportunities for themselves in a capitalistic society by developing training programs and securing low-interest and federal loans to Black businessmen. In the summer of 1968, the BEU opened offices in Washington, D.C., and Kansas City, Missouri, in an effort to further its goal of creating business opportunities for Blacks in major cities with large Black populations across the United States. The Kansas City office, spearheaded by Curtis McClinton, had great success in helping to develop numerous businesses and even a bank. For Jim Brown, the BEU firmly believed that economic self-sufficiency was essential to racial advancement for Blacks in America. The BEU identified the need for African Americans to create their own business ventures and not depend solely on the goodwill of whites to integrate and achieve economic equality.



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Aside from their work in Black communities across the United States, members of the BEU were integral in the development of businesses in the realm of sports. In 1967 they were key players with Main Bout, a boxing management group initiated by Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali. BEU members controlled the ancillary rights to Ali’s fight in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh. It was the first time that Blacks comprised a majority interest in such a company. However, Ali’s political views on the Vietnam War and subsequent conviction for draft evasion put his professional boxing career and the success of Main Bout in limbo. On June 4, 1967, Jim Brown and John Wooten organized a closed-door meeting with members of the BEU and Ali to discuss the sincerity of Ali’s stance on the war. In attendance were Brown, Wooten, Beach, Williams, McClinton, Mitchell, Shorter, Russell, Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Willie Davis, and Stokes. For hours, they debated among each other the pros and cons of Ali’s decision. They also discussed whether they would show solidarity and support Ali’s right not to enlist and face their own economic losses, especially with Main Bout. There was also the option to object to his stance and not publicly support him. At the end of the meeting a press conference was convened, and all parties involved joined together to express their support for Muhammad Ali and his decision not to join the war effort on religious grounds. Historically, this gathering has served as the BEU’s most notable moment. While there were efforts to create commercial opportunities for Blacks, several members of the BEU, such as Walter Beach III, John Wooten, and Sidney Williams, embraced Green Power in the realm of professional athletics. They contested Cleveland Browns ownership regarding their compensation as professional athletes from 1967 to 1972. The salaries of professional athletes had been kept private for much of the first half of the 20th century, and by the 1960s Black males during this period began to fight for greater pay, as the majority of white players were paid more than the Black players. Interestingly, regardless of the sport they played, professional athletes were restricted in their movement and their ability to profit from their own athletic prowess, as team owner controlled their fate. With the rise of revenue in the National Football League in the late 1960s, many players directed their attention to securing larger salaries, eradicating the reserve clause to allow them to barter their services with other teams without interference, and instituting retirement benefits once their playing careers were over. Their efforts were critical to the formation of the National Football League Players Association. Two BEU members, John Mackey and Brigman Owens, served integral roles in leadership positions. Mackey served as the association’s first president, while Owens operated as assistant executive director and associate counsel. Overall, the BEU was one demonstration of how Black males utilized their social capital as professional athletes to influence the lives of African Americans

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in the Black freedom struggle. The BEU assisted nearly 400 Black businesses during the organization’s tenure from 1966 to 1974. Depending heavily on private donors and federal funding, the BEU was able to utilize more than $2 million during that period for programming and business development. Some enterprises were able to thrive, while others did not. As of 2015, the chapters in Kansas City and Cleveland remained in operation. These offices focus on Black business development and the construction and development of urban housing opportunities. Many of the professional athletes who were members of the BEU have long left the organization but are active contributors in their respective communities. Robert A. Bennett III See also: Ali, Muhammad; Black United Front Further Reading Bennett, Robert A., III. 2013. “You Can’t Have Black Power without Green Power: The Black Economic Union,” PhD dissertation, Ohio State University. Bond, Julian, et al. 1966. “A Symposium: Black Power—It’s Meaning and Measure.” Negro Digest (November): 91.

Black Internationalism Black internationalism was essential to the era of Black Power. To fully comprehend the influence of Black international efforts during this intense period of selfdetermined activism, the historical forces and global dynamics that enabled and sustained its dynamism must be examined. Depending on usage, the term “Black internationalism” is a noun, an adjective, or a verb. As a noun, it refers to a political movement that advocates greater economic and political cooperation among people of African descent to overcome subordination, domination, and repression by Eurocentric forces. As an adjective, “Black internationalism” references a strategy that encompasses the concerted global ideological, political, and/or economic beliefs held by people of African descent. These beliefs have frequently emerged as a response to the conditions of bondage and economic exploitation that have affected the lives of Black people worldwide. Black internationalism recognizes that the forces of oppression are global in nature and that they emanate largely from the same political and economic sources. As a verb, “Black internationalism” refers to a specific action consciously or unconsciously exerted by people of African descent to eliminate oppression and improve their quality of life on a local, regional, and global scale. Black internationalism is therefore a broad and inclusive concept. It takes into account the global reaction of people of African



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descent in the United States who struggle in tandem with other peoples of color to overcome those seeking to enslave, exploit, deprive, or exterminate them. At the core of Black internationalism is universal emancipation, which critically intersects with Marxist tradition as revealed in the theoretical and historical contributions of Black radical internationalists such as C. L. R. James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and George Padmore. However, Cedric Robinson (1983) points out that as a Western construct, Marxism collides with the Black radical tradition. The Marxist perspective, he argues, for cultural reasons is unfavorable for deriving apposite solutions to problems facing people of African descent. In contrast, Black internationalism grew from the collective experience of African people worldwide. A unifying characteristic of adherents to Black internationalism as ideology is that they share life experiences borne because of oppression based on skin color and kinship. These dynamics reveal Black internationalism’s potential not only in the United States but also abroad in any nation-state seeking to maintain economic oppression and political subordination.

Origins It is unfortunate but true that the foreign policy decisions of the United States and other nations in the West are viewed more often than not as antithetical to the interests of nonwhite people. As such, African American actors in foreign policy, such as ambassadors, have found themselves in the awkward position of “foreign policy dissenters,” a term coined by Hanes Walton (2012). While the politics of Black ministers, envoys, and ambassadors holding formal government positions are necessarily constrained, informal actors have much greater latitude for action as foreign policy dissenters. This is so because the latter have fewer ties to governmental rules and regulations, and the motivation of the people can indeed instigate a profound commitment to change. These complexities are revealed in the work of West and Martin (2009), who maintain that it was during the Age of Revolution that Black internationalism splintered into two fundamental orientations—revolutionary and revivalist. The Haitian Revolution aided the formation of Black internationalism with the forging of linkages between Haitians and Black people enslaved and free in the United States who sought to defeat racial slavery and the evolving brand of capitalism that contributed to spread. The brutality of the American system of slavery, arguably the most repressive and violent of such systems ever to exist, was a major impetus for global capitalism, as exemplified by the triangular slave trade, which encompassed the transport and trade of human beings from Africa to Europe and the Americas, including the Caribbean. The Haitian Revolution served as an inspiration for the insurrections of Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, and Nat Turner. The impact of the Haitian Revolution in the United States reinforced the notion that the roots of Black internationalism stem from the experiences of a dispersed

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people who during the global proliferation of slavery in the 16th century were precast as the “first international proletariat” of the emerging capitalist world economy (Magubane 1984). Thus, the fusion of Black global movements in this era stood as a response to Black world repression and was facilitated by Black internationalists who joined forces to struggle against a global system of slavery driven by a worldwide capitalism that was racially configured.

Evolution Following World War I Black internationalism began to congeal as a strategy, in part due to the prevalence of the Jim Crow system especially in the Deep South. The obstinate resistance to racial equality eventually led Black leadership to conclude that the political, economic, and social well-being of African Americans could only be secured by bringing the matter to the world stage through activism. Moreover, the cataclysmic domination of African states in this era was a driving force for Black internationalism, as there was growing recognition that the political and economic conditions of Black lives worldwide were intertwined and influenced by the same global forces of capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. At the beginning of the 1900s, important Black international leaders emerged throughout the African diaspora. Their rise in part reflected the dire political and legal straits imposed on people of African descent in the United States. Overseas, African people and their culture were subjected to the disruption imposed as a consequence of the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, which institutionalized the European scramble for Africa. Among the most prominent leaders of the period was Du Bois, who understood not only the problem and implications of colonization but also the importance of the African continent to the Black diaspora. Du Bois poignantly stated that “The African movement means to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews, the centralization of race effort and the recognition of a racial fount. To help bear the burden of Africa does not mean any lessening of effort in our own problem at home. Rather, it means increased interest. For any ebullition of action and feeling that results in an amelioration of the lot of Africa tends to ameliorate the condition of colored peoples throughout the world. And no man liveth to himself” (Du Bois 1919). The upshot is that Black internationalism imbues the centrality of the African continent and asserts that Black people worldwide have been deliberately undermined. The goal, then, is for people of African descent to seize power in an effort to change the extant global condition. Established and led by Jamaican Marcus Garvey, the Garvey movement became the largest movement of African descendants in the Western Hemisphere. The mass support for a movement that openly asserted Black pride and Black selfdetermination was indicative of the quality and nature of an emergent Black



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internationalism. The Universal Negro Improvement Association was considered a threat to the national security of the United States and was decimated. However, the late 1930s brought a dramatic upsurge in Black political organizing in London and the United States. Developments in the Caribbean and Africa and the instillation of new leadership helped fuel Black global activity. With Ethiopia’s defeat of Italy in 1896 and Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905, it seemed that white supremacy was waning. However, by 1934 Ethiopia, which remained the only independent African state, was destined to be challenged. A border dispute with Ethiopia provided the pretext for Benito Mussolini, prime minister of Italy, to invade. The reaction of African Americans to the invasion was meteoric. In the United States many communities raised funds to support the Black nation, and in major cities such as New York organizations were formed to lend support, including United Aid to Ethiopians and the Ethiopian World Federation. Black internationalism was thrust to a new level as a result. During this period, Black Muslim influences, including those from the Garvey movement, were a potent force in shaping the quality of Black internationalism. Also noteworthy are the efforts of Du Bois, Alphaeus Hunton, and Paul Robeson, who led an anticolonial movement from within the Council of African Affairs. The council joined with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was led by Walter White. A fundamental tenet of Black internationalists was that the struggles for liberation in the United States, Africa, and Asia for democratic and Civil Rights were inextricably connected. The escalation of colonialism in the post–World War II era fortified the linkages between African liberation movements and Ghana, China, Algeria, and Cuba. Black radicals of the period, many of whom were products of the modern Civil Rights Movement, were drawn to these countries even though they were viewed as radical within the Western context. The Civil Rights Movement aimed to change the social, political, economic, and moral core of the United States on the issue of race. The coexistence of global movements helped encourage a symbiotic relationship among Civil Rights and international activists, leading to an increasingly coherent, unified, and powerful exhortation of internationalist discourse. Increasingly, vehement public resistance to the Vietnam War unearthed a shift in power relations around the world. This was significant because it supported the movement’s quest for global solidarity, especially with “the shirtless and barefoot people of the land” (King 1964). Despite the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, as revealed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, many of its actors became increasingly disillusioned by the stubbornness of white resistance to Black equality. National liberation was prominent in every part of the formerly colonized world, and the erosion of colonialism that had been advanced by the Dutch, French, and British introduced new nation-states composed of people of color. In

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1961, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) and others were arrested at the United Nations. They were protesting the murder of Congo’s premier, Patrice Lumumba. The protesters had supported African independence movements in Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, and Guinea. Malcolm X’s separation from the Nation of Islam (NOI) prompted another iteration of Black internationalism. As he grew increasingly disenchanted with Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm pursued education beyond his mentor’s teachings. He traveled to the Middle East and Africa, and he completed the hajj in 1964. When he returned to the United States, Malcolm disavowed the NOI. He established the Organization of Afro-American Unity and the Muslim Mosque, Inc., in an effort to disavow racism. His exposure outside the United States broadened his vision of people and struggle. He openly and consistently emphasized Black selfdefense, Black self-determination, and Pan-Africanism. Then on April 4, 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. shattered many of the hopes and dreams of the rank-and-file supporters of the Civil Rights Movement. Prior to that fateful day in April, King had increasingly begun to turn attention to the ongoing economic crisis, which long characterized the lives of the majority of Black Americans. The changing tide was exemplified by his efforts to help organize sanitation department workers in the city of Memphis. King’s untimely death, however, hastened the movement’s decline and further ignited Black militancy, as many became disenchanted with the strict adherence to nonviolent struggle in the face of what appeared to be increasingly vicious and terroristic attacks by whites. Black Power became a worldwide movement. Drawing strength from the challenge of African descendants worldwide to domination by whites, by 1970 radical Maoists of the Black Power Movement believed that Black liberation would develop in stages. The first stage was national liberation, which would be followed by the second stage, a social transformation encompassing a form of socialism. The parallels drawn between the Black struggle in the United States and independence, freedom, and social justice movements abroad encouraged both African American scholars and radicals to embrace internal colonialism as the framework for analyzing the economic predicament of Black people in the United States, particularly in major cities where their population tended to be concentrated. Along with Malcolm’s transformation, the so-called period of Black radicalization also saw the emergence of other groups including the Black Panther Party (BPP), Republic of New Africa, the Congress of African People, and the Us organization. However, it was the BPP, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966 in Oakland, California, that become profoundly interwoven into the fabric of Black internationalism. Early in its relatively short existence, the BPP opened an international headquarters. By doing so, Elbert “Big Man” Howard along with Newton and Seale sought to regularize the party’s international operations to coincide with its



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growing impact in the United States. Howard became a key international emissary for the party. As it gained notoriety, the party acquired worldwide recognition that positioned it to build solidarity with movements for justice around the world. In 1967, the BPP received its first invitation from an international labor union, in Montreal, Canada. This was followed by invitations for its members to visit and speak in Japan, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and Algeria. Although the party was invited abroad as a demonstration of its solidarity with women, students, and labor groups, these travels created the opportunity to spread awareness and understanding of Black life in the United States. In Bermuda, England, Australia, Israel, and India, Panther opponents embodied the goals and tactics of the party (Clemons and Jones 1999). Black internationalism is expressed through a myriad of ideas, ideologies, cultures, and social and political behaviors geared toward the attainment of freedom, social justice, and equality. Black internationalism holds that the status and conditions of Blacks in America are most effectively subject to change when internal or domestic political pressures proactively merge with power at the global level. These dynamics are demonstrated by the experiences of Black abolitionists and the Garvey, Black Power, and Civil Rights Movements—all of which benefited from and contributed to the formation of Black internationalism. Internationalization of the historical struggles of African Americans has been constructive to the continuing worldwide struggle to bring true independence and freedom to Africa and its descendants worldwide. The evolving world order combined with globalization suggests that Black internationalism will persist for the near future, although it will likely continue to adapt to global changes. Indeed, the climate of globalization will likely strengthen the linkages that propel Black internationalism, including the diffusion of knowledge, strategies and tactics, and innovation generally for improving the conditions of African people and annihilating repressive forces wherever they exist. Perhaps most important for the future is that technology will continue to be a driving force of globalization, and information technology in particular will increasingly aid the diffusion of Black internationalism. Michael L. Clemons See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Panther Party; Malcolm X; Newton, Huey P.; Pan-Africanism; Seale, Bobby Further Reading Bush, Roderick. 2009. The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Clemons, Michael L., and Charles E. Jones. 1999. “Global Solidarity: The Black Panther Party in the International Arena.” New Political Science 12(2): 183.

108 | “Black Is Beautiful” Du Bois, W. E. B. 1972. “Africa.” In The Emerging Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois: Essays and Editorials from the Crisis, edited by Henry L. Moon, 217–219. New York: Simon and Schuster. King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1964. “Nobel Lecture: The Quest for Peace and Justice.” Nobel Prize, December 11, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king -lecture.html. Magubane, Bernard. 1984. “The Political Economy of the Black World: Origin of the Present Crisis.” In The Next Decade: Theoretical and Research Issues in Africana Studies, edited by James Turner, 281–298. Ithaca, NY: Africana Research and Studies. Plummer, Gayle. 2013. In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, Cedric. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Slate, Nico. 2012. Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walton, Hanes. 2012. American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom. 6th ed. New York: Longman. West, Cornel. 1988. “Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition–Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric J. Robinson.” Monthly Review 40(4) (September): 51–56. West, Michael O., and William G. Martin. 2009. “The Haitian Revolution and the Forging of the Black International.” In From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution, edited by Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, 72–104. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. 2013. Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

“Black Is Beautiful” “Black is Beautiful” is a slogan that was popularized in the 1960s and was integral to the philosophical shaping of the Black Power Movement. “Black is Beautiful” aimed to cultivate an ontology of Blackness not rooted in negative, dehumanizing, and oppressive imagery—imagery that was defined from outside the culture and history of people of Black African descent. This oppressive imagery manifested in popular culture’s stereotypical framing of African American people. These stereotypes included perceptions of African American people as lazy, shiftless, irresponsible, amoral, lacking in intelligence, primitive, dangerous, criminal, and aesthetically ugly (big lips, big noses, kinky hair, and dark skin). Consistently, since Africans were stolen from their homeland, popular culture through political, economic, and sociocultural devices depicted Blacks as less than human (slaves as property equivalent to chattel), childlike (Sambo), and less intelligent than



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white people (eugenics). By the 1960s such perceptions dominated how African Americans were perceived writ large. This cultivation of a negative ontology of Blackness was deliberate and intentional. It was a collective strategy intended to create and reinforce a social hierarchy based on race and to reinforce whiteness as the standard. This ensured that white people would continue to enjoy unearned privilege felt through economics, social standing, and self-esteem. But it also, as Carter G. Woodson (1998) indicated, contributed to the “mis-education of the Negro,” as it required Black people to accept externally defined understandings of their beingness and an uncritical acceptance of their “place”—understandings and acceptance designed to not only consign them to a place of inferiority but also strip them of seeing self and the broader culture as positive, worthy, and good. It is against this backdrop that “Black is Beautiful” lunged into the lexicon of everyday Black Americans and became an important and impactful slogan of the 1960s Black Power Movement. “Black is Beautiful” is often characterized as a cultural movement that began in the 1960s, but its origin dates back to the mid-1800s. John Stewart Rock, a Renaissance man, was thought to have used the term in a speech in 1858. In addition to being the first Black person admitted to the bar by the U.S. Supreme Court, he was also a dentist, a doctor, an abolitionist, and a Civil Rights leader. Even though his speech at Faneuil Hall did not include the exact phrasing “Black is beautiful,” he did speak of the beauty of Black people. An excerpt from his speech titled “I Will Sink or Swim with My Race” asserts the intelligence, value, and beauty of African Americans: White men may despise, ridicule, slander, and abuse us; they may seek as they always have done to divide us, and make us feel degraded; but no man shall cause me to turn my back upon my race. With it I will sink or swim. The prejudice which some white men have, or affect to have, against my color gives me no pain. . . . I would have you understand, that I not only love my race, but am pleased with my color; and while many colored persons may feel degraded by being called negroes, and wish to be classed among other races more favored, I shall feel it my duty, my pleasure and my pride, to concentrate my feeble efforts in elevating to a fair position a race to which I am especially identified by feelings and by blood. (Rock 1958) Rock’s message of the beauty of Blackness physically, mentally, and emotionally was clear and undeniable. As an individual, he believed in the greatness and appreciated the beauty of his people. “Black is Beautiful” was therefore not just designed as a cultural affirmation but was also a political statement. It was an advocation for respect of culture and personhood alongside Civil Rights.

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“Black is Beautiful” was a message that was externally directed but was also internally driven. Politically (externally) it needed to correct misperceptions held by the dominant culture as part of a broader plan to advance the rights and interests of African American people. It was a message directed to those outside of the African American race. For African American people, it needed to create from within racial pride, self-efficacy, and communal responsibility for the collective legacy of African American personhood. In other words, African American people needed to understand and believe as ardently as white people did not believe that they were beautiful. This required respect not only from the dominant culture but also from African Americans and within oneself as well. The Black Power Movement of the 1960s inspired and was inspired by a resurgence of those ideals advanced by John S. Rock. Those ideals reflected an embodied knowingness of who Blacks were as a people and could be seen in the arts, hairstyles, clothing, and politics of the 1960s and 1970s. “Black is Beautiful” was an affirmation of and intercessor for self-pride, self-esteem, self-worth, and self-determination (Taylor 2016). James Brown’s 1968 song “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” was a reflection of what was intoned by the phrase “Black is Beautiful.” As these sentiments began to permeate the psyches of the Black Power generation, there was recognition that outward change was also necessary. The Afro hairstyle became a symbol of returning to a more authentic self. Hair that was “dyed, fried, and laid to the side” (permed, conked, straightened with hot combs and flattened) was no longer epitomized as the gold standard of beauty among African American women and men. Those hairstyles were castigated as emulations of white physical characteristics and rejections of their own. This embracing and elevating of all things Black also included a return to their African heritage. The language, history, dance and drum, and clothing were reclaimed as expressions of the beauty they saw in themselves. For instance, African dashikis, mud cloth dresses, and head wraps became staples of the African American fashion scene. Black media—film, magazines, and television, particularly Soul Train—promoted and validated these burgeoning expressions of Black beauty. The music, culture, and aesthetic style provided a backdrop for the political rhetoric of Black empowerment that dominated this time. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Tarika Matilaba, Elaine Brown, and Stokely Carmichael, among others, highlighted the inherent beauty of Blackness as an avenue for demanding respect and Civil Rights. This recognition of Black humanity was foundational to the project of Black Power. Carmichael is credited with shifting the movement from a freedom project to a Black Power project. In a speech dubbed “Black Power” delivered on July 26, 1966, in Greenwood, Mississippi, Carmichael said that “Everybody in this country is for ‘Freedom Now,’ but not everybody is for Black Power because we have got to get rid of some of the people who have white power. We have go to get us some Black Power” (Pohlmann 2003, 166). Carmichael



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brilliantly married the concept of Black Power with self-definition by encouraging Black people to be proud of the characteristics that made them who they were: The only thing we own in this country is the color of our skins, and we are ashamed of that because they made us ashamed. We have to stop being ashamed of being Black. A broad nose, a thick lip, and nappy hair is us, and we are going to call that beautiful whether they like it or not. (Pohlmann 2003, 163) In this sense, “Black is Beautiful” became a cultural movement designed to combat internalized racism, a by-product of the successful campaign to dehumanize African Americans, and the inevitable consequence of their miseducation. History indicates that this miseducation was not confined to the soil of the United States but was also a strategy for cultural, mental, and socioeconomic domination of Blacks in South Africa. Stephen Bantu Biko founded the Black consciousness movement while a university student in the late 1960s. His message echoed that of John Stewart Rock. In I Write What I Like: Selected Writings in an excerpt from his court trial, Biko provided an explanation for his use of the phrase “Black is Beautiful”: I think that slogan has been meant to serve and I think is serving a very important aspect of our attempt to get at humanity. You are challenging the very deep roots of the Black man’s belief about himself. When you say “black is beautiful” what in fact you are saying to him is: man, you are okay as you are, begin to look upon yourself as a human being. . . . So in a sense the term “black is beautiful” challenges exactly that belief which makes someone negate himself. (Biko 2015) Biko unapologetically asserts the humanity of Black people and the importance of Black people recognizing and defining their humanity. “Black is Beautiful” was undoubtedly a powerful device of the 1960s Black Power Movement. Its message was poignant then and still resonates today. It can be seen in the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, whose anti-Black racism emphasis highlights the sustained and systemic maltreatment of African Americans. Echoing the ideology of “Black is Beautiful,” it too stresses empowerment through the deconstruction of discriminatory societal structures such as law, education, and media and, as with its predecessor “Black is Beautiful,” is grounded in the politics of rights and the politics of identity. The message of “Black is Beautiful” crisscrossed the path of the Middle Passage as Black people from continent to continent demanded their rights as citizens of their respective countries and demanded that their ontological birthright of humanness be respected and has traversed time. It was a call for white dominant culture to acknowledge, hear, and respect Black bodies, but more important it was a call from within for solidarity, a reminder of hope, and a promise to love oneself because “Black is Beautiful.” Lisa R. Merriweather

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See also: Black Aesthetic; Black Arts Movement; Black Power Abroad Further Reading Biko, S. 2015. I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. Edited by Aelred Stubbs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pohlmann, M. 2003. African American Political Thought, Vol. 6, Integration vs. Separatism: 1945 to the Present. New York: Routledge. Rock, John S. 1858. “I Will Sink or Swim with My People.” Black Past, http://www .blackpast.org/1858-john-s-rock-i-will-sink-or-swim-my-race. Taylor, P. 2016. Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. San Francisco: Wiley-Blackwell. Woodson, C. G. 1998. The Mis-Education of the Negro. 1933; reprint, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Black Liberation Army The Black Liberation Army (BLA) was an underground resistance network of the radical Black Power Movement. Its purpose was to organize Black people so they could defend themselves militarily. The BLA engaged in guerrilla warfare in retaliation for political repression and police misconduct and participated in expropriation of U.S. financial institutions. The BLA also engaged in efforts to eliminate and punish criminal activity within the Black community, including theft and drug trafficking. Media and law enforcement reported activity of the BLA throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.

Origins The concept of armed struggle and a Black underground has a long history. The Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) was the first group to openly propose a BLA. RAM was initiated in 1962 by northern Black radicals who defined themselves as revolutionary Black nationalists seeking to organize an armed struggle to win Black liberation. As early as 1964 RAM organizers called for the development of a liberation army. An internal RAM document dated 1967 projected developing a paramilitary organization called the “Black Liberation Army.” From its inception, the Black Panther Party (BPP) For Self-Defense also promoted the BLA concept, and its underground apparatus was decentralized with autonomous units in different cities. These underground units were all part of the movement concept known as the BLA. By 1970, the official rules of the BPP stated that “no party member can join any other army force other than the Black



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Liberation Army” (“Rules of the Black Panther Party” 2017). Besides serving the function of an urban guerrilla force, the Panther underground contained an underground railroad to conceal comrades being sought by federal and state police. Clandestine medical units were also provided to care for BLA soldiers and BPP members who had been wounded in combat. Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt, a former U.S. special forces commando and Vietnam veteran, was a key organizer of underground resistance throughout the United States during the late 1960s. His military expertise became an asset in developing the BPP underground. After Los Angeles BPP founder Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter was killed in an internecine conflict between the BPP and the Us organization on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1969, ji-Jaga was asked to assume Carter’s position as southern California minister of defense. At the time of ji-Jaga’s appointment, national BPP minister of defense Huey Newton was incarcerated, so ji-Jaga assumed the national responsibility of organizing the BPP military. Ji-Jaga developed the Panther underground and built a cooperative relationship with other military units under the BLA concept.

Heyday of the BLA In response to state repression of the Black liberation movement and police violence in the Black community, the BPP-affiliated Black underground waged a “defensive/offensive” campaign against police. Between 1971 and 1973, nearly 1,000 Black people were killed by American police (Martinez, Meyer, and Carter 2012). Of particular concern to the BLA were the needless deaths of Black teenagers. From the perspective of BLA members, it was their duty to defend oppressed and colonized people who were victims of a genocidal war. They perceived the American police as an occupation army of the colonized Black nation and the primary agents of Black genocide. So, the BLA believed that it had to “defend” the Black people and their movement in an offensive manner through retaliatory violence against the agents of Black genocide. By 1973, the U.S. government attributed the deaths of 20 police officers to the BLA. In response to the retaliatory and other actions claimed by the BLA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) initiated new counterinsurgency campaigns. One campaign in particular was NEWKILL, organized to investigate police killings in New York that the BLA claimed responsibility for or were suspected of. The FBI and local police also initiated a national search-and-destroy mission for people they assumed were members of the BLA. On May 3, 1973, BLA members Zayd Shakur, Sundiata Acoli (aka Clark Squire), and Assata Shakur (aka Joanne Chesimard) were stopped by police on the New Jersey Turnpike. A shootout ensued between the Black revolutionaries and

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the police, resulting in the death of one of the police officers and Zayd Shakur. Assata Shakur, who was severely wounded, and Acoli were eventually captured days later in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Police hailed the capture of BLA members. In separate trials Assata and Acoli were both convicted by all-white juries for the murder of the New Jersey state trooper and even the murder of Zayd Shakur. Both were sentenced to life plus 30 years. It must be noted that no evidence was ever presented to confirm that Assata ever fired or handled a weapon during the 1973 shootout. Her lawyers established that she was shot twice in the back while her hands were in the air in a position of surrender. On November 14, 1973, BLA member Twyman Meyers was ambushed and killed by a joint force of FBI agents and New York police in the Bronx section of New York City. After the death of Meyers, New York police commissioner Donald Cawley announced that the campaign of the FBI and local police had “broke the back” of the BLA. Between 1971 and 1973, police claimed responsibility for the deaths of 7 suspected BLA members and the capture of 18 others believed to be “key figures in the movement.”

Ideology and Consolidation In the face of captivity and the loss of its comrades, BLA members decided to assert themselves politically. Incarcerated BLA members and some of their supporters attempted to consolidate the ranks of the movement under a central command, the BLA Coordinating Committee (BLA-CC). The BLA-CC made public statements to assert its ideological view and circulated a newsletter within penitentiaries and movement circles to create dialogue and ideological unity. Many BLA members also supported the objective of an independent Republic of New Africa.

The Liberation of Assata On November 2, 1979, Assata Shakur escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. Three days later, a demonstration of 5,000 people marched from Harlem to the United Nations building in support of Assata and the BLA. Hundreds of the marchers carried signs stating “Assata Shakur Is Welcome Here.” At the rally that day blocks away from the United Nations building, a statement was read from the BLA claiming responsibility for her escape. Considering the boasts of the FBI and police related to breaking the back of the BLA six years prior, the liberation of Assata was considered a victory by many within activist circles. The liberation of Assata led to a renewed campaign of repression by federal and state police agencies. The FBI and New York police formed the Joint Terrorist Task Force (JTTF) in order to collaborate more efficiently. The JTTF served as the coordinating body in the search for Assata and the



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renewed campaign to smash the BLA. Black activists and their allies organized a campaign to challenge the JTTF’s counterinsurgency efforts and to gain further support for the Black underground.

The Revitalization of the Armed Struggle On October 20, 1981, three whites with radical associations and one Black man were arrested in the aftermath of an attempted holdup of a Brinks armored truck and a subsequent shootout at a police roadblock in Rockland County, New York. Several Black men escaped the scene of the shootout. The holdup and shootout resulted in the death of one Brinks guard and two police officers. The JTTF immediately pursued a trail of physical evidence that led them to members of the Black underground. On October 23, 1981, in the Queens section of New York City, police pursued two Black men they suspected of being involved in the Rockland holdup. A shootout between the police and the Black men ensued, resulting in the death of one of the men, Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata, and the capture of the other, Sekou Odinga. Odinga, the former BPP section leader of the Bronx community of New York, had been a fugitive since January 1969 on charges related to the New York Panther 21 case. Odinga was taken to a police precinct, where he was brutally tortured in the police attempt to gain additional information about the Black underground and the location of Assata Shakur. Police beat and kicked Odinga, burned his body with cigars, removed toenails from his body, and forced his head into a toilet bowl full of urine and repeatedly flushed the toilet. Throughout the ordeal, Odinga defiantly remained silent. For Odinga, the health results of silence were severe, as his pancreas was severely damaged and he had to be fed intravenously for three months. Within the days, weeks, and months following Odinga’s capture several others were arrested by the JTTF. Others were forced underground. Some were also indicted by a federal grand jury for refusing to testify against the BLA and the New Afrikan movement. On November 5, 1981, members of the BLA issued a communiqué to the public that explained and placed the events in Rockland County and the subsequent arrests into political context. The October 20, 1981, holdup was described as an “expropriation,” or the seizure of property by political or military forces. The BLA communiqué stated that the attempted expropriation was the responsibility of the Revolutionary Armed Task Force (RATF). The RATF was described as a “strategic alliance . . . under the leadership of the Black Liberation Army” of “Black Freedom Fighters and North American (white) Anti-Imperialists.” This ideologically diverse alliance was formed in response to an escalation of white supremacist violence and actions in the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s, including the unlawful deaths of Black women in Boston, the shooting of four Black women in Alabama, and the acceleration of paramilitary activity by the

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Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations. Through expropriations of American capitalist financial institutions, the RATF would acquire the resources needed to support a resistance movement to oppose the right-wing white supremacist upsurge. The RATF planned to “accumulate millions of dollars under the political control of . . . revolutionary elements” to establish self-defense units and community cultural, health, and educational institutions in Black communities throughout the United States. The JTTF and federal prosecutors determined that the Rockland county incident was a part of several expropriations by the BLA and its white allies. From 1976 until December 1981, federal prosecutors charged several captured revolutionaries and political activists with federal conspiracy charges. These charges included the liberation of Assata Shakur. The investigations of the JTTF led to three separate trials. Kuwasi Balagoon, Judith Clark, Kathy Boudin, and David Gilbert were convicted by a Rockland County jury on murder and armed robbery charges for the October 20, 1981, expropriation. Gilbert, Clark, and Boudin were affiliated with the Weather Underground, a white radical organization that supported Black liberation. Federal prosecutors held two federal Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) conspiracy trials. In the first RICO trial, the defendants were charged with 28 counts of various criminal charges. After a five-month trial, a jury of eight Blacks and four whites returned not guilty verdicts on 22 of the 28 counts. Activist musician Bilal Sunni Ali was acquitted of all charges in the federal conspiracy case. In the same case, former BPP member Jamal Joseph and former Republic of New Africa worker Chui Ferguson were acquitted on racketeering, conspiracy, murder, and robbery charges but were convicted of acting as accessories. Odinga and Italian revolutionary Sylvia Baraldini were acquitted of robbery and murder but convicted of racketeering and conspiracy and sentenced to 40-year sentences. In the second RICO trial, Marilyn Buck and Mutulu Shakur were convicted of federal racketeering, conspiracy, and armed robbery and sentenced to 50 and 60 years, respectively. From 1976 until 1981, the focus of the “revitalized” BLA units during this period was different from the BLA of the post–BPP split period (1971 to 1975). The emphasis in the first period seemed to be retaliation against police, whom the BLA saw as the occupying army of the colonized nation. In the second period, the primary focus of BLA operations was the development of the infrastructure of the armed clandestine movement and support for aboveground institutions, organizing, and mobilization. Akinyele Umoja See also: Black Panther Party; Pratt, Geronimo ji-Jaga; Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa; Revolutionary Nationalism; Shakur, Assata; Shakur, Mutulu (Jerrell Williams)



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Further Reading Martinez, Elizabeth Betita, Matt Meyer, and Mandy Carter, eds. 2012. We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America. Oakland, CA: PM Press. “Rules of the Black Panther Party.” 2017. Marxist.org, https://www.marxists.org/history /usa/workers/black-panthers/unknown-date/party-rules.htm. Shakur, Assata. 1987. Assata: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. Stanford, Max. 1962–1999. Papers of the Revolutionary Action Movement, microfiche, UPA Collections, LEXIS-NEXIS. Umoja, Akinyele O. 1999. “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Legacy of the Black Panther Party.” New Political Science 21(2) (June): 131– 155. Umoja, Akinyele O. 2015. “Maroon: Kuwasi Balagoon and the Evolution of Revolutionary New Afrikan Anarchism.” Science and Society 79(2) (April): 196–220.

Black Marxism (Book) The book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition grew out of the Black liberation movement’s transition from campaigns for Civil Rights into battles for Black Power. In is in part Cedric Robinson’s meditation on and counteractive to what he perceives as the inadequacies and inanities of Black nationalism during the Black Power era. Robinson believes that Black Power–era nationalism diverged from African ontology and was largely a “perverse inversion” of white “political culture and racialism.” According to him, the Black radical tradition challenges what he calls “the simplifications” of Black nationalism, as expressed by Black Power–era nationalists such as Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture and Louis Farrakhan. Due to Robinson’s primary interest in mapping the encounters between what he considers Eurocentric Marxism and the Black radical tradition, his challenge to 1960s Black nationalism is silent. What we can surmise from Black Marxism is his mainly positive evaluation or at least lack of criticism of Black nationalism in the 1920s (Robinson 2000, 212–228, 250) and Richard Wright’s engagement with it in the 1940s (291). The nationalism of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), and Wright are PanAfrican or global in scope. For Robinson, these expressions of Black nationalism transcend “the distinctions of political space.” Hence, he sees the Black radical tradition as necessarily Pan-African. His commitment to Pan-African nationalism is made clear in “Endings,” Black Marxism’s final chapter. There he argues that Black people constructed a single “collective” identity throughout the diaspora, an

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identity that he says “suffuses nationalisms,” thereby creating a “historical identity” united in opposing racial capitalism. Robinson reads Black Power–era nationalism as national, not Pan-African, like its manifestations by the UNIA, the ABB (initially), and Wright. And equally important, as revealed in his 1999 interview with Chuck Morse, Robinson sees it as a “fictive radicalism” and as racially chauvinistic. Nonetheless, Robinson, like other 1980s-era Black radical intellectuals, imbibed the Black Power Movement’s emphasis on political autonomy and a distinct cultural ethos. These scholar activists produced numerous paradigm-shifting texts that center Black agency and reinterpret Black politics beyond the conservative/ liberal binary. Among those seminal works, none looms larger than Black Marxism. It is more ambitious in scope, as it challenges the centrality of historical materialism seeking to replace the Marxist grand narrative with a radical tradition grounded in an undying African cultural ontology. Robinson offers a reinterpretation of Black people’s history of resistance to racial oppression. For him, “the deposition of Black peoples in the new world” created “an integrating experience that left them not only with a common task but a shared vision” (Robinson 2000, 121, 166). This mutual conception Robinson identifies as the “black radical tradition.” He locates this tradition outside of Western conceptions of freedom and civilization. He presents it as a “negation of Western civilization,” including its radical traditions, especially Marxism. Robinson rejects the primacy of class, the determinacy of the material forces of production, and historical materialism, the core scientific theory and methodology of Marxism. He contends that class is not a universal experience and that culture and social consciousness are “as powerful” as political economy in determining human activity. He further claims that the materialist conception of history reduces Black people’s resistance to Western civilization to an opposition to capitalist organization (Robinson 2000). In contrast, Robinson argues that necessity demands that Black people oppose capitalism but that their opposition goes much further and that Black people are “much more” than what European radical theories conceive. He proposes the Black radical tradition as the blueprint by which Black people can fulfill their mission “to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality” (171). Black Marxism’s main objective is to chart the contours of the encounter between Marxism and Black radicalism and articulate the Black radical tradition as the theoretical pathway for Black liberation. Although academia and the organized Left ignored Black Marxism upon its 1983 release, over time it became a seminal text, and the Black radical tradition became the identification for subsequent political generations of Black scholar activists. As it has risen in popularity, it sparked debates over the viability of Marxism as a leading ideology in the Black liberation movement. Since its rediscovery in the early 2000s, Black Marxism has achieved a status similar to what



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Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual occupied in the 1960s–1970s. Like Cruse’s magnum opus, Black Marxism is innovative, expansive, and often a brilliant articulation of a contentious thesis. Black Marxism is divided into three sections. The first part, “The Emergence and Limitations of European Radicalism,” examines the formation of race beginning in feudal Europe through its subsequent shifts under industrial capitalism in the 19th-century British Empire. If the idea of the Black radical tradition is the most popular concept to emerge from Black Marxism, the second most used and perhaps more important concept is “racial capitalism.” In Part 1, Robinson establishes the historical and theoretical basis for his influential reconceptualization of capitalism’s origin and logic. Here he launches his critique of the contradictions of the Enlightenment, specifically European radical theories, socialism and Marxism, and nationalism. In the second part, “The Roots of Black Radicalism,” Robinson surveys the intellectual assault on the history of Africa and the humanity of its peoples, traces the origin and processes of what Walter Rodney calls the “European slave trade” and enslavement and resistance to it, and delineates the character of the Black radical tradition. Robinson argues that most observers have failed to comprehend the web of ideological unity that connects Black resistance across the diaspora and the African homeland. For Robinson, it was not the similarities of the slaverybased racial formations that account for Black radicalism; it and later racial formations provided “the condition” but not its “foundation.” Robinson views African people’s cultural and spiritual values and customs as the basis of their true challenge to racial capitalism. In the final section, “Black Radicalism and Marxist Theory,” Robinson traces the historical, social, and intellectual processes that generated the theoretical framework for the congealing of the Black radical tradition. Here, he sketches biographical analyses of three pivotal Black radical intellectual activists, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. Robinson describes the routes by which each came to the Black radical tradition after their specific encounter with Western Marxism. Robinson posits that these three, along with other Black radical intellectuals, were drawn to the Black radical tradition predominantly through engagement with and reconsiderations of the cultural practices and lived experiences of the Black working and poor classes and figuring out that Marxism was inadequate in addressing racial oppression. Robinson notes that neither Du Bois, James, nor Wright created Black radicalism, though each sought to theorize the tradition. The alternative history of capitalist development that Robinson offers in Part 1 draws theoretically on the work of radical Black sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox’s Foundations of Capitalism in which Cox emphasizes the role of international trade and exchange relations between emerging capitalist centers and

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peripheral areas of the capitalist world system. Thus, Robinson rejects the idea of Europe ever being a “closed system” (Cromwell Cox 1959, 4). Yet, whereas Cox concludes that racial oppression and racialization did not exist “before about 1492” and that they owe their making to the moment Karl Marx describes as “the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production,” Robinson finds race making inscribed in the formation of Europe. For him, it emerges in feudal Europe and is inherent in Western civilization. Therefore, racism appears before 1492, and its “genesis” is located “in the ‘internal’ relationships of European peoples” (Robinson 2000, 2). Robinson’s evidence for this theoretical point is overly dependent on a few sources, most notably the work of Belgian economic historian Henri Pirenne. The latest work by Pirenne, Robinson cites, was published in 1937. Robinson’s point about the importance of “internal” racial oppression to capitalism, however, is more powerfully made in Chapter 2. There he persuasively deconstructs the conceptions “English working class” and “English proletariat.” He shows that in terms of ethnicity and nationality they were so much more. Robinson highlights the role of the Irish, arguing that such “generic terms” disguise the multinational character of the Welsh, Scottish, Indian, Asian, and African proletarians laboring in the British Empire. Robinson’s point, however, is not to simply reveal the diversity of the English working class but instead to argue that Marx and Friedrich Engels failed to fully grasp how the working-class ethnic and national fractures undermine their thesis of the proletariat’s universality, hence its alleged role as the historical subject (41–43). Having presented his case against the universality of Marxism, Robinson shifts to essaying the Black radical tradition. In Part 2, he surveys a broad segment of time and covers a wide expanse of geography. Ultimately he settles his attention on the African diaspora, though the United States is slightly privileged. Yet despite the large amount of ground covered, temporally and spatially, Robinson doesn’t begin to define the Black radical tradition until page 168. Definition is perhaps too strong a term for what he actually does, however. At root, Robinson believes that Black people operate from a different ontology than Europeans. Speaking of “these brutally violated people,” he identifies two interrelated features of the Black radical tradition: the “absence of mass violence” and a tendency to turn violence inward, upon themselves. This preference, he argues, comes from a “metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses.” Instead, it was predicated on a desire to preserve the “ontological totality” of Africanity (Robinson 2000, 168). For Robinson, the existence of this African ontology explains why the initial expressions of resistance in the Black radical tradition took the form of maroonage. Escape and reconstruction of African political and cultural systems expressed Black people’s “revulsion” and “rejection” of white Western capitalist societies. Given this undying omnipresent African ontology, Robinson contends that “one Black collective identity” suffuses



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the diaspora and erases distinctions of space and time to create “a single historical identity” (317). Robinson is correct to argue that the sociohistorical experiences of Black people cannot simply be incorporated into Euro-Marxism. Frantz Fanon traversed this territory a generation earlier, contending that “This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.” But, Robinson goes much further than this. He rejects the methodology of historical materialism, reducing it to “a stage construction of history,” which he argues does not resemble the history of any human group. Thus, he concludes that it is antithetical to Black peoples. We believe that Robinson mistakes Marxism for economic determinism and grossly misreads Marx’s engagement with race and capitalism. The problem lies in how Robinson reads Marx’s primacy of class. Marx argues that while class is the primary structural determinant of exploitation, he sees race and racial conflict as necessarily structured by both political and economic forces that facilitate capital accumulation. Nonetheless, according to Robinson, despite its weaknesses, Marxist theory remains important because it retains several significant capacities, namely its deconstruction of capitalism. Given the harshness of his critique, it is somewhat odd that he finds Marxism largely correct in its critique of capitalism’s tendency toward the concentration of wealth, the expansion of poverty, the normalization of war, and social repression. Black Marxism is an important work that proposes critical questions regarding Marxism’s effectiveness as a revolutionary theory and the centrality of Black agency to historical narratives. Robinson’s greatest achievement in Black Marxism is that he provides scholars with an analysis that forces a reexamination of the theories undergirding movements for Black liberation. Augustus Wood and Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua See also: Che Lumumba Club; Communist International and Black Power; United Front, The Further Reading Cromwell Cox, Oliver. 1959. Foundations of Capitalism. New York: Philosophical Library. Cruse, Harold. 2005. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. 1967; reprint, New York: New York Review of Books. Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. 1963; reprint, New York: Grove. Kelley, Robin D. G. 2016. “Cedric J. Robinson: The Making of a Black Radical Intellectual.” CounterPunch, June 17, https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/17/cedric-j-rob inson-the-making-of-a-black-radical-intellectual/. Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital, Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Books.

122 | Black Music Meyerson, Gregory. 2000. “Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others.” Cultural Logic 3(2) (Spring): 1–43. Morse, Chuck. 1999. “Capitalism, Marxism, and the Black Radical Tradition: An Interview with Cedric Robinson.” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, 1(3) (Spring): 1, 6–8. Mullen, Bill V. 2001. “Notes on Black Marxism.” Cultural Logic 4(2) (Spring): 1–9. Nimitz, August H. 2002. “The Eurocentric Marx and Engels and Other Related Myths.” In Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, edited by Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, 65–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Reprint ed. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Rodney, Walter. 1974. How Europe Undeveloped Africa. 1972; reprint, Washington, DC: Howard University Press.

Black Music The ideals of the Black Power/Black Arts Movement were reflected in the art and activism produced by musical artists of the era across multiple genres and levels of national exposure. These ideals include militance of expression, affinity with Africa, Black unity, self-determination, assertions and explorations of racial and cultural identity, and explicit criticism of white supremacy. In the realm of music, such ideals were manifested in fashion, album art, song titles and lyrics, literature, and organizational and entrepreneurial activities and affiliations. Artists in whose work we can see these themes evinced a variety of political perspectives and degrees of long-term commitment to the cause. Viewed collectively, this thrust in Black music provided inspiration and affirmation for many seeking to continue the struggle for Black liberation. A short list of musical artists relevant to a discussion of Black Power and Black music includes such diverse figures as Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, Pharoah Sanders, Gary Bartz, Doug and Jean Carn, Abbey Lincoln, Phil Cohran, Horace Tapscott and the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, Randy Weston, Miriam Makeba, and Cal Massey as well as James Brown and Aretha Franklin. It is relatively easy to compile a long list of statements of identity and protest in musical recordings from the era, which shows the influence of Black Power. However, Black Power as a movement and specific political/cultural articulation is one wing of an even broader trend of Black consciousness—the seeking of knowledge about and affirmation of Black cultural identity that was taking place at that time. There were, of course, socially conscious performers, such as the ones listed above, who affirmed the revolution. But this doesn’t mean that the politics of the artists (and in some cases the songs) were totally aligned with the Black Power Movement.

Jazz singer Nina Simone is shown in London, 1968. Simone’s deep, raspy, forceful voice made her a unique figure in jazz and later helped define the Civil Rights Movement. (AP Photo)

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, elect­ed in 1973 during the Black Power era, with Motown artist Marvin Gaye. “What’s Going On,” released in 1971 by Gaye during the height of the Black Power Movement, was a classic expres­ sion of issues important to activists, including the Vietnam War, poverty, and police brutality. (Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at Cali­ fornia State University, Northridge)

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The political economy of the music industry does not lend itself to the success of ideologically driven Black performers. With few exceptions, the recording studios, labels, radio stations, and performance venues were owned by outsiders to the Black community who were uninterested in any insurgent politics. By the 1960s rhythm and blues was increasingly engaged with potential sales to mainstream audiences, and multinational corporations were buying out the independent labels that had produced the music. Jazz had long since shifted away from Black urban settings to downtown clubs and predominantly white audiences. Only art within a Black political economy could embrace Black nationalism without major contradiction, which calls for nuance in discussing the relationship between Black Power and commercially produced music. Thus, in considering specific Black nationalist radical expressions in music, most examples would be underground, truly independent ventures, little of which was recorded or distributed to any degree. It may be useful to understand the relationship of Black Power to Black music by looking at five categories of activity: soul, jazz, the rhetoric of musicians and commenters that included literary efforts, musician involvement in movement support activity, and the creation of independent organizations and businesses.

Soul The soul music era is contemporary with Black Power, reflecting the same historical and cultural forces—the drive for self-definition and self-assertion. Those in tune with the movement as well as consumers of different political engagements and commitments found affirmation and encouragement in popular art that spoke to these impulses. It is hard to separate the rise of the soul brother from Black Power, as part of soul was more than style and implied a basic political/cultural orientation. Behind the idea of the soul brother/sister lay a militant movement that was about Black consciousness, an implicit critique of America and integrationism. Yet the rise of a new Black style in speech affect and self-presentation obscured the vast range of political and ideological stances held and promoted by those with the Afros. The most famous recording associated with this movement is James Brown’s song “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” released in the late summer of 1968. It was a number-one record on the R&B charts for six weeks and became an instant touchstone for the era. (It was also a top-10 pop hit, which means that it garnered significant mainstream airplay and sales.) Themes of self-assertion, selfreliance, and self-celebration were prominent in Brown’s recordings of the era, but “Say It Loud” was a singular, explicit embrace of the Black cause and struggle by the most popular act in Black music. It also permanently etched the most evocative phrase in the national lexicon. Other fairly forthright Brown recordings of this 1968 to 1970 period include “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing,” “Get

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Up, Get into It, and Get Involved,” and “Soul Power.” He did perform for the demonstrators on the last night of the 1966 March Against Fear, during which a few days earlier the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) launched the Black Power slogan. But of course, Brown’s political perspective differed greatly from that of movement activists, as his dalliances with the Democratic Party and later President Richard Nixon and his Black capitalism initiative proved. Other high-profile songs that seemed to explicitly endorse the struggle include the Temptations’ 1969 Puzzle People album track “Message from a Black Man” (by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong), a top-20 R&B single for the Whatnauts a few months later. Syl Johnson’s title tune from his Is It Because I’m Black album was a top-11 R&B hit at the same time. This recording, featuring other consciousness tunes such as “Concrete Reservation” and “Black Balloons,” predates other better-known soul albums focused on the Black experience. “For God’s Sake,” the title tune of the Chi-lites’ third album Give More Power to the People, became a number-four R&B hit in the summer of 1971, with its direct quotation of the Black Panther Party (BPP) slogan. While highlighting the Middle Passage is not the exclusive province of the Black Power ethos, the title tune from the Ojays’ 1973 Ship Ahoy album contributes to the Black consciousness discourse in a direct manner. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Going On (1971) in both title and sound projected a Black ethos informed by the radical movement’s take on the United States. Special mention must be made here of a song that was not high profile: J. P. Johnson’s rendition of the Bob Dylan song “George Jackson.” Dylan wrote and recorded the tune shortly after Jackson’s August 1971 death in the San Quentin State Prison; Johnson’s version was released in January 1972 and was not a big hit, but it seems to be the only time in soul music that this immense figure in the Black revolution was the subject of a song. Robinson sings mournfully of the death of a heroic rebel, imprisoned for life for a $70 robbery. There are two figures associated with soul music who have been identified as movement artists: Curtis Mayfield and Nina Simone. Each experienced great professional success and developed an extensive repertoire reflective of the Black struggle. Simone, the “High Priestess of Soul,” performed very little if any soul music, but she earned the title because of her identification with an assertive, unapologetic Blackness evident in so much of her work.

Nina Simone Simone was a frustrated concert pianist who reluctantly turned to nightclub performing to pay the bills in Philadelphia while she attended music school. When her first recording unexpectedly yielded the hit “I Loves You Porgy” in 1959 (No. 2 R&B), it launched a grand entertainment success story. Over the next several

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years, Simone became one of the highest-paid acts in American entertainment. She recorded many albums and started Nina Simone Enterprises, with an office in Manhattan. One aspect that distinguished her from other great singers of her era— Nancy Wilson, Gloria Lynne, Abbey Lincoln, Betty Carter, and Etta Jones—was her artistry on the piano. Simone’s piano was an essential part of her sound. Her mercurial personality and demands for undivided attention onstage became a part of her narrative in the press. Her repertoire during the first half of the 1960s was eclectic: jazz standards, pop songs and show tunes, folk songs, a few songs from other lands, and some blues. Her gift of interpretation, ebullient piano with her penchant for the use of classical figures, and ability to create deeply affecting moods that ranged from joyful to mournful made her a singular artist of the era. (Ironically, later she would say that despite the critical and commercial success that she enjoyed during the 1960s, she had felt that she was not doing what she really meant to do, that she had wanted to be a concert pianist and that the pop career was ultimately a lesser achievement.) There were many recorded highlights of those early years with the Colpix label before the great change in Simone’s focus as an artist completely aligned with the cause of Black freedom. Masterfully rendered performances of the American songbook include “I Loves You Porgy” that had been notably recorded by Billie Holiday, “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” “You Can Have Him,” and a compelling instrumental of “Bye Bye Blackbird.” Simone’s art often celebrated her Black heritage, seen in her mining the African American folk tradition with such numbers as “Liza Jane” and “Children Go Where I Send You.” She also recorded the work of new Black songwriters and performers such as Oscar Brown’s “Brown Baby” and Babatunde Olatunji’s “Zungo.” Nonetheless, it is with Simone’s first album for the Philips label, 1964’s Nina Simone in Concert, that the advent of the committed artist is seen. It features versions of three ballads from her first album, and the four other selections form a suite of Black protest. Her adaptation of Bertol Brecht’s “Pirate Jenny” from Threepenny Opera reimagines the vengeful narrator as a maid in the South, waiting the arrival of the Black Freighter to lay waste to the oppressors. (Onstage she would change into her version of a maid uniform to perform this song.) This is followed by Simone’s musical rendition of Langston Hughes’s poem “Old Jim Crow,” a rollicking number that celebrates the struggle against and announces the imminent death of racial segregation in the United States. One of Simone’s most humor-filled performances is her adaptation of the antinuclear protest song “Go Limp.” The tale of a romance in the sit-in movement that the girl’s mother disapproves of, “Go Limp” displays Simone at her most charming with yet another endorsement of the Black freedom movement. The album closed with “Mississippi Goddam,” one of Simone’s rare compositions, that became and remains her most remarked upon song. In a career full of highlights, it is easily the one song most identified with her, and for good reason.



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The profanity in the title, the urgent and outspoken condemnation of American racism in the North and South both liberal and segregationist, and the anger (“you’re all gonna die and die like flies”), coming from one of the leading performers in American show business, combined to create an extremely memorable and powerful recording. It was instantly notorious, and the attention that it received was great enough that Philips released an edited single version for deejays to be able to play on the radio. This album largely defines the dominant image and memory of Simone’s career in her heyday and represents a major turning point in her artistic life, when she became a public advocate of the movement for Black empowerment. She spoke of the impact that the atrocities had on her in the 1963 movement, such as the assassination of Medgar Evers and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, and how these things fueled her composing of Mississippi Goddam specifically. Though the majority of Simone’s material continued to be drawn from American popular song, her performing persona as a voice of the people’s aspirations for freedom continued to develop. She appeared at movement events, adopted the Afro and African-styled attire earlier than most public figures, and performed many works that addressed themes of Black identity and empowerment. Her a capella rendition of Waring Cuney’s classic poem “No Images” dates from 1964, and her definitive version of “Strange Fruit” was recorded the following year. Simone wrote what many consider to be her greatest song in 1965, “Four Women.” The song is nothing less than a tour through the history of the United States from the perspective of four generations of Black women, highlighting essential and rarely acknowledged fundamental experiences: slavery, whippings, forced labor, rape and sexual exploitation, and poverty. The fourth and final stanza, narrated by the modern young Black woman Peaches, strikes a chord of historical resentment that is deep and disquieting. In its implications of alienation and explosiveness, “Four Women” vividly expresses a mood within Black America of profound and bitter dissatisfaction that would be seen in the increasingly frequent inner-city rebellions of the era. In 1969 after seeing the stage play based on Lorraine Hansberry’s life, Simone, with the help of keyboardist Weldon Irvine, wrote an inspirational tribute to her late friend and the cause of Black pride and empowerment—an anthem called “Young, Gifted and Black.” Hansberry had been a key figure in Simone’s life and inspired her to become a more politically engaged artist. “Young, Gifted and Black” became the singer’s second and last top-10 R&B hit and the eagerly awaited closing number in her live shows. Its message of hope, pride, and inspiration resonated throughout the country, and school and community groups adopted it and would sing it at public gatherings. In some ways, it was her greatest triumph and marks the peak of her power as a cultural symbol for her people. At this time Simone was at the forefront of high-profile artists who were expressing African

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American aspirations for change, identity, and pride. However, her career went into a serious decline not long thereafter with the 1970 dissolution of her marriage to manager and business partner Andrew Stroud, and a long period of professional and personal instability and exile followed. But the power of Simone’s art ensures that she will remain an emblem of the Robesonian commitment to art in the cause of freedom and against slavery.

Curtis Mayfield Another popular artist of the Black Power era associated with the ongoing commitment to Black consciousness-raising was Curtis Mayfield—the songwriter, guitarist, and lead singer for the Impressions. While his professed politics did not align fully with Black Power ideology (he cited Martin Luther King Jr. as his most admired political figure), his advocacy of struggle, awareness, and peoplehood and an increasing militancy of expression caused Mayfield to be a voice for the movement. Askia Toure’s 1965 essay “Keep on Pushing: Rhythm & Blues as a Weapon” for Liberator magazine cites the lyrics of the Impressions’ hit song throughout as exemplifying Black people’s use of music to forward the struggle for justice. The theme, indicated in the refrain, is about the collective struggle against oppressive forces that should be waged confidently and was echoed in the Impressions’ 1968 hit “We’re a Winner” and again on “Move on Up,” from Mayfield’s 1970 solo album Curtis! This Keep On Pushing trilogy illustrates the ongoing facet of Mayfield’s art, but in other works too, such as the anthemic “People Get Ready,” “Woman’s Got Soul,” “I’m So Proud,” and “Miss Black America,” we see a songwriter reflecting the political struggles of his people, an appreciation for the beauty of Black women, and the promotion of strong relationships with family and community. Curtis! presented a harder musical edge and a less poetic and more pointed and cynical eye on society. “Don’t Worry (If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go)” implicated all groups in an unsatisfactory societal status quo, projecting an urgency and an unsettled loss of faith in keeping with the radical Black Power critique of the U.S. social, political, and economic order. This tune was followed by “The Other Side of Town,” which explored the emotional costs and worldview of ghetto residents trapped by segregation and impoverishment. One of Mayfield’s most notable songs, “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue,” was a plea for unity, acknowledging struggle and progress but turning inward to decry selfdestructive behavior in the community and invoking Black pride to exhort people not to live down to racist stereotypes. This album and numerous other works and his high visibility as one of soul’s most successful artists ensured Mayfield’s standing as one whose music expressed the fundamental aspects of the Black Power ethos.



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Jazz It is in jazz, especially independently produced jazz, where the most sustained and explicit efforts to promote a Black Power ethos in music was evident. Building on earlier efforts to self-produce recordings by artists such as Charles Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie, in the 1960s jazz musicians created a number of landmark albums outside of the established jazz industry channels. A little earlier than the Black Power era, pianist Randy Weston made a series of recordings inspired by and celebrating the African independence movement. These included Uhuru Afrika (1960) and Music from the New African Nations Featuring the Highlife (1963). Dissatisfied with the exposure those received, he released the classic African Cookbook (1964) on his own Bakton Records label. Many of the strong statements of African heritage and Black resistance in jazz to follow would likewise be selfproduced. Julius Hemphill’s Dogon AD (1972) was one such classic, an independent release on his own Mbari label that brought attention to the accomplishments of West African people and in so doing enriched the understanding of African American cultural heritage. That was certainly the case for the entire career of Chicago’s Phil Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble. Cohran sought to operationalize the imperative for independent ownership, African-centered consciousness-raising, and self-determination. He was the driving force behind the Affro-Arts Center in Chicago, which operated from 1967 to 1970 and was a vital site for Black nationalist cultural work. His Zulu Records released singles and albums of the band’s music. “The African Look” and “Black Beauty” were singles, as were selections from perhaps the group’s best-known album, The Malcolm X Memorial Suite. Recorded live at the Affro-Arts Theatre in February 1968, this was an early example of the formal lifting up of the hero and icon of the Black Power Movement. (Broadside Press’s For Malcolm volume, justifiably considered a major signpost of Malcolm veneration, was published in 1970.) Armageddon was another Artistic Heritage Ensemble album that reflected a radical critique of U.S. society. Cohran was also a cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 1965 but ultimately left to pursue his more populist and Black community institution-building agenda. Mtume, son of saxophonist Jimmy Heath, contributed three important recordings to this underground jazz project of Black consciousness. As an acolyte of the Us organization, he was the primary creative force in his uncle Albert Tootie Heath’s 1969 album Kawaida, released independently on the O’be label. With the help of Herbie Hancock, Don Cherry, and Buster Williams, Mtume crafted a suite of tunes, including dedications to Imamu Amiri Baraka and Maulana Karenga and the title tune, wherein the musicians recite the Nguzo Saba. Under his own name, Mtume released Alkebu-lan—Land of the Blacks in 1971 on the musician-owned Strata East label. This live album, recorded at The East, the

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important cultural nationalist center in Brooklyn, New York, featured an invocation later added by Mtume—minilectures on the role and meaning of music in Black consciousness-raising. The band included major artists such as Leroy Jenkins, Stanley Cowell, Andy Bey, Joe Lee Wilson, Gary Bartz, and Billy Hart. Rebirth Cycle appeared in 1977 and was likewise self-produced and released on Third Street Records. “Sais” was the major work there, continuing the illumination of African history via an epic poem set to music on the glories of ancient Egypt; “Umoja,” the focus on Black unity, a core principle of Black Power and a tribute to Amilcar Cabral, sung by Dee Dee Bridgewater, brought attention to one of the leading figures of armed struggle and the African revolution. These three albums remain some of the most compelling artifacts of the Black Power–Black music nexus, self-produced recordings, containing explicit endorsements of radical nationalist principles as well as being of a very high artistic level and featuring some of the best musicians. There were other important bands of the era with lasting legacies, though they left few recordings. Foremost among these was the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (PAPA), led by pianist and composer Horace Tapscott. Seeking to represent and inspire the Black community with free outdoor concerts, music lessons, and affiliations and appearances with political activists, PAPA (founded in 1961 as the Underground Musicians Association) and its broader collective, the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension, was an ongoing presence in Los Angeles, connecting jazz to the struggle for Black empowerment. With a determined grassroots perspective, rejecting the cycle of striving for commercial success, Tapscott was a well-respected figure who promoted those ideals of identity community and self-determination. He was the arranger and musical director of Elaine Brown’s 1969 album Seize the Time on the Flying Dutchman label, providing the project with needed musical substance. (Well-known producer Bob Thiele’s new record company was the outlet for a number of hard-hitting Black albums, including SNCC’s Rap, interspersing speech excerpts from H. Rap Brown and songs by Leon Thomas, and Gil Scott-Heron’s first album, Small Talk on 125th and Lenox.) Few consider Brown to be an exceptional singer or songwriter, but the album, complete with cover art by Emory Douglass of a guerrilla with automatic rifle at the ready, has some memorable arrangements and turns of phrase, especially on the dynamic title tune. Unfortunately, there is almost no documentation of much of the Arkestra’s most vital years. The group is best represented by two late 1970s Nimbus recordings, Flight 17 and The Call. The politics of the period made its presence felt in the work of many. One of the most interesting is trombonist Clifford Thornton’s The Panther and the Lash. After Angela Davis’s capture and during her long detention and trial, this famous Black radical associated with the BPP (as an ex-member) and George Jackson became a cause embraced by many outside the radical political orbit. As a communist Davis did not advocate core tenets of Black Power, but as an iconic martyr



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of Black radicalism she was indelibly linked to the movement. In jazz we see Lee Morgan’s performance of Jymie Merrit’s “Angela” and saxophonist Harold Land’s “Ode to Angela.” In the realm of commercial releases in jazz, there were several important recordings to take note of that carried the message. Gary Bartz’s two-part Harlem Bush Music (1971) on the Milestone label is one of those landmarks. Doug Carn’s series of records for the Black Jazz label is another. Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, featuring the powerful instrumental “Blues for George Jackson,” has to be highlighted. Along with the aforementioned J. P. Robinson single, it is one of the only invocations of this revolutionary figure in the music.

Black Power Axioms There were two figures in jazz whose powerful music was seen and heard by writers and activists as reflecting Black Power values and principles: Pharoah Sanders and his former employer John Coltrane. Many poets of the Black Arts Movement ascribed revolutionary intent to their music, despite few if any such public statements by the saxophonists. Both Sanders and Coltrane lent their support to events sponsored by the Black cultural Left: Coltrane performed for Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, and Sanders was a regular at The East. Sanders called one of his albums Black Unity and a song “Red Black & Green,” and his unmistakable tenor graces the elegy “Malcolm X” on his associate Leon Thomas’s Spirits Known and Unknown (as “Little Rock” presumably for contractual reasons). But in general Sanders’s album and rhetoric tended toward the universal spiritual awareness. Coltrane was less taciturn than Sanders, but his discourse generally focused on spiritual matters. Nonetheless, as rendered in poems by Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, Askia Toure, and many others in the Black Arts Movement, Coltrane and Sanders also (with lesser frequency) were figured as avatars of Black consciousness, militant rejection of white America, and even revolutionary violence. These poems were just a portion of the many that elegized Coltrane. The saxophonist in fact became along with Malcolm X the icon of the Black Arts Movement, as images, poems, and references to him were ubiquitous. During Coltrane’s lifetime and especially after his shockingly early death in 1967, his interest in Africa, Black history, spirituality, and singularly compelling music made him a figure of immense symbolic power. The discourse of the value and cultural relevance of Black music that developed inevitably featured Coltrane, who was an inspirational figure across artistic disciplines. Henry Dumas’s short story “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” (1966) merits mention in this discussion. In it the musician Probe (whom some see as a Coltranelike figure) plays his Afro-Horn in a club where whites are not allowed; when

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three insistent whites manage to get inside, they cannot handle the music and die. The story’s themes—the spiritual power of Black music with its evocation of the ancestors, the need for an exclusive performance spaces controlled by Black people, and the notion of whites as inherently dubious outsiders to the scene—reflect ideas about Black music present in the work of numerous writers and artists of the era. Collaborations between writers and musicians also produced lasting statements. The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron, who was inspired by them, merged poetry with music in dynamic and crowd-pleasing ways. Baraka’s albums Black and Beautiful and It’s Nation Time continued a practice that dated back at least to his work with Albert Ayler in the 1960s. Haki Madhubuti’s collaboration with the jazz group Nation in Washington, D.C., produced two albums, Rise Vision Comin’ (1976) and Medasi (1979). In these works, music accentuated and amplified explicitly stated themes of revolt against white supremacy, collective identity, police brutality, and an entire range of concerns not easily expressed in song.

Black Power Activism Music was a key part of Civil Rights Movement mass meetings and fund-raising efforts, as seen most notably with the SNCC Freedom Singers. The BPP singing group, the Lumpen, shared the Freedom Singers’ tradition of retooling popular songs with revolutionary lyrics and performed frequently in 1970 and 1971, mostly at party-affiliated events. BPP leadership considered the group to be a recruitment tool for the organization and did much hawking of its lone single, “Free Bobby Now.” For Baraka, music was critical in the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School and later organizing in Newark with the Committee for a United Newark. He was able to get the participation of musicians such as Gary Bartz, Pharoah Sanders, and Coltrane for fund-raising concerts and other public events for his organizations. Likewise, one of the last major projects of Cal Massey, trumpeter and composer of the Black Liberation Suite, was the promotion of a series of benefit concerts for the Black Panthers with major artists such as Lee Morgan, Alice Coltrane, and Archie Shepp. The most sustained effort in this area was the Black Experience in Sound, the weekly concert series put on by the East Cultural Organization in Brooklyn. From 1970 to 1975 Jitu Weusi, Mensah Wali, and Maliki brought in the great jazz acts to perform as the centerpiece of evenings of cultural celebration and consciousness-raising. The Black Experience in Sound was conceived as part of the group’s nation-building project and as such included news, dialogue and spoken word, nutritional knowledge, and food. By no means did all the performers (including Rahsaan Roland Kirk, McCoy Tyner, Leon Thomas, and many others) subscribe to The East’s Black nationalist philosophy, but they all willingly contributed to a



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scene in which Black music played the role of unifying, uplifting, and enlightening Black people.

Musician Collectives In St. Louis, the Black Artists’ Group (1968–1972) drew together musicians, writers, visual artists, dance, and theater to stage performances, exhibitions, and youth educational programs in promotion of Black consciousness. In Chicago the AACM, formed in 1965, was primarily devoted to independent presentations of experimental musical performance. The organization continues today. In New York the Collective Black Artists (founded in 1970) was active. These and other similar organizations around the country, such as the Underground Musicians Association (later changed to the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension) in Los Angeles reflected key tenets of Black Power, in particular the drive toward self-determination and independence, though few of them espoused revolutionary rhetoric as organizations. In general these groups tried to advance the exposure of Black Arts, its accessibility to Black audiences, the musical education of Black youths, and greater control/ownership of performance opportunities. In this regard the era saw a number of independent record labels emerge, the most successful of which was probably Strata East, based in New York and led by trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell. Tribe Records in Detroit and Black Jazz in Los Angeles also put out a good number of records, often by artists of the local scene. These catalogs are in addition to numerous individual recording projects issued independently by some of the artists mentioned above such as Hemphill, Weston, Mtume, and others. W. S. Tkweme See also: Black Aesthetic; Coltrane, John; Cultural Nationalism; Kawaida; ScottHeron, Gil; Wattstax Further Reading Feldstein, Ruth. 2013. How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press. Isoardi, Steven. 2006. The Dark Tree. Berkeley: University of California Press. Madhubuti, Haki. 1969. Don’t Cry Scream. Detroit: Broadside Press. Sanchez, Sonia. 1969. Homecoming. Detroit: Broadside Press. Semmes, Clovis. 1994. “The Dialectics of Cultural Survival and the Community Artist: Phil Cohran and the Afro-Arts Theater.” Journal of Black Studies 24(4) (June): 447–461. Tkweme, W. S. 2007. “The Black Experience in Sound: Jazz and African American Communities during the Black Arts Era.” International Journal of African Studies 13(2) (Fall–Winter): 38–64. Vincent, Rickey. 2013. Party Music. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.

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Black Panther Party For over two centuries, Black people in the United States were murdered with impunity. In 1966 these unchecked murders, usually viewed as justifiable by the courts and other established authorities, gave birth to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). After local, state, and federal government agencies refused to work toward ending the violent oppression that Blacks faced daily, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the BPP, whose primary mission was to defend the Black community. The Panthers could trace their deep roots in the Black Power Movement directly to the recently martyred Malcolm X and to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members who had inspired them by choosing a Panther as their major political symbol during an important election in faraway Alabama. Taking the name and symbol as its own, the two young college students set out on a path to change the world. When Newton and Seale, who met at Merritt College in Oakland, officially launched the BPP in October 1966, they offered a document known as “The TenPoint Program” as their guiding principles. This document summarized the BPP’s mission and goals by calling attention to the myriad problems faced by Black communities all over the nation. In addition to demanding an end to police murder of

View of the Black Panther Party’s community information center in Washington, D.C., early 1970s. (David Fenton/ Getty Images)



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Blacks, the platform addressed such issues as decent housing, fairness in the courts, full employment, quality education, and Black exemptions from the military draft, which required Blacks to risk their lives fighting for rights abroad that they did not enjoy at home. In addition to demanding that Blacks have the right to control their own communities, the document also called for an end to abusive and discriminatory consumer practices, reparations for centuries of injustices, and a United Nations–supervised plebiscite where Blacks would vote to determine “the will of black people as to their national destiny.” Tapping into this bedrock of Black demands, the Panthers grew to epitomize what it meant to be a Black Power organization. Joined by a small coterie of friends who included Sherman and Reggie Forte, Bobby Hutton, and Elbert “Big Man” Howard, the early Panthers focused on self-defense and building community institutions that would protect the young, the elderly, and other vulnerable members of the Black community. To make their positions clear and to teach the members of the Black community how to properly defend itself, the Panthers called for Blacks to arm themselves and at the same time implemented a series of police patrols to follow police officers throughout Oakland’s Black communities. Observing the police with cameras and tape recorders while carrying law books and guns, the Panthers demonstrated to community members that Blacks could stand up to police officers and not be killed or brutalized. Though the police made it clear that they detested being shadowed by what they considered armed thugs, Newton had researched the law and discovered that citizens had a right to carry arms in public. He also learned that citizens had a right to observe police officers as they carried out their duties as long as they stood a minimum of 50 feet away and did not interfere. On numerous occasions the Panthers stood watch as police stopped Blacks in their communities, and not once was the person killed, brutalized, or otherwise harmed. Many of these episodes ended when the Panthers bailed the person out of jail that same night. Not only did the fledgling organization acquire numerous recruits in this way, but it also succeeded in having its message spread after the people it bailed out told friends and family about the unsolicited legal and financial support the Panthers provided. While their police patrols gained them a sort of local popularity, the Panthers’ visit to the state capitol in Sacramento brought them national notoriety. On May 2, 1967, armed members of the BPP entered the California state house and inadvertently entered the general assembly room, alarming lawmakers, security personnel, and Governor Ronald Reagan, who had been delivering a speech to grade school children on the front lawn of the capitol when the Panthers arrived. The Panthers had gone to Sacramento to protest the impending passage of the Mulford Act, which repealed legislation that allowed the open carrying of weapons. The state sought to pass the bill as a way to prevent Black Panthers from observing the police. News coverage of the BPP’s bold appearance at the California state capitol spread like wildfire. News reporters televised Panther founder Bobby Seale as he

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read a statement that implored Blacks to pick up arms to defend themselves from white attacks. The Panthers’ uniform, which included black berets, black leather jackets, black pants, and black boots, helped enhance their image because many of their contemporaries saw the style as unique and filled with sex appeal. Within months, the BPP expanded from a small local organization to one that had chapters in numerous California cities. By 1969, the BPP had nearly 40 chapters nationwide. Some of the more prominent Panther enclaves were in Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, and Philadelphia. The Panthers’ rapid growth can be attributed to their boldness and willingness to sacrifice their own lives to support their community. In addition to enticing those at the bottom of the economic order such as pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, and stick-up men, the BPP also appealed to the solidly working class, the college student, the business owner, and the schoolteacher. Though it was primarily oriented toward its youth base, the BPP succeeded in attracting thousands of mature adults. The organization also received widespread support from a small contingent of wealthy benefactors, including musicians and prominent actors such as Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda. The mass appeal of the Panthers received a tremendous boost in the wake of the tragic 1967 shooting death of Oakland police officer John Frey, who had stopped Newton that October morning for unknown reasons. The stop led to a confrontation that left Frey dead, another officer wounded, and Newton incarcerated with a bullet wound in his abdomen. Legal authorities made it clear that they would seek the death penalty against the Panther founder, and almost overnight a “Free Huey” campaign emerged. This nationwide effort to publicize Newton’s trial led to the Panthers’ popularity throughout the United States and in many places throughout the world. Though Newton was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison, an appeals court overturned his conviction and released him in 1970. While the Panthers were involved in numerous clashes with police officers in large urban areas such as New York City, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, members of the rank and file spent the majority of their time addressing a range of social justice issues that plagued Black communities. They organized rent strikes, protested against rodent infestations, set up community learning centers, worked on educational inequities, and helped community members become more knowledgeable about welfare laws that benefited the poor. Their most prominent community service, however, was the Free Breakfast for Children program, which fed thousands of hungry children and families in every city where the Panthers had an office. The Panthers also opened several Free Health Clinics in California, New York, Washington state, and Illinois. Other groups such as the Mexican Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords were inspired to implement similar programs in their own communities. Panther leaders also succeeded in establishing significant links with majority white organizations,



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including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Stop the Draft, and the Peace and Freedom Party. Still, few could deliver services as well as the Panthers, and as a result the BPP came to be viewed as the vanguard of the Black Power Movement. This vanguard organization succeeded because of the heavy participation of women. In many BPP chapters, men and women participated in equal numbers. Soon after its founding women outnumbered the men in the party and by 1974 represented most of the organization’s leadership. Elaine Brown, Tarika Lewis, Kathleen Cleaver, Afeni Shakur, and Erica Huggins are a few of the thousands of women who served their communities as leaders in the party. The BPP eventually became the most prominent Black Power organization whose membership consisted mostly of women. Addressing the pressing issues of hunger, health, education, housing, and community control of the police, the BPP rapidly expanded. Millions of people were attracted to its panache and bravado. The Panthers introduced into the American lexicon such phrases as “Right On!” and “Off the Pig” and challenged cultural norms with its weekly paper, which often portrayed Blacks engaged in armed revolutionary activity. The more attention the Panthers received for their outspoken critique against injustice, the more Blacks joined. Unfortunately, the BPP’s screening process had huge flaws, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)–sponsored infiltrators soon hobbled the organization. These interlopers flawlessly carried out numerous acts of subversion. Its positive momentum and attractiveness to the masses ironically subjected it to extremely stiff resistance. The federal government, with the assistance of state and local law enforcement officials, directed this frontal assault on the Panthers via its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). FBI director J. Edgar Hoover used this clandestine program to discredit, disrupt, and destroy political organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the SDS, SNCC, and the Congress of Racial Equality. Despite infiltrating and attacking all of these organizations, the overwhelming majority of the FBI’s attention was focused on the BPP. Eventually, infiltrators and informers planted by federal agents and local law enforcement wreaked havoc on the organization’s leadership and, by extension, its ability to survive. In 1969, COINTELPRO operations resulted in the deaths of Los Angeles Panther leaders Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins as well as Illinois Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who were killed in an early morning raid. COINTELPRO operations nabbed the leadership of the New York state BPP, placing 21 people in prison for two years based on bogus charges that they planned to bomb public facilities. FBI agents and their local counterparts framed Bobby Seale for the murder of a Panther in New Haven, Connecticut. The Panthers spent untold sums of money and thousands of valuable hours trying to keep their members out of jail. These actions exhausted party members, and by 1971 most of the rank and file had succumbed to the mental and physical exhaustion that came with being fulltime revolutionaries. Though feeding hungry children, protecting the elderly, and

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selling the Panther newspaper quickly became routine, few members could get used to being jailed on trumped-up charges and having their doors kicked in in the middle of the night for what typically turned out to be spurious reasons. Ultimately, COINTELPRO along with the BPP’s own inability to adapt to new circumstances succeeded in destroying the organization. It did so by sowing seeds of distrust between Panther leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton. Cleaver, the BPP’s minister of information and its most eloquent spokesperson, wanted the organization to continue along its militant and radical path, while Newton sought to direct the group toward community service and mainstream political participation, particularly as it related to voting and office holding. As this rift developed, Cleaver supporters launched a premature assault on local police thought to be occupying Black communities. This contingent, often referred to as the Black Liberation Army, attacked and killed police officers, robbed banks and businesses, and attempted to foment a general reign of terror on the authorities. By the close of the 1970s, both Newton and Cleaver had given up the fight and moved back into their private lives, leaving in their wake thousands of disappointed and disaffected party members who believed that they would see revolution in their lifetimes. Designating itself a vanguard organization whose duty was to lead the masses to liberation, the BPP succeeded in capturing the imagination of millions of likeminded supporters worldwide. At its height, it circulated 200,000 copies of its wildly popular weekly newspaper, served more than 20,000 free breakfasts a week throughout the nation, and inspired the creation of Panther affiliates and support groups in places ranging from the Caribbean and Africa to Europe, India, and New Zealand. In the process, it put police departments on notice that Blacks would no longer accept being beaten and murdered without invoking the age-old right to self-defense. As its membership grew and its influence spread, it fell into the crosshairs of a vengeful federal government that incarcerated its best organizers, killed its most effective leaders, and then demonized and discredited it in the eyes of the public. By 1982, this unprecedented federal assault had transformed the BPP from a national organization with over 40 U.S.-based chapters to a single entity in Oakland composed of fewer than 30 members who primarily worked to keep the BPP’s once well-known community school open. The school closed in 1982 due to lack of funding. By this time Newton had been discredited, Seale had long left, and Cleaver had become a supporter of Ronald Reagan. Many Panthers who did not die in the bid for Black liberation made valiant efforts to reconstruct their lives based on the principles they learned in the BPP. Some went to law school, while others earned college degrees, opened businesses, and became artists, professors, teachers, and judges. Still others are locked up and languishing in America’s state and federal prisons after having served 30 to 45 years. Some of these political prisoners include Mumia Abu-Jamal, Herman Bell, and Ruchell Magee. Panthers Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Sekou Odinga, and Eddie

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Conway are among the few who were released from prison after serving 20, 33, and 43 years, respectively. Others succumbed to either drugs or alcoholism in response to repression and internal contradictions. Many Panthers continued to perform community service work long after they left the party. Some worked as artists, musicians, and teachers, while others such as Kathleen Cleaver and Afeni Shakur became lawyers and started nonprofit social justice foundations. While Newton’s tragic drug-related death marred the image of the BPP, his brave stance against the police, poverty, and oppression remains one of the major turning points in American and world history. Despite its tragic end, the BPP left behind a legacy of struggle that continues to resonate with young people. From the 1980s and 1990s when young hip-hop artists such as KRS One and Public Enemy extolled the virtues of struggling for Black freedom to the tumultuous 21st century when Black Lives Matter activists look, sound, and act like the 1960s-era activists, the BPP continues to serve as a benchmark for protest organizations. A half century after its founding, it continues to inspire people to struggle against injustice by any means necessary. Curtis Austin See also: Carter, Alprentice “Bunchy”; Malcolm X; Newton, Huey P.; Seale, Bobby; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Bloom, Joshua. 2016. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press. Seale, Bobby, and Stephen Shames. 2016. Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Shih, Bryan, Yohuru Williams, and Peniel E. Joseph. 2016. The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution. New York: Nation Books. Spencer, Robyn C. 2016. The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Primary Document Federal Bureau of Investigation, Notes on the El Paso Black Panther Party, 1968 The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was established to neutralize internal and external security threats to the United States. Domestic targets included members of socialist

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and communist groups, antiwar activists, and Civil Rights and Black Power organizations. COINTELPRO was particularly malicious and cruel toward Black leaders and organizations during the 1950s–1970s, labeled “Black Nationalist– Hate Groups.” The FBI directed its field offices to destroy, disrupt, neutralize, and discredit Black activism. FBI surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panther Party received special focus, considering their widespread popularity in the United States and abroad. The FBI memo dated October 11, 1968, provides an example of the FBI tactics against Black political activism. Referencing a previous communication sent to the San Francisco office, the memo expresses concern about a possible development of an El Paso chapter of the Black Panther Party. The memo outlines several counterintelligence and surveillance techniques designed to create suspicion and destroy trust among activists, including distributing fictitious news stories and accusations of financial and marital transgressions. To: Director, FBI (100-448006) From SAC, El Paso (157-126) Subject: Counterintelligence Program Black Nationalist–Hate Groups Racial Intelligence (Black Panther Party) Date: 10/11/68 Re: Bureau letter to SF, 9/30/68 The existence of a Black Panther Party Chapter in the El Paso Division has not been established to date nor has any information been received which would indicate that the Black Panther Party (BPP) of California is actively recruiting members at this time in the El Paso Division. The only information received regarding California BPP persons being in­ volved in El Paso came on 8/1/69 from a liaison source who reported that two individuals had told him that a . . . and indicated to them that he had talked with two Black Panthers from California, who were surveying the situation in the El Paso Division. On 9/1/68, an individual identifying himself as . . . called the El Paso Office and advised that he had . . . , and that meetings were scheduled for the fourth and fifth of 9/68. As a counterintelligence tactic, the alleged meeting place was surveilled by Agents of the El Paso Office, with negative results to indicate any type of meeting. . . . On 9/5/68, a member of the Military Intelligence Division of the Texas State Guard, reported that he had received information that there were two tall



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Negro males in black berets and black clothing in El Paso on 8/31/68, and that they had the initials “BP” on armbands. No other reports of these two individu­ als were received by any of the intelligence agencies or police departments. On 9/26/68, an individual believed to be a Negro, called the local radio station indicating that he was a Black Panther, and there were 20–27 Black Panters in El Paso, with more coming in for a demonstration. He was invited by the moderator of the open forum-type program to come to the station on 10/2/68 and/or 10/3/68 to be interviewed. On 10/2/68, during the program from 4 to 5 p.m., the individual called and stated he was unable to show up because “someone had put sugar in his gas tank.” On 10/3/68, the alternate date, no call was received nor did anyone appear. The BPP being an open organization and not clandestine in its activities, a grave doubt was raised as to the existence of the organization. Nevertheless, the El Paso Office covered the alleged meeting spots on suc­ cessive nights without any information being developed to indicate a meeting taking place, established a surveillance across from the radio station to observe and photograph any Black Panthers who showed up. . . . Regarding counterintelligence techniques which can be utilized on a local or national level, the El Paso Office suggests the following for the Bureau’s consideration: 1. Interview suspected Black Panther members in an area where the in­ terview by Bureau Agents can be observed by other Black Panther members, thus casting the suspicion that the interviewed individual is a Bureau informant. 2. Call for the member at the BPP Headquarters or other place known to be frequented by them, and leave a fictitious name and the number of the FBI Office with the request that they have the man call. When, if suspicion has already been cast upon this member, a member of the Black Panthers calls to verify the number, the Bureau switchboard op­ erator will, quite naturally, deny the existence of such an Agent, thus creating further suspicion. 3. Have a female call the wife of a Black Panther member or official, ask­ ing for the husband by first name. 4. Write a letter or make a telephone call to the wife of the member de­ manding that her husband stay away from the writer’s wife, lest there be trouble. 5. Anonymously send a small contribution to the BPP, stating that this amount is not as huge as that contributed previously (stating a large figure if deemed advisable) and since no record of the receipt of such

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a letter will be at the BPP Headquarters, the inference will be that someone there intercepted the money. 6. A variation of #5 would name a Black Panther member to whom the previous money was allegedly contributed, thus casting the suspicion that the member is holding out money on the organization. 7. If applicable, write a letter to the National Headquarters inferring in the letter that the local treasurer of the local BPP Chapter is holding out money on the National Headquarters. 8. Furnish to a cooperative, friendly, trustworthy newspaper or news me­ dia man, the criminal, moral, and other pertinent background regard­ ing the leadership of the BPP. 9. An anonymous letter stating that despite what brother . . . or as the name may be, says about the leadership of the BPP Chapter, the writer believes that they are doing a fine job. It is realized that not all of the techniques can be utilized in every situation, and that some have been used in the past, nevertheless, it is believed that the greater the disruption at the time of the organizing of a Black Panther or Black Nationalist Group chapter, the greater the possibilities of neutralizing the chap­ ter and its leadership. El Paso will remain alert to the counterintelligence problem, and will furnish information and techniques as they develop. ** SAC, El Paso (157-126) (Rec-138) Director, FBI (100-448006) Counterintelligence Program Black Nationalist–Hate Groups Racial Intelligence (Black Panther Party) 10/11/68 The various counterintelligence proposals contained in relet have merit and will be considered in the over-all counterintelligence program aimed against the Black Panther Party (BPP). Suggestion #5 contained on page 3 of relet has considerable merit and could be implemented in the near future, however, the suggestion is irrelevant

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to your division in view of the fact there is no known organized BPP activity in El Paso. This suggestion is being set forth for the odification of the San Francisco Division which may desire to utilize it against the BPP headquarters. “Anonymously send a small contribution to the BPP, stating that this amount is not as large as that contributed previously . . . and since no record of the receipt of such a letter will be at the BPP headquarters, the inference will be that someone there intercepted the money.” Prior to dispatching such a communication to the BPP headquarters, San Francisco should submit the proposed letter to the Bureau for approval along with specific comments relating to the anticipated effectiveness of the letter. ** Letter to SAC, El Paso Re: Counterintelligence Program (Black Panther Party) NOTE: In relet El Paso makes nine specific recommendations concerning coun­ terintelligence measures against the BPP, all of which will be considered in an over-all review of suggestions from the field concerning captioned matter. The suggestion set out in the body of the letter for San Francisco has immediate po­ tential for use by the San Francisco Office, however, it is not pertinent to El Paso in view of the lack of any organized activity of the BPP in that division. Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Black Power Abroad Black Power was an international phenomenon. This entry traverses the movement’s transnational reverberations across the world, mapping its experiences beyond the pervasive rim of the United States. It aims to do more than add to the volume on Black Power with examples muted from the U.S.-centric landscape. This entry suggests that U.S.-centered appraisals of Black Power should be recalibrated by the borders of the global African diaspora. Without seeking to downplay the African American freedom struggle, it asks what was the significance of Black Power in demographically majority Black, multiethnic, and indigenous societies such as in the Caribbean, Africa, and Oceania? How central were Black women in the movement globally? What were the relationships between Black Power and

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decolonization? It is impossible to truly understand the possibilities, meanings, and relevance of Black Power without a global hearing.

Black Power Was the Daughter of Pan-Africanism Historically and politically, Africa birthed many societies of “power” such as Ghana, Nubia, and Kemet. Arguably, then, the Black world’s modern quest for power began with its fight against European slavery in the 15th century. This struggle was particularly marked by the success of the Haitian Revolution. Amy Jacques Garvey (2005) argued that Black Power was an extension of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Black Power’s mother wore many faces. She was Sally Bassett and a basket of white toad, Oshun carrying blades under her lapa, Nanny waging guerrilla war in the mountains of Jamaica. Black Power was the Vodun-blessed knife of Cécile Fatiman—at Bois Caïman she cut the throat of a pig to launch the Haitian Revolution. As true as Truganini, she survived a gunshot to her head while fighting against Tasmania’s British invaders. She guided the canoe of the five Melanesian women from the Solomon Islands, who took part in a payback killing for the kidnapping of their brothers by white blackbirders. Make them think twice. Black Power’s powerful hands simultaneously loaded the rifles of Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman, and Yaa Asante Waa. She had the Black world looking to the east for the coming of a Black queen, like Empress Taitu’s checkmate of Italian imperialism at Adwa. Black Power was 1896. She sat next to Anna Julia Cooper at the 1900 PanAfrican Congress. She survived the 1912 massacre of Cuba’s Partido Independiente de Color with Reyita. She watched Louise Little, the Grenadian-born mother of Malcolm X, navigate the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States under the banner of UNIA. She built clandestine Black liberation armies with Grace Campbell and the African Blood Brotherhood. She spoke of “Internationalisme Noir” à la Martinique’s Jane Nardal in 1928. She was a copy of the Negro World, folded under the arm of Madame M. L. T. De Mena, fluent in the Black nationalism of Henrietta Vinton Davis. Black Power was surreal. She sharpened negritude’s discourses on colonialism like Suzanne Césaire. She was the Afro-Asian solidarity of Grace Lee Boggs. She was the revoked passport of Eslanda Robeson of the Council of African Affairs. Black Power sat to the left of Trinidad’s Claudia Jones, waiting to be deported from Ellis Island because she was a high-ranking official of the Communist Party USA. She radicalized religious organizations with Fiji’s Amelia Rokotuivuna and its Young Women’s Christian Association. Black Power formed Afro-Peruvian dance companies such as that of Victoria Santa Cruz. She was a young Winnie Mandela in exile, two brown-skinned sisters smuggling food to Kenya’s MauMau soldiers, South Sea Islander Faith Bandler recalling her father’s stories of



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being forced at gunpoint to labor in Australia’s sugar plantations. She was the little girl who cut school to witness Bermuda’s 1965 BELCO uprisings—one of the strikers borrowed her red and black jacket to hide his weapons. Black Power was a onetime unknown soldier like Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti who repatriated to Ghana like Shirley Graham Du Bois, Maya Angelou, and Pauli Murray; formed national theater companies like Efua Sutherland; founded schools in Ethiopia with Mignon Ford of Barbados; and read constitutions and raised questions of citizenship like Septima Clark. Touching the whole world, Black Power wrote radical poetry and gave birth to Black Panthers such as Australia’s Kath Walker. Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah defined Black Power as the “sum total of the economic, cultural and political power” necessary for Black survival in the world. He described the movement as being in the vanguard of a global revolution against (neo)capitalism and imperialism. Its Pan-African scope included the Americas, Europe, Australia, and Africa (Nkrumah 1973). Hamilton and Ture’s Black Power convincingly argued that Black visibility did not equate to power, that Africa America was a domestic colony of the United States, and that Black Power was linked to the worldwide African revolution. Black Power sought Black self-determination, engaged Asian and indigenous liberation struggles (as in Palestine), and advocated armed struggle. The nascent phrase “Black Power” flourished into a movement during an intense moment of global Black protest. She emerged in the shadows of the assassinations of Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. She witnessed and was seen by South Africa’s antiapartheid movement, the Cuban Revolution, Vietnam, reggae, and decolonization in Papua New Guinea. Victoria Santa Cruz and her Teatro y Danzas Negras del Perú performed at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico—they shared the world stage with Tommie Smith and John Carlos, whose gestures of liberation became globally visible as symbols of Black resistance. The latter’s raised gloved fists, bowed heads, and black jerseys became just as iconic as the orange, green, and black cover of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. As did Black Power and Seale’s Seize the Time, Fanon’s Handbook for the Black Revolution reached the hands of activists as far as Australia and Melanesia.

Concerning Violence: Black Panthers, Mumbai, and London In 1969, Amy Jacques Garvey positioned Black Power as a “weapon of defense” against white power (Garvey 2005). Indeed, Black Power was a response to an atmosphere of white violence and its physical, social, and economic manifestations. These included institutional racism, capitalism, apartheid, and the state’s deportations and murders of the colonized. Invoking the Algerian War, Martinique’s Fanon logically argued that colonized peoples would find their freedom in and through violence proportionate to the violence employed by the colonial regime to

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repress them (Fanon 2004). It was this analysis that made Wretched of the Earth so powerful. It articulated the moral imperative of armed struggle, legitimizing Malcolm X’s well-stated position on freedom—by any means necessary. The black panther embodied this notion of armed self-defense. With the support of Kwame Ture and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Lowndes County Freedom Party was formed in 1965. With the black panther as its symbol, it influenced the creation of other Black Panther formations. A year later, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton formed the Oakland-based Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). Masses of the world’s Black and brown youths were drawn to the party’s political platforms, survival programs, and positions on armed struggle. Donned in the aesthetic of the Black revolution—Afros, leather jackets, berets, street sweepers, and Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book—the Panthers were also cultural icons with whom young freedom fighters identified. Despite the masculine framing of “the Panther,” the revolutionary philosophies and aesthetic of women such as Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver inspired the movement globally. Countries such as Tanzania, Cuba, and Guinea became places of refuge for Panthers, and Algeria became home to the party’s international wing. Panther formations appeared across London, Trinidad, Israel, New Zealand, Australia, and India. These Panther groups critically helped to shape the broader landscape of Black Power, which emerged out of local and regional political struggles. Founded in Mumbai in 1972, India’s Dalit Panthers understood social violence as being closely related to African American, African, and Asian liberation movements. Their manifesto called for a social revolution to liberate India’s “downtrodden Untouchables.” The Panthers aimed to eradicate “untouchability” and “casteism” placed on the Dalits—India’s Scheduled Castes and Tribes, neo-Buddhists, women, working people, and landless and poor peasants. They were highly influenced by the political thought and legacy of Dalit activist scholar Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. The group transformed “Dalit” into a transnational term, arguing that it referred to all politically and religiously oppressed peoples and nations across the “Third Dalit World.” The Panthers produced Dalit theater, poetry, and literature through their journal Panther and poetry magazine Akrosh (Joshi 1986). In London, Black Power manifested when Ture electrified the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Conference. The movement rooted itself within urban Black communities such as Brixton and Notting Hill—the political playground of Claudia Jones. Spearheaded by West Indian and African migrant communities, it refused to bow to police brutality, white violence, and Britain’s racist education system. Placed under constant pressure by British police officers, Black Power rallied around West Indian restaurants, Rocksteady dance halls, Rasta, and the historic hub of Black radical speech, Hyde Park. Under the leadership of Nigerian playwright Obi Egbuna, London’s BPP was formed in 1968. Egbuna had toured the United States with SNCC. He was



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incarcerated for allegedly writing a document that legitimized retaliatory violence against police aggression. In prison he penned his critical treatise on Black Power, Destroy This Temple. Reflecting Black Power’s transnationalism, the Panthers included the likes of Trinidad’s Althea Jones-Lecointe (who became its chairperson), Jamaica’s Olive Morris, and poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. The London-based Caribbean artists movement (CAM) reflected the international dynamics of the Black Arts Movement. In July 1968, CAM’s Andrew Salkey led a protest against Jamaica’s banning of Black Power literature. Inspired by a visit to Cuba, Salkey argued that revolutionary artists had a responsibility to dismantle the entrenched class-based cultural establishment. In that same month, a Third World benefit featured steel pan music, poetry readings, and speeches in support of Wole Soyinka, Amiri Baraka, and Egbuna. All three playwrights were incarcerated or facing politically inspired criminal charges in their respective locales (Hustler 1968). Other Black Power organizations in Britain included the South East London Parents Organization, the Universal Colored People’s Association, and the Racial Adjustment Action Society.

Black Power in the Americas In the Caribbean, Black Power was essentially a youth response to the unfulfilled socioeconomic promises of political independence. It was heavily influenced by Africana and Caribbean liberation struggles. Guyana’s Walter Rodney argued that Black Power necessitated far more than just Black political visibility. It called for the Caribbean to break from imperialism, for a class revolution where the Black masses would claim political power and reconstruct a national culture in their own images. While teaching at Jamaica’s University of the West Indies, Mona, Rodney grounded with the community about Black Power and African history. Jamaican prime minister Hugh Shearer regarded Rodney as a threat to the island’s national security. In 1968 while traveling from Montreal’s Congress of Black Writers, Rodney was prevented from reentering the country. This sparked an uprising in Kingston. “Dread and terrible,” Black Power in Jamaica waved an Ethiopian flag. It was wrapped in the red, green, and gold fabric of Rasta’s consciousness of Africa and love of Blackness. Rasta was a liberation theology forged from decades-long struggles against Babylon, representing underprivileged urban youths, the unemployed sufferers, and the grassroots intellectuals. Black Power organizations in Jamaica included the Abeng group, which was centered on a short-lived but seminal transnational newspaper. Montreal’s Congress of Black Writers reflects the ways in which West Indians were critical conduits for Black Power’s global spread. Its participants included C. L. R. James, Dominica’s Roosie Douglas, Kwame Ture, Miriam Makeba,

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Michael Thelwell, and Jimmy Garrett. About a year later, West Indian students at the Sir George Williams University staged a protest against racism by taking over the school’s computer center. Numbers were arrested and brutalized by Canadian police officers. These included Douglas, Barbados’s Anne Cools, Cheddi Jagan Jr., and Coralee Hutchison from the Bahamas. The aftershocks of Montreal were immediately felt across the Caribbean. In support of the students, Mackandal Dagga helped to form the New Joint Action Committee in 1969. The NJAC’s 1970 “Black Power Revolution” mobilized more than 10,000 people in protest of neocolonialism. It established a people’s parliament but was far less successful in building a coalition with the island’s sizable working-class East Indian population. Prime Minister Eric Williams implemented a state of emergency to suppress the uprisings. When soldiers in the national army mutinied in support of Black Power, he requested U.S. military aid to suppress it. The struggle continued. As the National Union of Freedom Fighters engaged the state’s army in guerrilla warfare, it lost members such as Beverly Jones, sister of Lecointe-Jones. Black Power messages were also visible in the songs and culture of Calypso artists and Carnival participants, such as Aldwyn Primus and the Black Panther Organization. Black Power in the Caribbean was the stepping razor of Peter Tosh. The movement birthed numerous organizations. This included Eustace Esdaile’s Black Power Group in St. Kitts and Nevis and the United Community of the Bahamas. In Barbados, the People’s Progressive Movement drove Black Power through its bookshop and paper, Black Star. The regional New World Group established branches on several islands. It was a critical intellectual voice for Caribbean nationalism and published its New World through the University of the West Indies’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (Meeks 2007). Journalist Tim Hector played significant roles in Antigua’s Afro-Caribbean Movement (ACM) and the Antiguan-Caribbean Liberation Movement. He was succeeded by the infamous Warren Hart, an agent provocateur once employed by the U.S. National Security Agency. ACM’s Outlet was fervently nationalist and razor sharp. Groups such as the United Black Socialist Party (1969) and the Movement for a New Dominica (1972) represented Black Power in Dominica. “Roseau College,” essentially a speaker’s corner, became a radical site of Rasta, Black Power discourses, and memories of the neg mawon (Black maroon). In 1969, Grenada’s Maurice Bishop and Unison Whitman, Saint Lucia’s George Odlum and Peter Josie, and Jamaica’s Trevor Munroe organized a covert Black Power Conference in Saint Lucia. They established the Forum, a decentralized organization that launched groups in Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Antigua, and Guyana. Bishop’s New Jewel Movement seized state power in Grenada in 1979. He was assassinated in a coup four years later, shortly followed by the U.S. invasion of the island.



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Black Power set fire to the non-Anglophone Caribbean. Puerto Rico’s connection to the movement was most visibly seen through the efforts of the Young Lords. The Cuban Revolution served as a critical example of the revolutionary potential of the Americas. It granted refuge to several Black Panthers, such as Assata Shakur. In 1969, labor uprisings—Trinta di Mei—broke out in the Dutch colony of Curaçao. Suppressed by hundreds of Dutch marines, the Frente Obrero Liberashon (Party Workers’ Liberation Front, FOL) was formed in its aftermath. FOL leaders included schoolteacher Stanley Brown, Amador Nita, and union leader Wilson “Papa” Godett. According to the Central Intelligence Agency, FOL was a wellorganized radical socialist and militant Black party that candidly identified with Black Power. To the agency’s chagrin, it believed that FOL was trained in “terrorist tactics.” Believed to be the “leader of the black radicals,” Brown was charged with arson connected with Trinta di Mei. Whites considered his newspaper Vitó—published in the Afro-Creole language of Papiamento—to be inflammatory, racist, and antiwhite establishment (Central Intelligence Agency 1969). Black Power also influenced the South American mainland. In Surinam, Cyriel Karg formed the Black Power Organization. Young activists from the AfroVenezuelan town of Curiepe fought to prevent its San Juan festival from becoming a commodity for tourism. In Brazil, Afro-Brazilians moved to the sounds of soul music and reggae. The African-centered Carnaval group Ilê Aiyê emerged in Bahia in 1974. Ilê Aiyê was drawn to Black Power and African struggles against Portuguese imperialism, as in Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique. In 1964, Eusi Kwayana founded Guyana’s African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA). A tireless organizer, Kwayana developed ASCRIA’s educational programs to highlight Guyana’s African cultural background. The South American nation reflected the complications of Black Power in the region. Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, in a shrewd effort to keep the movement in check, publicly supported its leaders. He employed Kwayana as a government official, funded Afro-Guyanese cultural projects, and granted political asylum to African American Panthers. Yet, he worked closely with British intelligence officials to curtail Black Power’s growth away from the socialist analyses of the university-based Ratoon Group. In the British colony of Honduras (Belize), Evan X Hyde, Lilette Nzinga Barkley-Waite, Lionel Clarke, and Rufus X founded the United Black Association for Development (UBAD) in 1969. A former student at Dartmouth College, Hyde aimed to use Black Power to unite Blacks across Honduras, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. UBAD’s founders unsuccessfully attempted to radicalize the country’s active UNIA division along the lines of the tenets of Black Power. Still, they used the UNIA charter as a template to build UBAD’s constitution. UBAD’s newspaper, Amandala, was named after the South African word for power, amandla. Its

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“survival” programs included its bakery, UBAFU, named after a Garifuna word for “power.” In 1972, UBAD members were arrested amid uprisings during a PanAfrican Liberation Week. In the same year, the Dangriga (a historic Garifuna settlement) Cultural Association came to the attention of British colonial authorities because of its Black Power and Marxist political orientations. In Bermuda, Black Power was overtly anticolonial. Formed in 1969, the Black Beret Cadre sought a political revolution through Black Power. Through its Black Beret newsletter, liberation schools, survival programs, and low-scale urban guerrilla warfare, the cadre clashed with the island’s colonial officials. In 1970 its founder John Hilton Bassett was arrested after a demonstration in which the cadre burned the British flag in denouncement of apartheid and British colonialism. His legal consul was Jamaican Pan-Africanist and lawyer Dudley Thompson. Cadre associate Erskine “Buck” Burrows assassinated Bermuda’s British police commissioner and governor in 1973. In 1977 Burrows was hung for the acts, prompting an island-wide revolt. In 1969, Bermuda’s Pauulu Roosevelt Brown Kamarakafego organized the First International Black Power Conference. Kamarakafego was an ecological engineer by trade. His canvassing of the Americas took him beyond the Anglophone Americas to Cuba, Guadeloupe, Venezuela, Curaçao, Martinique, and Mexico. The Bermuda conference attracted activists such as Acklyn Lynch, Queen Mother Moore, Flo Kennedy, and C. L. R. James. James opened the event by challenging Black youths not to “play with revolution” (James 1933–2011). He contextualized Black Power within a global, revolutionary framework of struggle against American imperialism and Caribbean colonialism. In the aftermath of the talks, Nkrumah and James encouraged Kamarakafego to organize a 1970 Black Power Conference in Barbados and begin preparations for the Sixth Pan-African Congress (6PAC). Feeling the heat from Trinidad and Tobago’s Black Power Revolution— not to mention Kwame Ture’s public calls for armed struggle during his scorching spring 1970 tour of the Caribbean—Barbados prime minister Errol Barrow rescinded his initial agreement to host the conference. With the support of Amiri Baraka, the conference was instead held at Atlanta’s Morris Brown College as the Congress of African People.

Black Power in the South Pacific Black activists from the Pacific sent revolutionary greetings to the Bermuda conference, specifically from Tahiti, New Caledonia, and the Solomon Islands. In New Caledonia, Kanak activists such as Groupe 1878’s Nidoish Naisseline and Déwé Gorodé were embroiled in an intense struggle against French colonialism. Groupe 1878 was named after the legendary Chief Ataï, who killed a French general in an 1878 Kanak anticolonial revolt. At the 1975 Pacific Women’s Conference



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in Suva, Fiji, Gorodé likened the Kanak struggle to that of the Black and indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa. Black Power in Australia was about indigenous sovereignty, land rights, selfdetermination, challenging miscegenation, and the necessity for Black people to define the world in their own terms. Pat Korowa, Bruce McGuinness, and Bob Maza of Melbourne’s Aborigines Advancement League (AAL) sought to attend the 1970 Barbados meeting. In July 1969, they invited Kamarakafego to Australia to advise them in their Black Power efforts. Falsely rumored to be “Stokely Carmichael’s lieutenant,” Kamarakafego held a press conference on Black Power that made national headlines. According to Australian Black Power activist and scholar Gary Foley, this short but impactful visit propelled Black Power into the popular vernacular of Australia (Maza 1969). The AAL expressed its views on Black Power through publications such as Smoke Signals. It saw Black Power as the liberation struggles of formerly colonized Black and brown peoples. In Australia, this included Black control of Aboriginal protest organizations, as in the 1969 Aboriginal takeover of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and the formation of the United Aboriginal Women’s Council. The AAL encouraged its supporters to read literature such as Fanon’s Wretched and Ture’s Black Power. With Kamarakafego’s support, an Aboriginal delegation of Maza, McGuinness, Korowa, Sol Bellaer, and Jack Davis attended Atlanta’s Congress of African People. They spent time in Atlanta and Harlem with Black and Native American organizations. This included Harlem’s National Black Theatre, the Nation of Islam, the BPP, Queen Mother Moore’s Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, Uhuru Sasa, and the Shinnecock Nation. They also presented a petition on behalf of Aboriginal peoples to the United Nations. The delegation utilized these experiences to further push for political change in Australia. The 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy also marked Australia’s Black Power Movement. Brutally attacked by the police, the Canberra-based embassy demonstrated that indigenous Australia had never ceded its sovereignty. In 1972 Denis Walker, son of long-standing activist Kath Walker, founded Australia’s BPP in Brisbane. Walker argued that he was “first black and then aboriginal,” because that linked him up with Blacks in Africa, India, and America (Fact and Opinion 1972). Women of the Panthers included Marlene Cummings and Bobbi Sykes. Sykes represented Black Australia in organizing for 6PAC. In Redfern, young activists such as Foley and Sykes organized around Paul Coe. This group read Black Power literature just as much as they studied indigenous history through books such as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. They established police patrols, an Aboriginal Legal Aid Center, and a health service. Black Power in Australia produced a wide canon of print media, such as Black News, a profound transnational newsletter that discussed Black Power and indigenous movements across the Americas.

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Black Power found home in the radical traditions of Pasifika indigenous communities. Across Melanesia and Polynesia, Black and brown communities battled genocide, political incarceration, miscegenation, stolen generations, whitening, white violence, (neo)colonialism, and ecological devastation through Black Power, liberation struggles, women’s movements, and the nuclear-free movement. In 1968, students at the University of Papua New Guinea formed the Niuigini Black Power Group (NBPG). Their key concerns were colonialism, segregation, and the exploitation of Papua New Guinea’s mineral resources. The NBPG consisted of a core of Melanesian nationalist poets, politicians, playwrights, and novelists who studied contemporary African literature. These included Bouganville’s Leo Hannett, John Kasaipwalova, and Arthur Jawodimbari. They studied negritude’s Presence Africaine, Wole Soyinke, Chinua Achebe, and Léopold Sédar Senghor and established journals such as Kovave. The NBPG held demonstrations, lectures, and debates on Black Power and engaged the ideas of Nkrumah, Ture, King, and Malcolm X. In Aotearoa, New Zealand, Black Power took root among an emerging generation of Māori activists. In 1970 they formed Nga Tamatoa, an organization of Western-educated urban Māoris. Nga Tamatoa argued that Black Power in Aotearoa was not simply a Pacific version of the African American freedom struggle but was also an extension of historic Māori movements for self-determination. In 1971, the Polynesian Panthers emerged. Primarily composed of Pasifika migrants, they organized prison programs, police patrols, food banks, homework centers, noninterest loan schemes, and legal aid. The Panthers studied African American political literature and Māori history. Amid forceful clashes with the state, its Tongan chairman Will ‘Ilolahia argued that “blackness as a Polynesian identity was the solution to colonial divide and rule” (Shilliam 2015).

Africa, Black Arts, and Internationalizing COINTELPRO Algeria’s Pan-African Cultural Festival (1969), Tanzania’s 6PAC (1974), and the Second World Festival of Black and African Art and Culture (1977) demonstrated the connections between culture, Black Power, and neocolonialism in Africa. This was critical, because it was often erroneously claimed that even African countries ruled by neocolonial elites (such as Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire) represented Black Power. From exile in Guinea, Nkrumah continued to be an important advocate of African liberation and Black Power. His Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare was a crucial guide for establishing the transnational All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. In Nigeria, Afro-beat artist Fela Kuti referenced Black Power in songs such as “Water No Get Enemy.” He was constantly harassed by the state for his political views. Pan-Africanist Steve Biko led the antiapartheid Black consciousness



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movement in South Africa; South African police murdered him in 1977. In 1979, the reggae group Steel Pulse released its iconic album Tribute to the Martyrs. One of its songs, “Uncle George,” was written in memory of Black Panther field marshal George Jackson. Bob Marley’s meteoric performance at Zimbabwe’s 1980 independence celebrations capped off a long decade of Africana political struggle and reaffirmed the role of culture in Africana movements for freedom. Across the world, Black Power was brutally attacked by state forces. This included the administrations of Black leaders who, as in the Caribbean and Africa, were threatened by the movement’s push for self-determination. The assaults on Black Power extended beyond the desks of J. Edgar Hoover, the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The movement’s antagonists included the Canadian Royal Military Police; Australia’s Secret Intelligence Organization (ASIO); Britain’s Special Branch, Scotland Yard, M-15, and M-16; France’s Gendarmerie; and America’s Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency. For example, the British, U.S., and Canadian authorities sought to sabotage Bermuda’s Black Power Conference. Caribbean activists such as Ture and Dagga were prevented from embarking at a number of the region’s islands. Black Power activists in London (such as Winston Trew) were incarcerated and consistently harassed. Australia’s ASIO closely monitored the movement. In the Pacific political condominium of Vanuatu, French and British colonial officials deported Kamarakafego for “spreading Black Power doctrines” in 1975. These same officials also deemed Patricia Korowa to be an “undesirable person” because she had attended the Congress of African People for the “emancipation of the black race.” The French were particularly concerned with the “dangerous liaison” between Pan-Africanism, Tanzania, and Vanuatu; nationalist leaders such as Barak Sope attended 6PAC and compared Africa’s liberation struggles to those of the Pacific (“Snythese Mensuelle de Mai 1974” 1974). In response to Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s formation of the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front, the French sent thousands of troops and paramilitary police to New Caledonia (Ounei 1985). The assassinations of Guinea-Bissau’s Amilcar Cabral (1973), Guyana’s Walter Rodney (1980), and New Caledonia’s Eloi Machoro (1985) and Yeiwéné Yeiwéné (1989) are painful reminders of the state violence enacted against the global Black revolution. Decades later as Black communities still face police brutality, violence, gentrification, mass incarceration and (neo)colonialism, the notion of Black Power remains pertinent. Its ideas continue to be engaged by contemporary activists. Assata Shakur, former Panther and member of the Black Liberation Army, remains in exile in Cuba. The Black Lives Matter movement is raising critical questions about power, race, class, gender, and police violence. These are global queries—Black

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deaths while in police custody is one of the most critical issues facing Australia’s Black communities. Activists across the South Pacific are fighting for ecological justice against Western-created scourges such as the rising of sea levels and deepsea mining. Bermuda remains a British colony. Afro-Colombians stand against genocide. The Chagossians are yet to return home to Diego Garcia. Artists across the world, from hip-hop’s Jasiri X to reggae’s Chronixx, sing of Black Power. Quito Swan See also: Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Fanon, Frantz; Mallory, Mae; Sixth Pan-African Congress Further Reading Austin, David. 2013. Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal. Montreal: Between the Lines. Central Intelligence Agency. 1969. Intelligence Memorandum: Black Radicalism in the Caribbean. College Park, MD: National Archives. Fact and Opinion. 1972. “Tonight the Panthers Speak.” February 9. Fanon, Frantz. 2004. Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove. Garvey, Amy Jacques. 2005. Black Power. Kingston: Miguel Lorne Publishers. Hustler. 1968. 31 August 1968, 2–4, Box 24–15, Caribbean, Joseph Jones Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas–Austin. James, C. L. R. 1933–2001. “Open Statement to Black Power Conference.” CLR James Papers. New York: Columbia University Archival Collection. Joshi, Barbara, ed. 1986. “Dalit Panters Manifesto.” In Untouchable! Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement, 145–146. London: Zed Books. Maza, Bob. 1969. “Roosevelt Brown.” ASIO files, Vol. 1, August 26, Canberra, National Archives of Australia. Meeks, Brian. 2007. Narratives of Resistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, and the Caribbean. Jamaica: UWI Press. Nkrumah, Kwame. 1973. The Struggle Continues. London: Panaf Books. Ounei, Susanna. 1985. For Kanak Independence: The Fight against French Rule in New Caledonia. Auckland, New Zealand: New International Publications. Quinn, Kate. 2014. Black Power in the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Shilliam, Robbie. 2015. The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections. London: Bloomsbury. “Snythese Mensuelle de Mai 1974.” 1974. Port Vila, Vanuatu. National Archives of Vanuatu, New Hebrides Collection. Swan, Quito. 2010. Black Power: The Struggle for Decolonization in Bermuda. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, Rhonda. 2014. Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century. New York: Routledge.



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Black Power Conferences The annual Black Power Conferences were held between 1966 and 1969, which according to historian Komozi Woodard constitutes the inception of the Black convention movement. These conferences became the base for the evolution of national Black leadership, designing a forum for ideological struggle over the Black Power Movement and a political training ground for newer leadership and offering plenary sessions and workshops for youths. The first national Black Power Conference was convened by U.S. congressman Adam Clayton Powell. The session was a one-day Black Power Planning Conference on September 3, 1966, that mobilized 169 delegates from 18 states, 37 cities, and 64 organizations. Three months after the popularization of the mantra of “Black Power” by activists Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Willie Ricks, the planning for the Black Power Conferences began. Members of the planning committee included Us organization founder and chairman Maulana Karenga; Episcopal clergyman Nathan Wright Jr. of Newark, New Jersey; scholar and journalist Chuck Stone of Washington, D.C.; New York City advocate for community control of schools and former Tuskegee airman Isaiah Robinson; and Harlem Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chairman Omar Ahmed. This committee was known as the Continuations Committee. Wright suggested that the 1967 conference be held in Newark. After a series of meetings between 1966 and 1967, Karenga went to the Black Arts Movement headquarters in Newark—at the Spirit House—and met Amiri Baraka. Komozi Woodard suggests in his work A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics that this meeting probably took place in 1966, before Baraka left to teach Black studies at San Francisco State in the spring of 1967. Baraka would join Dr. Nathan Hare, hired to create the first Black studies program at a four-year institution; psychologist Dr. Asa Hilliard; and Black Arts pioneers Sonia Sanchez and Askia Toure. The Newark Black Power Conference on July 20, 1967, focused on the debates around the choice between revolution and reform. The 1967 Black Power Conference took place eight days after the devastating Newark Riot. The conven­ ers had to decide to proceed after six days of upheaval and 26 deaths from the uprising. The Newark gathering was considered a success in the aftermath of the rebellion. Woodard stated that “Seeking a representative meeting, the conference drew a body reflecting the diversity within the Black community, including both Civil Rights leaders and Black militants.” The session resulted in a press conference attended by Maulana Karenga and Reverend Jesse Jackson. The objective was for a Black united front, and Black nationalists such as Karenga called for all parties

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involved to keep their individuality and differences, to move forward together. He called this concept “unity without uniformity.” Conveners expected at least 400 representatives at the four-day conference; however, 1,300 participants, including international delegates, from Black or predominately Black organizations and institutions attended. Fourteen workshops held six sessions, and position papers were presented and organized around issues such as the urban crisis, youths, culture social change, economic development, professionals, family, fraternal and civil groups, religion, alliances and coalitions, and nationalism and internationalism. The conference displayed the ideological diversity of the Black Power Movement. The energy of the Newark Riot was fresh in the minds of those at the 1967 gathering. The spirit of resistance inspired the conference speakers and sessions. During one session, the new chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), H. Rap Brown, was introduced. Brown spoke about Black liberation in a way that resonated with most in attendance. Baraka, who was also in attendance, bandaged from a police beating, made a call for action to Newark. Karenga was defiant at the summit and argued that “Any white people here who oppose our demands? Any Negroes who want to stand up for their white masters? We’re giving you a chance to die for your white master!” (Woodward 1999). Representatives included the National Urban League, SNCC, the National Association for Colored People, CORE, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Us organization, the Mau Mau (Harlem), and the Organization for Afro-American Unity, which was founded by Malcolm X. Woodard posits that the most radical sessions convened at Newark’s Mount Zion Baptist Church, where delegates met for four hours and rallied. The conference participants developed proposals related to the Newark Riot. The chairman of national CORE, Floyd McKissick, advocated for the removal of Newark mayor Hugh J. Addonizio. Three resolutions passed that specifically responded to the Newark Riot: to demand the release of persons in jail after the riots that broke out the previous week, to support the right of Black people to revolt when conditions make it necessary, and to ask the United Nations to investigate Newark under the authority of its charter on colonial territories. The conference also proposed a myriad of resolutions, including the push for “buy black” policies, a call for reseating Adam Clayton Powell in the U.S. Congress and the restoration of his seniority, the proposal of all predominately Black school systems being controlled by Black administrators and boards of education, and a boycott of sponsors of televised boxing until Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight champion title was restored. The most controversial of the resolutions was to create an independent Black nation, which would geographically divide white and Black Americans. As a result of the conferences in 1967, newer organizations formed in Newark, New Jersey. Black women created space with and supported Amina Baraka to not



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only discuss Black liberation and African culture but also to help her as she established the African Free School (1967) at the Spirit House. Informally they established the collective the “United Sisters” and over time became political activists in the Congress of African People. The Third Black Power Conference occurred in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from August 29 to September 1, 1968. More than 4,000 participated in sessions of the conference at Philadelphia’s Church of the Advocate. While ideological differences and organizational competition created tensions at the gathering, participants would reach consensus in their opposition to Black participation in U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. The 1968 conference also reached agreement on the necessity of an independent Black political party. The 1969 Black Power Conference was held in Bermuda. This gathering, officially called the First Regional International Black Power Conference, was primarily organized by Bermudian radical intellectual Pauulu Kamarakafego. The conference focused on global Black issues, such as communications, technology, education religion, politics, economics, and history. It was attended by Black Power advocates from the United States, including Queen Mother Moore, attorney Flo Kennedy, Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannon, professor Acklyn Lynch, and Trinidadian revolutionary and Pan-Africanist C. L. R. James. Melanie A. McCoy See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Arts Movement; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Congress of Racial Equality; Karenga, Maulana; Vietnam War; Wright, Nathan, Jr. Further Reading Woodard, K. 1999. A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Black Prisoner Activism A steadfast resistance to white supremacy has always been ingrained in the fabric of the Black freedom struggle. With the destruction of the Reconstruction period came the rise of the prison industrial complex, which was meant to keep Black Americans in chains. Close to a century later in 1955 with the arrest of Rosa Parks and the onset of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, incarceration became a badge of honor in the struggle to gain social, political, and economic freedom. Throughout the next 10 years, Black youths would voluntarily break laws and proudly be jailed across the South in an effort to dismantle Jim Crow laws. In 1966, the movement took a turn toward Black Power politics. Incarceration became an unwelcomed

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destiny, and young men and women worked tirelessly from inside and outside prison to dismantle the prison system. The context of Black Power prison activism is overwhelmingly masculine and male; however, there were women who played significant roles as well. Malcolm X proclaimed “America is Prison” in response to the oppressive nature of the white power structure of the United States that marginalized and dehumanized people of color, in particular Black Americans. The Nation of Islam (NOI) was active in recruiting Black prisoners to join its cause. As more incarcerated Black men joined the group and started learning their true history, they began organizing around issues facing prisoners. However, the NOI’s support for prisoners was focused mainly on religious freedoms and did not extend to other human rights challenges for prisoners. The NOI was extremely active in demanding changes in the prison system, and many federal and local changes were made due to their efforts between 1961 and 1978. Malcolm X may have become the first well-known prison intellectual. In the 1960s prisoners were active in reading, writing, teaching, and spreading the word of prisoners’ rights and Black consciousness. By 1968, a group in San Quentin State Prison began The Outlaw newsletter in response to guards killing an inmate to stop a fight. The newsletter stressed grievances by inmates, including a demand for parole reform, better food and living conditions, and increased wages. Prisoners caught with a copy of the newsletter were sentenced to solitary confinement. A graduate student from the University of California at Berkeley was visiting the prison when she discovered the newsletter. She contacted several Bay Area newspapers, and the Berkeley Barb responded by reprinting copies of The Outlaw in a section of its paper in 1970. With the help of the Barb, prisoners used The Outlaw to organize a prison strike at San Quentin in which protestors gathered outside of the prison in support of the prisoners inside who were refusing to work. By 1968 prison activism was becoming more common, with several defining moments to come in the following years. Black prisoners were inclined to organize in collaboration with all races in the prison system. However, there are accounts from prisoner activists that race played a key role in the inhumane treatment of Black and Latino prisoners especially. Guards and staff working at jails and prisons in the late 1960s and early 1970s were predominately if not entirely white, and they worked to ensure that the racial order of segregation and inequality was maintained inside the prison facilities. Black prison activists organized and resisted across cell blocks and facilities, and this spread through the prison system largely by the transport of prisoners from one facility to another. Activists spoke of human rights and socialism rooted in an antiracist critique of capitalism. Unlike the early Civil Rights activists who used imprisonment in the jails and prisons to dismantle Jim Crow laws of the South, Black Power prison activism was intent on the eradication of the prison system.



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One of the most noted Black prisoner activists of the Black Power period was George Jackson. Jackson was in and out of the State of California corrections facilities from the time his family moved to Los Angeles in 1956. In 1960, he was convicted of driving a getaway car during a gas station robbery and was sentenced by the judge to one year to life in prison for the crime. This was an ambiguous sentencing that left Jackson’s fate up to the parole boards that he faced occasionally, and because of his known resistance to the prison system and several minor offenses he accumulated while inside, he was continually denied release. While his sentence dragged on, Jackson started writing home to his family, especially his mother, father, and youngest brother, Jonathan, to air his grievances about life as an imprisoned Black man in the California Department of Corrections. In 1970, these letters were compiled into a book called Soledad Brother. It was named for the prison that he was in at the time. On January 13, 1970, after more than one year of having the exercise yard shut down due to a murder that had occured there in 1968, guards opened the yard to Black and white prisoners. Guards and prisoners alike were aware that tensions were on the rise between Black and white prisoners, and inevitably a fight broke out shortly after the yard was opened. A guard from the gun tower above the yard shot and killed three Black men who were in the fight; only one white prisoner was injured from a ricocheted bullet. Many prisoners viewed the incident as a setup by prison officials, and Black prisoners responded with action. They went on hunger strikes, burned prison furniture, and sent out large amounts of mail to their families, attorneys, and state officials demanding an investigation. The prison was in an all-out state of rebellion. After prisoners heard news that the district attorney ruled the case justifiable homicide, they concluded that the law would offer them no recourse. Later that day a prison guard was thrown off a top tier of the prison to his death. George Jackson, enemy number one, and two other inmates, John Clutchette and Fleeta Drumgo, were charged with the guard’s murder. The three became known as the Soledad Brothers. As the Soledad Brothers were on trial for the murder of a prison guard, George Jackson’s brother Jonathan was becoming even more disgruntled of the prison system from beyond the walls. In response, Jonathan entered a Marin County courthouse armed with several guns while San Quentin prisoners William Christmas and Ruchell Magee were in the courtroom as witnesses in a case for prisoner James McClain. Jonathan Jackson armed the prisoners upon entering the courtroom, and the men began to take hostages. Police trying to minimize casualties opened fire on the group, killing Jackson, Christmas, and Judge Harold Haley and wounding McClain and District Attorney Gary Thomas. Because the guns used in Jonathan Jackson’s rebellion were licensed in the name of Angela Davis, she became an instant target for law enforcement as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Davis would make the FBI’s “Ten Most

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Wanted” list after she went underground for several months. Her trial became one of the most symbolic fights for justice during the Black Power period, and during her almost year and a half in prison the “Free Angela Davis” campaign was gaining widespread attention and support. Davis, who was already established as an intellectual and critical Black activist of the time, solidified herself through her trial. Her fight for her own freedom not only boosted the Black Power Movement but also impacted the peculiar struggle that women faced in the struggle for liberation. She became one of the few women of the movement to garner such widespread attention and support, although certainly not the only woman involved in Black prisoner activism. To be sure, there were other Black women who engaged in activism from within the confines of prison as well as outside of the walls. About a year after his brother was killed in an attempt to take over the Marin County Courthouse, George Jackson would engage in his final form of resistance to the prison system that maintained a tight grasp on his freedom. After a visit from his attorney on August 21, 1971, at San Quentin, Jackson headed back to his cell. When he returned to the Adjustment Center (solitary confinement), Jackson, having acquired a gun, overtook the guards of the unit and started to unlock cells and let his fellow prisoners out. He took several guards back to his cell; their throats were slit, and they were left for dead. The unit was in chaos, and many of the prisoners did not know what to do with themselves and stood in awe. As guards were finally called in from other units, Jackson made a daring dash into the yard, where he was met with the fire of the prison guards’ guns. He was struck twice and killed, and fellow inmate Johnny Spain, who had entered the yard with him, surrendered to the guards. Jackson was dead three days before his trial for the killing of a prison guard was set to begin. In all, six prisoners were charged with the rebellion and became known as the San Quentin 6. The fact that Jackson never left prison shows the influence that prison activism could have on the outside world and not just the reverse. Prisoner activism was not unique to the California prison system during the Black Power period, and in fact Black Power activists were staging rebellions in different prisons around the nation. Jackson’s death sparked one of the deadliest prison rebellions in history just weeks later. On September 9, 1971, almost half of the prison’s 2,200 prisoners at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York state took a number of guards hostage in a demand for better conditions and prisoners’ rights. Governor Nelson Rockefeller then demanded an end to the uprising and ordered state police to take back control of the facility. Police intervened with a barrage of gunfire that left 39 people dead, including 29 prisoners and 10 prison guards. The Attica Prison Rebellion marks a monumental moment in prisoner activism and came in response to the unjust system of incarceration and the actors of the Black Power Movement who work diligently to dismantle it. In the Deep South, Louisiana State Penitentiary fostered a type of oppression akin to slavery. The state prison, also known as Angola, was a former slave plantation



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named for the African country from where its enslaved people had been brutally uprooted. During the Black Power period, three inmates arrived at the prison who would organize fellow prisoners in an effort to reform the slave-like system in which inmates were forced to work the plantation in the hot Louisiana sun as prison officers on horseback patrolled the grounds wielding shotguns. Robert King Wilkerson, Herman Wallace, and Albert Woodfox—known as the Angola 3—were all in the prison after being convicted in separate instances. Wallace and Woodfox formed a chapter of the Black Panther Party in Angola Prison in 1971, with Wilkerson joining their efforts one year later. The Angola 3 were responsible for organizing many hunger and work strikes in the prison. Additionally, the men filed many motions in federal court against the violent and segregated conditions in the prison. Their efforts forced a federal oversight of the prison for more than 20 years. All three of the men were charged with murders they did not commit in an effort to silence their protests. This led each of them to unprecedented stays in solitary confinement, where they remained for decades. Their continued dedication to Black Power activism helped to alleviate some of the harsh oppression they, along with their fellow inmates, experienced at Angola over the years. Many instances of Black prisoner activism occurred during the Black Power period through prison intellectuals and their writings as well as their teachings. Black prisoner activists such as George Jackson, the Soledad Brothers, and the San Quentin 6 took intellectual activism a step further with armed resistance against the prison officials who held them in bondage. Although it is acknowledged that women received less notoriety for their efforts during the Black Power Movement, there is no doubt that an equally powerful account of Black women’s prison activism could more fully be explored. Angela Davis was just one of the Black women to fight for prisoner rights during the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Angola 3 were men of the Black Power Movement who had stood in the face of adversity in a prison that resembled the dark days of slavery. Even now, the legacy of incarceration continues to affect Black families, and the survivors of the earlier fight to eradicate the prison system continue to resist against oppression and fight to abolish the system. Ryan Warren See also: Attica Prison Rebellion; Davis, Angela Yvonne; Jackson, George L.; Malcolm X Further Reading Acoli, Sundiata. 2008. “A Brief History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle.” Sundiata Acoli, http://www.sundiataacoli.org/a-brief-history-of-the-new-afrikan-prison-struggle -parts-1-and-2-19. The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation. 2008. Directed by J. O’Halligan, produced by S. Crow and A. Harkness. Snag Films, http://www.snagfilms .com/films/title/_angola_3.

162 | Black Psychology Berger, D. 2015. Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. James, Joy, ed. 2003. Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Black Psychology Black psychologists contend that the field does not simply focus on the behavior of Black people but also aims to transform these individuals into “self-conscious agents of their own mental and political liberation” (Karenga 1993, 440). Thus, Black psychology is a distinct field of scientific inquiry that challenges the scientific racism of traditional European and Euro-American psychology and rejects the claims of universality advanced in these academic disciplines (Anderson and Stewart 2007). As such, it is premised on a philosophical radicalism (Jamison 2008). Although the field has its origins in the early 20th century when Francis Sumner became the first Black person to earn a PhD in psychology in 1920, the more systematic and sustained efforts at its establishment as an academic discipline arose in the 1960s. The origin and organization of Black psychology as a legitimate and necessary field of scientific inquiry emerged in the 1960s because of the upsurge of Black nationalist politics and Black Power expressions. Calls for Black psychology occurred alongside those for Black sociology and other culturally distinct academic disciplines during the nationwide pursuit of curricular transformation within American higher education. In large part, the politics and activism of the Black Power Movement on college campuses prompted these developments that in turn generated the ideal social and political environment to create racially and culturally congruent fields of academic inquiry. The creation of the Association of Black Psychologists in 1968 exemplifies the fruit of these efforts. Not only did this in part form Black psychologists’ criticism of the American Psychological Association for its unrelenting support of racist American society, but it also led to scholars within the field distinguishing Black psychology from Western psychology because of its nature and essence.

Schools of Thought and Critical Methodologies Scholars in the field have identified three distinct schools of thought within Black psychology: traditional, reformist, and radical (Karenga 2010). The traditional school is defined by its defensive position, continued support for Eurocentric concepts and models with minor modifications, concern for shifting white attitudes, disinterest in developing a canon of Black psychology, and offering criticism



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without substantive correctives (Guthrie 1970; Karenga 2010). The reformist school of thought, while subscribing to an Afrocentric orientation, maintains its concern for white attitudes and behaviors (Karenga 2010). Proponents of this school of thought also focus on changes to public policy and not just attitudinal shifts, thereby appealing for systemic change that benefits all of U.S. society (Karenga 2010; Jamison 2008). Finally, the radical school focuses its attention entirely on Black populations in terms of analysis, treatment, and transformation and makes no appeal to white society (Karenga 2010). Psychologists of this school are also socially conscious practitioners and researchers for whom the transformation of Black social reality through cultural and political means is a priority (Karenga 1993). Furthermore, this school emphasizes an African worldview analysis, espouses the centrality of African philosophy, and considers the core beliefs, values, and behaviors among people of African descent central to understanding African Americans. African-centered scholars and practitioners of Black psychology view the field as specific to the people of African descent. This scholarship is more loosely identified as pro-Black and pro-Afrocentric (Belgrave and Allison 2006). Within this radical school of thought are notable Black psychologists: Frances Cress Welsing, Na’im Akbar, and Bobby E. Wright. There are three methodological approaches among Black psychologists. Though they may imply a particular theoretical posture, these methodologies are distinguished from the schools of thought in that the latter unambiguously represent ideological orientations (Jamison 2008). These have been identified as deconstructive, reconstructive, and constructive (Banks 1982; Jamison 2008). The deconstructive approach was employed in the early 1900s when early Black psychologists directed their attention at exposing, deconstructing, and debunking myths about the psychological inferiority of people of African descent (Nobles 1986; Jamison 2008). With the reconstructive approach the focus is also on correcting scientific distortions regarding Black people, but going beyond exposing these weaknesses, those who follow this approach seek to create new models that are more culturally relevant (Nobles 1986; Jamison 2008). Finally, the constructivist approach, while continuing to use empirical methods, also questions empiricism as the dominant mode of knowing (Kambon 1992; Jamison 2008). Therefore, constructionists focus on creating new models that draw on “an organic, authentically African epistemological and ontological base” (Harrell 1994, 45). Put simply, the methodological approaches outlined above represent specific research agendas more than they do schools of thought (Jamison 2008).

Na’im Akbar Na’im Akbar was born Luther Benjamin Jr. on April 26, 1944, in Tallahassee, Florida. He completed his primary education in a segregated community in

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Tallahassee and moved to the Midwest, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of Michigan. He also earned a master’s degree and PhD in clinical psychology there (Jamison 2012). As a university student, Akbar became heavily involved in the Black student campus activism of the late 1960s. Once he graduated, his teaching career mostly involved positions at historically Black colleges and universities—Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, and Norfolk State University in Norfolk, Virginia (Jamison 2012). At Morehouse, Akbar created and taught the first Black psychology course in the history of the institution, which ultimately led to the creation of a Black psychology program that he briefly chaired (Jamison 2012). After a short time in Atlanta, Akbar left his position at Morehouse to work in Chicago at the Nation of Islam (NOI) headquarters and opened the Office of Human Development. Upon joining NOI in 1971, he initially changed his name to Luther X, which he later changed to Na’im Akbar when he joined the World Community of Al-Islam in the West. His most recent faculty position was at Florida State University in his hometown of Tallahassee, Florida, where he taught courses in Black psychology for 28 years. Akbar retired from this position in 2008. Akbar’s work on African American psychological disorders has been groundbreaking for Black psychology. To begin, he considers the universal application of Eurocentric psychological categories and definitions to people of African descent a form of “intellectual oppression” and condemns society’s failure to question these normalized practices of “democratic sanity.” According to him, the various mental illnesses experienced by African Americans are the direct result of the alien and oppressive environment within which they live. Akbar outlines four major mental disorders because of this alien environment: alien-self, antiself, selfdestructive, and organic (Akbar 1991a). The alien-self disorder is defined by individuals who overtly reject their natural dispositions to the detriment of their survival. Crucial to this condition is the preoccupation with materialism and the denial of sociopolitical oppression. Similar to the alien-self disorder, the antiself disorder includes the additional dimension of negative views and attitudes toward their own group. This diagnosis includes a completely colonized mentality and comfort in alien identification. Victims of self-destructive disorders are most directly impacted by oppression and are represented by self-deprecating behaviors they engage in. Organic disorders present the most severe form of biochemical, neurological failings. These disorders are akin to traditionally recognized mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, which are partly the outcome of a disordered and defective environment (Akbar 1991a). Akbar is considered a preeminent African American psychologist and a pioneer of African-centered psychology, which involves not only a systematic examination of the African mind but also approaches to mental health and healing and ultimately mental liberation. Drawing on Black Power political philosophies, Akbar



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advocates social ethical reflections geared toward the advancement of the Black struggle for comprehensive socioeconomic empowerment. In fact, Akbar views “The Black Family as Black Power” (Walker 2001).

Frances Cress Welsing Frances Cress Welsing was born on March 18, 1935, in Chicago. She grew up in Chicago and later attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1957. Welsing received her MD from Howard University College of Medicine in 1963, after which she pursued a career in general psychiatry as well as child psychiatry. After holding many positions in hospitals and government agencies and a teaching assignment at Howard University College of Medicine, Welsing started her private practice in Washington, D.C., in 1967. In addition to being a psychiatrist, Welsing was also an activist and race theorist based in Washington, D.C. Her particular political radicalism aimed to critique white supremacist behavior and its effect on people of African descent. Moreover, Welsing’s work sought to challenge the sociopolitical elements that affect quality of life for Black people (Jamison 2008). In 1970 Welsing published her most renowned and provocative essay, “The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy).” This explores the psychogenetic grounds for the practice of white supremacy. Given that the major psychological theories and concepts have been standardized among European and Euro-American populations, Welsing views these as more relevant for application to diagnoses of people of European descent (Jamison 2008). As such, her use of Eurocentric theories is specific to parsing out the cultural logics undergirding Eurocentric thought and behavior. In this essay, Welsing argued that the origins of racism were rooted in the effects of varying levels of melanin on racial perception and development. She hypothesized that the lack of melanin, which results in white skin, is “a genetic inadequacy or a relative genetic deficiency state or disease based upon the genetic inability to produce the skin pigments of melanin which are responsible for all skin coloration” (Cress Welsing 1974, 34). This genetic inadequacy has resulted in the belief that white genetic survival is threatened because Europeans are a minority world population. Moreover, white supremacist hostility toward people of African descent manifests as a psychological defense mechanism intended to mask a sense of inadequacy and inferiority among Europeans (Jamison 2008). These tendencies, according to Welsing, are what led to the manifestation of white supremacy as a systematic global force. The Cress theory offers people of African descent a guide for grasping the global nature of white supremacy. For Welsing, the Cress theory therefore provides the basis for examining numerous issues confronting the Black community,

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including those related to sexuality. Welsing further elaborates these ideas in a later publication, The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors (1991).

Bobby Wright Bobby Eugene Wright was born on March 1, 1934, in one of the oldest all-Black communities in the country—Hobson City, Alabama. Wright’s formative years were spent in Alabama, after which he made his way to Chicago for his higher educational pursuits. He passed away in Chicago on April 6, 1982. Wright was an African-centered psychologist trained at the University of Chicago, where he received a PhD in psychology in 1972. In his professional life he had many designations, including teacher, school psychologist, truant officer, college educator, mental health administrator, clinical psychologist, author, researcher, political activist, and community organizer. He is best known for using his training and skills in the best interests of Black communities and for the cause of Black liberation. Wright is also considered a founder of the school of Black psychology. Wright’s research into the psychopathology of white people was an effort at understanding Eurocentric and supremacist attitudes and behaviors toward people of African descent. His seminal text, The Psychopathic Racial Personality, is a collection of essays published by Third World Press in 1984. In this volume, Wright employs a social scientific approach to analyze the psychosocial features of Western society in terms of racism and their impact on Black life. To this end, he meticulously takes up questions of government, military strategies, science, medicine, education, and religion. Using the World Health Organization’s Inter­national Classification of Mental Disease as the basis, Wright differentiates between the psychopathic, psychotic, and neurotic in Eurocentric thought and behavior. Relatedly, he also coined the neologism “mentacide,” which he defined as the destruction of a group’s minds, with the extermination of said group as the ultimate objective (Wright 1979). He distinguished mentacide from notions such as brainwashing based on its longrange goals. Wright’s involvement in the Black Teachers Caucus is a prime example of the Black Power thought and ideology he espoused: Black control of Black social institutions, including Black education. Having served as a truant officer in the Chicago public school system, Wright led successful campaigns challenging the racist policies and procedures for hiring Black teachers. In addition to his important contributions to the Association of Black Psychologists, Wright’s civic associations and professional memberships included the Conference on Minority Public Administrators, the National Association for Black School Educators, the African Community of Chicago, the National Black United Front Political Action Conference of Illinois, the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania (chair), and the National Black Independence Party (cochair), among others. He became the



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executive director of the Garfield Park Comprehensive Mental Health Center on the West Side in Chicago, a Black-controlled facility for addressing the mental health needs of Chicago’s Black community. This has become the largest Black mental health facility in the nation and has been renamed the Bobby E. Wright Comprehensive Behavioral Health Center. Sureshi M. Jayawardene See also: Black Studies; Pan-Africanism; Sixth Pan-African Congress Further Reading Akbar, N. 1991a. Chains and Images of Psychological Slavery. Jersey City, NJ: New Mind Productions. Akbar, N. 1991b. “Mental Disorders among African Americans.” In Black Psychology, 3rd ed., edited by R. L. Jones, 339–352. Berkeley, CA: Cobb and Henry Publishers. Akbar, N. 1996. Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery. Tallahassee, FL: Mind Productions and Associates. Akbar, N. 1998. Know Thy Self. Tallahassee, FL: Mind Productions and Associates. Akbar, N. 2003. Akbar Papers in African Psychology. Tallahassee, FL: Mind Productions and Associates. Anderson, T., and J. Stewart. 2007. Introduction to African American Studies: Transdisciplinary Approaches and Implications. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Baldwin, J. A. 1986. “Black Psychology: Issues and Synthesis.” Journal of Black Studies 16(3): 235–249. Banks, W. C. 1982. “Deconstructive Falsification: Foundations of a Critical Method in Black Psychology.” Minority Mental Health, edited by E. Jones and S. Korchin, 59–72. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Belgrave, F. Z., and K. W. Allison. 2006. African American Psychology: From Africa to America. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cress Welsing, F. 1974. “The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation.” Black Scholar 5(8): 32–40. Cress Welsing, F. 1991. The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors. Chicago: Third World Press. Guthrie, R. V., ed. 1970. Being Black: Psychological-Sociological Dilemmas. Alexandria, VA: Canfield. Harrell, J. C. 1994. Manichean Psychology. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Hemphill, E. 1999. “If Freud Had Been a Neurotic Colored Woman: Reading Dr. Frances Cress Welsing.” In The Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics, edited by L. P. Gross and J. D. Voods, 180–184. New York: Columbia University Press. Jamison, D. F. 2008. “Through the Prism of Black Psychology: A Critical Review of Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Africology as Seen through the Paradigmatic Lens of Black Psychology.” Journal of Pan African Studies 2(2): 96–117.

168 | Black Student Activism Jamison, D. F. 2012. “I’m Trying to Get You Free: Na’im Akbar, African Psychology and the Reconstruction of the Collective Black Mind.” The Griot: Journal of African American Studies 31(2): 55–65. Jones, R. L., ed. 1991. Black Psychology. 3rd ed. Berkeley, CA: Cobb and Henry Publishers. Kambon, K. 1992. The African Personality in America: An African-Centered Framework. Tallahassee, FL: Nubian Nation. Karenga, M. 1993. Introduction to Black Studies. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, M. 2010. Introduction to Black Studies. 4th ed. Los Angeles, CA: University of Sankore Press. Nobles, W. 1986. African Psychology: Towards Its Reclamation, Reascension, and Revitalization. Oakland, CA: Black Family Institute. Nobles, W. 1991. “African Philosophy: Foundations for Black Psychology.” In Black Psychology, 3rd ed., edited by R. L. Jones, 47–64. Berkeley, CA: Cobb and Henry Publishers. Walker, T., Jr. 2001. Empower the People: Social Ethics for the African American Church. 2nd ed. Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice. Wright, B. 1979. “Mentacide: The Ultimate Threat to the Black Race.” Unpublished manuscript. Wright, B. E. 1984. The Psychopathic Racial Personality and Other Essays. Chicago: Third World Press.

Black Student Activism Black student activists contributed to the leadership and intellectual contours of the Black Power Movement. From young to old, they used their status in America’s institutions of higher education to demand equal access to education, curriculums that took seriously the history and culture of the African diaspora and Third World peoples. In Black communities and secondary schools, they organized alongside manual laborers, educators, and mothers to fight for self-determination, freedom, community control, liberation from state violence, and political power. Their programmatic aims were deeply informed by a rich range of ideological commitments, including Marxism, Black nationalism, Black revolutionary nationalism, Black Christian nationalism, Maoism, and Black feminism. They used direct-action tactics such as strikes, boycotts, walkouts, sit-ins, and building takeovers to win social and political struggles. These activists used their collective power to organize Black student unions on college campuses and drew on the spirit of anticolonial struggles that were occurring across the globe. Black student activists also contributed to the development of the Black Arts Movement and Black studies programs. Black student activism during the Black Power Movement was one phase of the long Black student movement. Black student activism has a long history, with



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Two Yale University cheerleaders raise black-gloved fists in a Black Power sa­ lute during the playing of the Na­tional Anthem before a Yale-Dartmouth game in New Haven, Connecticut, November 1968. (AP Photo)

origins in the era of the New Negro (1919) and concluding with the massive shift in racial and class demographics in higher education during the 1970s. The final phase of the long Black student movement was deeply informed by tactics and ideas that emerged during the previous stages but also expanded the focus of student activism to include the needs of Black communities. On February 1, 1960, four Black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University—Clarence Henderson, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and Billy Smith—staged a sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the Woolworth store’s lunch counter. This marked the beginning of 1960s Black student activism. Students across the South began to use sit-ins as a tactic to desegregate public spaces. Months later these students came together to organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) with the guidance of Ella Baker, a longtime Civil Rights activist. SNCC’s leadership consisted of Stokely Carmichael, Diane Nash, Julian Bond, John Lewis, and Marion Barry. The organizers embraced Baker’s call for a movement that was energized by a spirit of participatory democracy. Under the banner of “Freedom Summer,” SNCC organized voter registration campaigns. It also organized Freedom Schools as an alternative form of schooling for African American southerners. Under SNCC’s leadership, the Freedom Schools taught students rudimentary academic skills as well as organizing skills necessary for social change agents.

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Black student radicals, who possessed a critique of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, often led student groups. Such examples include UHURU and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). In 1962, Donald Freeman and Max Stanford formed RAM, a Black revolutionary nationalist organization that embraced armed self-defense and class struggle. The group’s activities mostly occurred underground with the exception of its publication Soulbook and other revolutionary literature. Under the mentorship of Grace and James Lee Boggs, members of RAM studied alongside activists from UHURU. Luke Tripp, a senior at Wayne State University, organized UHURU along with General Baker, Ken Cockerel, and several others. The Swahili term uhuru means “freedom,” and UHURU embraced Black nationalism and armed self-defense as well as Third World solidarity. The student activists often became workers committed to struggle as labor and community activists. In 1968, UHURU members formed the Detroit-based Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and League Revolutionary Black Workers. As Black students gained greater access to higher education on the West Coast, in large part due to the California Master Plan, Black radical groups emerged in places such as Oakland, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, California. In 1962 Donald Hopkins, Dennis Ramsey, and Donald Warden formed the Afro American Association (AAA) at the University of California, Berkeley. Inspired by Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams, this student organization created study groups, produced a radio show, and organized marches to raise Black student and community consciousness. When the AAA took its organizing into the nearby city of Oakland, it attracted Black students from Merritt College. In 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton—former students at Merritt College and members of the AAA—formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California. Black radicals shaped the intellectual development of Black student activists. In 1967, H. Rap Brown urged students at Columbia University to challenge white supremacy in higher education. A member of SNCC, Brown called upon students to use their academic training to improve society and the lot of African Americans. Other speakers included world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, poet laureate Sonia Sanchez, and comedian activist Dick Gregory. Student activists read and debated works by scholars from a wide range of ideological perspectives, including Afro-Caribbean intellectual Frantz Fanon and Black feminist scholar Frances Beale. These ideas and theorists prepared Black student activists to wage struggles against local police repression and national intelligence agencies as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counterintelligence Program. While Black student activists contributed to the Black Power Movement in many ways, their leadership in the development of Black studies was at the fore of these contributions. In the spring of 1967, San Francisco State University (SFSU) launched the nation’s very first Black studies program. The work began when Jimmy Garret, the Black Student Union president at SFSU, submitted “A Proposal



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to Initiate an Institute of Black Studies at San Francisco State University” to the Instructional Policy Committee of the Academic Senate. Black studies advocates at SFSU, including Sonia Sanchez, saw the academic discipline as a social and intellectual contribution to the long struggle for Black liberation. Black studies evolved out of activists’ study groups and the Black consciousness movement. Students fought for programs and departments that would study Black history and culture rather than Eurocentric curriculums that had relegated Black lives to the margins of history. Student activists demanded a culturally relevant education that would serve as a tool for Black liberation from white supremacy. Immediately following the struggle to establish a Black studies program at SFSU, Black students at other universities followed suit. Black studies has become one of the most enduring legacies of the Black Power era; it was the first academic discipline created in response to a social and political movement. Black student activists also contributed to the development of the Black Arts Movement, the sister struggle to the Black Power Movement. This was especially true of student activism in the South, where there was a critical mass of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). As movement intellectuals and students, Black artists were just as important to the movement. Founding artists of the Black Arts Movement Larry Neal attended Lincoln University, and Amiri Baraka attended Howard University in the early 1960s. Some HBCUs supported the Black Arts Movement by hiring or offering residencies to Black artists such as Margaret Walker (Jackson State University), Lance Jeffers (Howard University), and Audre Lorde (Tugaloo). Black students and artists were also shaped by and contributed to Black Power think tanks such as the Institute of the Black World (IBW). As one of the central intellectual centers of Black political and social thought, the IBW supported African American art and literature and called for research on the Black aesthetic. It presented an opportunity for artists, scholars, and activists to discuss and debate nationalist art. Students of Black liberation theology also contributed to the development of Black Power. This brand of theology views religion through the lens of social justice and liberation. In 1969, Black students at the Union Theological Seminary staged a building takeover to show support for James Forman’s Black Manifesto. During this takeover, Black students demanded that the seminary increase the hiring of Black professors and develop a socially responsible curriculum. School officials agreed to contribute $500,000 to support Harlem’s communities and an additional $1 million to support Black communities in the surrounding area. The concerns of Black student activists sometimes varied according to whether they attended a historically Black college or university or a predominately white institution (PWI). As Black students at PWIs, they often faced harassment by the police and white students and confronted racist assumptions that Blacks were lazy and lacked a work ethic. Excluded from white student organizations, Black students

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fought to desegregate social organizations at PWIs as well. Black student activists at HBCUs struggled to eradicate the paternalist ethic that informed Black universities with predominantly white faculty, as was the case at Clark Atlanta University. Black high school students were equally important to the development of the Black Power Movement. High school students fought for Black community control of schools, an end to police repression in educational institutions, and Black history classes. They also pressed for and won student and community input in educational policy decisions. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, students across the country staged protests and memorials. In Los Angeles, Black and Chicano high school students called for bilingual education. Young people viewed their political activism as being interconnected to earlier Civil Rights struggles. On the national stage, high school students called for a serious response to the influx of drugs in urban schools. In one instance, student collaboration entered the terrain of Black labor activism. In Detroit, Michigan, the Black Student United Front, a citywide coalition of junior high and high school student organizations, worked alongside the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a Black nationalist Marxist-Leninist labor group. Black student activism was an important hallmark of the Black Power Move­ ment. As college and high school students, Black activists demanded that Amer­ ican institutions become more responsive to the needs of Black communities. Their vision for a better world was deeply informed by a wide range of political ideas and experiences with state repression. Their tactics drew upon and differed from previous generations of Black student activists. In its final measure, Black student activism laid the foundation for a change in the production of knowledge in American institutions of higher learning. Dara R. Walker See also: Ali, Muhammad; Black Arts Movement; Black Panther Party; Black Studies; Institute of the Black World; League of Revolutionary Black Workers; Revolutionary Action Movement; Sanchez, Sonia; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; UHURU Further Reading Biondi, Martha. 2012. The Black Revolution on Campus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bradley, Stefan. 2009. Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Danns, Dionne. 2003. “Chicago High School Students’ Movement for Quality Public Education, 1966–1971.” Journal of African American History 88(2): 138–149. De Schwenitz, Rebecca. 2011. If We Could Change the World: Young People and America’s Long Struggle for Racial Equality. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Graham, Gael. 2006. Young Activists: American High School Students in the Age of Protest. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Hale, Jon. 2013. “‘The Fight Was Instilled in Us’: High School Student Activism and the Civil Rights Movement in Charleston.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 114(1): 4–28. Joseph, Peniel E. 2006. Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. Reprint ed. New York: Holt Paperbacks. Murch, Donna. 2010. Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland California. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ransby, Barbara. 2003. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rogers, Ibram. 2012. The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972. New York: Palgrave Macmillian. Smethurst, James. 2005. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Theoharis, Jeanne. 2010. “W-A-L-K-O-U-T!: High School Students and the Development of Black Power in L.A.” In Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level, edited by Peniel Joseph, 107–130. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, Heather. 2001. Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Primary Document Ten-Point Program and Platform of the Black Student Unions, February, 1969 Black student activists used their status in educational institutions to demand equal access to education, an expanded curriculum that took seriously the history and culture of the African diaspora and Third World peoples, the hiring of great faculty and administrators of color, and much more. These activists used their collective power to organize Black student unions on high school and college campuses across the country as well as several tactics including walkouts, sit-ins, strikes, boycotts, and building takeovers to win social and political struggles. Their demands were informed by a range of ideologies such as Marxism, Black nationalism, Black revolutionary nationalism, and Black feminism. They linked their ideas about freedom to their education and believed that it was their duty to take ownership of the direction of the educational system. We want an education for our people that exposes the true nature of this deca­ dent American Society. We want an education that teaches us our true history

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and role in the present day society. We believe in an educational system that will give our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to related to anything else. 1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our school. We believe that we will not be free within the schools to get a decent educa­ tion unless we are able to have a say and determine the type of education that will affect and determine the destiny of our people. 2. We want full enrollment in the schools for our people. We believe that the city and federal government is responsible and obli­ gated to give every man a decent education. 3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black community. We believe that this racist government has robbed us of an education. We believe that this racist capitalist government has robbed the Black Community of its money by forcing us to pay higher taxes for less quality. 4. We want decent educational facilities, fit for the use of students. We believe that if these businessmen will not give decent facilities to our community schools, then the schools and their facilities should be taken out of the hands of these few individual racists and placed into the hands of the com­ munity, with government aid, so the community can develop a decent and suitable educational system. 5. We want an education for our people that teaches us how to survive in the present day society. We believe that if the educational system does not teach us how to survive in society and the world it loses its meaning for existence. 6. We want all racist teachers to be excluded and restricted from all public schools. We believe that if the teacher in a school is acting in racist fashion then the teacher is not interested in the welfare or development of the students but only in their destruction. 7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black peo­ ple. We want all police and special agents to be excluded and restricted from school premises. We believe that there should be an end to harassment by the police depart­ ment of Black people. We believe that if all of the police were pulled out of the schools, the schools would become more functional. 8. We want all students that have been exempt, expelled, or suspended from school to be reinstated.

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We believe all students should be reinstated because they haven’t received fair and impartial judgment or have been put out because of incidents or situ­ ations that have occurred outside of the school’s authority. 9. We want all students when brought to trial to be tried in student court by a jury of their peer group or students of their school. We believe that the student courts should follow the United States Con­ stitution so that students can receive a fair trial. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by a jury of his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economical, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court would be forced to select a jury of students from the community from which the defen­ dant came. We have been and are being tried by a white principal, vice-prin­ cipal, and white students that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black Community. 10. We want power, enrollment, equipment, education, teachers, justice, and peace. As our major political objective, an assembly for the student body, in which only the students will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of the students as to the school’s destiny. We hold these truths as being self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these rights within the schools, governments are instituted among the students, deriv­ ing their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of student government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the students to alter or abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foun­ dation on such principles and organizing its power in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experiences have shown, that mankind are more liable to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and force, pursuing invariably the same object, reveals a design to reduce them to absolute destruction, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. February, 1969 Source: “October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program,” The Sixties Project, http:// www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/Panther_platform.html.

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Black Student Alliance Black students at historically white colleges and universities created self-conscious sociopolitical and cultural organizations most commonly referred to as Black student unions (BSUs), Black student organizations, and Black student alliances or Black student associations (BSAs). Largely founded in 1967 and 1968, these organizations developed in response to a growing need for intraracial group solidarity, security, and political voice on campus. They became unifying organizations for Black students on college and university campuses throughout the United States. In addition, others also formed coalition organizations of Black students and organizations across campuses. Emphasis on the Black Student Alliance in Los Angeles reveals the centrality of Black student activism during the Black Power Movement both on and off campus. On top of the immediate concerns and environments, Black students were motivated by and therefore learned from previous and concurrent movements such as the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, and liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. On the heels of the Civil Rights Movement and as part of the fledgling Black Power and Black Arts Movements, Black students founded Black student alliances at universities such as Yale University (1967), Emory University (1968), and Pasadena Community College (1968). They developed demands rooted in Black Power principles as part of the Black campus movement. Demands included but were not limited to increasing the number of Black students, staff, faculty, and administrators in institutions of higher education. In addition, they demanded Black cultural centers and Black studies programs. On numerous campuses, BSAs held events such as lecture series, wrote letters, took over office buildings, and negotiated their demands with campus authorities. For example, in May 1968, the BSA at Yale University organized a symposium titled “Black Studies in the University,” with speakers from major universities addressing the academic relevance and contribution of Black studies to the academy. Ultimately, Yale became the first Ivy League institution to house a Black studies unit. Black student alliances were also active off campus. In 1969, the Black Student Alliance at Yale also became very active and vocal about police brutality—both on campus and in New Haven. They wanted the university to take more of an active role in holding the police accountable for their actions and bringing justice to their victims. In California, Black student activists named many of their organizations “Black Student Union,” with San Francisco State being the first. Black student alliances formed as a coalition organization in an effort to consolidate power, develop student and community relationships, and serve both student and community needs. In northern California, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) sponsored and supported Bay Area BSUs, forming a Black Student Alliance in May 1972. As



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one of the BPP’s community programs, the goal was to develop concrete programs and initiatives to serve student and community needs and increase communication among Black students across campuses. In collaboration with the BPP, the Black Student Alliance developed programs to assist with financial aid, child care, food, and transportation. The two organizations collaborated to demand relevant courses and better instructors as well. The Black Student Alliance involved itself in sicklecell anemia and tuberculosis testing, the Seniors Against a Fearful Environment program, and local election work. Little known is that in southern California Harry Truly, a California State University–Los Angeles sociology professor, organized the Black Student Alliance in Los Angeles in 1967 to bring together Black student activists. He truly wanted to harness the youthful energy of Black student activists by organizing several hundred across campuses. In addition to students attending two- and four-year colleges and universities, students in high schools were supported by this alliance of students. A number of campuses worked together to spread the idea of creating Black student unions and Black studies programs as well as encouraging the completion of postsecondary education in Los Angeles. Truly believed that the Black Student Alliance had the potential of growing a national Black students movement. He believed that the student was the natural ally of revolutionary movements. The Black Student Alliance in Los Angeles viewed itself as a progressive political organization with the purpose of uniting and organizing Black students in southern California. The organization provided support for student activism in northern California as well. In addition, the organization sought to increase political consciousness and awareness while struggling against racism and capitalism, using socialist principles. Although it was a student-centered organization, the BSA soon formed a paramilitary apparatus after experiencing dangerous encounters with law enforcement and other threats because of its ideological positions. For instance, the BSA’s constitution defines a student as any person who is learning about him or herself and actively engaging in the liberation struggle. It also outlines a hierarchal structure drawing upon democratic centralism—that is, democracy in the sense of allowing free and open dialogue—while simultaneously having strong central control to ensure unity and discipline. The Central Committee is only subordinate to the Security Committee, or paramilitary wing, in times of crisis. Active participation, attendance at meetings, and political education classes were mandatory for continued membership in the BSA. Membership in the BSA swelled as protest activity intensified around Los Angeles. The BSA became involved in high schools when Black students at Fremont, Jordan, Washington, and Jefferson High Schools in Los Angeles formed BSUs in the mid to late 1960s. The BSA supported the student boycotts and walkouts at Manual Arts High School in the fall of 1967 and at Jefferson High School in the spring of 1968. The BSA also collaborated with the high school BSUs and other

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supportive organizations and organized protests against unfair treatment by teachers and administration and demanded more Black teachers and administrators, Black studies courses, and college preparatory curriculum. The support for the high school students increased momentum and membership in the BSA. On May 26, 1968, the BSA hosted a concert as a fund-raiser at the Los Angeles Sports Arena headlined by the Impressions, with other acts such as Oscar Brown Jr., Dick Gregory, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Johnny Guitar Watson, and Eartha Kitt. Proceeds went toward a Black scholarship fund, tutorial projects, and the establishment of liberation schools. The BSA gained so much interest and momentum that it became more than a coalition of Black student unions; it became an organization in and of itself. Members of the BSA became increasingly politicized and adopted varying ideological positions as they were exposed to local organizations such as the BPP, Che Lumumba Club, and the Us organization. The Los Angeles BSA also was part of a coalition to support the Los Angeles chapter of the BPP during the LAPD’s new SWAT unit’s attempted raid on Panther headquarters at 5:00 a.m. on December 8, 1968. Black Panthers, the BSA, and Che Lumumba organizations collaborated efforts and stayed in contact with those Panthers who were defending themselves in their headquarters during the violent confrontation. The BSA kept its promise to remain during the surrender as part of a community of supporters. Jefferson High School students secured the gym for a community rally with the administration’s support. When called, the BSA supported junior high school students. On Friday, March 7, 1969, new principal Andrew W. Anderson Jr. called the police to George Washington Carver Junior High School. Anderson wanted to remove Black Student Union member Joseph Johnson, who was a student at Southwest College and an adviser to the Black Student Union at Carver. Students at Carver called Johnson to speak to the new principal on their behalf as tensions were escalating on campus between the majority Black students and white administration. As word of Johnson’s detainment and pending police arrival spread, Carver Black students filled the main corridor. Students, parents, and teachers accused the police of excessive force when clearing a path through the corridor upon their arrival. The melee resulted in the arrest of nine students; four other students were injured. By Monday, March 10, the BSA had proposed a strike against all South Los Angeles schools in support of the Carver students. The BSA, the Carver BSU, and other supporters offered a list of demands that included (1) no police on campuses, (2) police being brought to justice for clubbing students, (3) community control of schools, (4) Black studies courses in all schools in the area, (5) Black administrators and principals in Black schools, (6) campus security being responsible to the local community, (7) visitors being allowed on campus, and (8) bringing an end to brutal attacks on all Black people. The strike brought some concessions to South Los Angeles schools while bringing increased awareness to the BSA.



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The BSA in Los Angeles was also part of a larger coalition organization called the Black Congress. The Black Congress, a coalition of Black organizations established after the Watts Rebellion, worked toward improving the quality of life and living conditions for Black people in Los Angeles. By early 1969, the Black Student Alliance and a few other organizations such as the United Parents Council, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Malcolm X Foundation split from the Black Congress and formed the Black Alternative. By 1970 the BSA in Los Angeles began to decline in numbers and significance, resulting from internal ideological differences and external forces such as the killing, imprisonment, and intimidation of movement activists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police. M. Keith Claybrook Jr. See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Panther Party; Black Student Activism; Black Studies; Brown, Elaine; Che Lumumba Club; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; UHURU; Us Organization Further Reading Browne, Elaine. 1992. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. New York: Pantheon Books. Hilliard, David, ed. 2008. “Black Student Alliance.” In The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs, 40–41. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Kistler, Robert. 1969. “Black Alliance and School Aide Differ on Boycott Support.” Los Angeles Times, March 14. Kumbula, John. 1969. “Black Students Strike Endorsed by Parents: Walkout Set at All South L.A. Schools to Protest Calling Police to Carver Junior High.” Los Angeles Times, March 10. McCurdy, Jack. 1969. “Carver Melee: ‘Brutality’ Charge Repeated.” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 3A. Rawitch, Robert. 1969. “9 Junior High Students Seized as Sit-in Erupts into Violence: Window-Breaking Melee at Carver School Triggered by Arrest of College BSU Leader Sends Hospital.” Los Angeles Times, March 8, A1. Rawitch, Robert, and John Kumbula. 1969. “Schools Open without Any Serious Incident: Attendance Climbs Everywhere but Boycott Continues at Jefferson High, Carver Junior.” Los Angeles Times, March 18, 3A. Reich, Kenneth. 1969. “Signs of Impending Trouble Preceded Clash at Carver School: Lieutenant Who Summoned Police Squad Says Entrance of Officers May Have Inadvertently Caused Student Panic.” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1. Salazar, Ruben, and Stanley Williford. 1969. “Carver Junior High BSU Group Faces Suspension Today.” Los Angeles Times, March 21, A3. Theoharis, James. 2010. “‘W-A-L-K-O-U-T!’: High School Students and the Development of Black Power in L.A.” In Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level, 107–129. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Black Studies Black studies—also referred to as Africana studies—constitutes the systematic and critical study of the thought, practices, and experiences of African-descended people within their contemporary as well as historical development (Karenga 2010). Black studies encompasses the history, life, and culture of Africana descendants in Africa, the United States, and elsewhere in the diaspora (Gordon 1981). It is a scientific enterprise dedicated to interpreting and elucidating the Black experience in its totality (Turner 1997). Unlike other disciplinary formations, Black studies is composed of “different objects and methods of study” (Hine 2014). As an intellectual discipline with roots in activism, Black studies originated in the Black Power Movement and in Black nationalist political consciousness and action on college campuses across the nation in the late 1960s through the early 1970s (Rojas 2007; Biondi 2011; Rogers 2012). The purpose of the discipline is threefold: moral, social, and intellectual. Currently, Black studies represents a proliferating number of academic departments and programs in many American universities and colleges. In addition to the nomenclature “Africana studies,” a variety of names and labels are used to refer to the discipline, including Afro-American studies, African American studies, Pan-African studies, and African diaspora studies.

A Scholar Activist Tradition As a formalized academic discipline, Black studies extends the “Black Radical Tradition” (Carr 2011). This was an outcome of Black collegian activism from 1966 to 1972 that aimed to “reconstitute higher education” (Rogers 2012). Succinctly referred to as the Black campus movement, this student campus activism grew out of the frustrated and limited efforts within the Civil Rights Movement. Breaking with the Civil Rights Movement, Black nationalists sought a more radical approach to addressing concerns of the Black community, which demanded the creation of institutions specifically dedicated to serving African American concerns and needs. However, Black representation and inclusion remained important goals for Black nationalists (Biondi 2012). These demands reflected Black nationalist rhetoric with an emphasis on the creation and control of institutions for and by Black people. Yet, the circulation and concerted activism of Black college students began well before the 1960s (Rogers 2012). Certainly, Black studies finds its roots in the struggles and social visions of Black students enrolled in historically Black colleges and universities and predominantly white institutions across the country during the 1960s. However, the deliberate embrace of long-view memory permits a broader envisioning of the intellectual posture inherent in these efforts beyond the mere institutionalization of a subject-matter field.



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Black studies historians and scholars affirm that the discipline is defined by and shapes its mission within the longer historical intellectual activist tradition that extends back to the freedom-oriented work during enslavement as well as other periods of crisis, struggle, and achievement. In effect, the long Black student movement “began after World War I in the New Negro Campus Movement (NNCM) in the 1920s and early 1930s” (Rogers 2012, 29). Some of these early student activists were participants of the antebellum abolitionist and colonization movements. At that time, Black students struggled for basic academic and social freedoms within higher education, which included on-campus housing, the ability to publish a student newspaper, and room to organize student governments, among other things (Rogers 2012). Prominent figures belonging to this scholar activist tradition are Black activist intellectuals such as Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, Mary McLeod Bethune, St. Clair Drake, and E. Franklin Frazier. Some of these forerunners of Black studies were affiliated with major research universities. Much of their research also attests to the importance and merit of studying African American life and institutions (Rojas 2007). The demise of the NNCM resulted in student activism in a variety of other organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Student Union, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and the Congress of Racial Equality, all of which fulfilled the long Black student movement (Rogers 2012). All of the above scholar activist efforts, though discrete, were still intertwined and culminated in the Black campus movement of the 1960s.

Black Studies and Black Power The Black Power Movement of the 1960s marshaled a new approach to engaging questions of power relations, the pervasiveness and centrality of racism, and the place of Black people within society. This included a direct focus on the role of Black people at the university. The Black campus movement represents the “academic arm” of the Black Power Movement (Rogers 2012). During this period, the political consciousness of the Black Power Movement urged students to seek cultural grounding, relevant education, and cultural student activism. Black Power activists who traveled across the country delivering speeches at college campuses and community gatherings energized Black students who had already begun critiquing the academy as well as wider American society (Biondi 2012). The rhetoric and political analysis central to the Black Power Movement “emphasized the creation of black-controlled institutions and racial solidarity and entailed a vigorous emphasis on culture—both in celebrating African American culture and in seeing it as a catalyst for political action and the forging of a new Black consciousness” (Biondi 2012, 4). These Black Power ideas enhanced “self-determination,

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self-love, and [a] sense of black solidarity” among Black campus activists, raising their consciousness about the racial irrelevance of higher education and its exclusionist organizing principles (Rogers 2012, 67).

Disciplinary Development Many African Americans viewed the struggle for Black studies as a necessary component of Black liberation, and breaking the white monopoly on knowledge was inherent to that objective (Pinkney 1976). For Blacks, relevant education meant that knowledge production contributed to improving their quality of life. Nathan Hare argued that a culturally relevant education must address the problems associated with race and produce “persons capable of solving problems of a contagious American society” (Hare 1969). These sentiments are evidenced by one of the first successful Black studies initiatives, which took place in 1966 at San Francisco State University (formerly known as San Francisco State College). Members of the powerful student organization the Black Student Union demanded a legitimate Black studies department that was funded by the university and controlled by Black people (Karenga 2010). In 1968, Nathan Hare assumed responsibilities as the departmental coordinator and proceeded to develop the first Black studies department at San Francisco State College. Thereafter, institutionalizing Black studies became a widespread priority for many colleges and universities throughout the nation. Cultural grounding, social responsibility, and academic excellence formed the early mission of Black studies. This mission continues to bear on the discipline’s contemporary intellectual and sociopolitical thrusts. The sociopolitical purpose underpinning the intellectual agenda of Black studies is indispensable in the training of Black studies scholars. Hence, the ultimate task of the Black studies scholar is to produce knowledge that prioritizes the needs and interests of Black communities (McDougal 2014b). This sociopolitical thrust is tied not only to the objective of liberation but also to the imagination and development of new Black futures.

The Discipline Today Since its formalization within the academy, Black studies has experienced various intellectual advances. For instance, today there are several hundred Black studies programs and departments across the United States. Many of these offer graduate degrees. Though rooted in the African American community and struggle, Black studies has expanded. In its self-conceived Pan-African spirit and orientation, the range and reach of the discipline has come to truly represent the experiences and thought of people of African origin from around the world (Karenga 2009).



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Although Black women were indispensable in the Black campus movement, their discursive erasure and absenting of a number of Black gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer scholars has led to the emergence of new directions in Black studies. Insisting that Black women’s issues and interests are fundamentally Black issues and interests, Black feminist and womanist theorists have offered models and matrices for examining the nuances inherent in Black women’s experiences and thought. These theoretical innovations include Africana womanism, Black feminism, African womanism, Afrocentric womanism, and kawaida womanism. Attendant to the Black women’s studies movement has been that of Black queer studies, which distinguishes a very specific group: gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals in the Black community. Geared toward theorizing gender and sexuality in conjunction with other influences on Black identity formation, this emergent dialogue has gained both an intellectual currency and a political currency within the academy. In order to grasp the development of the discipline, a view of its unique epistemological character is also useful. This epistemic identity represents the multidimensionality of the discipline and lends itself to its trajectory. The dimensions of Black studies’ epistemic identity include recognition of the necessity of cultural specificity, heterogeneous collectivism, prioritization of Black interests and needs, agency and self-consciousness, collective emancipation and empowerment, intersectionality, historical location, and the effects of liberation and oppression (McDougal 2014a). Similarly, the concept of a “Black studies mind” captures the intellectual character and thought of Black studies scholars and theorists (Hine 2014). These “habits of mind” include intersectionality, nonlinear thinking, diasporic perspectives and comparative analyses, and an understanding of oppression and resistance as well as solidarity with others subordinated by the same oppressive forces of society (Hine 2014). Practitioners of Black studies have also been influential in the development of professional organizations for the discipline. Formed in 1975, the National Council for Black Studies has been instrumental in providing important venues for the development of curriculum, assessment, service learning, community relationships, and international exchanges. Other key players in this regard include the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, established by Carter G. Woodson in 1915, and the African Heritage Studies Association, founded in 1969. The Black campus movement also waged the formation of smaller Black professional organizations such as the Association of Black Psychologists, the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, the Association of Black Anthropologists, and the Caucus of Black Sociologists. These organizations contribute to the rich and long history of Black scholarship in the lineage of organizations such as the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, formed by Carter G. Woodson in 1915, and the College Language Association, which was formed in 1937. The

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professional structure for the discipline also includes important peer-reviewed scholarly journals that emerged in the 1970s. These include the Journal of Black Studies, the Black Scholar, and the Western Journal of Black Studies. However, older journals such as the Journal of Negro History, Phylon, and the Journal of Negro Education contributed to the further development of the discipline. In fact, the Journal of Negro Education was notably instrumental during the 1970s and 1980s in documenting the growth and organization of Black studies (Biondi 2012). These professionalizing venues persist in their significance to Black studies scholars, instructors, researchers, and undergraduate and graduate students. Sureshi M. Jayawardene See also: Bambara, Toni Cade; Black Student Activism; Black Student Alliance; Hare, Nathan Further Reading Aldridge, D. P., and C. Young, eds. 2000. Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Anderson, T., and J. Stewart. 2007. Introduction to African American Studies: Transdisciplinary Approaches and Implications. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Azibo, D. 2007. “Articulating the Distinction between Black Studies and the Study of Blacks: The Fundamental Role of Culture and the African-Centered Worldview.” In The African American Studies Reader, edited by N. Norment Jr., 525–546. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Biondi, M. 2012. The Black Revolution on Campus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carr, G. 2007. “Toward an Intellectual History of Africana Studies: Genealogy and Normative Theory.” In The African American Studies Reader, edited by N. Norment Jr., 438–452. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Carr, G. 2011. “What Black Studies Is Not: Moving from Crisis to Liberation in Africana Intellectual Work.” Socialism and Democracy 25(1): 178–191. Drake, S. 2007. “What Happened to Black Studies?” In The African American Studies Reader, edited by N. Norment Jr., 338–349. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Gordon, V. 1981. “The Coming of Age of Black Studies.” Western Journal of Black Studies 5(3): 231–236. Hare, N. 1969. “The Case for Separatism: Black Perspective.” In Black Power and Student Rebellion, edited by J. McEvoy and A. Miller, 233–235. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Hine, D. C. 2014. “A Black Studies Manifesto: Characteristics of a Black Studies Mind.” Black Scholar 44(2): 11–15. Karenga, M. 2009. “Names and Notions of Black Studies: Issues of Roots, Range, and Relevance.” Journal of Black Studies 40(1): 41–64. Karenga, M. 2010. Introduction to Black Studies. 4th ed. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press.



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McDougal, S. 2014a. “Africana Studies’ Epistemic Identity: An Analysis of Theory and Epistemology in the Discipline.” Journal of African American Studies 18: 236–250. McDougal, S. 2014b. Research Methods in Africana Studies. New York: Peter Lang. Norment, N., Jr., ed. 2007. The African American Studies Reader. 2nd ed. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Pinkney, A. 1976. Red, Black, and Green: Black Nationalism in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rogers, I. H. 2012. The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rojas, F. 2007. From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Turner, J. E. 1997. “Africana Studies and Epistemology: A Discourse in the Sociology of Knowledge.” In Africana Studies: A Disciplinary Quest for Both Theory and Method, edited by J. L. Conyers, 91–107. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Black United Front The Black united front is a concept, a tool, and a persistent objective of the Black Power Movement and, taking many forms, has been a consistent component of the organizing methodology of local, national, and international movements for Black Power. It became a key consideration of Black Power strategy due to the influence of Malcolm X and his insistence on unifying the Black movement for self-determination. The Black united front is rooted in the historical resistance of African descendants and the necessity to build unity to maximize Black political, economic, cultural, and social resources to successfully achieve common goals. The Negro Convention Movement of the late 1800s and the Pan-African Congresses of the first half of the 20th century are examples of pre–Black Power forerunners of the united front. The Black united front concept, unity of diverse forces within the movement, can be found in the speeches, artistic expression, and publications of Black Power. It is also a specific objective in the political programs of Black Power organizations locally and nationally, and strategies were developed and implemented with various degrees of success to create united front structures. The Black united front was a central concept of the political organizing philosophy of Malcolm X, arguably the most important intellectual influence on the Black Power Movement. Even while a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI), he consistently put forward the idea that Black people should be willing to join together despite their organizational, religious, or political affiliations or differences. After his departure from the NOI, his emphasis on building the united front accelerated and matured. During his travels in Africa he witnessed the attempt to build African unity through the establishment of the Organization of African Unity, an alliance

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of the newly independent African nations and the anticolonial and antiapartheid liberation movements. He also participated in numerous discussions with revolutionaries from Asia and Latin America who were fighting colonialism and imperialism and also advocating for a global united front. In his last year, Malcolm X met with and sought unity with other leaders and organizations including traditional Civil Rights groups. In 1964, he and others founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) as a significant attempt to create a structure in the United States that could serve as or facilitate a political unity for African Americans. As a critical foundational element of Malcolm’s strategy for Black liberation, the united front also became a basic tenet of Black Power organizations after his assassination on February 21, 1965. While Malcolm X was an open advocate of the united front concept as a part of a more radical strategy for liberation, the traditional national and local Civil Rights organizations had established practical united front working relationships with each other over many years and numerous campaigns. While sometimes rivals for funding and supporters, they often collaborated in what could be seen as a united front to maximize their resources and impact. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLSC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the National Council of Negro Women, the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Urban League, and others were typically unified on key objectives of the movement even if they had differing approaches. The Black Power organizations that emerged before and in the wake of the assassination of Malcolm X made numerous local and national attempts at building a Black united front with varying degrees of success but were not as successful in sustaining them, although the overall movement continued to embrace the strategic value of the Black united front. In the summer of 1965 the Watts Rebellion erupted in Los Angeles, followed by more than 200 rebellions in major and smaller cities including Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, and Washington, D.C., over the next five years. Emerging Black Power organizations became more visible and assertive in advocating programs of selfdetermination and the building of a broad united front of forces within the African American community, including community activists, churches, educators, Civil Rights organizations, politicians, and Black nationalists. When the demand for Black Power echoed across the United States from Mississippi in 1966 with the famous public call by SNCC organizers Willie Ricks (Mukasa) and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), the shift in objectives from Civil Rights to self-determination was occurring and accelerating. Over the next decade, the demands of the movement and the structures to realize those demands relied heavily on the Black united front concept. Black Power organizations began to take root prior to the call and continued doing so throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The formation of the OAAU (1964) was



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preceded by the formation of the Revolutionary Action Movement (1963) and followed by the emergence of historically significant Black Power organizations throughout the country, including the Us organization (1965), the Black Panther Party (1966), the Republic of New Africa (1968), and League of Revolutionary Black Workers (1969). This period also gives rise to the Black Arts Movement and the Black student movement that led the demand for and establishment of Black studies (1968) and used the united front concept to organize artists and students. Throughout the Black Power era, activists in local communities formed Black united front structures. On the West Coast this included the Los Angeles–based Black Congress, and on the East Coast it included the Committee for a United Newark. In Washington, D.C., Carmichael gathered activists from SNCC, scholars such as Nathan Hare, students and community organizers including Marion Barry and Mrs. Willie Hardy to create a local Black united front. While struggling for civil and human rights and Black empowerment, local communities often faced racist legal and extralegal violence in attempts to terrorize the Black community and the organizations working on their behalf. For example, the United Front Cairo, Illinois, was formed in response to white supremacist violence against the Black community. Boycott organizer Rudy Shields in Mississippi led the communities of Jackson, West Point, and Aberdeen in forming Black united fronts to organize economic resistance and to protect the community and movement through organized self-defense. Local united fronts typically sought support and unity with those in other communities. They also were participants in the Black Power Conferences and other major gatherings of the era. In 1966 a Washington, D.C., meeting, the Black Power Planning Conference, was convened by New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell with more than 100 activists across the Black political spectrum. It was the first of what is known as the Black Power Conferences (D.C. 1966, Newark 1967, Philadelphia 1968, and Bermuda 1969). These conferences represent the early and most comprehensive national attempts at building a broad national Black united front in the Black Power era. One of the most important programmatic actions from the Black Power Conferences was the charge to create a Congress of African People that would serve as a broad united front of Black Power and Civil Rights activists and organizations. The founding of the Congress of African People took place on Labor Day weekend in 1970. More than 2,000 Black Power activists and 100 organizations from throughout the United States with representatives from Africa and the Caribbean converged on Atlanta for the founding. At its founding, the Congress of African People represented the most significant Black united front. Also, one of the major outcomes of the conference was the call for a national Black political convention and a Black political agenda. Over the next two years, the Congress of African People developed as a national Pan-African nationalist cadre organization and less of a united front. It

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joined with other Black nationalists and the growing local movements for political power, and the largest Black united front effort of the era took place in 1972 in Gary, Indiana. The National Black Political Convention was convened by Gary’s first Black mayor, Richard Hatcher; Detroit congressman Charles Diggs; and Black nationalist leader Imamu Amiri Baraka. It drew 8,000 Black Power activists from across the political spectrum including nationalists, Civil Rights workers, elected officials, and grassroots community organizations. The diverse delegates and participants at the Gary Convention agreed on a broad political program, expressed in the National Black Agenda, and voted to continue the work of building a united front political structure, the National Black Assembly. The assembly was seen as a precursor to the establishment of an independent Black political party. Also in 1972 another important united front structure emerged out of the work to organize the first African Liberation Day demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco on May 27. This was a part of an effort to build a broad global united front to support African liberation movements against colonialism. The organizing committee included representatives from the nationalist Pan-Africanist organizations as well as students, community organizations, and other anti-imperialists. More than 50,000 people attended the D.C. march. African Liberation Day organizers agreed that there was a necessity for an ongoing united front structure. The African Liberation Support Committee was formed with chapters in dozens of cities and on college campuses and continued to build connections to and support for the struggle to liberate Africa. In 1974 the Sixth Pan-African Congress (6PAC) was held in Tanzania and was organized as the first of the congresses organized on African soil. The first five were convened in the first half of the 20th century as united fronts against colonialism and apartheid and as expressions of Pan-African unity. The U.S. delegation to 6PAC was a diverse group of organizers from the Pan-African, anti-imperialist, and Black Marxist organizations. Among the principal organizers of the U.S. delegation was Sylvia Hill, the secretary-general of the North American Region of the Sixth Pan-African Congress. While many of the publicly acknowledged leaders and organizers of Black Power–era united fronts were men, women held significant positions and played crucial leadership and organizing roles in these structures. To specifically focus on the issues of women, the Afrikan Women’s Conference was convened in 1974 by the women of the Congress of African People. From that conference a call came for the creation of a Black women’s united front that would include Black Power activists, unions and worker’s groups, women’s organizations, and grassroots community organizations. The founding convention of the Black Women’s United Front took place in January 1975. While short-lived, this formation did significant work around the incarceration of Black women, welfare rights, sexism, and the importance of women in leadership within the Black liberation movement.



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Throughout the Black Power era and through the last decades of the 20th century, local and national attempts at Black united fronts continued as a key strategy of the movement. One of the most important was the National Black United Front, which formed in 1979 with chapters in several cities throughout the United States and continues into the 21st century as an organization committed to the liberation of Black people. Michael Simanga See also: Black Arts Movement; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Congress of African People; Nation of Islam; Pan-Africanism; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading “African Liberation Support Committee.” 2017. African Activist Archive, http://african activist.msu.edu/organization.php?name=African+Liberation+Support+Committee. Farmer, Ashley. 2016. “Abolition of Every Possibility of Oppression: The Black Women’s United Front.” Black Perspectives, http://www.aaihs.org/abolition-of-every-possibility -of-oppression-the-black-womens-united-front/. Joseph, Peniel. 2006. The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era. London: Routledge. Malcolm, X. 1963. “Message to the Grass Roots.” November, 10, 78. Malcolm, X. 1964. “The Ballot or the Bullet.” April, 3, 23–44. “National Black Political Convention Collection, 1972–1973.” 2004. Indiana Historical Society, http://www.indianahistory.org/our-collections/collection-guides/national-black -political-convention-collection.pdf. National Black United Front. 2017. African Activist Archive, http://africanactivist.msu .edu/organization.php?name=National+Black+United+Front. Simanga, Michael 2015. Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People: History and Memory. New York: Palgrave. Umoja, Akinyele. 2013. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: NYU Press.

Black Women’s Alliance/Third World Women’s Alliance (1970–1975) The Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) was a revolutionary antiracist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist organization that grew out of the concerns of Black women activists within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The TWAA was revolutionary not only in its critique of capitalism as a major source of Black inequality and the need for it to be replaced with socialism but

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also because it advocated armed struggle as the means to replace capitalism and institute socialism. The TWWA went through three stages of development, reflecting its members’ understanding of the dynamics of the society in which it was created. The first incarnation focused on the experiences of Black women activists and sexism within SNCC. Frances Beale, who was a communications worker in SNCC’s New York office, organized the Black Women’s Liberation Committee (BWLC) inside of SNCC in December 1968 to focus on the “triple oppression of Black women as Blacks, women, and as workers.” Internal ideological and theoretical struggle inside of SNCC during that time created an opportunity for Black women activists to organize around their concerns in the organization. By the late 1960s SNCC staff adhered to Black nationalism but also identified the fight against racism as only part of the Black struggle. Kimberly Springer wrote, They believed that in addition to racism, capitalism and imperialism resulted in Black inequality. They recognized the connection between Black Americans and third world peoples and nations around the globe. Like the beloved community, this multifaceted belief system created a comprehensive orientation in SNCC that provided the context necessary for feminism to develop among Black female activists. Understanding Black nationalism in its international context and rooting Black inequality in racism, capitalism and imperialism provided the intellectual environment necessary for Black women in SNCC to identify themselves not only as Blacks but also as women and workers. (Springer 2005) As SNCC underwent its own ideological change from integration to Black nationalism, the organization was not immune to the debates in Black communities regarding Black women’s role in the struggle. The Moynihan Report authored by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which posited that the ills of the Black family were due to a pathological family structure, having Black women as the matriarchs/heads, influenced many male Black thinkers and activists. The BWLC engaged in internal study groups as well as public education forums as part of its work to change this perception, promoting the idea that Black women needed to be full participants in activism and revolutionary struggle. At the beginning of 1970 the group understood the need to expand its focus and membership to all Black women—single mothers, students, activists, and organizers—regardless of their membership in SNCC, which led to the TWWA’s second incarnation: the group changed its name to the Black Women’s Alliance (BWA). The BWA saw its role as twofold, putting forth theory and activism, emphasizing a commitment to bettering the conditions of the Black community at large and Black women specifically.



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By mid-1970 the BWA, which had maintained its insistence that capitalism and imperialism were just as much to blame for Black inequality as racism, had solidified ties with groups of Puerto Rican and other Third World women around similar issues. The group had an internal discussion about how best to contribute to the fight against the triple oppressions and common enemy that Black and other women of color faced. The result was to embrace and expand the Black Women’s Alliance to include these other women, thus the final name change to the TWWA, the third stage. They also expanded beyond the New York base and established a chapter on the West Coast in California. According to the group’s statement of purpose, the women were committed to “tak[ing] an active part in creating a socialist society where we can live as decent human beings, free from the pressures of racism, economic exploitation and sexual oppression.” As women, they promoted and forged a sisterhood among Third World women. They accomplished their goals by collecting, interpreting, and distributing information about the Third World “both at home and abroad, and particularly information affecting its women.” They did not exclude men from their efforts; rather, they sought to build solid relationships with men, “destroying myths that have been created by our oppressor to divide us from each other, and to work together to appreciate human love and respect.” Finally, they wrote, their mission was “to train, develop, and organize Third World women to actively participate in the liberation struggles of our people.” While rooted in the experiences and struggles of Black and other Third World women, the TWWA identified itself as feminist, but its feminism was not like that of white feminists or other groups of Black feminists of the time. As Fran Beale wrote, “The Third World Women’s Alliance—at least in the chapter that I was working with in New York—did not like that term [“feminism”] because at that time it came to mean women who put female first and that was the only thing, you know, it was a very narrow perception. And what we were trying to deal with was the integration of race, gender, class, in consciousness, and not like just put one above the other, because we didn’t think it actually operated as one is more important than another, but that there was actually an integration of that” (Beale 2005). The TWWA was one of the first Black feminist organizations during the Black Power Movement to articulate what would later be known as intersectionality. Other formations such as the Combahee River Collective similarly put forth this analysis. Beale further emphasized the importance of Black women’s liberation: “it’s Black women’s liberation—because Black women’s liberation is not just the skin analysis. It’s not just the class analysis. It’s not just the racial analysis. It’s how those things operate in the real world in an integrated way, to both understand oppression and exploitation and to understand some methods by which we might kind of try to deal with them” (Beale 2005).

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The TWWA did not see Black men as the cause of problems for Black women; they did, however, see Black men’s adoption of white middle-class values vis-àvis Black womanhood as problematic. Some Black nationalist men assumed ahistorical gender values that privileged the cult of true womanhood and notions that women should be submissive and allow men to be leaders of the race. The TWWA did not agree with this view. The political and social issues facing Black women and Black people were rooted in the economic system of capitalism, according to the TWWA. The organization felt that socialism was the antidote needed. They also believed that it would take armed revolution to make socialism a reality in the lives of these women. The TWWA based its conclusions on its studies of anticolonial movements around the world. The TWWA was an all-female revolutionary organization. Importantly, it was not a “women’s auxiliary” of a mixed-gender organization but instead saw itself as being capable of dismantling the capitalist society and sought to replace it with socialism, utilizing arms as necessary. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also agreed that the organization was revolutionary. Documents from the FBI show that the group was under surveillance from the end of 1970 until the spring of 1974. At least six different operatives supplied information on the TWWA to the FBI during this time period, providing copies of Triple Jeopardy, the TWWA newspaper; notes from meetings; and photographs and reports on the activities of specific members. Triple Jeopardy was named for its emphasis on the exploitation and oppression that women of color suffer as women, as workers, and as members of oppressed racial/national ethnicities. The paper included articles and essays on capitalism, the working conditions of women of color in the United States, anti-imperialist struggles around the globe, and the experiences of the women in those countries as women and as liberation fighters in their respective countries. Beale wrote that “Our own international work had to deal with solidarity with the Vietnamese women, and as it pertained to Africa, it also was solidarity with the women in FRELIMO (Frente de Libertaçao de Moçambique), the women in South Africa, and we were very much influenced by Amilcar Cabral [of Guinea-Bissau], in terms of some of his writings” (Beale 2005). Like many Black Power organizations, the TWWA was inspired by the success of the Cuban Revolution as well. Beale recalled that Cuba “played an important role, in terms of our kind of evolving consciousness around both some race and class issues, although some people had some differences about the speed at which some of these old problems were being addressed. But I think that many of us have, you know, witnessed in Cuba the possibility of a society in the future that was free of racism and the possibility of a society in the future in which women played an active and equal role in society. So this influenced us a lot” (Beale 2005). In addition to the TWWA’s emphasis on armed struggle, solidarity with liberation movements around the globe, and its insistence that a capitalist economy must



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go, the organization’s antiwar stance made it a target for government surveillance. The TWWA’s position was, as in its overall work, both theoretical and practical. With the TWWA being a feminist organization, the question of sexuality was inevitable. During the late 1960s and early 1970s both Black and white feminist organizations dealt with the reality of same-sex attraction. Some organizations ignored the issue completely, while other organizations in the Black community participated in intense ideological discussions about membership, goals, and strategies as they pertained to same-sex desire. In some cases, the result was a split or purge in the organization—individuals either leaving the organization to form new ones (or resigning from political work altogether) or being dismissed or removed from the organization. The TWWA experienced both in its eastern/New York– based and western/California-based membership. In the spirit of tackling the issue head-on from a principled standpoint, the predominantly eastern/New York–based membership authored a statement to be adopted by the organization and its membership as a whole that asked members to change their traditional views of gender roles and instead view the issue as “role integration,” accepting homosexuals as dignified human beings. This statement, which appeared in the group’s spring 1972 issue of Triple Jeopardy, was groundbreaking in that it was among the first from a Black organization on the issue of sexuality. It was also the first from a Black feminist organization. The TWWA’s position paper predates that of the Combahee River Collective, the most well-known Black women’s organization of the era that dealt with the issues of Black feminism and Black women’s sexuality. The TWWA stands in the great tradition of radical Black Power protest. Much of its work was ahead of its time in terms of its critique of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, its commitment to socialist vision of meeting the needs of the most vulnerable, and its pronouncements on sexuality and the inherent worth and dignity of humans regardless of their sexuality. The fact that these sistas also promoted “picking up the gun” was also kind of cool. Thandisizwe Chimurenga See also: Bambara, Toni Cade; Chisholm, Shirley; Combahee River Collective; Kennedy, Florynce “Flo”; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; National Black Feminist Organization; Smith, Barbara; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Vietnam War Further Reading Beale, Frances. 2005. Oral History Interview conducted by Loretta J. Ross, Women’s History Archives, Smith College. Ross, Loretta, Kimberly Springer, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. 1999. Still Lifting, Still Climbing: African American Women’s Contemporary Activism. New York: NYU Press.

194 | Blaxploitation Films Roth, Benita. 1999. “The Making of the Vanguard Center.” In Still Lifting, Still Climbing: African American Women’s Contemporary Activism, edited by Kimberly Springer, 70–90. New York: NYU Press. Springer, Kimberly. 2005. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Springer, Kimberly. 2006. “Black Feminists Respond to Black Power Masculinism.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era, edited by Joseph Peniel, 105–118. New York: Routledge. Ward, Stephen. 2006. “The Third World Women’s Alliance: Black Feminist Radicalism and Black Power Politics.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights– Black Power Era, edited by Joseph Peniel, 119–144. New York: Routledge. Williams, Rhonda Y. 2006. “Black Women, Urban Politics, and Engendering Black Power.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era, edited by Joseph Peniel, 79–103. New York: Routledge.

Blaxploitation Films Blaxploitation films were produced during the 1970s for an African American audience with a predominantly African American cast and/or actors in leading roles. The term “blaxploitation” is a combination of the words “black” and “exploitation.” Ex-film publicist and head of the Los Angeles–based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Junius Griffin coined the phrase in the 1970s. Exploitation is the act of treating someone unfairly or unscrupulously in order to benefit from their work, talent, or ignorance. Blaxploitation films encompassed many genres including western, action, dramatic, comedy, and romantic. Therefore, blaxploitation can be very hard to define and does not fit neatly into the narrow box created and sustained by mainstream media. Equivalent to white B-movies, blaxploitation films were inexpensively produced and often poorly written and acted. Many glorified the Black underworld of criminals, drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and con artists. Nevertheless, African American audiences were happy to finally see strong independent Black characters on the big screen. Two vastly different films have been credited with starting the blaxploitation film craze. During the 1950s and 1960s Sidney Poitier was the only major Black film star. Often he was the only Black actor in a film, and 70 percent of the audience was white. According to Donald Boogle in Toms, Coons, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, “The film that launched much of the energetic, optimistic spirit of the 1970s was Ossie Davis’s Cotton Comes to Harlem” (Boogle 2008, 233). The film was released in 1970 and was based on a novel by Black author Chester Himes. The film’s protagonists are two street-wise Harlem police detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques)



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and Gravedigger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge), who were featured in Himes’s crime series novels. Gravedigger and Coffin Ed try to recover $87,000 stolen from exconvict-turned-preacher Deke O’ Malley’s (Calvin Lockhart) Marcus Garvey–like back-to-Africa organization. The action comedy begins when O’Malley’s outdoor fund-raiser is robbed by a group of masked white men. Gravedigger and Coffin Ed pursue the robbers in a high-speed chase through Harlem. They crash into a watermelon truck but find the robber’s vehicle later, minus the money. The only clue left in the vehicle is a piece of unprocessed raw cotton that the stolen money was stashed in. This provokes a running line through the film of “what’s a bale of cotton doing in Harlem?” Many African Americans had migrated to New York from the South to escape the remnants of slavery and working in cotton fields as sharecroppers. Coffin Ed and Gravedigger never recover the money but discover that O’Malley and his white crime partner are responsible for the robbery. Director Ossie Davis cleverly uses stereotypical portrayals of African Americans as a humorous way for the characters to interact, not for a condescending white audience to laugh at. He also uses humor for his Black characters to outsmart white characters in positions of power. The movie did well at the box office and launched the film careers of Lockhart, Judy Pace, Cleavon Little, and Redd Foxx. Technically it cannot be considered exploitative, which makes it difficult to classify as a blaxploitation film, a term that actress Judy Pace refuses to use. She prefers the term “black film renaissance.” According to Pace, “I don’t understand the term or why people use the term black exploitation films. And I always asked, ‘Just exactly what is that?’ Yeah, black exploitation films—but what is that? Show business is a form of exploitation. That’s what it is. So wouldn’t all the white films be white exploitation films.  .  .  . [O]ur movies were basically what Hollywood always calls a B movie. It wasn’t the high budget movie. It was a B movie” (Rice 2014, 75). Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is credited with being the first blaxploitation film. Van Peebles wrote, directed, and starred in Sweet Sweetback. It was released one year after Cotton Comes to Harlem and had a very different premise. In his lead character, Sweetback, Van Peebles unashamedly put a hero on film who violently got revenge for centuries of brutality against Black people by whites. On film, Sweetback was the Black Power response to the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement. He was Huey P. Newton to Sidney Poitier’s many nonviolent characters. Sweet Sweetback was an independently produced action film written and set during the Black Power Movement. Sweetback is a Black stud who was orphaned and raised in a brothel in Los Angeles. When he was a teenager he lost his virginity to an older prostitute, who nicknamed him Sweet Sweetback due to his sexual abilities. When Sweetback is arrested for a crime he did not commit, he witnesses the beating of a Black Panther by two racist white police officers. He takes

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revenge and beats them into unconsciousness. Afterward he goes on the run through South Central Los Angeles and survives with help from the African American community. After several close calls with the police the chase ends in the desert, with Sweetback fighting off police hunting dogs and escaping into Mexico, swearing to return to “collect dues.” The film was revolutionary in several ways. Van Peebles used his own money to finance the film outside of the Hollywood studio system. According to Boogle, Van Peebles shot the film under the pretense of making a pornographic film in order to use a nonunion crew. The film was shot in 19 days. Beginning with Sweet Sweetback, the musical soundtrack also became an integral part of the advertising process of filmmaking. Short of funds, Van Peebles released the soundtrack composed by himself and a then unknown group called Earth, Wind & Fire before the film’s release as an advertising tool. Unlike previous asexual Black male characters portrayed in films, Van Peebles produced a Black sexual movie hero in Sweetback. The character also met racist violence with violence and won. The film became a huge success, with a predominantly Black cast and no big-name stars. The film broke many of the rules established by the big white-owned studio system and proved that there was an audience for a militant Black film. In doing so Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback helped create what Junius Griffin coined the blaxploitation genre, appropriately described by Ann Hornaday (2004) as “a deliberately ambiguous term that refers not only to the exploitation of the hitherto-untapped African American market but also to the often gratuitous sex and violence that the films contained.” Unfortunately, gratuitous sex and violence minus the noble cause pursued by Sweetback would be the most copied elements in many of the films that followed. In 1971 MGM studios released Shaft. The premise of the action-crime film was very simple. Shaft is hired by Black Harlem mobster Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn) to rescue his daughter from the Italian mobsters who kidnapped her. Shaft spends the rest of the movie fighting, shooting, getting shot, and making love to women both Black and white before rescuing the girl with the help of a Black Power organization (a theme running through all three films). Shaft was directed by African American photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks Sr. and starred a then unknown Richard Roundtree. Like Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones, private detective John Shaft hands out his own particular brand of justice in Harlem. John Shaft has elements of Coffin Ed, Gravedigger Jones, and Sweetback rolled up into one stylishly dressed take-no-nonsense ladies’ man whose boundaries have expanded beyond the men in Cotton Comes to Harlem and Sweet Sweetback. Unlike the detectives who humorously outthink their white superiors in Cotton Comes to Harlem and outfight them in Sweet Sweetback, Shaft is in total control of his destiny. Shaft contains some of the most important elements that define blaxploitation films. The Black Power aesthetic in fashion was an integral part of the film. Shaft’s



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Black leather jackets and turtleneck shirts brought an inner-city cool that was in direct contrast to the apparel worn by Black male characters in previous decades. Shaft was a lawman who was just as emotionally removed from his many sexual adventures as his criminal counterpart Sweetback. Everything about John Shaft is sexual, from his last name to his leather clothes to the lyrics of his theme song. The innovative soundtrack to Shaft was another reason it had large audience support. Singer-songwriter-producer Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft” turned out to be a number-one smash radio hit. With its 16th-note hi-hat and syncopated wah-wah guitar-driven groove, orchestration, and sparse lyrics, it was the perfect theme song about the film’s lead character. After a more than two-minute instrumental introduction, Hayes and the female backup vocalists engaged in a call-andresponse singing of the 10 lines that summarized Shaft’s character. The opening lines start with the double entendre “Who’s the black private dick, that’s a sex machine to all the chicks? (Shaft) You’re damn right.” The highlight of the lyrics comes when Hayes starts to call Shaft “a bad motherfucker,” but the backup singers interrupt with the line “Shut yo’ mouth!” The music was so incontestably good that Hayes was the first African American to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song. He also won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and the Grammy for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture. Shaft also included another element that occurred in the blaxploitation genre: it gives the illusion of being produced by African Americans, but its producers were all white men. The film was based on novels written by white author and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman. Its screenwriters Tidyman and John D. F. Black and producers Joel Freeman, Stirling Silliphant, and Roger Lewis were all white. Although the film connects Shaft to the Black community through his work, the trappings of his success are based on the values of white men. As a financially successful private detective, Tidyman does not locate Shaft’s residence in the community where he works but instead in white upper-class Greenwich Village. It appears that Tidyman allowed Shaft to sleep with the occasional white girl because that is what he thinks most Black men aspire to do. These are legitimate reasons why some of his acquaintances and former associates call him a sellout and an Uncle Tom. In spite of the dissonance, the film had a deep connection to the Black community because of its gritty use of New York as the backdrop. Another important film in blaxploitation was the Gordon Parks Jr.–directed box-office hit Super Fly, released in 1972. Super Fly had a simpler premise than its blaxploitation predecessors. It is the familiar story about a lifelong criminal who attempts to “go straight.” Ron O’Neal plays Youngblood Priest, a Harlem cocaine dealer who wants to make one last score and then get out of the game. Unfortunately, his crime partner and suppliers do not want him to stop dealing. Priest spends the first part of the film showing his street cred, making love to his women, and setting up his last big score. During the second half of the film, Priest

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permanently severs his ties with his white suppliers with the help of his Black girlfriend, Georgia (Sheila Frazier). Super Fly provides a grittier tour of Harlem through Priest’s drug underworld. Most of the characters in Super Fly are involved in criminal activities with the exception of Georgia. Super Fly glorified the lifestyles of pimps, crooked cops, and drug dealers in Harlem’s underworld. The characters’ actions and occupations were solely motivated by money. Priest is Sweetback and Shaft on steroids. Like the zoot suits of the 1940s, all of the male characters’ clothing goes to the extreme to draw attention to the character’s prosperity. Priest’s clothing draws special attention, with bright colors and long maxicoats topped off with wide-brimmed hats. Priest’s chromed-out Black customized 1971 Cadillac Eldorado is the perfect accessory to his pimped-out clothing and apartment. Junius Griffin and members of the Black community objected to the film’s glorification of a cocaine dealer’s lifestyle and prosperity. Nevertheless, the film produced a generation of young African American men who wanted to look, dress, and drive a fly ride like Priest. Curtis Mayfield created a hit soundtrack that had more impact on blaxploitation films than the Sweetback and Shaft soundtracks. Shaft had a superior theme song accompanied by instrumental filler tracks. Mayfield produced a hit album with nine songs that closely follow the narrative of the film and could have stood on their own without the film. Like Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On, it is one of the first socially aware concept albums made by a soul singer during the Black Power era. In contrast to Shaft’s ambiguous take on the drug game, Mayfield produced a funky and rhythmic, antidrug soundtrack that focused on different themes or characters in the film that were reflected in the real world. Mayfield does not hide the film’s characters in lyrical fluff. In the verse of Pusherman, he sings I’m your mama, I’m your daddy I’m that nigga in the alley Although the soundtrack did not win any awards, its significance and impact cannot be underestimated. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame listed the title track Superfly among the 500 songs that shaped rock and roll. Rolling Stone magazine ranks the album number 6 of the 25 greatest soundtracks of all time. Curtis Mayfield set the mold for the gritty soundtracks that would accompany the blaxploitation films that followed Super Fly. The blaxploitation era lasted from 1971 until 1976, and during that time over 150 films with Black leads and casts were produced. Following the success of Super Fly, the production of films aimed at African American audiences went into overdrive. Blaxploitation films were based on horror movies such as Blacula (1972), mafia movies such as Black Ceasar (1973), kung fu movies such as Black



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Samurai (1976), Nazi movies such as Black Gestapo (1975), and zombie movies such as Sugar Hill (1974). Most films were male-led action movies, with no genre left unexploited. Eventually blaxploitation films featured women in leading roles such as Tamara Dobson in Cleopatra Jones (1973) and Rosalind Cash in Melinda (1973). In 1973 Pam Grier became a blaxploitation movie star when her character went on a killing spree to avenge her young sister’s heroin addiction in the vigilante action film Coffy. Like Shaft, many blaxploitation films were not the product of African Americans. They were written, produced, and directed by whites who realized that they could exploit Black audiences by making low-budget films. Sherwin “Keith” Rice See also: Black Aesthetic; Black Arts Movement; Black Music Further Reading Beale, Lewis. 2009. “1970s Blaxploitation Films: A Lot Has Changed, but Much Has Stayed the Same.” Los Angeles Times, October 11, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/11 /entertainment/ca-blaxploitation11. Boogle, Donald. 2008. Toms, Coons, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. Briggs, Joe Bob. 2003. “Who Dat Man? Shaft and the Blaxploitation Genre.” Cinéaste 28(2): 24–29. Dolan, Jon, Will Hermes, Christian Hoard, and Rob Sheffield. 2013. “The 25 Greatest Soundtracks of All Time.” Rolling Stone, August 29, http://www.rollingstone.com/movies /lists/the-25-greatest-soundtracks-of-all-time-20130829/superfly-1972-19691231. Hornaday, Ann. 2004. “Baadasssss! Sweet, Mario.” Washington Post, June 11, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2004/06/11/AR2005033113099.html. Rice, Keith. 2014. Transcript, Oral History Interview with Judy Pace 14.14.OHT.01a-b Pace Flood_Judy, 9 April and 11 June 2014, by Keith Rice, p. 75, Oral History Program, Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, California State University, Northridge. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 2007. “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll by Artist (K–M).” Internet Archive, October 14, http://web.archive.org/web/20071014005804 /http://www.rockhall.com:80/exhibithighlights/500-songs-km/.

Boggs, James (1919–1993) and Grace Lee (1915–2015) James and Grace Lee Boggs were revolutionary theorists in the Black freedom struggle. In the early 1960s they argued that changing the American political and social landscape required both a class struggle and a racial struggle. Their analysis of these issues predate Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks yelling “Black Power” in the summer of 1966 in Greenwood, Mississippi. The Boggses’ writing and

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publications were widely distributed and influenced young activists across the country and internationally. Indeed, they laid the foundation for revolutionary struggles during the Black Power Movement. James was an American auto worker, and Grace was a Chinese American philosopher; they were both writers and activists in Detroit, Michigan. James “Jimmy” Boggs was born on May 27, 1919, to Ernest Boggs, a blacksmith and iron core worker, and Lelia Boggs, a cook. Raised in Marion Junction, Alabama, James Boggs was one of four children. His rural upbringing shaped his political reality. Alabama was a place where white folks were gentlemen by day and Ku Klux Klan members by night. Despite Blacks making up over 50 percent of the total population, less than 1 percent were registered to vote. After graduating from Dunbar High School in 1937 Boggs migrated, like many Black men did in those times, taking a freight train north. He ended up in Detroit, Michigan, where he worked for the Works Progress Administration. World War II opened up new possibilities for Blacks, including employment opportunities, and he secured a job at Chrysler, where he worked for over 25 years. As a worker he developed a keen analysis of U.S. capitalism. He honed his skills as an activist doing union work and became a gifted writer. Grace Lee was born on June 27, 1915, in Providence, Rhode Island, to Chinese immigrant parents. Her mother, Yin Lan, was a homemaker who did not know how to read or write, and her father, Chin Lee, was a successful businessman, owning several Chinese restaurants, the largest in New York City where Grace was raised. Grace excelled at school and graduated from Barnard College in 1935 as a philosophy major. Her interest in the writing of German philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx enthralled her, and she went on to earn a PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College. She even translated a few of Marx’s essays from German to English. After graduating with a PhD in philosophy, Grace attempted to find work but ran straight into the color line—no one would hire “Orientals.” She opted to move to Chicago, where she found a job at the University of Chicago and her activist footing as well. Grace began to apply her radical vision of the world to the plight of Blacks in America as she witnessed the power of grassroots activism. First participating in protests against poor living conditions and then as an organizer for the March on Washington movement, led by socialist labor organizer A. Philip Randolph to protest discrimination at defense plants during the war. From this grassroots work, Grace grew into an activist and a radical intellectual concerned with workers, Black liberation, and revolutionary change (domestically and internationally). A few years later, Grace moved to Detroit to help edit the radical newsletter Correspondence as a member of the Johnson-Forest Tendency led by C. L. R. James, a Trinidadian Marxist, and Raya Dunayevskaya, a Russian Marxist. It was



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in this group that Grace met fellow intellectual James Boggs in 1952. The couple married in 1953. After breaking with C. L. R. James in 1962 the radical activist couple focused on the dynamic Black freedom movement in the United States. In 1963 James Boggs published The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook. The publication dealt with the failures of the labor movement and the social and economic implications of automation. This proved to be one of the most celebrated features of the book, catapulting Boggs into a national debate during the early 1960s about the effects of automation on employment and the future of the industrial economy (Ward 2016, 307). In essence, Boggs argued that automation was making Black labor obsolete and that this would ultimately impact the direction of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black freedom struggle overall. James and Grace Boggs also played an important role in organizing support for Robert F. Williams and the armed self-defense movement in Monroe, North Carolina. Through their work with radical organizations, activism, and writing, James and Grace Lee Boggs charted a political course analyzing the development and growth of the Black Power Movement. They drew a real distinction between the integrationist objectives of the Civil Rights Movement and the radical potential of Black people seizing power in urban centers across the country. They helped to forge networks of Black radicals, working with Malcolm X, Muhammad Ahmad, Kwame Nkrumah, General Baker, and members of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, often hosting meetings and study sessions at their home on 3061 Field Street, known as Field Street University. The Boggses understood the need for creating space for thinking and orga­ nizing, and thus their home was a meeting ground for Black militant nationalist revolutionaries in Detroit. They often exposed young and old militants to the international struggles and anticolonial movements occurring in Africa and Asia. They encouraged young revolutionaries such as Malcolm X to develop an anticapitalist stance and influenced their thinking on domestic issues and how to best bring about a revolution. In 1963 along with several other radicals in the Motor City, the Boggses helped to organize the Group on Advanced Leadership’s Northern Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference. It was at this gathering that Black radical leaders converged to discuss the intellectual political development of the Black freedom struggle. During this conference Malcolm X delivered one of his most famous speeches, “Message to the Grass Roots.” In his speech he challenged the dominant ideology of nonviolence as a philosophy and tactic of the movement and encouraged Black radicals to think in revolutionary and international terms. The Boggses believed that Black political power was the key to Black liberation, essential for bringing about a new society and for the economic emancipation of the masses. They stressed the need for studying revolution and the American system

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and for thinking through what activists meant by “Black Power.” They argued that Black Power could not be fueled by emotion or rash thinking. The Boggses emphasized systematic thinking and systematic building as essential elements for leading the masses to power. To be sure, the Boggses argued for Black self-determination, armed resistance, and revolutionary change and did so methodically. Grace Lee and James Boggs each held an unnerving commitment to making a revolution in the United States and together worked toward that commitment for over four decades. Jimmy passed away in 1993, and Grace continued their shared commitment through her thinking, writing, activism, and movement building until her death in 2015 at the age of 100. Jasmin A. Young See also: Baker, General Gordon, Jr.; Group on Advanced Leadership; League of Revolutionary Black Workers; Malcolm X; Obadele, Gaidi (Milton Henry); Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry); Revolutionary Nationalism; Stanford, Max (Muhammad Ahmad); UHURU; Williams, Mabel; Williams, Robert F. Further Reading Boggs, Grace Lee. 1998. Living for Change: An Autobiography. Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press. Boggs, James. 1963. American Revolution, Vol. 15. New York: NYU Press. Boggs, James. 1967. “Black Power: A Scientific Concept Whose Time Has Come.” Black Fire: 105–118. Boggs, James. 2011. Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Marable, Manning. 2011: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. New York: Penguin. Ward, Stephen M. 2016. In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Young, Jasmin A. 2010. “Detroit’s Red: Black Radical Detroit and the Political Development of Malcolm X.” Souls 12(1): 14–31.

Bond, Julian (1940–2015) Julian Bond was an African American Civil Rights activist and politician. He helped to establish many important organizations during the Civil Rights Movement, becoming one of the strongest advocates for Black Americans in the southern United States. His enduring legacy includes his role as communications director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) and the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). From



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1967 to 1974 he served as a representative of the Georgia House of Representatives, and from 1975 until 1987 he was a member of the Georgia State Senate. He served as chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1998 to 2010. His prominent role in activism and American politics placed him among the new political block of Black Americans to rise from the South since Reconstruction. Horace Julian Bond was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Julia Agnes (née Washington) and Horace Mann Bond. Growing up, Julian had attended George School—an integrated private Quaker school near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania— before the family moved to Atlanta when he was 17, in 1957. There, Julian’s father became dean of the School of Education at Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University). By the time Julian attended Morehouse College he was of a minority of third-generation college-educated Black Americans; his parents came from distinguished families, and both were distinguished educators. His father had attended Berea and Oberlin Colleges before becoming a clergyman. At a time when few women received a college education, Julia Agnes was among only a few Black women to earn a master’s degree in library sciences from Atlanta University. Julian’s father became the first Black president of his alma mater, Lincoln University, and had published scholarship on racial discrimination in education. The Legal Defense Fund, the litigators in the landmark Brown v. Board of Edu­ cation trial, used Horace’s research in its arguments. The household that Julian Bond grew up in was steeped in analyzing and critiquing the effects of racism. Important figures in the African diaspora, including the founder of Pan-Africanism and the first postcolonial prime minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, as well as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, helped to expand Bond’s sense of self and the importance of race. Many across the country viewed Atlanta as the jewel of racial progress in the South, escaping many of the issues infecting the rest of the South at the time. Indeed, a coalition of elite Black Atlantans and progressive whites had until the 1960s developed a pragmatic approach to the racial disparities in the city. Through this environment during Bond’s teenage years, these seminal experiences developed a powerful sense of racial pride in him. In 1957, Bond enrolled as an undergraduate at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He became popular on the swim team, founded the literary magazine Pegasus, and interned at Time magazine. Importantly, he attended a seminar taught by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. As with many other college-age Civil Rights activists, Bond’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement that began with the founding of the SNCC in 1960 cut his time at Morehouse short, and he dropped out in 1961. He would return in the early 1970s to complete a degree in English. On the Morehouse College campus, fellow student and Korean War veteran Lonnie King approached Bond about starting a sit-in protest in Atlanta following

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the success of the North Carolina sit-ins. Together they enlisted a group of students from Morehouse and Spelman Colleges. Some moderate Black leaders in Atlanta looked down on the sit-in movement, and many, including the local Black Atlanta leader and lawyer A. T. Walden, saw the courts as the appropriate place to gain Civil Rights for Black Americans. Walden and others asked the students to write a notice to the community listing their concerns. While other college students participated in sit-ins, Bond and Lewis, leaders at the Atlanta University Center, formed the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR) at the behest of Black moderates. COAHR published its “Appeal for Human Rights” on March 9, 1960, which argued that in education, employment, housing, and hospitals segregation had led to inadequate facilities. Law enforcement treated Black citizens as second-class citizens, and of the 830 police officers in Atlanta only 35 were Black. In addition, segregation led to movie theaters, concert halls, and restaurants being inaccessible to Black people. In condemning legal segregation, they held that the State of Georgia at once taxed all Georgians the same yet did not afford Black Georgians the same access to public institutions and facilities that whites were guaranteed. The Black community leaders and their allies believed that a list of concerns could move the students to seeing litigation and working with the NAACP as an alternative and legal way of contesting segregation. However, the new generation of student activists looked to direct action to gain their legal rights, especially seeing the effectiveness of the sit-in movement to mobilize Black youths. Despite the hopes that this would lead to a mediated understanding of what was possible, the generational divide grew, as the moderate interracial leaders of Atlanta opposed COAHR. Realizing that it could not rely on Walden and other leaders, COAHR began its sit-ins. Divided into small groups, the students entered several public and government buildings wearing their best clothing. By focusing on public buildings, they purposefully chose buildings that would make the state confront Black citizens. Bond’s group entered the Atlanta Court Building. Following the sit-in, the group was criticized by Black elites, other Black students, the mayor, and white businessmen. The group was accused of communist leanings, and many businessmen made it clear that they had no intentions of ending segregation. The response from white and Black members of the public led to the formation of SNCC under the leadership of James Lawson (Brown-Nagin 2012). Bond served as the communications director. In his new role, he served as the editor of Student Voice and its successor, the Atlanta Inquirer. Student Voice launched in the summer of 1960 and ran articles on various topics such as nonviolent tactics, fund-raising, and how to obtain scholarships for students expelled for leading protests, which was a great concern for many of its readers. It would eventually report on hundreds of activities run by SNCC workers across the country.



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By 1965, SNCC had moved further away from mainstream Civil Rights and liberal allies. In May 1966 Stokely Carmichael was elected national chairman of SNCC. Along with a number of its Black members, he moved SNCC toward the Black Power Movement that aimed toward Black self-determination, nationalism, and sometimes separatism. Those in support of a Black-only membership in SNCC coordinated with other white and integrated radical organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society. Bond and others who supported an integrated SNCC left a year prior to the new membership change and organizational focus. There were several concomitant forces that led to this change, and Bond was far from the actions of SNCC at this time. Bond’s political campaign to be seated in the Georgia House of Representatives kept him from being a part of the discussion of SNCC’s future. And more so, Bond had not participated in any protest activity since the 1960 sit-in and had not been involved with any of the field operations that SNCC ran. Although many supported Bond’s run, others felt that he and his allies had sold out to play the political game. In reality, Bond’s run reflected Black Power ideology at its core and echoed the response from many within Atlanta’s Black activist community who called on the city’s Black population to be at the forefront of local politics. Bill Ware, leader of the Atlanta Project, sought to increase Black community control. Ware and the Atlanta Project linked community power with racial separatism (Carson 1995). As Black Power grew, Bond, along with 10 other Black men, joined the Georgia House of Representatives in 1966. It was the first time that Black Americans served in the legislature since the end of Reconstruction. His ability to join the legislature was marred by his stance against the Vietnam War. SNCC had released a statement on the war in sympathy with those who resisted the draft and the hypocrisy of promising freedom for the people of Vietnam when the ethos of American freedom was denied to Americans. When interviewed, he stated his support for SNCC’s stance and was accused of disloyalty by Representative James “Sloppy” Floyd and other white members of the House. Bond was blocked by the legislature from taking his seat, and it took the unanimous vote in Bond v. Floyd by the 1966 U.S. Supreme Court for Bond to take his post. The case proved important for allowing Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first Black American from New York, to assume his seat in U.S. Congress three years later with the ruling in Powell v. McCormack (Williams 2013). As a member of the House, Bond sponsored bills for testing for sickle-cell anemia and providing low-interest home loans for low-income citizens. In 1971, Bond along with Morris Dees founded the SPLC in Montgomery, Alabama. From 1971 to 1979, Bond served as president of the board and continued as a board member for the rest of his life. During his second year at the SPLC, Bond wrote A Time to Speak, a Time to Act: The Movement in Politics. It would be one of his most powerful statements on the

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freedom struggle and on the development of Black Power. Focusing on the treatment of Bobby Seale as a member of the Chicago 8, Angela Davis’s murder charge, and George Jackson, Bond argued that the new militant forms of Black politics were deeply tied to W. E. B. Du Bois and the birth of 20th-century Black political struggle. Bond in particular wanted to make the case for the Black Panthers’ politics of armed resistance being an outgrowth of peaceful protest on college campuses that reached the ghettos of Oakland. As long as Civil Rights were violated, groups such as the Panthers would be the logical extension of student organization. And through their youth food programs and medical aid for the poor, the Panthers reflected a similar mind-set that Bond had as a representative and with the SPLC. Still, he was aware that for many, especially young Black men, the Panthers held a larger appeal than the SPLC or the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. It would be the standard set by Malcolm X that would capture more and more of the youths (Bond 1972). At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Ted Warshafsky, a lawyer and delegate from Wisconsin, nominated Bond for the vice presidency—the first Black American to receive the honor. Although at the age of 28 Bond was too young to qualify, he told a reporter that perhaps the laws could be changed for his running. His nomination was a part of the antiwar movement within the Democratic Party that favored the nomination of Eugene McCarthy over Hubert Humphrey. Warshafky’s nomination came from a desire among many Democrats and those associated with the youth movement to see the Democratic Party represent the continued political strides of SNCC and other movements of the 1960s. Aware that the nomination would be purely symbolic, Warshafsky saw Bond as part of the promise of a future youth politics. By nominating Bond, it was hoped that more conversations could be channeled to focus on racism, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. In 1986 Bond ran against John Lewis, a former SNCC chairman and colleague, for the 5th District congressional seat in Georgia. Whereas Bond and John Lewis had met in SNCC two decades earlier and had organized the Voter Education Project, the difference between them led to a contentious race between Lewis, the son of a sharecropper, and Bond, the son of an elite family. The divisions between the two candidates deeply affected the Black community, which strained two stalwarts of the Civil Rights era. Although Bond started ahead of Lewis, the race proved controversial: Lewis’s campaign accused Bond of soliciting contributions from the mayor of Atlanta’s office. In response, Bond accused Lewis of demagoguery and McCarthyism. Atlanta’s newspapers and white liberals supported Lewis, while Bond garnered support from the Black community. Lewis won the democratic ticket against Bond in a runoff. At the same time, Bond suffered a federal investigation for the use of cocaine, a charge brought to the authorities by his estranged wife. Although he was cleared of the charges, the experiences of 1986–1987 proved to be a difficult and stressful period of his life, when he suffered from debt accrued from his congressional race. He would spend



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the next decade as a professor of history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and as a visiting professor at American University in Washington, D.C. By 1998, he reemerged into the political spotlight as the chairman of the NAACP and furiously attacked the presidency of George W. Bush. Although Bond never endorsed either of the two major political parties, the NAACP was investigated for political bias, which would have annulled its tax-exempt status. In his final years, Bond was a commentator on NBC’s Today Show, wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column titled “Viewpoint,” and contributed to the New York Times and The Nation. To the dismay of many conservative Black Americans, Bond became a supporter of LGBT rights. He testified before the Senate in 2009 in support of barring the government from discriminating against gays and lesbians in family reunification visas. The same year, he also spoke at the National March for Equality before the NAACP had taken a stance on the issue. A few years before his death, Bond remained an ardent activist, joining in protests against the Keystone XL oil pipeline by chaining himself to the White House fence. At the time of his death he was chairman emeritus of the NAACP and president emeritus of the SPLC. Bond became well known throughout his years of activism and politicking through appearances on national television, where he would become one of the key voices of the Black freedom struggle. Beyond bringing his years of experience in the Civil Rights Movement to television, he would also host Saturday Night Live in 1977. Bond’s years of service, especially during his rise in political circles through the 1970s and 1980s, made many hopeful that he would be the first Black president. Following the youth movement and its insurgency during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Bond became a familiar name as part of a new generation following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. From his days in SNCC until his death, Bond had been a political celebrity and a popular speaker across the nation. Although he had attained political office on the state level and lost the Senate race to Lewis in 1986, Bond had frequently stated that despite the pressure of others, he was disinterested in higher office. However, the importance of Bond’s life in the history of Black liberatory struggle remains his legacy of local organizing and the networks of advocacy that he helped to foster with SNCC, SPLC, and the NAACP. Paul J. Edwards See also: Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Forman, James; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Publications; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Bond, Julian. 1972. A Time to Speak, a Time to Act: The Movement in Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster.

208 | Bremond, Walter (1934–1982) Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. 2012. Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carson, Clayborn. 1995. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, Juan. 2013. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965. New York: Penguin Books.

Bremond, Walter (1934–1982) Although Walter Bremond was described as someone with a mild personality, he was also a brilliant outspoken advocate for institution building during the Black Power era. Professionally, Bremond was a social worker, foundation executive, and philanthropist who used his knowledge and skills to help sustain the Black community. He established several organizations in Los Angeles designed to provide social services, promote mutual aid, coordinate the activities of Black leaders, and challenge racism. Bremond was born in Austin, Texas, in 1934. After his parents divorced, his mother moved to San Francisco in 1943 with her children to join other family members. While his mother served as a domestic worker, Walter and his brother Harry attended school. Bremond was well known for his love of basketball, which he played in high school and college. He was also very committed to social work, the profession that he studied at San Francisco State College. He earned a bachelor of arts degree and a master’s degree in science in the field and pursued associated opportunities. Bremond served in the military for a stint and worked in parks and recreation in Marin County. After receiving an offer to become a program officer from James Joseph, an executive at the Cummins Engine Foundation, Bremond moved to Los Angeles. He was charged with helping the African American community recover from the Watts Rebellion, which lasted for six days and left the community devastated. He became the associate director of the Protestant Community Services, which developed broad outreach programs in Los Angeles. Using a grant provided by the Cummins Engine Foundation, one of Bremond’s early actions was to establish the Black Congress to serve as an umbrella organization for Black community groups. Operating under the philosophy of organizational unity, the Black Congress brought together leaders, activists, and organizations reflecting the myriad liberation and problem-solving perspectives in the Black community. Some organizational members included the locally based Community Alert Patrol, the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, and Black representatives of the Communist Party. National organizational membership ranged from the nonviolent-oriented



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Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to self-defense/Black Power organizations such as the Us organization, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality. Powerful political leaders, ministers, and elected officials also became involved in the Black Congress. The Black Congress provided its members with office and meeting space at its building, leadership training, strategies for organizing, and opportunities to coalesce. The Black Congress also published a newspaper, the Black Voice, edited by John Floyd, as an alternative to mainstream journals. As a foundation executive, Bremond supported organization-based fund-raising, which included War on Poverty grants. As a social worker, he helped to build a community agenda that emphasized health, education, human rights, economic development, and mutual aid to enhance the quality of life for Black people. Bremond also became an important spokesperson on behalf of the Black Congress to government officials. At times, attempting to build consensus within the Black community and negotiate with city officials to support Black interests was difficult. In one case, an affiliate of the Black Congress lost a grant because the affiliate hosted a rally for H. Rap Brown, which Bremond publicly supported. In another instance, Bremond openly defended the Coalition Against Police in its effort to combat police brutality by engaging in the coalition’s own surveillance of the police. On the other side, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bremond urged African Americans to remain calm. As an alternative to a violent uprising, he proposed that African Americans boycott businesses and avoid spending on the upcoming Easter as a show of power. Bremond was supported and criticized for each of those decisions by Black Congress members based on their ideological and strategic objectives. In addition to establishing the Black Congress, Bremond instituted the Brother­ hood Crusade as a social services organization, emphasizing self-determination and mutual aid. The idea emanated from members of the Black Congress and community leaders. In 1968, the organization that would create a systematic and strategic model for Black fund-raising was born. Bremond committed $15,000 from his personal funds to provide seed money for the Brotherhood Crusade and to sustain the Black Congress. As a charitable group, the Brotherhood Crusade raised funds and distributed them to Black community-based organizations. One of the most important concepts implemented by the Brotherhood Crusade was the payroll deduction program, which allowed deductions from local government employees’ paychecks as an avenue to make contributions. This particular program was instituted with the assistance of several city councilmen, including Gilbert Lindsay, Billy Mills, and Tom Bradley. The payroll deduction program was a successful fund-raising strategy and decreased the Brotherhood Crusade’s dependence on external supporters.

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At the age of 35, Bremond resigned from the Black Congress. His resignation came soon after the murders of two members of the BPP at the University of California, Los Angeles, on January 17, 1969. During his public announcement, Bremond mentioned the important work of the Black Congress in human rights and social services. He also stated that the person who serves “as an initiator can’t be the arbitrator” (Bingham 1969), which was an indication of tension within the Black Congress. In October of that same year, Bremond’s home was bombed. Despite the intracommunity contention and hostile external forces, Bremond was indomitable. In 1972, he established the National Black United Fund (NBUF) under the motto “The Helping Hand that is Your Own.” The justification for NBUF was set forth in a special issue of Black Scholar. Bremond argued that African Americans needed the NBUF because traditional philanthropic programs frequently exclude the Black community, white professionals in control of charitable institutions have little knowledge of the Black community, and the organization will help educate Black people to pursue collective action versus individualism. Perhaps the most impactful of Bremond’s endeavors to institutionalize philanthropy was the legal challenge he waged to participate in the government’s Combined Federal Campaign (CFC), which only allowed United Way to receive payroll deductions from federal employees to donate to charity. Bremond’s legal team argued that the rule did not grant all communities equitable access to the CFC and therefore was unfair. In 1980, the NBUF won the legal right to enter the CFC. It is because of Bremond’s leadership and commitment that African Americans and other groups can now contribute to their own communities through the federal payroll deduction system, thus enhancing Black philanthropy and mutual aid. Bremond married Bertha Caroline and had three children. He left the Cummins Engine Foundation and ran a losing campaign for state senate. Even still, the organizations that Bremond established during the height of the Black Power era to support self-determination continue to thrive. Bremond served as the first executive director of the NBUF until his death in 1982. Karin L. Stanford See also: Black United Front; Electoral Politics and Black Power; National Black United Fund, Inc.; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Us Organization Further Reading Bakewell, Danny JX. 1976. “The Brotherhood Crusade a Conceptual Model.” Black Scholar 7(6): 22–25. Bingham, Joe. 1969. “Black Congress Chairman Quits.” Los Angeles Sentinel, January 30, A-l, A-10. Bremond, Walter. 1976. “The National Black United Fund Movement.” Black Scholar 7(6): 10–15.



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Carson, Emmett D. 1993. The National Black United Fund: From Movement for Social Change to Social Change Organization; New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising. New York: Jossey-Bass. Porter, Chuck. 1968. “Operational Unity: Answer to Negro Division.” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 9, D1. Smith, Jessie Carney. 2006. Encyclopedia of African American Business, Vols. 1 and 2. Santa Barbara: Greenwood. Tinker, Jimmy. 1969. “Black Leader’s Home Bombed: Arsonist Firebombs Home of Walt Bremond.” Los Angeles Sentinel, October 23, A1. Tyler, Bruce. 1983. “Michael Black Radicalism in Southern California, 1950–1982.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. “Walter Bremond, a Black Activist.” 1982. Obituaries. New York Times, July 1.

Brown, Elaine (1943–) Elaine Brown is a former leader of the Black Panther Party (BPP), serving as the first and only female chairman from 1974 to 1977. She joined the organization in Los Angeles as a rank-and-file member of the Southern California chapter in 1968. As a Panther, Brown also ran for a position on the city council of Oakland, California, twice. Since the 1970s, she has been active in prison, juvenile justice, and education reform. Brown was born on March 3, 1943, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Dorothy Clark and Dr. Horace Scott. Brown was raised by her mother and grandmother in North Philadelphia, a majority Black and low-income community. Her mother enrolled her in Thaddeus Stevens School of Practice, an experimental school for exceptional children. During her formative years, Brown learned to play classical piano and perform ballet. In 1957 she attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls, an elite institution designed to produce the world’s movers and shakers. Four years later she enrolled at Temple University in North Philadelphia but left in the middle of her second semester. Brown left North Philadelphia in 1965, headed for Los Angeles, California, to pursue her dreams of becoming a professional songwriter. It was in Los Angeles that her political and social consciousness developed. First, at the behest of a friend Brown taught piano lessons to children living in the Jordan Downs projects in Watts. This experience ultimately contributed to her decision to join the BPP years later. While working as a cocktail waitress in West Hollywood, Brown met Jay Kennedy, a writer and social activist and member of the Communist Party, whom she credits as being central to her radicalization and politicization. Soon, Brown joined several Black Power organizations. She was involved in the Black Congress, a collective of several Black organizations that served the political

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and social needs of Black people in the Los Angeles community. She worked for the Black Congress newspaper Harambee (Swahili for “Let’s Pull Together”) as a copy editor and writer, and she helped Harry Truly, a professor of sociology at California State University, Los Angeles, organize the Black Student Alliance, a coalition of Black student unions in California. During this period, she also became a student in the High Potential Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. In April 1968, Brown joined the Southern California chapter of the BPP, an organization founded in Oakland, California, two years prior by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale to challenge police brutality and injustice. Members of the organization were required to attend regular meetings, political education classes, and weapons training and memorize the 10-point party platform and program. As a member of the Southern California chapter, Brown led political education classes and helped to establish several programs that provided free breakfasts for children, busing to prisons, and free legal aid. In 1969, Brown released her first album, Seize the Time, arranged by Horace Tapscott with the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. The album featured jazz notes, piano melodies, and Brown’s poetry. Brown’s political astuteness and organizing abilities led to her elevation as a party leader. The same year of her album’s release, Brown became the BPP deputy minister of information of the Southern California chapter. Soon after the BPP was established, the organization experienced extreme repression from local and federal law enforcement officials. Across the country, law enforcement agencies infiltrated, surveilled, discredited, and disrupted the operations of several BPP chapters. Some of these operations also led to the death of party members, such as Fred Hampton and Mark Clark of the Illinois chapter. In response, Huey P. Newton placed greater emphasis on community programs and closed down several chapters. In 1971 Brown was elevated to national minister of information, a year after giving birth to her only daughter. Brown also became editor of the Black Panther, the official newspaper. The party’s shift in direction and emphasis was evident in its participation in traditional political campaigns. In 1973, Brown made her first run for Oakland City Council while Bobby Seale ran for mayor. Although both lost, they won a considerable amount of support from Black people in Oakland and brought attention to the most pressing issues impacting the Black community. In August 1974 Huey P. Newton appointed Brown as chairman of the BPP while he lived in exile in Cuba. As the newly appointed leader, Brown’s first action was to call a meeting in Oakland with the Central Committee and various leaders from local cadres including activists from Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Based on gender bias and sexism that she and other women had experienced, Brown unequivocally informed her audience “if you don’t like the fact that I am a woman, if you don’t like what we’re going to do, here is your chance to leave. You’d better leave because you won’t be tolerated!” (Brown 2015, 5).



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Under Brown’s leadership, women in the BPP gained access to positions that held greater power and responsibility. For the first time in BPP history three women, Ericka Huggins, Norma Armour, and Phyllis Jackson, served on the Central Committee at the same time. During Brown’s tenure as chairman, she secured federal funding for the Panther Liberation School and created more opportunities for BPP members to seek power through traditional political channels. Electing a Black mayor in the city of Oakland was one of the party’s objectives. Brown, after registering 90,000 Black Democrats to vote, secured the endorsement of California governor Jerry Brown for Black Panther candidate Lionel Wilson. Wilson was elected the first Black mayor of Oakland, California, in 1976 with the support of BPP political organizing. In 1975 Elaine Brown waged her second campaign for city council, this time receiving the endorsement of local Democratic leaders, the United Farm Workers, and the Teamsters Union. Brown was defeated. Upon Newton’s return from exile and amid growing hostility within the party, Brown resigned in 1977. Since leaving the party, Brown has maintained a revolutionary interest in Black liberation as a writer, activist, and speaker. In 1992 she released her memoir, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. In 1997 she also wrote The Condemnation of Little B., which recounts the story of Michael Lewis, “Little B,” a 13-year-old Black boy who was arrested and convicted as an adult in Atlanta, Georgia, for a murder he did not commit. Brown remains at the forefront of the most pressing issues impacting the lives of Black, brown, and poor people in the United States, having lectured throughout the country at colleges and universities as well as at numerous conferences. Her most recent work includes cofounding Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice and the National Alliance for Radical Prison Reform. Jasmin A. Young See also: Black Panther Party; Black Student Alliance; Davis, Angela Yvonne; Newton, Huey P.; Seale, Bobby; Shakur, Assata Further Reading Brown, Elaine. 2015. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. New York: Pantheon. Collier-Thomas, Bettye, and Vincent P. Franklin, eds. 2001. Sisters in the Struggle: African American women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement. New York: NYU Press. Gore, Dayo F., Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds. 2009. Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: NYU Press. Perkins, Margo V. 2000. Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Springer, Kimberly, ed. 1999. Still Lifting, Still Climbing: Contemporary African Amer­ ican Women’s Activism. New York: NYU Press.

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Brown, Hubert “H. Rap” (1943–) H. Rap Brown (aka Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) was one of the most wellknown leaders and spokespersons of the Black Power Movement. Brown was thrust into the national spotlight in 1967, when he was nominated as national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was often associated with the 1960s urban rebellions and became a target of federal, state, and local repressive agencies. Brown was captured by New York police in 1972 and spent five years in the Attica Correctional Facility, where he emerged as a leader in the Islamic community in the United States.

A Brief Background to a Life of Activism On October 4, 1943, Al-Amin was born Hubert Gerold Brown in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In segregated Baton Rouge, he observed that the facilities and resources of the local Black college Southern University didn’t compare to that of the local white-only Louisiana State University. Brown was a politically active young person. His first organized political activity was as a teenager, when he and his older brother Ed worked in a voter registration campaign with the YMCA-based group Phalanx.

H. Rap Brown, National Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1967. (AP Photo)



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In February 1, 1960, four students from historically Black North Carolina AT&T State University organized a sit-in protest at a segregated lunch counter at a Woolworth’s department store in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. This local protest inspired hundreds of sit-ins across the Jim Crow South. In the spring of 1960, also motivated by these protests, Hubert’s older brother Ed, then a student at Southern University, organized a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Baton Rouge. In solidarity with Ed and his comrades, young Hubert organized his high school classmates to demonstrate in support of the sit-in. Ed’s activism eventually led to his expulsion from Southern University. In protest, students there went on strike. Hubert and his classmates participated in another demonstration downtown as part of the strike. However, the second demonstration was met with a stiff response from local authorities, and the students were beaten and tear-gassed. To continue his education, Ed left Louisiana and enrolled at Howard University, a historically Black university located in Wash­ ington, D.C. Howard was the base of one of the most dynamic and well-organized student protest organizations, the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG). NAG was one of the major affiliates of the newly organized SNCC, and Ed soon became active with the group. In the fall of 1960, Hubert Brown enrolled at Southern University’s Baton Rouge campus. In 1962, he began to travel north in the summer to spend time with his older brother. Visiting Washington, D.C., provided the young man with a stimulating political environment. He began to read the books of brilliant African American authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, and Richard Wright. In 1963, Brown participated in the March on Washington and became involved in the campaign for social and economic justice in Cambridge, Maryland. In 1964 he traveled to Mississippi to attend meetings and support the Freedom Summer campaign. He stayed a month in Holmes County, where his brother Ed was also involved with a SNCC project.

Thrust into Leadership Brown made a decision to remain in Washington, D.C., to work with NAG in the fall of 1964 instead of returning to Southern University to complete his senior year of college. That decision helped NAG and SNCC maintain a presence in the city, considering that many leaders of the organization remained in Mississippi or moved to Alabama to start campaigns. Recognized for his leadership and organizing skills, Brown was elected chairman of NAG. In that role, he emphasized developing a relationship between Howard University, other college students at universities in the District of Columbia, and the grassroots Black community. Brown’s ability to speak to common folk earned him the name “Rap” by his colleagues in the movement.

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As the primary SNCC spokesperson in the D.C. area, Brown was responsible for representing the organization in meetings with federal government officials. The violent repression of the voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama, created the demand for him to speak on behalf of the movement to federal officials. On March 7, 1965, SNCC chairman John Lewis, Southern Christian Leadership Conference organizer Hosea Williams, and a contingent of 600 men, women, and children participated in the nonviolent march. The marchers were brutally attacked by Alabama state troopers while attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge (leading from Selma to Montgomery). The attack on the marchers in Selma led to a national campaign that demanded the right of people to peacefully march without the threat of state reprisal and for voting rights for all American citizens. Brown became part of the movement delegation that met with President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Nicolas Katzenbach demanding protection for activists in Selma. Brown’s challenge to the president about the lack of action on behalf of the federal government to protect Civil Rights workers in the South received attention from Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson. Pearson offered that “One Negro leader Hubert Brown” treated the president with “ill-tempered abuse.” In 1965, Brown also participated in discussions concerning the direction and character of SNCC. The disenchantment of relying on the Democratic Party and the federal government and the challenge of increased activism in the United States led many members of SNCC to assert that the Black community needed autonomous organizations to marshal its political power to effect social change. Brown was in the forefront of this faction in the organization that called for independent organization of the Black community to consolidate its power. This motion would lead to the call for Black Power and the advocacy of armed self-defense.

Organizing for Black Power After Freedom Summer of 1964, a significant contingent of SNCC workers wanted to expand their work in Alabama. They targeted the Alabama Black Belt and those counties in the state that had a Black majority. Due to the exclusion of Blacks from electoral politics, the Alabama Black Belt was a bastion of white minority rule. In 1966, SNCC field organizer Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture) asked Brown to come to Alabama to serve as director of the Greene County SNCC project. Poverty and illiteracy rates for Black people in the area were high, and there was severe economic disparity between Blacks and whites. In addition, anyone organizing Black people to fight against white supremacy could be subjected to terrorist violence at any time. Lowndes County, Alabama, became a central beachhead and model for SNCC organizing in Alabama. The Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP) would be



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the prototype independent party for others in the state. Since the LCFP utilized a Black panther as the symbol of the party, it came to be known as the Black Panther Party (BPP). The BPP emphasized political education and leadership development of the Black community with an emphasis on poor Blacks. The SNCC-initiated campaign for independent freedom organizations in the Alabama Black Belt came to be known as the Black Panther Movement. SNCC’s priority in Alabama was building the LCFP and supporting the new political party’s first involvement in county elections on November 7, 1966. Brown and other SNCC workers in the Black Belt went to Lowndes to support the LCFP campaign. Due to threats of violence on the Black community, Brown and others set up an armed patrol of the Black community on election night. While none of the seven LCFP candidates won in the November 1966 race, the momentum established by the political organization on the ballot inspired the supporters of the LCFP. With Lowndes County as a model, Brown worked to develop the Black Panther Movement in Greene County. In the 1960 census, Greene County had a population of 13,600, with 11,079 (81 percent) of its residents being Black. By August 1965, only 300 of the 11,979 Blacks eligible to vote were registered. Voting rights activists were often targets of racist violence. Brown built the Black Panther Movement in Greene County in the November 1966 election by organizing the Greene County Freedom Organization. Greene County would eventually elect as sheriff Sam Gilmore, the first Black sheriff in the South. In 1967, SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael appointed Brown director of SNCC projects in the state of Alabama. Brown traveled to various Black Belt projects to organize freedom organizations and self-defense units to protect political activity and Black communities from racist attacks. His primary agenda was to expand and consolidate the Black Panther Movement in the state through the building of freedom organizations.

Thrust into the National Spotlight On May 12, 1967, SNCC held a press conference in Atlanta, Georgia, and announced that H. Rap Brown was the national chairman of the organization. As SNCC’s new leader, Brown emphasized building freedom organizations, supporting Black economic development, and organizing antidraft and antiwar activities in the Black community. Soon, Brown emerged as a primary spokesperson for the Black Power Movement. SNCC was already recognized as the organization that popularized the slogan “Black Power.” Now, Brown had joined Carmichael as the preeminent spokesperson for the slogan nationally and internationally. Brown spoke to local communities as well as national media outlets. His expressions, such as “violence is American as cherry pie,” were often quoted and vilified by

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enemies of the movement. His oratory often described and interpreted the urban rebellions of the period. Generally depicted with dark glasses, an Afro hairstyle, and a tall, slender frame, Brown’s image was also represented by movement artists as a symbol of resistance. Other Black Power organizations sought Brown for honorary positions; for example, the BPP and the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa both selected him as minister of justice. Brown’s enhanced popularity and visibility in the movement brought personal consequences, and he became a primary target of the repressive agencies of the state. The U.S. government focused attention on disrupting and “neutralizing” SNCC and other forces in the Black Power Movement. A little more than three months after Brown assumed the chairmanship of SNCC, on August 25, 1967, J. Edgar Hoover issued a memorandum to field offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) instructing them to initiate a “hard-hitting and imaginative program” to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of” the leadership and the rank and file of Black movement organizations. Before Brown’s first year of tenure had ended on March 4, 1968, Hoover sent a memorandum titled “COINTELPRO—Black Nationalist Hate Groups” that identified Brown, Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., and other Black activist leaders by name as targets for individual “neutralization.” One clear example of government repression occurred after Brown spoke at a rally of 500 people in Cambridge, Maryland, on July 24, 1967. Police initiated gunfire against Brown and a group of Black residents leaving the rally. But Cambridge Blacks fired back, and the violence spiraled into a spontaneous uprising, resulting into the burning of a local elementary school and several businesses. The police-initiated violence led to Brown being charged with instigating a riot.

Underground and Political Prisoner The Cambridge indictment and several other charges sent Brown underground; he became a fugitive. Matters became worse when two of his SNCC comrades, Ralph Featherstone and Che Payne, were killed in a car explosion on their way to his court hearing in Bel Air, Maryland, on March 9, 1970. After his disappearance, Brown was placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list. New York police captured him in 1971 in what is believed to be an attempted expropriation of a bar, which was a known narcotics enterprise. Brown served five years for armed robbery in New York state’s Attica Correctional Facility. While incarcerated he announced his conversion to Islam and his new name, Jamil Al-Amin. In 1976, Al-Amin was released from prison. He and his family located to Atlanta, where he opened a grocery store and served as iman (spiritual leader) for an Islamic community. Al-Amin was arrested again in 2000 after being charged with shooting two county sheriff deputies (one fatally) during their attempt to



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arrest him with a warrant in Atlanta. He was convicted of murder, even though the surviving officer stated that the shooter was wounded by police gunfire in the conflict, and Al-Amin was arrested days later without injury. Moreover, his fingerprints were not on the rifle that was believed to be the assault weapon. Al-Amin was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Maintaining his innocence, he remains beloved in Islamic and activist communities. Akinyele Umoja See also: Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Revolutionary Nationalism; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Brown, H. Rap. 1970. Die Nigger Die! A Political Autobiography. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill Books. Hart, Ariel. “Court in Georgia Upholds Former Militant’s Conviction.” New York Times, May 25, 2004, http://ez/lib.jjay.cuny.edu/docview/92805184?accountid=11724. Rashad, A. 1995. Islam, Black Nationalism and Slavery: A Detailed History. Beltsville, MD: Writers Inc. International.

Brown, James (1933–2006) A prominent soul singer and progenitor of funk music, James Brown was the most visible and popular Black artist associated with racial pride and Black Power. Brown’s message as a cultural icon who promoted a musical message of racial pride and uplift fit perfectly with the Black Power philosophy of African American political agency and self-determination. Primarily through his music, he was seen as representing both the political aims of radical Black leaders and the values and practices of everyday African Americans. Beginning in 1956 Brown had an unprecedented string of hits, including “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (1965), “I Got You (I Feel Good)” (1965), “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” (1966), and “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” (1970). In spite of contradictions between the positive credos espoused in his music and his personal struggles with drugs, domestic abuse, and financial mismanagement, his influence within the Black Arts Movement was tremendous. The aesthetic innovations he developed during his 60-year career directly shaped the development of hip-hop music. On May 3, 1933, in Barnwell, South Carolina, James Joseph Brown was born to Joseph Gardner Brown and his 16-year-old wife, Susie. Brown’s family lived in abject poverty in Elko, South Carolina, and during his early childhood his mother left the family and moved permanently to New York City. Shortly thereafter,

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young James Brown moved into his aunt’s brothel and stopped attending school in the sixth grade. Instead, he spent his teenage years in the ghettos of Augusta, Georgia, where street preachers, shady enterprises, evangelical churches, and the sights and sounds of the brothel all contoured his artistic aesthetic. At age 16, Brown was caught breaking into a car and was sentenced to hard time. It was during his time in jail that he made the connections that would lead to the formation of his first musical group, the Ever Ready Gospel Singers, who later became the Famous Flames. With their precise choreography and musical interpretation, the Famous Flames quickly attained a devoted following. Then, a chance encounter with popular rock-and-roll singer Little Richard led to the signing of the first recording contract of James Brown and the Famous Flames in 1955. Their first hit was the gospel-inflected “Please, Please, Please” in 1956. In his early 20s, Brown was celebrated as an inventive, dynamic performer. Though decidedly secular, much of Brown’s trademark musical lexicon was derived from the music of the Black church. He toured the United States, winning legions of African American and white fans and earning the sobriquets “Godfather of Soul,” “Black President,” and “hardest-working man in show business.” An exacting manager, Brown maintained tight control of his band and even tighter control of the structure and presentation of his music. Rhythms took center stage as never before, with melodies subordinate to jazz improvisations and Brown’s primal shouting. His music eventually was recognized as a pioneering new genre, which he called funk. As Brown gradually embraced more radical personal views, his music harnessed the burgeoning Black consciousness that was occurring during the post– Civil Rights turmoil of the mid to late 1960s. The uplift of the African American community, along with self-sufficiency and political education, was a central tenet of Brown’s music; it reflected the ethos of northern urban life more than the spirit of Southern soul music. Brown’s artistic output registered substantive shifts in the collective thought of African Americans on political, social, and artistic matters. Self-made success was a virtue for Brown, and he presented himself as an exemplar of it. Eventually he became the owner of several record labels, production companies, and radio stations that he used to promote his music and that of other Black artists. Visually and musically, Brown’s approach to racial pride was at once politically aware, virile, visceral, energetic, entertaining, stylish, and sensual. In 1968 he released “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” a song that was the assertion of racial pride and was posited as accessible art for which many Black nationalist leaders had hoped. “Say It Loud” was a huge hit. In a moment when the peaceful protest methods of the Civil Rights Movement were giving way to the uncompromisingly proud “Black Is Beautiful” revolution, Brown’s music also ignited the radical fervor of activists such as Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael, and Eldridge



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Cleaver. They proclaimed James Brown as the musical representation of the Black Power Movement. Brown’s music spoke to the African American masses in the same crystalline, direct manner that Malcolm X’s speeches had. With lyrics such as “Don’t give me no integration / Give me real communication,” he never suggested that African Americans should turn the other cheek; he provided a direct counterpoint to orientation toward interracial harmony presented in the Motown catalog. As the Black Arts Movement sought to connect African American cultural output with Black Power political activity, Brown’s music—bald-faced in its pro-Black message—was an immediate and obvious fit. In addition to the impact of Brown’s music in the United States, James Brown became known internationally. For instance, in the early 1970s European-trained jazz trumpeter and future Afrobeat pioneer Fela Anikulapo Kuti turned to the funk recordings of Brown when he sought to infuse his music with the spirit and sounds of Africa. The postcolonial marketplaces of Africa and the Caribbean were especially receptive to the music of Black Americans, with its youthful vigor, innovative rhythms, and unabashedly pro-Black message of self-sufficiency; artists such as Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Otis Redding, and Wilson Pickett inundated the global airwaves. Even though Brown’s public persona was that of a pro-Black, Black Power advocate, his nonpartisan political views made links with the Black Arts and Black Power Movements uneasy at times. Ever the iconoclast, in 1971 Brown supported Richard Nixon’s reelection bid, assuming both that he would win a landslide victory and that his endorsement would win favor with the president. The effort permanently cost Brown part of his African American audience, who had been largely disobliging of Nixon’s policies. Brown’s ardent support of the Vietnam War was an additional source of controversy in his career. Toward the end of the 1970s Brown’s music began to decline, especially as disco co-opted much of what made funk popular and repackaged it for a much broader commercial audience. Furthermore, Brown’s perceived role in Black radical undertakings resulted in the dogged monitoring of his activities by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Federal Communications Commission, resulting in his owing millions of dollars in unpaid taxes. Brown’s tax problems hurt his reputation and crippled his businesses over the course of the decade. Appearances in early 1980s films and television shows, including The Blues Brothers, Rocky IV, and Miami Vice, brought Brown back to the public’s attention. Yet further stints in civil and criminal courts for a host of charges ranging from nonpayment of royalties to drug-related felonies to domestic assault threatened to silence him. Despite his personal problems, Brown’s iconic status endured, and during the 2000s he was recognized with lifetime commendations from the Grammy Awards, the National Association of Black-Owned Broadcasters, the American

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Music Awards, and the Kennedy Center Honors. He died on Christmas Day in 2006 from congestive heart failure at the age of 73. Even still, James Brown’s music remains alive and plays on after his death largely as a consequence of his oeuvre being sampled in rap songs more than that of any other artist, according to Rolling Stone magazine. An array of successful artists, including Michael Jackson, Prince, Usher, and Beyoncé, have cited Brown as a major influence. Leon James Bynum See also: Black Arts Movement; Black Music; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Newton, Huey P.; Vietnam War Further Reading Bolden, Tony, ed. 2008. The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. George, Nelson, and Alan Leeds, eds. 2008. The James Brown Reader: 50 Years of Writing about the Godfather of Soul. New York: Plume. Vincent, Rickey. 1996. Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

C Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture) (1941–1998) Stokely Carmichael, who chose the name Kwame Ture in 1972, was a master organizer and liberation theorist. He dedicated his life to greater social justice in African (or Black) communities worldwide, beginning in the U.S. South where blatant disenfranchisement, segregation, and lynching injustices reigned. His main tactic was consciousness-raising through imparting political education so that African descendants across the United States and globally would be empowered to organize and end the cruel violence and poverty that he saw them suffer. Ture concluded, as did many in the freedom movement, that this condition was imposed through white racist supremacy—the use of all means by white power holders to retain a position of privilege defined by race to maintain profits from exploiting Africans and Africa in the economic system of capitalism. After recognizing the need for Black Power to counteract white power, his analysis brought him squarely to the solution advocated by some of the greatest Black leaders, Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), Malcolm X (1925– 1965), Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), and Sékou Touré (1900–1984), among others. As Ture would unvaryingly define it, Pan-Africanism is the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism. This articulation identified Black people in the United States as “African” and the resolution of their struggle as beyond the scope of American national politics, and thus part of the global struggle for Africa by African people against capitalism. Ture’s thought was “nationalist” and anti-imperialist in that he identified as allies other peoples with historic civilizations and cultures who were seeking to regain control over their lands and destinies, including Native Americans, the Palestinians, and the Irish. He contributed philosophically and scientifically grounded theory in support of Pan-Africanism, in order to benefit the vast majority of African people. Judy Richardson, who interviewed Ture for the documentary Eyes on the Prize, stated that “What I remember most was his ability to combine this absolutely consistent visionary politics with this absolutely ultimate humanity,” and his biographer and longtime comrade, E. Michael Thelwell, says of Ture that “If there was confrontation to be had, he would find it. He was absolutely fearless. He was totally dedicated. He was probably the greatest leader I’ve known, particularly because he inspired people to transcend themselves.”

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Stokely Carmichael and Muhammad Ali share a laugh during a special event in 1973. (Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge)

Stokely Carmichael began life in the quasi–self-reliant community of middleclass workers in Port of Spain, Trinidad, where hope and faith reigned as union organizing laid a base for independence from British rule. He and his siblings stood at the top of their school classes, participated in cultural activities, and learned morality by becoming involved in multiple churches. After his father and then his mother left for the United States to secure more opportunity, Carmichael followed at age 11 in 1961. The social jumble of the immigrant neighborhoods of the Bronx, New York, showed him an array of different values and choices available in life. His path nonetheless remained relatively set: he would excel in educational pursuits, attending prestigious schools, such as the Bronx High School of Science. During his formative years, he developed a sense of responsibility to the people in his community. Carmichael learned of the freedom movement from street orators and about the international workers’ movement against capitalism through classmates. Carmichael entered Howard University and completed a double major in philosophy and sociology. There he joined the Nonviolent Action



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Group and participated in the debates and turmoil of student demands for freedom on campus. He also volunteered in community organizing efforts to end segregation in the city of Cambridge, Maryland. In 1960, Carmichael spent his first college summer break participating in Freedom Rides with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to confront segregation of public transportation services in Mississippi, which white segregationists opposed with violence and police action. As a result, Carmichael was jailed for 49 days. White politicians in the South had enforced racial supremacy since the Rutherford B. Hayes Compromise of 1877, when politicians in the North agreed to let them suppress African people’s right to vote through various policies, including requiring them to read and respond to civic and history questions, made difficult because they were denied adequate education. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act and later the Voting Rights Act, the majority of African people across the South were still prevented from voting by violence. This spurred Carmichael to advocate empowerment through organizing political education and Freedom Schools for the community children. By 1964, SNCC and the organized communities in Mississippi, armed with knowledge of the electoral process and their own new sense of self-worth, decided that since white Democrats continued to exclude them, they would carry out the proper procedures for holding primaries themselves. Calling their state party the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, they sought recognition as the only true representatives of the Democratic Party in Mississippi. A nationwide coalition within the Democratic Party signed on to support their claim, but at the convention many gave in to party pressure to protect their “greater” interests and voted not to maintain the racist Mississippi delegation. Carmichael theorized from that experience that a relatively weak and powerless group could not enter into coalition with much more powerful groups because there was no way to ensure that their cooperation would last. He concluded that African people needed independent political power, and he and SNCC members put forth the call for Black Power during the Meredith March in 1966. Carmichael had spent his college summers on the forefront of direct confrontations with racists, who attacked them, jailed them, and murdered friends and community leaders. Carmichael and SNCC came to doubt that mass marches, with their media excitement, contributed sufficiently to achieving the goal of Black empowerment. During this time, many Civil Rights leaders responded to violence in Selma, on the border of Lowndes County in Alabama, by voting to join in a march. Carmichael and SNCC’s vote against this course of action was ignored, and in the face of the infamous slaughter of marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he and SNCC organized among the grassroots people of majority Black Lowndes County. In 1965, Carmichael accepted a field coordinator position for SNCC in

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Lowndes County. Soon thereafter he was voted chairman of SNCC, and issues of safety and strategy led to agreement on separate areas for Black and for white organizers. Carmichael became known for the militant stance against the U.S. war in Vietnam, epitomized in the slogan “Hell, no, we ain’t going.” The issue of sexism in the movement was also confronted. Shortly thereafter in June 1966, Carmichael and SNCC and other Civil Rights leadership found themselves returning to the Mississippi Delta to take up the March Against Fear started by James Meredith, a 220-mile walk the length of the delta from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to combat fear and encourage new voter registration. Despite passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, voting registration of Black people remained low. Soon after the march started, Meredith was shot and wounded. Carmichael and SNCC along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and others decided to follow through on what Meredith had started, and thus began an intense encounter over strategy. On June 16 at the end of a long, hot day 10 days into the march, Carmichael was arrested for trespassing when the march entered the grounds of an elementary school in Greenwood, Mississippi, which had arranged to host their camp for the night. When he was released hours later, visibly angry at this harassment, Carmichael climbed on the platform erected at the new campsite and declared that he would go to jail no more. It was during this moment that he called for Black Power, which the crowd echoed in great enthusiasm. This media-captured public outcry reverberated across the United States and was picked up around the world. It made explicit what the movement old guard had come to accept during the long, hot march: that independent Black organizing was making this march possible and that the way forward would include strategic armed self-protection. All the lessons Carmichael internalized while organizing in Maryland, Mississippi, and Alabama were now framed as Black Power: only through welding more power itself could the Black community ensure that its needs would be met and that justice would prevail. As they passed through communities where Carmichael had served as field coordinator, enthusiastic crowds greeted him. Though there were still differences in viewpoints, the importance of Carmichael’s coming-of-age as a leader was unmistakable. Paradoxically, while the media sought to highlight the differences over strategy, Carmichael credits this march as the time when he became closest to Martin Luther King Jr., as they shared stories, laughed, and relaxed with local people. By the time they reached Jackson, the march had grown from a small group to 15,000 people, the largest in the state’s history. And Carmichael and King were bound in a relationship of trust, later most notable in their mutual decisions to oppose the Vietnam War.



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Returning to Alabama, Carmichael and SNCC struggled to organize support for participants fired from jobs and evicted from plantation housing. By the fall of 1966, the independent Lowndes Country Freedom Organization was ready to contest elections. Based on its symbol of a leaping black panther, it was the first to become known as the Black Panther Party. Carmichael continued to organize with advocates of independent Black politics and self-defense for Black communities in New York, California, and elsewhere. Black Panther–affiliated chapters sprang up around the country amid the repression of urban rebellions and confrontations with police. In 1967 Carmichael was asked to serve as honorary prime minister for the Oakland-based BPP, and when Huey P. Newton was jailed, Carmichael spoke at rallies on his behalf. However, differences in their organizing and coalition building led Carmichael to resign. Carmichael was invited to speak and discuss Black Power by many inter­ national liberation movement forums, students, and intellectuals in Africa, Eu­ rope, Latin America, and Asia. He moved to Guinea, West Africa, and changed his name to Kwame Ture, honoring African liberation leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure. At age 26, Carmichael became a secretary to Nkrumah. Carmichael saw the underlying common interests of racist and economic social elites, who no longer relied primarily on racist local police and instead deployed the strength of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which followed him around relentlessly in covert surveillance. Lynching—murder—continued to be the ultimate sanction, as witnessed by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the eve of the Poor Peoples’ Campaign in 1968. Carmichael also attempted to organize a National Black United Front. During this period, he married the visionary singer Mariam Makeba, and left the United States as planned. His adoption of a Pan-African path was made clear in his name change to Kwame Ture, in honor of both leaders. Ture thereafter understood the liberation of Black people in the United States as being dependent on their recognizing that they are not just Americans but a group connected by a common heritage and oppression. Following Nkrumah’s conceptualization, Ture helped organize the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) in 1968. The AAPRP strategy was to focus on students who were able to study, analyze, and create a common ideology—an explanation of who the people are and how to realize their goals. Ture also always spoke for the working and poor African people rather than the more privileged, who would have difficulty ending allegiance to capitalist and elitist ideologies and oppressive social relations that they might benefit from, in Africa and in America. He concluded that only through revolution ending oppression of Africa would its people everywhere, including those considered Black Americans, have the

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support and rejuvenated self-worth to express their own culture and protect their own well-being. The AAPRP has sought to highlight this effort through commemoration of African Liberation Day annually. Ture was a leader in the long struggle to end the FBI and CIA antidemocratic actions against people’s political rights. The Freedom of Information Act of 1966 eventually led to opening the extensive records of U.S. government actions against him. One major effort was the Counterintelligence Program of 1956–1971, launched to “prevent the rise of a Messiah” through a concerted “dis-information” campaign to poison public opinion against Ture, King, and other social movement leaders by spreading false information. Ture became a revolutionary and pursued justice despite the suffering that pursuit involved. He was jailed in the South on 27 occasions and banned from multiple cities and countries, yet he was on the road over nine months of the year almost every year of his life to spread the movement’s message. He was a radical philosopher, contributing to the theory of Pan-Africanism, yet his strategies and organizing grew out of a scientific social analysis involving theory and practice, not just reaction to slogans or popular statements. Ture maintained his conviction that if you work for the people, the people will take care of you; thus he never acquired any personal property. He found in the collective tradition of African people a humane way of existence whereby spiritual values could be upheld and peace and well-being would follow. Shortly before his death from cancer in 1997 as quoted in The Black Scholar, Kwame stated that We are revolutionaries and we are never pessimistic, never. . . . [W]e have total faith in the mass of the people and we’re convinced of the correctness of our position since the early sixties, and the conditions in America prove it today, clearly. America is more ripe for revolution in 1997 than it was in 1967 . . . and the reason why we have faith in these masses is because their instincts, their mass instincts are instincts of justice. Cynthia M. Hewitt See also: Black Panther Party; Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; PanAfricanism; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Carmichael, Stokely [Kwame Ture]. 2007. Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to PanAfricanism. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. Carmichael, Stokely, with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. 2003. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). New York: Scribner. Grant, Joanne. 1997. “Stokely Carmichael.” Black Scholar. 27: 39–41.

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Radio Pacifica. 1999. “Democracy Now!” Broadcast, November 14. Ture, Kwame. 1997. “Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture.” Black Scholar 27: 15–32. Ture, Kwame, and Charles V. Hamilton. 1992. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. New York: Vintage.

Primary Document Stokely Carmichael, Black Power Speech, 1967 As one of the most charismatic figures involved in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Stokely Carmichael delivered this address as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The Trinidadian-born leader joined the Civil Rights Movement during the early 1960s. He participated in the Freedom Rides, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the Selma, Alabama, campaign for voting rights. Carmichael was arrested more than 30 times and brutalized for his advocacy of equal rights and justice. In 1966, Carmichael openly advocated Black Power, capturing the attention of the world. He also challenged traditional Civil Rights leadership to change their strategy of nonviolence to self-defense. Carmichael later joined the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and became a Pan-Africanist. He changed his name to Kwame Ture, in honor of African leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sékou Touré. In the speech at Garfield High School, Carmichael talks about white definitions of Black people, the importance of education, and the reasons why the Vietnam War should not be supported. Garfield High School Seattle, Washington April 19, 1967 Good evening. It is good to be here. You know what usually happens is in the newspapers they call us racists and anti-white and say we hate white folk and all other irrelevant nonsense, and they do that ‘cause they use white people as their measuring stick, you know. But I want you to look clear before you notice that in all their beautiful, liberal press media there isn’t one black man. So when the honkies talk tomorrow about violence and anti-white and hat­ ing white people, tell them they ought to have a black man reportin’ it cause they don’t understand ‘cause we talkin’ to black folk anyhow.

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Now tonight we want to (mic bump and later for all that other junk). Tonight we want to do several things. We want to talk about some of the basic assump­ tions from which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee moves, and then move into an area of pragmatics and what, in fact, black people gonna have to do if we going to survive in this country and live as human beings. The first thing we want to talk about is the theory of self-condemnation. Then we want to move on and talk about denying one one’s freedom as op­ posed to giving one one’s freedom. Then we want to talk about the importance of definition and the need for black people to define themselves as they see fit in this society and to have those definitions recognized by our oppressors— white society. Then we want to talk about violence, ’cause it’s going to be im­ portant; ’cause I don’t know why everybody’s so scared about it—they going to draft you all and send you to Vietnam; I guess you going to go over there and make love to the Vietnamese. Then we want to talk about the lies that this country has told about black people to make us ashamed of ourselves. I want to move on and talk about developing a concept of peoplehood which we desperately need in this coun­ try today. And we want to instill among our people, particularly among the young in our generation, the will to fight back when messed over by anybody. We want to talk about self-condemnation. Self-condemnation is impossible; nobody can condemn themselves or no people can condemn themselves. If they do they have to punish themselves. See, if I did something wrong, and I admitted that I did it wrong, then I have to punish myself, see. But if I can keep telling lies or if I can rationalize away my guilt, then I’ll never feel guilty. Hmm, let me give you some examples. The Nazi’s who were brought to trial after Hitler was—after the Hitler re­ gime was brought down, they said, the one’s who allowed themselves to live, they said that they killed Jews but that Jews weren’t human beings—they were inferior—so they didn’t really commit a crime. Or they said that they didn’t know what was going on in Germany at the time that Hitler was killing all the Jews. Or they said what most white Americans are saying today, that they were just following law and order. Now, if they . . . if they said that, they just rationalized away their guilt—they just served their sentences and waited until they got out. But now the ones who admitted that they killed human beings had to commit suicide—they had to commit suicide. You got to understand that. For us in this country, a clear ex­ ample of that would be in Neshoba County in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a honky by the name of Rainey, decides with eighteen other honkies to kill three people. Now the entire county of Neshoba cannot indict Rainey because they



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elected him to do just what he was doing, to kill anybody who troubled with the status quo. If they indicted him, then all of them will be guilty, and they can’t do that. See, they cannot admit that they are guilty. And in SNCC we say that white America, the total community, cannot condemn herself for the acts of brutality and bestiality that she has heaped upon us as a race, black people. It is impossible for her to do it. She must rationalize away her guilt. She must blame everybody else but herself cause if she were to blame herself she would have to commit suicide. My brother Leroy Jones reminds me that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Now we want to move from there to the concept of denying one one’s free­ dom. And this is very very important because white people have assumed that they’re gods; that they can give somebody your freedom, and so if they don’t like the way you act, they won’t give you your freedom. So now what you have to get crystal clear in your mind is that nobody gives anybody their freedom. People can only deny somebody their freedom. It’s very important. We are all born free. We are enslaved by the institutions of rac­ ism that white America produces. Our job is to stop America from being racist; not to . . . not to give us our freedom. So in reality, our fight is to civilize white America, ‘cause it’s uncivilized. Now then, if you take that to its logical conclusion, you would say that any civil rights bill that was passed in this country might have eased the struggle for black people but helped civilize white America. Let me give you an example. I’m black. I know that I’m black. I know that I’m a human being. And I know with that comes certain dignities that all hu­ man beings have. One of those is that I’m able to enter a public place. But now there are some dumb honkies who don’t know that. So that every time I try to enter a store, the honky gets in my way, shoots at me, bombs my church, kills my children, or beats me up. ’Cause he doesn’t know that I’m a human being. So the white folk in Washington, DC got to write a Civil Rights Bill to tell this honky, “When I come, get out my way . . . get out my way . . . get out my way.” So that what they’ve done is they’ve civilized this honky—because I’m the same man I was, I’m just going to the store. The only trouble is that he is now forced to recognize my humanity. That’s very important. And the same thing is true about the Voting Rights Act. We’re black, we know we should be able to vote, every time we try to vote some honky stops us. So they got to pass a civil rights bill to stop him from denying us our rights. They don’t give us anything! You’ve got to get that clear in your mind. Now then, we want to talk about definitions ’cause they’re very very impor­ tant. See, white, western society—and you should use the words “western

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society,” never “western civilization” ’cause they don’t know nothin’ about it—white western society has been able to define everybody. They just define them to put them in places. And once they’re defined, they can’t get out of those definitions. And people just stay there. Let me give you some examples so you can understand it much better. You’ve watched the red man and the white man on TV? Fighting each other? If the red man is winning, then the white man calls for the cavalry. I mean, here comes the cavalry, and they’re riding very white and very proper, and when they get up to where the battle is, they all get off their horses and they get out their guns and they systematically shoot all the red men; you know, kill ’em dead. They get back on their horses and they ride back to the fort, and at the fort there’s always a white woman standing there and she says, (in falsetto) “What happened?” and there’s always this lieutenant who says, “We had a victory. We killed all the Indians.” This is very good, you know. Now the next time when the reverse happens, when the red man beats the hell out of the white man, you know, and there’s one of them left draggin’ on the horse, and she says, (in falsetto) “What happened?” “Those dirty Indians; they massacred us.” See, what they are saying, is that a massacre is not as good as a victory. A victory is much better. So here are these poor red people who all their lives gonna fight and they ain’t never gonna have a victory. Here’s Sitting Bull, the greatest strategist you have in a war; he’s won all these wars, but he ain’t never gonna have a victory; he’s always gonna win a massacre. And a massacre is dirty, so you gotta understand that one in your minds. You see that on television all the time. Even today about the Vietnam war; do you ever see ’em? Those dirty, filthy, rotten, Communist, rebels threw a Molotov cocktail and killed civilians. And then the other guy comes on and says, “And in the meantime, our good GI boys have been bombing the hell out of North Vietnam.” Or even better, would be a group of students at Nashville decide to take care of some honky cops ’cause they pickin’ on them and it’s “Fiske Students Riot!” And in Fort Lauderdale, honkies gonna throw bottles and beer at police­ men and they gonna say “College Students go on a Spree.” So the white people have been defining us all our lives and we have been forced to react to those definitions. And see, they call you all Negroes. I guess you all came from Negroland. (laughs) You got ’em! Yeah! But see you have allowed white people to name you. When we were in Puerto Rico a couple of months ago we were speaking in Spanish. I was looking through the dictionary to find the word for Negro in Puerto Rican. There is no such word. The closest



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word is negro: it means black. In French, there is no word for Negro. In German, there is no word for Negro. In Swahili, there is no word for Negro. You wouldn’t want me to leave out Swahili. It’s what’s happenin’! Yeah! All right! So that they have defined that and with the word Negro comes people who are stupid, apathetic, love watermelon and got good rhythm. Yeah! But now they do something even more insidious with definitions. Let me give you an example so then we can get into Black Power and the definitions of Black Power. Now you remember, especially from my generation, when the whole thing broke out with integration and we used to sit glued to the TV set. You know, our black leaders would got up and say, “We want to integrate.” In our minds, we knew the cat was talking about good schools, good houses, good jobs, and a good way of life. That was in the minds of all black people. But some dumb honky gonna jump up and say, (in a drawl) “You want to marry my daughter, don’t you?” And instead of our black leaders being aggressive and saying “Later for you honky,” at that time they would react to the honky. See they would let the honky define their own term “integration” and they would say, “Uh, uh, we don’t want to be your brother. We just want to be your brother. Ah, ah.” Yeah, yeah, you know! And they just go to sweating and puffing, “We don’t want to sleep in your bedroom. We just want to live next door to you.” Yeah, yeah! And so what they were doing was that here was a honky who defined their term and they were reacting to his definition. They don’t pull that junk with us at SNCC ’cause we tell them right out when they say that nonsense about “marrying my daughter.” Your daughter, your sister, your mama, we tell them to the point! To the point, to the point! We tell them crystal clear: “The white woman is not the queen of the world—she’s not! She’s not the Virgin Mary. She can be made like anyone else. Let’s move on to something important! Let’s move on to some­ thing important.[”] So that we will not be caught in a bind about reacting to their definitions. And the same thing happens, see, we say Black Power and some honky goin’ to jump up and say, “You mean violence.” And he wants us to say “Uh-uh, boss man, we don’t mean violence.” Later for the honky! It’s our term—we know what it means. Later for him! Black Power is the coming together of black people to fight for their libera­ tion by any means necessary. Now we want to talk about violence. Because I understand that some of your so-called Negro leaders have been saying that we violent. I won’t deny it.

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Yeah, I’m violent. Somebody touch me, I’ll break their arm. But the problem isn’t one of violence, see. The problem is one of hitting back white people when they hit you. That’s the real problem ’cause we’ve never done that all our lives. They’ve been able to walk over us, bomb our churches, beat us up, shoot into our houses, lynch us, and do everything they wanted to do and we would just sit there and whisper about it behind closed doors. It’s . . . a . . . new day . . . today! It’s a new day today. But what really upsets me is that these people who talk about violence are not concerned about black people. Because there is more violence in our neigh­ borhood on Friday and Saturday night than there is anyplace else, anyplace else. We cut and we shoot each other more then we touch anybody in the world, and don’t nobody talk out against that violence—nobody talking about it! And the reason they don’t do it is because they don’t give a damn about us. They’re only concerned about white folk. If they were against violence, they would be preaching non-violence in the black communities, ’cause that’s where we need it most. We need it there. We need to learn to love and to respect each other and stop cutting and shooting each other. But they don’t care about us, they don’t care about us, no! The only time you hear these preachers talk about nonviolence is when a honky hits you and you gettin’ ready to take care of busi­ ness. That’s the only time you hear them talking about non-violence. Then you see them on television—the only role they have is to condemn their own people, “Ah, we don’t believe in violence, those vagabonds throw­ ing rocks and bottles. Oh yes, be believe in the war in Vietnam. We think our boys should go over there and shoot. But we don’t believe in violence at all.” What is that junk? They gonna put you in a uniform and send you 8,000 miles to shoot a man who ain’t never called you a Nigger? Get outta here! And you get cats like Lyndon Baines Johnson get up on TV and say, (in a drawl) “My fellow Americans, every night before I go to sleep, I ask myself, ‘What have I done to preserve peace in this country?’” And yet he’s talking about preserving peace and dropping bombs all over Hanoi: bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb. And then before national TV and says, “Violence never accomplishes anything.” If the honky believes it, tell him to use nonviolence in Vietnam. What they’re saying is violence is OK against everybody except the white man. That’s what they’re saying. You ought not to get fooled by it. You ought to understand that in the world there exists especially in this country, a victim and executioner relationship. We are the victims and white people are the executioners, and they have kept us down by force and by violence, and that if we are violent, it is just that we have learned well from our teachers. Don’t you get fooled by it. . . .



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They have bombed our churches, they have shot us in the streets, they have lynched us, they have cattle-prodded us, they have thrown lye over us, they have dragged our children out in the night. We have been the recipients of vio­ lence for over 400 years. We’ve just learned well how to use it today. Don’t you ever condemn people for using violence. When those black preachers get up, you tell them to get the guts to condemn the white folks for the violence they’ve heaped on us. If they can’t do that, if they can’t condemn the white folks, tell them to keep their mouths shut! So don’t you get caught up in no discussion about violence. We just making it crystal clear to the honky today that if he try to shoot us, we gonna kill him ’fore God gets the news. Period! Now if he doesn’t want to got shot, tell him to stay home. ’Cause they leave their beds and their wives at three o’clock in the morning and come to our community and going to work out their frustration by going and shooting into our community. If they got frustrations, tell ’em to go see a psychiatrist. So you got to understand that one in your mind, and don’t got carried away with that nonsense about riots. You ought to understand, you ought to be proud of your black brothers in Nashville. You ought to be proud, because what happened was on Friday night two honky policemen going to walk into the middle of the neighborhood and gonna start beating up on a black brother. And when the other brothers told them they didn’t have to, they gonna turn on them. But they forgot: it’s a new day! It’s a new day! It’s a new day! See they didn’t recognize that this generation is saying if you wear a sheet at night, or a badge in the day, if you put your filthy white hands on our beautiful black skin, we gonna TCB, period! Period! Period! You just dismiss that nonsense about violence. When they tell you about violence, you tell them, “Yeah, we dig your nonviolence in Vietnam. We dug your nonviolence in Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.” You tell them we dug ’em. Yeah! (A woman in the audience yells “The Congo!”) We ain’t gonna forget the Congo, baby. We dig it there, too. We dug . . . they tried violence in Cuba, too, but Castro took care of them. Yeah! Now we want [to] talk then pragmatically about how these things affect our lives as black people. What white America has done in order to rationalize away her guilt for what she’s done to us, is that she’s told a number of lies about us that she believes. Now that’s expected. Hitler said if you tell a lie long enough, and hard enough, everybody will think it’s the truth. And white American has done that. But what is pathetic and what is bad is that some

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black people believe those lies about themselves. Yes. And so what we have to do tonight is begin to clarify those lies for ourselves. You all don’t mind if I take off my jacket, do you? Us draw heat you know! Now the first lie that white America told about us is that we are lazy peo­ ple. Now are you hip to that. And here goes some of us down the street, “Oh, oh, we just lazy people. We could be just like white folk, they always working hard and trying to get somewhere. We so lazy.” You ought to get it in your minds, we not lazy. We hardworking. White people are lazy. Look here. They so lazy they came to Africa to steal us to do their work for them. We’re not lazy. We are the hardest working people in this country. We are! The trouble is we are the lowest paid and the most oppressed and the most exploited people in this country. In this country, yeah! We’re not lazy people. If you ride up and down the Delta In the South today, you will see black people chop­ ping and picking cotton for $2.00 a day while white folks sit on the porch, drink Scotch, and talk about us. We’re not a lazy people. It is our mothers who take care of their own family and then go cross town to take care of Miss Ann’s family. So you should get that out of your mind: we’re not lazy. We are a hard working, industrious people. Always have been—our sweat built this country. Built this country. Now the next lie she tells is what she tells our kids in school. If you work hard, you will succeed. Now you all ought to know that’s a lot of Junk. ‘Cause if that were true, black people would own this country lock, stock, and barrel. It’s not a question of hard-working. It is a question of who has power and who has control. That’s all. That’s all it’s about. Because we are the people who re­ ally built this country. We are the domestics, we are the share-croppers, we are the fruit-pickers, we are the janitors, we are the elevator men, we are the gar­ bage men, we are the hardest working people in this country. We are. See then if it were true that you had to work hard to succeed, then the contrary of that would be true, that people who didn’t work hard would be poor. And Bobby Kennedy would be the poorest honky in this country. So then we must begin to get it crystal clear in our minds, it is simply a question of who has power. And we don’t have that. We got everything else but that and the white man ain’t got nothing but that. You ever dig that? We got love, we got nonviolence, we got morality, we got Christianity, we got rhythm, we got everything you need. But we ain’t got power. We ain’t got power. The honkies don’t have love, can’t spell nonviolence, don’t know what reli­ gion is all about, and you know they ain’t got rhythm. But they have power,



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that’s what they have. Power over our lives! So we got to get it clear, the thing we need is power. The next lie they tell us is this thing about education. If you go to school and get a degree you gonna make it, you know. All our college students when they get out of college with a college degree, make less money than a honky with a high school degree. Not only that, the education system that they teach us is riddled with racism. It is filled with racism! We can’t see ourselves projected anywhere. They show us as a stupid people. They let us keep thinking we’re stupid. They start off with their elementary books about Tom, Dick, and Jane. Tom is white, Dick is white, Jane is white, even their dog Spot is white. And the only time we see ourselves is little black Sambo on the last page eating watermelon. But not only is it riddled with outright racism, it is riddled with subtle rac­ ism, and the history books just lie. They lie! And they have to lie because white people have got to lie to themselves. They cannot tell the truth about them­ selves. And what happens is they fill our minds with all those lies and we have to accept them as truths. Let me give you an example; one that is very hard but you gonna dig it. If I said to you Mr. Kwame Encrume, who is a brilliant black men—he’s out of sight, don’t let them white folk fool you; he should be your hero, he’s out of sight—and if I said to you Mr. Cusmian Krumm (you wouldn’t know about him because he’s a leader in Africa) (or was until the CIA overthrew him) and if I said to you that Mr. Cusmian Krumm discovered England in 1961, you’d laugh huh? That was the first time that that black man had set foot on England since we as black people did not recognize the existence of nonblack people, he would have discovered England, huh? If I said to you that Christopher Columbus discovered American in 1492 you would say that that is right. If you were my teacher, you’d give me an A. Alright, now dig. Here comes this honky from Europe, sets foot on this country, the red people are here, but they don’t exist, so he discovered it. This has been the history of white society, they have never recognized anybody who is non-white, so nothing happens until they come and find you. Ha! But now you’ve got to dig this thing about Columbus real deep, because when they tell you he discovered America and he was a dumb honky, I mean he was real stupid. He died thinking he was in India that is how dumb he was. And because he was stupid, he titled the Red man Indians. That’s why they have the name, because some dumb honky thought he was in India. So you’ve got to understand that. That’s how riddled with racism it is—that you can’t even recognize it. They don’t even recognize how racist it is to say

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that Christopher Columbus discovered America. And they never will admit it; they can’t, they can’t. Not only that, if you go to writing the real history of this country you would say that this country is a country of thieves. They started off by stealing this country from the red men and committing genocide against them. Not only did it steal the country from the red men—that didn’t satisfy them—they stole us from Africa. You’ve got to understand that this nation is a nation of thieves and is becoming a nation of murderers in Vietnam, we’ve got to stop it, we’ve got to stop it. Because we have to save our humanity! Let white American do as it will, but as black people we have to save our humanity. That is very very important. They start our kids off with the Roman Empire, the Greek Empire, and never teach you about Africa. They make you ashamed of Africa. You ask kids, “Where you from?” “My mother is from Seattle.” “Where’s your grandmother from?” “From Kansas.” “And where are your great grandparents from?” “From Texas.” “And where your great-great-grandmother from?” “Mmm-umm” (I don’t know). She is from Africa! Africa! But you don’t know anything about Africa ’cause you have white people who define Africa as savages. You let them define them for you and you don’t want to be a savage. You want to be white. Yeah! Yeah. Um-hmm. You want to be so white that you don’t want to part of your brothers in Africa. You want to be so white that you go to the movies to watch Tarzan. Yeah. You want to be so white that you sit up on your movie seats and yell for Tarzan to beat up your black brothers. That’s how white you want to be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You should recognize what they’re doing to you. Here you are jumping up and down iden­ tifying with a white man—and he’s dumb! He’s dumb—he can’t even speak. All he says is “Uh-ah-yuh-ah-yah!” (Tarzan’s yell). And you over there identifying with this white man because what they tell­ ing you is here comes this honky from Europe, and because he’s so smart and so intelligent, and we are black and so stupid, he comes over to Africa and knows the jungle better than us, and we been living there all our lives. Are you hip to that? And whenever we get into trouble with the elephants, we have to go to the great white father to keep the elephants from us. Ain’t that some junk?



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But what you have to recognize is that what they have done is brainwashed us. When you see Tarzan on TV, you yell for your black brothers to come and beat the hell out that white man. Beat him up! But you see that has been calculated by white America, that we will never find out about ourselves. Because a people without its roots, a people without it history is like a tree without its roots and we have been floating for 400 years. Just floating. Just floating. They didn’t tell you that the first university in the world was the university in Timbuktu in Africa, did they? Africa, did they? They couldn’t tell you that because you would begin to identify with Africa and see a part of other black people. They tell you about the Roman Empire conquering the world, they didn’t tell you that Hannibal, a black man, crossed the Alps and beat the living daylights out the Romans. That’s right, Hannibal did it! And when they get ready to put Hannibal in the movies, they put a honky like Victor Mature playing Hannibal. Because they don’t want you to know that he was black. But I’m here to tell you that he was a proud black man. He crossed the Alps and went into Italy and smashed the Romans. You know the Italian honkies runnin’ around here with dark complexion and brown eyes, Hannibal did that—Hannibal! The next time some Italian honky calls you a Nigger tell him “Get on outta my face, I’m your Daddy!” They can’t afford to tell you the things that black people did because you would identify with them. They tell you about Napoleon Bonaparte. Did they tell you that the little black man who was a slave named Toussaint L’Overture in Haiti, beat him up and sent him home crying like a baby? Huh? They leave that out of your history books because they want you to be ashamed. When Napoleon got back to France, his wife was pregnant for a Pygmy. Get to that! Get to that! Get to that! When Napoleon looked at his wife he asked her what happened when the baby was born black. She said that the little black man was staring at me; he said “He must have had an awful penetrating stare my dear!” But they won’t give you that in the history books. They give white heroes to identify with. They mesmerize our minds. They give you George Washington. He’s supposed to be your hero. He’s the man who had you enslaved—sold a black woman for a barrel of molasses—and he’s supposed to be my hero? Later for him! Later for him. They can’t tell you about the Nat Turners and the Denmark Veseys, can they? They can’t tell you because they were fighters who beat up all kinds of white folk who were trying to make them slaves. That’s why they can’t tell you be­ cause they want you to keep on being slaves, so they can define your very actions. It ain’t going to happen to today!

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All of those things in the schools are calculated to make us ashamed of our­ selves. But the most insidious things they could have done to us is to make us believe as a people that we are ugly. The criteria for beauty in this society is set by white folk. In the books you read, in the television programs you see, the movies, the magazines and the newspaper. If she’s beautiful she’s got a thin nose, thin lips, stringy hair and white skin—and that’s beauty. And they believe in that beauty so much, that our women run around day and night bathing in beauty cream from morning to night. They have got us believing that so that all these young men go out and pro­ cess their hair so they can have straight hair to look beautiful. I hope you can take the truth, because they mesmerized our women’s minds so that they pro­ cess their hair every Friday night. And the rest of them get their fifty dollars and buy wigs. We have to as a people gather strength to stand up on our feet and say “Our noses are broad, our lips are thick, our hair is nappy—we are black and beautiful!” Black and beautiful! So that we don’t have to any longer be ashamed of ourselves and make our children think that they are shamed. Black parents won’t tell us, “Don’t drink coffee, because it makes you black. Bite in your lip, ‘cause it’s too thick.” I was surprised in college to find in a young man who wore a nose-clip on his nose every night. But that’s how they have messed up our minds. They messed it up so much that every time we begin to think somebody’s beautiful, they pick somebody who is light, bright, and damned near white. And then they are beautiful. And when you marry somebody, our mother’s keep telling us, “Make sure you marry somebody with hair that’s, you know, straight. Because I don’t want to be . . .” That’s how much they have messed up our minds. We are ashamed of our­ selves and of our color of our skin. If you want to start a fight, call somebody black. “I ain’t black they’s black, they’s black, I ain’t black. What you talkin’ ’bout?” You are black and beautiful! Stop being ashamed of what you are! Once we stop being ashamed, we can move on because we can then begin to develop a concept of people-hood. We so ashamed of each other. “Now I’m on the bus, and here comes a black sister, there are five of us standing there. She is going to stand next to us. We are so clannish we got to be together.” We are so ashamed we don’t even want to see each other in a group. We are so ashamed that we go walking down the street and see a honky cop beating up on one of us, and know he beating him because he’s black and we keep walk­ ing right on by.



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We are so ashamed of ourselves, that we watch our brothers and sisters get put out of their houses, put their furniture on the street, and we wait until night time to go and steal what we want. We are so ashamed of ourselves that we’re raping, plundering, and murdering each other. We have to build a concept of peoplehood where we recognize that we are all the same people, the same brothers and sisters. So that we can move to the strength to tell them “When you touch one of us, you’ve got to touch all of us.” And when we have got the strength to move to that position, ain’t none of them going to mess with any of us. But the reason is they know they can come into our community, beat us up, take our women, and we won’t do nothing because they know we don’t even want to associate with them. You had better wake up. The rest of your brothers and sisters are coming together. They not letting them come in there and pick­ ing on one anymore. That’s what we got to do. If they touch one, they got to touch all. That is the only way we are going to survive as a people. You have got to understand that. Now I want to point out something to the older folk, who get upset about this thing called law and order. They say, “Well the trouble with that Nigger and that SNCC is they goin’ around there and they stirring up trouble and breaking law and order. . . . Well, they talk so bad and so mean.” Let me tell you of all the harsh words we say in SNCC, we can never begin to match the treatment that white America has heaped upon us and continues to heap upon us. Continues to heap upon us. We can call them honkies until they turn red, we ain’t even begun to match what they have done to us. So don’t you begin to get disturbed about the words, it’s about time somebody spoke up! But our older folk talk about law and order because they don’t recognize that you can have law and order and have injustice. This country has law and order. It don’t have justice for black people. Don’t have none! Don’t have none! Hitler had the most efficient system of law and order—he couldn’t spell justice. But what we saying to them is that you may have law and order, but if you ain’t got justice, you ain’t going to have law and order. You ain’t going to have it. We tell them like Jesus Christ told them. “I have come to bring the sword, not the shield. I have come to turn son against father, mother against daughter, nation against nation, for where there is injustice there shall be no peace.” No peace. No peace. And wherever the honkies are heaping injustices upon us, in every city, we goin’ tear it up. Tear it up!

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If they want peace in their country, they had better learn how to administer justice. If they don’t know how, we will teach them how. So you just explain to them that Law and Order without Justice ain’t nothing but fascism. Understand that. ‘Cause we have to understand that these folk ain’t playing with us. You see a lot of folk out there think that they are just playing. You remember Noah, he told them all to come help him with this ark. They say “Uh-uh.” He say, “You all come on. The man gonna rain on you for forty days and nights.” They say, “Uh-uh. He’s good to us. I know the man. I work for him. He give me his old clothes. He good to me.” Yeah. Noah went on and built his ark, and he rained on him for forty days and forty nights. Don’t you all forget Moses. He told all those Uncle Toms, you better come on and leave this Pharaoh. “Uh-uh, the Pharaoh he good to me. He good to me. Yes sir, he pat me on the head. I can speak to him any time I want to. I can go to his back door and have tea and cookies with him.” Yeah. But Moses said you all better come on with me through this Red Sea because this Pharaoh is a mean man. “Uh-uh, you just a trouble maker, Moses, just a trouble maker, Moses. Pharaoh ain’t done nothing to us.” And Moses just went on through the Red Sea. He left them behind. When we walking on today, we leaving a whole lot of Uncle Toms behind. Behind. We have to instill in our young people, the right and the will to fight back. We don’t have it. You ever see our young kids? Ask them what their name is— “Mumble, mumble, mumble.” “What’s your name?” “Mumble, mumble.” You shouldn’t laugh. It is very serious You ask a white boy what his name is: (loud and clear) “My name is Richard.” We are so ashamed of ourselves that our kids won’t even hold their heads up high. They learn to bow down before white folk by the time they are nine years old. And our parents call themselves Christians. Did they forget the first commandment? Though shalt have no other gods before me. They have taught us to bow down before white folk as if they were gods. And white people be­ lieve they are gods. And that has been the fault of black folk because we let them believe they were gods too. We let them play gods, but they don’t under­ stand that we telling them that play period is over and they better come on home. They think that everybody was put on this earth to benefit them. And they use us against each other. Well, I want to say two things before I sit down. I want to develop this concept to fight back and then I want to talk about Vietnam. Now see, the only people our children can identify with in school, and in a school like this, is George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington. Booker T. Washington was a Super-Tom. And George Washington Carver was an ignorant Super-Tom. Now



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the reason they teach our kids about Booker T. Washington, was because he used his mouth to do two things: to eat and to say “Yes, sir.” And they want our kids to do the same thing. And I guess why they teach them about George Washington Carver is because if white folk didn’t have him, they would eat jelly sandwiches for the rest of their lives. He was so stupid that every peanut-butter factory today is owned by a white folk. And he invented over 100 uses for the peanut, and white folk got it all. He was nice to them. Did you see it? He used to go ’round and teach them how to use the peanut and wouldn’t come to his own people because we were too dumb and stupid and weren’t cultured enough. Before I name our heroes for you, I want to talk about this thing called culture, because the honkies are still defining us today. Did you ever hear them?—they call us deprived children. Now you listen to that, and here you send your chil­ dren to school and they writing a paper, “The Cultural Deprivation of the Black Race.” Ain’t that some junk? They say we are culturally deprived. You all better let them in because they gonna charge me with inciting to riot. They wouldn’t let us have the gymnasium and then they’re going to charge us with inciting to riot. Now let me tell you, don’t you ever let anybody say you are culturally deprived, because what white folk are talking about is that they don’t recognize our culture until they legitimatize it. Here they were teaching you in school, “Way Down upon the Swanny River” and “My Old Kentucky Home” was written by Stephen Foster. Ain’t that some junk? They gonna tell you a honky wrote music like that about us and for us? He stole it! That’s all he did! That’s all he did! That’s all he did! How would he know how to write it. The trouble is they steal our music from us and then give it back to us and call it culture. Here come the Beatles, singing our music—they can’t even harmonize and they gonna talk about culture. And they come taking our kids to school and talking about music apprecia­ tion. They teach them Bach, Vivaldi, Rachmanikov, and all them other cats. Then they say, now let’s bring it down to modern music and they say Gershwin. Then they say, “Let’s talk about jazz.” They say, “Kids, here’s the man who has led jazz in America more than any other man—Benny Goodman.” Brothers and sisters do you know that Benny Goodman can not carry the empty trumpet case of Miles Davis? Do you know that? They say we are culturally deprived. Culture is anything man made. If they say we are culturally deprived, they are denying our very existence. Don’t let them do it to you. We got culture. We’ve got Dr. W. E. B. DuBois! We’ve got County Colin! We’ve got Leroy Jones! We’ve got Mahalia Jackson! We’ve got the Staple Singers! We’ve got the Mighty Clouds of Joy. We’ve got James Brown! We’ve got Ray Charles! Yeah! And to put the icing on the cake we’ve got Reverend C. F. Franklin and his soulful daughter, Aretha Franklin!

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Yeah! Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me! Yeah! The problem is that our culture is not legitimatized. They have made us ashamed of it. Forget it! They have never had any culture! They have always stolen ours. That’s a fact. The blues ain’t theirs. Come on, be serious! Ha! Be serious Don’t let them get away with that. The Blues . . . We might let them get away with Bach. Beethoven was black. They won’t tell you that in school. He was a Spanish Moor— black as you and I, but they don’t tell us that. It’s calculated, it is calculated. We need for our kids when they go to our school, to learn a number of things. They need to learn about Africa! It should be included in their curricu­ lum. We don’t want them teaching our kids German, they should teach then Swahili! You should learn Swahili so you can talk to your African brothers and the white man won’t know what you are talking about. We need to know who our heroes are. Our books must have Frederick Douglass. They must have Denmark Vesey. They must have Nat Turner. They must have Dr. W. E. B. DuBois. They must have Richard Wright. They must have J. A. Rodgers. They must have Lerone Bennett. They must have County Colin. They must have Lane Lock. They must have Leroy Jones. And when you get the guts . . . when you get the guts, tell them you want to learn about brother Malcolm X! But you don’t know anything about Malcolm X. What do you know except what the honkies tell you. He preached hatred. He hated white folk. There were white folk writing the paper. They put black people on the last page on a special sheet, call you Niggers, and describe you every time you rape some­ body, and they’ve got the nerve to tell you that one of your own hates white folk. And you believe them. You ought to get you a copy of Malcolm X Speaks or the Autobiography of Malcolm X and read it yourself. And then when you read it, you will stand up when you hear his name called. But you ought to know that. The history is that white people never let any black man who is speaking for you speak to you. They always castrate them. They always kill them. They always lynch them. Or today, they kick him out of Congress. You ought to know that anything they are against, you should auto­ matically be for. That’s how come we knew Black Power was so good—we said the word, and the whole white world came out against us! We said, “That’s it, we got it! Black Power!” Now, finally, then, about the War in Viet Nam. So we can have some questions. Oh, before we do that, see, black people also have to learn how to support the movement. Yeah. We give money to religion but we don’t give money to our movements. So they are going to pass the collection plate during this and you should give some money to support what you believe in. You can’t have



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nobody else pay for the music because if they pay for the music, they gonna call the tune. If you want to call the tune, you got to pay for the music. Dig it? But we not going . . . oh yeah, somebody just reminded me to use Paul Robeson. I apologize for leaving him out. A great black man. Marcus Garvey, got to do it! We know all the rest, we don’t want to talk about the Senators from Massachusetts. Bomb Hanoi. We want more bombs in Hanoi. Look how white we are. Yeah. Don’t call me a Negro. Call me a man, first. Have you ever heard some­ body Jewish get up and say, “Change my name, don’t call me Goldberg. Call me Smith.” ’Cause they had changed their names, they’re ashamed of their heritage. Have you ever heard anybody black get up and say, “Don’t call me a man, me an American first.” That’s what we want to talk about: American first. Because that has been the dilemma of the black man in this country. We have always tried to be Americans first and black people all the way down the end. And that’s why we catching hell the way we catching it today. You ask anybody in this country, what they are: I’m Polish-American, I’m Jewish-American, Italian-American, Irish-American. Say what are you little boy? “American-Negro.” He wants to be American first because he is so ashamed of himself. The very first man to die for the War of Independence in this country was a black man named Crispus Attucks. The very first man, yes! He was a fool. Yeah! He died for white folk country while the rest of his black folk were enslaved in this country. He should have been fighting white folk instead of dying for white folk, but that’s been our history as black people—we’ve always been dying for white folk. In the American Revolutionary War, they wouldn’t let us fight, because we were black, and stupid, and ignorant. Oh, but we wanted to be Americans, broth­ ers and sisters. We wanted to be Americans so bad, that we got out in our bare feet and trampled up and down the eastern shores of this country training with wooden rifles, begging the white folk to let us fight. And finally they came and said, “Good, you can fight.” And they had us go out and fight the Indians in the war of Independence like fools. We should have teamed up with the Indians! Yeah! But that was all right. We fought and we won the war. Our blood was shed and they gave us a purple heart and pat us on the head and said, “That’s a good Nigger.” The rest of our brothers were still in slavery, but we were fighting be­ cause we were good Americans. We wanted to prove to America how good we were to her. The Mexican War came, and they were yelling about “Remember the Alamo!” They never told you that the Alamo was on Mexican Territory. But

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that’s ok. We went out there and we begged to fight. There we were again, fighting non-white people. Dying for the white man. The war wasn’t even over and we still in slavery. Then came the Civil War. Our great white father, Abraham Lincoln, who was supposed to free us, started the war in 1861 and didn’t sign the Emancipation Proclamation until 1863 because the South was beating the living daylights out of the North. He wouldn’t even let us fight in the Civil War. He said we weren’t fitting to fight. And Frederick Douglass, a great black man, had to go to him and urge him to let us fight. And when the South was still winning, he let us fight, but in segregated units. Said Mr. Lincoln, we weren’t fitting to fight next to white men. Oh! But we wanted to prove to America how good we were. So we went out and fought in the Civil War. Then came World War I and they were drafting white people and they wouldn’t draft us. And we were ashamed. “Oh, draft us!” we cried. “Please draft us.” The NAACP begged them to draft us. Our forefathers ran to the draft table. “We are good Americans—let us fight.” And they sent us over to Europe to fight to make the world safe for democracy and we couldn’t even spell the word democracy. That was in World War I. We didn’t even come back. We didn’t have a chance to take our uniforms off after World War I when they hung an entire platoon in Texas with our uniforms on our backs. Oh! But we weren’t, no not us, we got to prove what good Americans we are. So here comes World War II, and we gonna fight. We gonna prove how good we are. Let us fight on the front lines. Let’s stop this war. We must fight. We are good Americans. Let us take Pork Chop Hill! Let us fight in Poland, to stop Hitler. And our fathers gave their lives in Poland to stop Hitler from run­ ning over the Poles, and in 1966 a Polish honky in Cicero gonna throw a rock at us and tell us get out his neighborhood. Yeah! Oh, but not us—we were good Americans. We were gonna fight. You ought to read Mr. Langston Hughes’ The Fight for Freedom and History of the NAACP. He tells you in Texas there was a prison camp and black American soldiers who had gone to Europe to fight for this country were bring­ ing home Nazi prisoners and they put them on a train in New York and when they get to Washington, D.C., the white Nazis, who were enemies of this coun­ try sat in the front of the train, and the Niggers had to sit in the back. Oh, but we wanted to prove what good Americans we were. May I remind you that in World War II, we fought in segregated units. Oh, but that wasn’t enough, no, we wanted to be good Americans. So, Mr. A. Phillip Randolph in 1947 and ’48 mounts a campaign to integrate the troops and Truman gets white enough and he integrates the troops.



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And here comes our chance. Korea, at last, our chance to fight with our white brothers. “Oh, we must stop Communism at any price!” was the cry and it was our blood that paid the price. It was our blood that stopped Communism at any price. And our uncles came back to this country with one leg and one arm only to walk into a store and to have some foreigner slam his door in his face and say, “Get out my store, Nigger.” We wanted to prove what good Americans we were. In the Vietnamese war, let America prove something to us. We will not fight in their war. How could you let them destroy your humanity? How could you let them put you in a uniform and fight people who have never done anything to you? How could you? When are we going to get the strength to tell this country we will not let her destroy us? You see that honky McNamara on television? He ain’t nothing but a racist. He says, “Yes, we are going to draft thirty percent of the Negroes in the Army. This is where they can have equal opportunity. Yeah. Yes . . . yes it’s true that they are only ten percent of the population, but this is a better chance for them.” When that honky talk about drafting thirty percent black people, he’s talking about black urban removal—nothing else. You have got to understand that that war in Vietnam is calculated to get rid of us. Thirty-five percent of the people who die in Vietnam are us—by their figures. By their figures! So you know what the true figures really are! You ought to stand up like the greatest, the prettiest, Mohammed Ali. And you ought to tell them, “We are not going to fight your war!” You get up on your feet and tell them this war is for the birds: Lyndon Bird, Lady Bird, and Loony Bird! Let them go fight it! You tell them we are no longer going to kill people just because a honky says “Kill.” You tell them, “When we decide to kill, we will decide who we gonna kill!” You have to recognize what they are doing. Dr. Martin Luther King was a great leader of his people until he came out against at the war in Vietnam. Dig it? Then all of a sudden he’s not fitting to lead us anymore because the honky still thinks he picking out leaders for us today. You stand pat behind Dr. Martin Luther King. Stand one hundred percent behind him. Our guts and blood have been spilled for this country and we go to the worst schools this country can produce. We who have spilled our guts and blood for this country. Our guts and blood have been spilled for this country, it’s time we spill them for our people. Thank you. Source: Stokely Carmichael, Black Power speech, Garfield High School, Seattle, Washington, April 19, 1967, http://courses.washington.edu/spcmu/carmichael/transcript.htm.

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Carter, Alprentice “Bunchy” (1942–1969) Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter was the founder and principal organizer of the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Prior to his appointment as local BPP leader, he was a well-known principal of a street organization and a former convict. Carter was killed at the age of 27 because of an internecine conflict with another Black Power organization. Decades after his death, Carter remains a martyr of the BPP and the Black Power Movement.

Origins Carter was born on October 12, 1942, in Shreveport, Louisiana. His parents, Elmore and Nola Mae Carter, moved their family to Los Angeles, California, in 1945. Alprentice Carter became known to friends and relatives by the name “Bunchy.” According to his mother, a family friend affectionately called him “Bunchy” because he was plump as a baby. Carter would later introduce himself as “Bunchy . . . like a bunch of greens.” Even though the Carter family avoided the kind of overt segregation that they had experienced in Louisiana, they still experienced racism in 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles. Nola Carter made sure that her 10 children had an awareness of discrimination even though Los Angeles lacked the colored and white signs that she grew up with in the South. As a teen growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Bunchy joined the Slausons, a street organization that defended his community from the racial violence of white gangs in neighborhoods adjacent to the African American community. The Slausons name was reflected in South Central’s Slauson Park (now called Bethune Park). The 5,000-member Slausons was the largest street organization in Los Angeles during the early 1960s. Carter emerged as a leader of the Renegades, a 500-member subset of the Slausons.

From Gangster to Revolutionary In 1963, Bunchy Carter was convicted of armed robbery and received a four-year sentence. He was sent to Soledad State Prison in California, where he joined the Nation of Islam (NOI). It was also during this period in NOI history that Malcolm X’s dispute with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad led to Malcolm’s departure from the organization in 1964. Malcolm X founded Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the Organization of African American Unity to continue organizing African Americans to fight against oppression in the United States and worldwide. Because of several conversations with Eldridge Cleaver, another prisoner at Soledad who was also



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from Los Angeles, Carter broke with the NOI and embraced Malcolm’s version of Islam and Black revolutionary nationalism. After Malcolm X’s assassination, Cleaver and Carter founded the Soledad prison’s African history and culture class in 1966, and both had planned to continue Malcolm’s legacy after being released from prison. Reorganizing the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) would be their vehicle for organizing a Black revolution. Cleaver was released on parole to San Francisco, California, in December 1966. However, it was during this period that he encountered the BPP and decided to abandon his plans to rebuild the OAAU. Cleaver joined the BPP, and the organization’s founders, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, appointed Cleaver to the position of minister of information.

Carter Joins the BPP At the time Carter was released from the Soledad prison in the summer of 1967, Los Angeles youths had become politicized because of the organizing after the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Cleaver had tried to convince Bunchy to join the BPP, but he did not initially share Cleaver’s assessment of the merits of the organization. Cleaver remembered that Carter’s position was that they “not get hung up with these college boys (since both Newton and Seale were college students)” (Cleaver 2006, 115). When Bunchy was released, his mother was heavily involved in providing support for the Black community as director of a War on Poverty program, the Neighborhood Adult Participation Project. The Carter matriarch was not only a community leader but was also an advocate for the development of young people. Bunchy Carter was able to secure employment at another antipoverty program in South Central Los Angeles, the Teen Post. Established after the Watts Rebellion, the Teen Post provided services for youths including counseling, employment, job training, and recreational activity. In addition to the benefit of employment and fulfilling Carter’s parole requirements, Teen Post served as a base for him to work closely with its constituents. Carter had charisma and was a very effective motivational speaker and poet. Along with his street credibility, his oratory and poetry resonated with young people and helped him to organize in Los Angeles. Using his natural gifts, Carter was able to inspire them to be part of a revolutionary and paramilitary group called the Radicals. Eventually, Carter’s connection to Eldridge Cleaver and more interaction with the BPP changed his impressions about the Oakland-based organization. After BPP minister of defense Huey Newton survived a gun battle with Oakland police on October 29, 1967, and was arrested, Carter contacted Cleaver and asked to join the group. Cleaver immediately traveled to Los Angeles to begin the orientation and transformation of the Radicals into a BPP chapter.

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Southern California Panthers The Southern California chapter of the BPP was founded on February 18, 1968. The Teen Post Radicals group, former Slausons’ Renegade associates, and other friends and family were the foundation of the chapter. Carter was appointed the chapter’s deputy minister of defense, the de facto head of the Southern California BPP. Carter also utilized his street relationships to build the Wolves, a clandestine wing of the BPP in Los Angeles. The identities and activities of the Wolves were not revealed to rank-and-file Panthers. Carter recruited U.S. Army veteran Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt into the chapter and assigned him with the task of building its military capacity.

BPP/Us Conflict In 1968, Carter enrolled in the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) High Potential Program, established to admit students who demonstrated promise, but did not meet the traditional standard for admissions to the university. Several Black Power activists were admitted into UCLA through the program. That same year, an intense rivalry developed between the BPP and the cultural nationalist Us organization. The rivalry between the BPP and Us was manipulated by local and national law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that exploited the contradictions. The distinctions between the BPP and Us were elevated when each organization took different positions on the selection of leadership for the newly formed Black studies program at UCLA. A fight between BPP captain John Huggins with Tawala Jones, a member of the Us organization, escalated into a gun battle. Carter and Huggins were killed, while the Us members involved escaped. The deaths of Carter and Huggins devastated the Southern California BPP and the Black Power Movement in Los Angeles. Bunchy Carter remains an inspirational figure in the movement for Black freedom. Similar to Malcolm X and George Jackson, Carter’s name is evoked as a transformational figure, someone who transformed his life from criminality and incarceration to advocacy of liberation and social justice. Akinyele Umoja and Sherwin “Keith” Rice See also: Black Panther Party; Cleaver, Kathleen Neal; Newton, Huey P.; Pratt, Geronimo ji-Jaga; Seale, Bobby; Us Organization Further Reading Austin, Curtis. 2006. Up Against the Wall: Violence and the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Cleaver, Eldridge. 2006. Target Zero: A Life in Writing. Edited by Kathleen Cleaver. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.



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Cleaver, Kathleen, and George Katsiaficus. 2001. Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party. New York: Routledge. Jones, Charles E., ed. 1998. The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Rice, Keith. 2015. Transcript, Oral History Interview with Nola Mae Carter 15.09. OHT.01, 26 January 2015, March 3, 2015, by Keith Rice, p. 57, Oral History Program, Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, California State University, Northridge.

Che Lumumba Club The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) began as an organization with mostly European immigrants as its base when it split from the Socialist Party in 1919. Many of these immigrants had little to no contact or understanding of the Black experience in the United States. The CPUSA’s progressive stance against lynching, at a time when neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party would speak out against these terrorist acts that were spreading throughout the South and the Midwest like wildfire, caught the attention of many in the Black community. Organizers of the CPUSA saw the Black community as a possible catalyst for revolutionary activity because of their social and economic standing and the statesponsored and -organized suppression of the Black community under Jim Crow laws. The Red Summer of 1919 saw Black men and women, especially returning veterans from World War I, attacked on the streets by violent white vigilante mobs with the cooperation of local law enforcement intent on “keeping the Negro in his place.” The lynchings, beatings, and rapes, and the destruction of homes and businesses in the Black community were ignored by President Woodrow Wilson. With nowhere to turn, the Black community sought to organize for self-defense. In 1918 a British West Indian immigrant, Cyril Briggs, began publishing a newspaper called The Crusader that advocated for the unity of the working class with a Marxist analysis. But most important to the Black community, he called for armed self-defense. In September 1919, The Crusader announced a new Black Marxist community organization based on the idea of community self-defense, the African Blood Brotherhood. The African Blood Brotherhood established chapters in Black communities throughout the country, including the Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. By the 1920s the African Blood Brotherhood had merged with the CPUSA, with many of the former African Blood Brotherhood leaders becoming influential members of the CPUSA. During the late 1920s the CPUSA began organizing sharecroppers in southern states such as Alabama under the political vehicle known as the Sharecroppers Union. The political organizing and challenge to Jim Crow was met with limited

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success (the Elaine, Arkansas, massacre of 1919 is one example). Even though the Sharecroppers Union was open to all races, it quickly became a virtually all-Black organization. The shining moment for the CPUSA’s organizing in the South came in 1931 with the arrest and trial of the Scottsboro Boys, nine teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama. The CPUSA created a political vehicle for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys that was called the International Labor Defense. This organization also defended other activists, both Black and white, in the South at that time, leaving a powerful impression on the Black community in the South and the North. Many Black people joined the CPUSA simply because of its stance on lynching. This included Black intellectuals, writers, and entertainers such as Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and average working men and women. It was the only organization besides the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that was openly calling for an end to Jim Crow segregation and lynching. Beginning in the late 1930s and early 1940s a wave of Black migrants came out of the South and into the industrialized North. Under pressure from A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Walter White from the NAACP, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in 1941, banning discrimination in the defense industries to avoid a threatened march on Washington. This order was like ringing a virtual dinner bell for hundreds of thousands if not millions of Black people in the Jim Crow South, since the custom was that a Black man could never make the same money as a white man for the same job. This order meant that Black people could finally make a living wage. And many families answered that bell. The migration was not just to the north but also to the West. Many Black families that were living in Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas moved to California seeking a better way of life and an escape from the Jim Crow South. As millions of Black southern immigrants flocked to the West Coast to work in the defense industries, they met with a new version of Jim Crow. This version became known as “James Crowe Esquire.” Housing and job discrimination along with police brutality and a racially biased court system tarnished the glow of freedom on the West Coast. The Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, the mass arrests and confinement to concentration camps of the Japanese community, and the Zoot Suit Riot in downtown Los Angeles reminded the Black migrants arriving in southern Calif­ ornia that there was probably a reason why they called it “southern” California. But there was good money to be made in the defense plants. Even though Black homeowners were restricted by racial covenants and were forced to live in overcrowded neighborhoods with older housing stock, it was better than living where most of them came from. The 1950s brought the Cold War and McCarthyism to American politics. Attacks on suspected communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee and



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prosecutions under the Smith Act along with internal contradictions severely crippled the CPUSA. By the early 1960s the CPUSA was a mere shadow of what it had been and was no longer taken seriously in the political arena. In the South, the Civil Rights Movement under the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was seriously challenging Jim Crow segregation. The overcrowded, dilapidated housing that was common in the Black neighborhoods of the North was beginning to fester. In 1965 with a little help from the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles Police Department on a hot August night, that festering wound of discrimination, injustice, and brutality exploded and convulsed for six days, giving birth to a new aggressive Black consciousness that called into question the goal of integration that was the backbone of the traditional Civil Rights Movement. After years of watching Black demonstrators—men, women, and children—being beated by vicious white mobs, attacked by police dogs, and injured with fire hoses for simply trying to vote or sit down at a lunch counter, the Black community in Watts, California, felt empowered. They stood up to and fought back against their own racist tormentors, the brutal Los Angeles Police Department, led by Los Angeles’s answer to Birmingham’s Eugene “Bull” Connor, Chief William H. Parker. After the Watts Rebellion, a new consciousness took over the streets in the Black community—a sense of racial pride infused with a sense of outrage at the racial injustice and oppression that was evident to anyone paying attention. New grassroots community organizations began to appear in the Los Angeles Black community like mushrooms as the federal government pumped millions of dollars into new poverty programs in the hope of quelling any further insurrections. But it was too late. After the Watts Rebellion, Black youths had become radicalized and began to question the structure and nature of the society that seemed so brutally opposed to their existence. Many Black youths who had formerly been in a street gang structure or found themselves on high school or college campuses wanted organizations that would reflect this new Black consciousness and provide an analysis of the current situation in the community. Formation of the Black Congress on Broadway Boulevard in Los Angeles brought many old guard organizations together with new Black revolutionary organizations that called into question the very existence of the status quo. New organizations such as Ron Karanga’s Us organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) could be found at the Black Congress. Charlene Alexander Mitchell’s early memories include visiting her father, a labor activist, in federal prison. By age 13 Mitchell was organizing protests against Jim Crow segregation. By age 16 she was an active member of the CPUSA. By the 1960s she was an effective leader and agitated within the CPUSA leadership for a

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Black cell or club to be formed to organize the Black community in Los Angeles. Mitchell would become the first chairman of what was to be known as the Che Lumumba Club. According to Dr. Angela Davis in her autobiography Angela Davis, “Black communists in Los Angeles had fought within the Party for a Club that would be all-Black and whose primary responsibility would be to carry Marxist-Leninist ideas to the Black Liberation struggle in L.A., and to provide leadership for the larger party as far as the Black movement was concerned.” Leadership of the Che Lumumba Club consisted of Franklin and Kendra Alexander, Deacon Alexander, Tamu McFalls, and Angela Davis. In 1968 Mitchell became the CPUSA’s candidate for president of the United States. This made her the first Black woman to run for the national office. Because of her campaign duties, Franklin Alexander (her brother) became chair of the Che Lumumba Club. Members of the Che Lumumba Club began to organize with the students at the new Southwest Jr. College, which was opened in the Black community as a result of the Watts Rebellion and the 27-year agitation of community activist Mrs. Odessa Cox. Angela Davis and Deacon Alexander began working with the Southern California chapter of the BPP, and its leader, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, tasked Deacon Alexander and Davis with opening a BPP office on the west side of Los Angeles at Seventh Avenue and Venice Boulevard. The assassination of Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Jerome Huggins at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) on January 17, 1969, put the leadership of the Southern California chapter of the BPP in disarray. During this time, Deacon Alexander was purged from the BPP. In December 1969 after a fivehour shootout with the newly formed Los Angeles Police Department’s SWAT team at their Central Avenue headquarters and raids on their other Los Angeles facilities, the Che Lumumba Club in partnership with the Black Student Alliance, the umbrella organization for Black student unions, on college and high school campuses in southern California, and the BPP organized a huge rally in support of the legal defense of the Los Angeles 18, those 18 members of the BPP arrested after the attack on their headquarters. The Che Lumumba Club also became involved in defending one of their own. The governor of California, Ronald Reagan, initiated a campaign to remove Angela Davis from the faculty of the university because of her membership in the CPUSA. The Che Lumumba Club, in alliance with UCLA’s Black faculty and staff, and the campus Black Student Union, along with the Black Student Alliance, organized in defense of Davis’s right to teach regardless of her political outlook. Even though she would eventually win her fight, the physical and emotional toll on her and her family and friends was enormous. Unfortunately, this was just the beginning. The Soledad Brothers were three southern Californian Black men, George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgo, who had been accused of murdering a guard at Soledad State Prison. The Che Lumumba Club was already involved

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with organizing against California’s indeterminate sentence law. George Jackson, for instance, was sentenced to one year to life for a $70 gas station robbery that he was a party to because he was in the car driven by the perpetrator. He had already served 10 years. Now the three prisoners were being charged with murdering a prison guard. The Che Lumumba Club in alliance with the BPP began to organize the Soledad Brothers Defense committee statewide. During this time George Jackson’s younger brother Jonathan began working closely with members of the BPP and the Che Lumumba Club and soon began to function as Davis’s security. In 1970 Jonathan Jackson took over the Marin County Courthouse and freed three prisoners, William Christmas, James McClain, and Ruchell Magee. As they made their escape to a waiting van with the judge, several jurors, and the prosecutor as hostages, San Quentin State Prison guards fired on the van, wounding the prosecutor and a female juror and killing everyone else except Ruchell Magee, who survived. Davis was charged with murder and kidnapping and, fearing for her life, went underground. After several months she was captured in New York City and extradited to California. The Che Lumumba Club, with the full force of the international Communist Party, organized the worldwide defense of Davis. One thing that most people on the Left understood was that the Communist Party was very good at organizing legal defense committees. The worldwide support she received eventually led to her acquittal. For the first time since the late 1940s, the Communist Party was in the spotlight again with its international support of Davis. Without the Che Lumumba Club, it is doubtful that Davis would have joined the CPUSA. Charlene Alexander Mitchell, Franklin Alexander, and Deacon Alexander were all longtime CPUSA members and were known as “red diaper babies” because of their parents’ participation in the CPUSA. The politically disciplined organizing team of Franklin and his wife Kendra Alexander were known throughout California for their amazing organizing abilities. Without the Alexander family, there would probably have never been a Che Lumumba Club in Los Angeles. After Davis’s acquittal, the Che Lumumba Club faded away and was eventually replaced by her new organization, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, that continued her work for prison reform and advocated for freedom for political prisoners. Robert Lee Johnson See also: Black Student Activism; Black Student Alliance; Communist Inter­ national and Black Power; Davis, Angela Yvonne; United Front, The Further Reading Brock, Lisa. 2004. The noeasyvictories.org interview of Charlene Mitchell, July 18. Cortes, Amber. 2006. PRX interview of Charlene Mitchell, March 8.

256 | Chisholm, Shirley (1924–2005) Davis, Angela Y. 2008. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York: International. Johnson, Robert Lee. 2017a. Interview of Stanley “Deacon” Alexander, April 9. Johnson, Robert Lee. 2017a. Interview of Harry Carey, Black Student Alliance leader, late 1960s–early 1970s. KTVU. 1968. San Francisco Bay Area television archive KTVU news footage from July 16, 1968, press conference with Charlene Mitchell, presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA.

Chisholm, Shirley (1924–2005) As an elected official during the Black Power era, Shirley Chisholm was a fierce advocate for African Americans and other marginalized people. Her efforts and successes within the halls of Congress and on the campaign trail broadened Black Power to include the electoral arena. Chisholm was the first woman elected to the New York State Assembly, the first African American congresswoman, and the first African American woman to seek the presidential nomination within the Democratic Party. Born in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant community in 1924, Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was the oldest daughter of Charles and Ruby St. Hill, from British Guiana and Barbados, respectively. At the tender age of three Chisholm and her two younger sisters Muriel and Odessa were sent to live with their grandmother in Barbados so that the St. Hill family could establish itself and save money. During this time Chisholm grew up among family members, including her uncle and aunt and four cousins, and began attending school. By the time she was five she had learned to read and write in the Barbados British grammar school. She would always credit her great speaking and writing skills to this early education in the British grammar school. Upon the children’s return seven years later in 1933, Chisholm was placed in classes with students who were two years her junior. Bored, Shirley made spitballs and kept a pocketful of rubber bands to snap at other students. Eventually school officials realized that Chisholm needed more challenging work, so she was placed in the correct grade. She also received tutoring in American history and geography. Rooted in the strict nature of the St. Hill family and its focus on education, Chisholm did extremely well in school and received many scholarship offers from colleges such as Oberlin and Vassar. However, due to the family’s limited finances, Chisholm attended Brooklyn College. During this period she decided to become a teacher, believing that it was one of the few professions available to a Black woman. However, she majored in psychology and minored in Spanish. Spanish



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would help her immensely with her future political ambitions, as it would allow her to reach voters whom other candidates were unable to reach. It was at Brooklyn College where Chisholm’s political acumen was recognized by her blind science professor, Louis Warsoff. Although Chisholm believed that it was impossible for her to participate in politics because she was Black and a woman, she joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. By the year of her graduation in 1946, Chisholm was ready and prepared to enter the field of teaching. However, she was consistently denied a position because of her diminutive size and youthful looks. Finally, she was given a chance by Ella Hodges of the Mount Calvary Child Care Center in Harlem. Chisholm first underwent a probationary period as a teacher’s aide and then gained seven years of experience at the center. She continued her growth as an educator by obtaining a master’s degree in early education from Columbia University. Also during this period in her life Chisholm married her first husband, a Jamaican, by the name of Conrad Chisholm. In the meantime Shirley Chisholm excelled in her work as an educator, moving from teacher’s aide to teacher to director to a directorship, where she was in charge of 24 students, maintenance personnel, and 130 kids, and finally to her biggest and last job in education, the position of educational consultant to the City Division of Daycare. Around the time of Chisholm’s entry into teaching, she began her own education in politics by joining a clubhouse in New York City. Although overlooked, the local clubhouses provided the first taste of politics for the young Chisholm. As her interests in politics began to grow after attending clubhouse meetings, she finally decided to join the Seventeenth Assembly District Democratic Club, where she held several positions, including cigar box decorator, third vice president, and member of the board of directors. Chisholm continued to grow politically. In 1953 she participated in the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League with her mentor, Mac Holder. Then in 1960 Chisholm formed the Unity Democratic Club, which was successful in the elections of 1962 and 1964. These elections opened the door for Chisholm to campaign to become the next member of the New York State Assembly. Chisholm faced an uphill battle and encountered much sexism along the way; she remembers that “I won by a satisfying margin, in a three-way contest, with 18,151 votes to 1,893 for the Republican, Charles Lewis, and 913 for the Liberal, Simon Gloar” (Chisholm 1970, 50). For the next four years, Chisholm would work to get laws passed that strengthened and helped her community in Brooklyn. She introduced 50 bills in the legislature, notably the Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) program, which helped young men and women from disadvantaged communities gain access to college, and a bill that set up unemployment insurance for domestic and personal services. In 1968, Chisholm became a candidate for Congress. Running on her slogan “Fighting Shirley Chisholm—Unbought and Unbossed” and with the help of her

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mentor Mac Holder, Chisholm campaigned in the streets and talked to the people. She launched a rigorous campaign schedule, working for 10 months to secure votes. She was even endorsed by a committee of citizens because of her independence and sometimes disagreeable nature. Chisholm refused to be told what to do, how to act, or what to say, and this played greatly in her favor because her supporters wanted someone who would not be run by the political machine. She even refused to decline an endorsement from the Black Panther Party, despite political pressure. She faced a three-way primary race against Dolly Robinson and William C. Thompson. Though many believed that Chisholm was a long shot to win the primary, she won by 1,000 votes. After her primary win, Chisholm was diagnosed with a benign tumor that required surgery. The health crisis occurred in July, and Chisholm was not at all happy to be removed from the campaign trail. By August, although she could barely walk on her own, she was out on her sound truck. While Chisholm was healing from surgery her Republican opponent, James Farmer, was out campaigning and drawing national attention, of which Chisholm received none. Farmer was the former national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality and had never lived in Brooklyn but rented an apartment to run for office. In order to win, Holder and Chisholm reached out and organized with Black women in their neighborhoods and communities. This strategy worked, and Chisholm won by 34,855 votes to Farmer’s 13,777. Chisholm carried the same take-no-prisoners attitude and independence to Washington. This was immediately seen when she demanded to be removed from the Agricultural Committee because it had little bearing on her urban constituency. She was eventually appointed to her first choice for committee work in 1971, the Education and Labor Committee. During this time, Chisholm became a founding member of the Democratic Select Committee in 1969 and the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. By 1972, Chisholm decided to take on the biggest political challenge of all: running for the presidency of the United States. On January 25, 1972, she announced her run for the presidency, making her the first African American to attempt a major presidential campaign. Chisholm conducted her run for the presidency the same way she conducted her other campaigns—with a grassroots approach. Unfortunately, she was unable to gain the necessary votes to be nominated. She won 152 delegates at the Democratic National Convention but not a single ballot, losing to George McGovern. Although Chisholm did not expect to win the presidency, she viewed her presidential campaign as a necessary component to stimulate a change in politics. Chisholm remained in Congress after her presidential campaign and began to accumulate more political power. By 1977, she moved to the House Rules Committee and was elected as secretary of the Democratic Caucus. That same



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year, she and her first husband, Conrad Chisholm, divorced, and she married her second husband, Arthur Hardwick Jr. In 1982, Chisholm retired from Congress. The conservative climate in government and her husband’s involvement in a bad car accident had factored into her decision. However, she did not take a backseat and sit down; instead, she continued to be a political powerhouse. Chisholm was still active in politics, working for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign of 1984. Many credited his success to Chisholm and her earlier attempt at the presidency. Furthermore, she continued her advocacy for women by establishing a new organization, the National Political Congress of Black Women (NPCBW). The NPCBW would in four years wield real political power with 8,500 members in 36 states, with Chisholm serving as chairwoman from 1984 to 1993. Chisholm began teaching at Mount Holyoke College in Hadly, Massachusetts, where she was named the Purington Professor. By 1985 she was a visiting scholar at Spelman College and was working on the speaking and lecturing circuit. In 1986 her second husband died of cancer, and Chisholm decided to retire in the summer of 1987. By 1991 Chisholm moved to Florida and began to fade from public life. However, the documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed, produced by Shola Lynch, became a reminder of Chisholm’s historic presidential campaign. Even in retirement, Chisholm was sought for high-stakes political work. President Bill Clinton nominated her as ambassador to Jamaica in 1993, but she declined for health reasons. In later years, she would spend her time reading political biographies and playing her grand piano. Chisholm suffered a series of strokes and passed away on January 1, 2005. Shirley Chisholm continues to be remembered today for her unapologetic stance toward social justice and politics and her “unbossed and unbought” attitude that refused to back down from even the smallest challenge. Makeiva Jenkins See also: Congress of Racial Equality; Electoral Politics and Black Power; Hatcher, Richard Further Reading Barron, J. 2005. “In Memoriam: Shirley Chisholm ‘Unbossed’ Pioneer in Congress, Dies January 3, 2005.” Black Scholar (1): 38. Brownmiller, Susan. 1969. “This Is Fighting Shirley Chisholm.” New York Times, April 13, SM32. Chisholm, Shirley. 1970. Unbought and Unbossed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Scheader, Catherine. 1990. Shirley Chisholm: Teacher and Congresswoman. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow.

260 | Cleaver, Kathleen Neal (1945–) “Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm 1924–2005.” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 46 (2005): 45. “Shirley Chisholm, Nation’s First Black Woman to Serve in Congress, Dies.” 2005. Jet 107(4): 14.

Cleaver, Kathleen Neal (1945–) Kathleen Neal Cleaver contributed to the Black Power Movement during the 1960s through her participation in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). With her participation in both SNCC and the BPP, Cleaver’s work represents expansions from nonviolent direct action in the Civil Rights Movement to the ideology and practice of armed self-defense largely espoused by Robert Williams and Malcolm X. The call for Black Power captured the imaginations of SNCC leaders Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and Panther founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby G. Seale. The movements they led provided venues where Kathleen shared her remarkable talents, progressively affecting each group.

Kathleen Neal Cleaver was one of the first women to serve on the Central Committee as the National Communication Secretary for the Black Panther Party for SelfDefense. (AP Photo/stf)



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Kathleen was born in Dallas, Texas, on May 13, 1945. She was the daughter of highly educated and accomplished parents: Ernest Neal, a college professor, and Pearl Juette Johnson Neal, a civil servant with the Department of the Interior. Both of her parents attended graduate school at the University of Michigan due to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund’s challenges to segregation in their home states of Virginia and Tennessee. People of African descent were prevented from attending white-only institutions, and African American colleges did not have the programs that Ernest and Pearl desired to pursue graduate education. Ernest came to the University of Michigan after graduating from a historically Black institution in Tennessee, Knoxville College. Pearl graduated from Virginia Union and received a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan by the time she was 16. Ernest and Pearl would meet in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. Pearl became a secondary school teacher before marrying Ernest. Both parents also supported the Civil Rights Movement. Ernest later joined the faculty of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he successfully worked with small farmers and was recruited by the U.S. foreign aid program to develop projects abroad. This opportunity allowed him and his young family to live in India, the Philippines, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. This global exposure, with the normalcy of people of color in leadership positions ruling themselves and accomplishing economic and productive development, impacted the young Kathleen Neal. While her parents remained in West Africa, Kathleen returned to the United States to complete high school at a recently desegregated Quaker institution, the George School, outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During the early 1960s she was inspired by southern high school students in the Albany (Georgia) Movement, especially the girls, protesting for the African American right to vote. Those students followed a “jail, no bail” campaign and when arrested held a hunger strike. Neal was later particularly impressed with activists such as Ruby Doris Robinson (1942–1967), an Atlanta protest leader who emerged as a national leader of SNCC. Kathleen noticed Robinson, who was featured in a popular magazine article. Robinson became executive secretary in 1967. After Kathleen Neal graduated from George School in 1963, she attended Oberlin and then Barnard College in New York. Not seeing the relevancy of academic pursuits while her people were actively fighting white supremacy, when SNCC leader Ivanhoe Donaldson offered Kathleen a position at the New York office, she abandoned college immediately. Recruited for the national office in Atlanta, she became a campus organizer and helped to plan an important student conference in 1967. SNCC members traversed the South wherever projects to fight against racism and segregation were established. Kathleen, then, worked in both Atlanta with George Ware (1924–2010) and in New York with Donaldson.

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Once SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998) called for Black Power and most white SNCC members left the group, the financial support collapsed. This dire situation meant no money for gas, travel, lodging, and so forth, but Neal helped to offset this disadvantage. She talked her father into releasing the tuition he paid to Barnard to let that monthly allowance cover the rent for the Atlanta apartment where the entire campus staff of SNCC lived during 1967. Neal met Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) at a SNCC conference on Black liberation that the organization’s campus program planned at Fisk University. Eldridge was among several invited guest lecturers, but an East Coast blizzard that March prevented the other invited speakers from reaching Nashville. Adding to that upset, Fisk refused to allow SNCC to use its space because the media accused Carmichael of fomenting violence. Eldridge, who flew from San Francisco, made it to the conference, which now moved to a local church. The newly installed minister of information of the BPP, he was instantly attracted to Neal, whom he pursued. Eldridge, the acclaimed ex-convict intellectual and writer for Ramparts magazine, indeed needed Kathleen’s organizing skills, since the Panther organization was in a state of crisis when he persuaded her to join him in Oakland, California. Huey Newton (1942–1989) was incarcerated and facing the death penalty after being wounded in a shootout with Oakland police in October 1967, with one officer killed. Another BPP founder, Bobby Seale, was serving a sentence related to the demonstration in Sacramento of 22 armed Panthers challenging the Mulford Bill, legislation designed to disarm the Panthers. The organization had lost its office and no longer published the Black Panther newspaper, and the members were primarily a handful of active teenagers. With the founders of the Panthers jailed, Eldridge asked Kathleen to join him in California to help save Newton’s life and to keep the fragile organization together. Marrying Eldridge on December 27, 1967, Kathleen became the female voice of the BPP, writing press releases, orchestrating speaking events for herself and her husband, running for public office, and galvanizing the “Free Huey” campaign in the Bay area and all over the United States. According to historian Robyn Spencer, Kathleen Cleaver’s administrative experience was a critical asset that enabled the BPP to survive the repression of the early years of the organization and establish the foundation for a national and international mobilization that eventually freed Newton from incarceration. Spencer (2016) argues that Cleaver’s leadership and grassroots organizing of rank-and-file women in the BPP was central to the survival of the organizations in these early years while its founders, Newton and Seale, were incarcerated or fighting indictments. Kathleen Neal Cleaver was the first female public speaker and intellectual to articulate the BPP’s “The Ten-Point Program.” She was appointed communication secretary of the BPP for Self-Defense and was the first female member of the initial Central Committee of the organization. Handling the press heightened her public



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profile, where her appearance, particularly her pronounced Afro hairstyle, already popularized by artists, musicians, and Black activists, influenced Black women across the country to imitate her look, manner of public speaking, and style. Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver became the symbol of the Black Power couple and as speakers were much sought after by universities and other national venues. This attractive pair electrified Panther members and supporters nationwide in the “Free Huey” campaign. When the BPP’s coalition partner, the Peace and Freedom Party, nominated Eldridge to run for president of the United States and Kathleen for a California Bay Area Assembly seat, their celebrity heightened even more. Kathleen’s campaign poster was a photograph of herself standing at her doorway wearing black boots, a black leather jacket, a black dress, and sunglasses and holding a riot shotgun. The slogan of her campaign was “The Ballot or the Bullet.” On April 6, 1968, two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Eldridge and seven other Panthers were involved in a police confrontation, resulting in the killing of Little Bobby Hutton (1950–1968). Eldridge, on parole from a nine-year sentence, would most likely return to prison for parole violation. Yet amazingly he won a habeas corpus petition, which allowed him to go free on bail. Then the court of appeals overturned the decision, and he was ordered to surrender on November 27, 1968. Yet Eldridge publicly stated “Damn the police” repeatedly as he campaigned for president—and he kept his word. On the appointed day of his surrender to the San Francisco Police Department, Eldridge failed to appear. He left the United States in late 1968 to be a political exile in Cuba before leaving the Caribbean socialist nation to receive asylum in the North African regime of Algeria. Kathleen would join him there, where they would establish the International Section of the BPP. Then in Algiers on July 17, 1969, Eldridge spoke at a press conference at the opening of the First Pan-African Cultural Festival, where Panthers, SNCC activists, Black American writers, activists, poets, musicians, and a host of African liberation movements were among the invited guests. On July 28, 1969, in Algiers, Kathleen gave birth to their son Maceo, named after the Black Cuban general Antonio Maceo. In Algiers, Kathleen and her husband faced an enormity of obstacles to surviving abroad as they continued the revolutionary nationalist vision of “The Ten-Point Program” of the BPP. The building of the International Section of the BPP in Algiers was an uphill struggle. The Cleavers had to negotiate for liberation group status, overcome language barriers, survive in isolation from the Muslim population, and deal with racial prejudice. Yet despite this alienation, the Cleavers met helpful supporters among the Palestine Liberation Organization, African liberation movements such as the African National Congress and the Southwest African People’s Organization, and the National Liberation Front of (South) Vietnam (NLFV). Because of the generosity of international friends who supported the purpose of the BPP, they won liberation movement status and received a villa from the

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Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam, which became the headquarters of the BPP International Section. The villa from the NLFV received governmental status in Algeria and moved to another venue. The Panther contingent in Algeria grew with the arrival of fugitives from the United States, and Eldridge and Kathleen traveled throughout the Third World making alliances with governments in Hanoi, China, and North Korea. Simultaneously, President Richard Nixon had 30 clerks and 40 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) develop a secret intervention campaign targeting the International Section of the BPP. In addition to her Panther obligations, Kathleen in 1971 gave birth to Jojuyoughi in Pyongyang while a guest at the Democratic Women’s Union. She was not the only Panther to have a child in exile. Barbara Easley-Cox, Panther wife of Donald Cox, a fugitive Panther field marshal, and Charlotte O’Neal Panther, wife of Kansas City leader Pete O’Neal, were also of the International Section of the BPP while pregnant and had children abroad. Thus, in Algiers the Panthers built a communal nursery, created audio and video tapes, built a library, and published a newsletter to send back home to America in addition to sending delegates to conferences in Asia and Africa. It was in the Peoples Republic of Congo-Brazzaville where the Panthers hoped to build new headquarters because of the tension building between themselves and the Algerian government. This tension peaked after two sets of American hijackers arrived in Algiers in 1972 with ransom money to join the international BPP. Unbeknownst to the world, the Algerian government was engaged in negotiations to export liquefied natural gas to the United States. Thus, the international BPP members were privately becoming a liability to the Algerian officials. After Eldridge Cleaver wrote an open letter to the president of the country, the government put the entire International Section under house arrest. In 1973 Kathleen openly left for France, where Eldridge had traveled clandestinely and ultimately gained political asylum. Kathleen made several trips from Paris to the United States to try to arrange her husband’s legal return. On November 18, 1975, Eldridge arrived in New York City in the custody of the FBI, which was his “surrender.” After finalizing details in Paris, in late 1974 Kathleen returned to America to work full-time on her husband’s legal defense. He was facing a trial in Oakland but finally in 1976 was freed from prison and sentenced to community service. While her husband repudiated his original Black Power and revolutionary politics, Kathleen Cleaver returned to Yale University in 1982 and graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1984; she then earned a law degree in 1988. Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver divorced in 1987. After graduating from law school she became a law firm associate, serving as a clerk for Judge Leon Higginbotham in Philadelphia, and continued working to free political prisoners such as Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Cleaver joined the faculty at the Emory University School of Law in 1992. She also serves as a senior



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lecturer in the Department of African American studies at Yale University and as codirector of the Atlanta-based Human Rights Research Fund, which documents and contests the human rights violations of U.S. citizens who challenge America’s racist and military policies. The Human Rights Research Fund also assists political prisoners with efforts to gain their freedom. Cleaver along with Jamal Joseph and other artists and activists founded the Harlem-based International Panther Film Festival in 1999, which produced events through 2003. In 2006 and 2007, Cleaver participated in international forums in Beirut and Rio de Janeiro and was a delegate for the Third Annual Book Fair in Venezuela. In 2009, she returned to Algiers as a member of the American delegation to the Second Pan-African Cultural Festival. As law professor, an activist, and an author, Cleaver has contributed writings that have appeared in Critical Race Feminism, The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, and Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party, which she coedited, and also edited Target Zero: A Life in Writing (1954–1984), a book of essays by Eldridge Cleaver. Random House is scheduled to publish Kathleen Cleaver’s memoir Memories of Love and War. Appearing in a series of films since 1970, her most recent books are The Black Power Mix Tape (2011) and The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015). Regina Jennings See also: Black Internationalism; Black Panther Party; Newton, Huey P.; Political Prisoners and Exiles; Pratt, Geronimo ji-Jaga; Seale, Bobby Further Reading Cleaver, Eldridge, and Kathleen Cleaver. 2006. Target Zero: A Life in Writing. New York: St. Martin’s. Cleaver, Kathleen, and George Katsiaficus. 2001. Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party. New York: Routledge. “Faculty Profiles: Kathleen N. Cleaver, Senior Lecturer in Law.” n.d. Emory Law, http://law.emory.edu/faculty-and-scholarship/faculty-profiles/cleaver-profile.html. Jones, Charles E., ed. 2005. Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Baltimore: Black Classics. Spencer, Robyn. 2016. The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and Black Panther Party in Oakland. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Coltrane, John (1926–1967) John Coltrane, composer, bandleader, and tenor saxophonist, played an immense role in shaping the development of mid-1960s Black political activism. Coltrane’s

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aesthetic voice and creative imagination placed him at the foundation of the rising tide of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. Coltrane’s influence on the nationalist movements of the 1960s was strongest on the Black Arts side of the Black Power/Black Arts Movement continuum. Specifically, Coltrane’s significance to the Black Arts Movement came through the influence his music had on a growing cadre of Black Arts activists. During the early 1960s Coltrane, alongside musicians Ornette Colman and Cecil Taylor, was a part of a jazz avant-garde, pioneering a new style of music called free jazz. Free jazz broke with conventional Western music-making practices by shifting the compositional focus from melodic to harmonic development and by freeing improvisations from the confinement of preset chord progressions. Free jazz also drew ideas and inspiration from the musical traditions of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Within the community of Black musicians, critics, and fans, the new jazz style was often referred to as “new Black music.” Coltrane’s approach toward making new Black music helped to frame the way that many within the Black Arts Movement interpreted cultural nationalism. Black Arts activists gravitated toward Coltrane’s break with the Western musical tradition in both structure and style. For Black Arts activists, Coltrane’s music was an aural example of cultural nationalism in practice. They used Coltrane’s musical example as a model, demonstrating how to perform cultural nationalism. They worked to replicate Coltrane’s break with Western culture in the art and movement organizations that they created. Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, on September 23, 1926. His family was a part of Hamlet’s small middle-class Black community. After Coltrane’s father, John Robert Coltrane, died in 1938, Coltrane’s family moved to High Point, North Carolina. John Coltrane was first introduced to music while in High Point. He was invited to join a community band being organized by Reverend Warren Steele, pastor of High Point’s St. Stephen’s Church. Coltrane played alto saxophone and clarinet in the band, which performed church hymns, spirituals, and John Phillips Sousa marches. Coltrane continued to play alto saxophone in the William Penn High School Band. After graduating from high school in 1943 he moved to Philadelphia, where he continued to study music while working in a sugar refinery. Toward the end of World War II, Coltrane was inducted into the U.S. Navy and played clarinet in the naval band. In 1947 Coltrane began his transition into a career as a professional musician. He was hired to play saxophone in Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson’s band. But because Vinson also played the alto saxophone, Coltrane was asked to play tenor saxophone. In 1949 Coltrane joined Dizzy Gillespie’s big band and forged a friendship with fellow saxophonist Yusef Lateef, who sparked Coltrane’s interest in nonWestern religion and philosophy, an interest that shaped the remainder of Coltrane’s professional career. Between 1953 and 1957 Coltrane played tenor saxophone in



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the bands of Johnny Hodges, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk. In 1957, which was a pivotal year, Coltrane overcame a powerful addiction to alcohol and heroin. He also recorded Dakar, his first album as a bandleader, with the Prestige recording label. Between 1957 and 1961 Coltrane recorded with United Artists, Blue Note Records, and Atlantic Records. His 1961 Atlantic Records release of My Favorite Things sold more than 50,000 copies in its first year. Coltrane’s work produced during his recording relationship with Impulse Records captured the imagination of an emerging cadre of Black Arts activists. When Coltrane signed with Impulse Records, a spin-off of the ABC-Paramount Recording label, he had assembled the Coltrane Quartet, featuring McCoy Tyner (piano), Elvin Jones (drums), and Reggie Workman (bass). The relationship that formed between Coltrane, Tyner, Jones, and Workman, who was later replaced by bassist Jimmie Garrison, produced the music that shaped the philosophy and direction of the Black Arts Movement. The Coltrane Quartet’s first album with Impulse, Africa/Brass (1961), foreshadowed the Black Arts Movement’s effort to instill cultural pride in an African past among Black Americans. The album’s liner notes explained that “Africa” musically reflected Coltrane’s conscious desire to recenter the rhythmic elements of African music within the jazz tradition. Breaking away from the conventional 4/4 time of the Western musical tradition, Coltrane employed the use of two upright basses to create an African rhythmic pattern to drive the song forward. He recorded several other albums on Impulse featuring such songs as “India,” “Dahomey Dance,” “Liberia,” and “Afro-Blue.” Like “Africa,” these songs displayed Coltrane’s interest in non-Western musical forms and connected to the growing nationalist consciousness within the freedom movement. Indeed, Mike Canterino, co-owner of Manhattan’s Half-Note jazz club, recalled the ways that politically conscious African Americans flocked to Coltrane’s performances and shouted “Freedom now!” during his extended solos in the early 1960s. Amiri Baraka was one of the first figures within the Black Arts Movement to place Coltrane’s music at the root of an emerging Black cultural nationalist philosophy. Baraka’s (writing as LeRoi Jones) 1963 Blues People framed Coltrane’s music as the current manifestation of a blues-inflected Afro-American consciousness, a consciousness born out of the experience of enslavement and expressed through the field holler, work songs, and blues of the enslaved. Baraka interpreted Coltrane’s recentering of the blues and improvisation as the central elements of jazz composition and performance as a deliberate rejection of Western popular forms. For Baraka, Coltrane’s jazz was a reflection of the growing nationalist consciousness, in attitude and emotion, of the broader Black American community. Baraka worked as a jazz critic writing for Down Beat magazine the year Blues People was published. He penned the liner notes to Coltrane’s Live at Birdland album the following year. In those notes Baraka described Coltrane’s music as the

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counterbalance to the ugliness of capitalist America. Baraka suggested that Coltrane’s sound had the power to destroy America’s vile capitalist profile and replace it with something beautiful. Coltrane’s Live at Birdland also carried one of the few instances when he waded directly into the politics of the freedom struggle. As a response to the September 1963 bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church—an organizing center for the Civil Rights Movement’s Birmingham Campaign—Coltrane recorded “Alabama,” an emotionally charged musical eulogy for the four young girls who were murdered in the attack. “Alabama” was one of two recorded songs added to the album’s otherwise live performances. Baraka described the song as an example of Coltrane’s ability to wrest beauty out of tragedy. Baraka carried his understanding of Coltrane’s music, established in Blues People and the liner notes to Live at Birdland, into the Black Arts Movement. In the aftermath of the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, Baraka completed a shift toward Black cultural nationalism and became a leading voice in the literary wing of the Black Arts revolution. Baraka was not the only literary figure to have shifted from jazz critic to Black Arts revolutionary. Black Arts writers including A. B. Spelman, Harold Cruse, and James Stewart followed similar paths. The close association between the worlds of jazz criticism and Black Arts placed free jazz and Coltrane at the foundation of literary cultural nationalism. The connection between Coltrane’s music and the literary arm of the Black Arts Movement was evident in Black Fire, the 1968 anthology of Black Arts literature and theory edited by Baraka and Larry Neal. James Stewart’s essay “The Devel­ opment of the Black Revolutionary Artist,” for example, saw in Coltrane’s break with the Western musical tradition a model for the artistic expression of Black consciousness. Stewart suggested that the goal of the Black revolutionary artist was to replicate in other artistic mediums what Coltrane had accomplished in music. Lindsay Barrett’s contribution, “The Tide Inside, It Rages,” described the Black man’s status in the white Western world as being in a state of open war. Barrett mused that if the Black man could transform a Coltrane solo into a club, then the Black man would be armed with a weapon powerful enough to beat back the shackles of racial oppression. For Barrett, Coltrane’s use of non-Western elements gave his music the strength to be used as a weapon. Spellman’s essay “Not Just Whistling Dixie” suggested that the value that free jazz held to the Black Arts revolution stemmed from its ability to redefine the image of Black America through the creative agency of the Black musician. Because new Black music created by musicians such as Coltrane was based on non-Western musical traditions, the image that Black musicians created would not be bound to the racial hegemony of the West. Spellman suggested that Coltrane’s work was additionally significant because he drew his listeners’ attention to the freedom struggle through his choice of song titles such as “Africa” and “Alabama.” Indeed, Coltrane’s influence on the literary wing of the Black Arts Movement was so significant that an



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entire genre of poetry was created out of a body of work celebrating his life and music. Black Arts writers including Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, Tom Dent, Spellman, Jayne Cortez, and others composed “Coltrane poems.” Many of the Coltrane poems worked to reproduce the vocality and tonal screams in Coltrane’s solos with the written word. Coltrane’s influence on the Black Arts Movement went beyond the literary arena. Coltrane actively lent his craft to Black cultural nationalist organizations. In December 1964 and April 1965 he performed at benefit concerts organized by Paul Robeson in support of Freedom Ways, a journal dedicated to African American and African diaspora history, culture, and society. Coltrane performed at a benefit concert supporting Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in March 1965 at New York City’s Village Gate jazz club. Coltrane also performed a benefit concert to support fellow jazz musician Babatunde Olatunji’s Harlem-based Center for African Culture in April 1967. Coltrane’s performance at the Center for African Culture marked his final public appearance before his death in July 1967. Coltrane also shaped the development of jazz performance collectives rising out of the Black Arts Movement. Beginning in the mid-1960s, local Black musicians and artists began to organize performance collectives with the goal of providing self-help for its members and the larger Black communities in which they lived. Jazz collectives broadly sought to build a sense of cultural pride within Black communities by offering arts performances and arts education services. Coltrane was a source of inspiration for many of these collectives and their members. Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), for example, held tribute concerts to memorialize Coltrane after his death. AACM members such as saxophonist John Stubblefield were significantly affected by Coltrane’s passing. The members of Los Angeles’s Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA) incorporated Coltrane’s songs into their performances at local coffee shops in the Watts neighborhood to honor Coltrane’s legacy. UGMAA members described Coltrane as the spirit of their musicians’ collective. Of all the albums that Coltrane recorded during his time at Impulse, his 1965 A Love Supreme became the most influential in shaping his legacy within the Black Arts Movement. Selling more than 500,000 copies by 1970, the recording offered a powerfully moving articulation of Coltrane’s spirituality. Alongside the 1965 Autobiography of Malcolm X, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme has been credited for its ability to draw people into the Black Arts Movement. The album continued to shape the movement into the late 1980s. Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do The Right Thing featured A Love Supreme as a part of the film’s narrative. Addressing race relations and police brutality in Brooklyn, New York, Lee used portions of A Love Supreme to frame his audience’s interpretation of the urban rebellion that was taking place in the film’s climax scene. Nicholas Gaffney

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See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Arts Movement; Black Music; Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee); Neal, Larry; Sanchez, Sonia Further Reading Anderson, Iain. 2007. This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Baraka, Amiri, and Larry Neal, eds. 2007. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. DeVito, Chris, ed. 2012. Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Gioia, Ted. 1997. The History of Jazz. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Isoardi, Steven. 2006. The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jones, LeRoi [Amiri Baraka]. 1999. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. 1963; reprint, New York: Quill. Lewis, George. 2008. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Monson, Ingrid. 2007. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saul, Scott. 2003. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smethurst, James. 2005. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Thomas, J. C. 1975. Chasin’ the Trane: The Music and Mystique of John Coltrane. New York: Da Capo.

Combahee River Collective The Combahee River Collective was formed in 1973 by a group of Black feminists in Boston, Massachusetts. The collective was committed to Black feminism—a political movement to combat racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression— things the group considered interlocking systems of oppression. Its members included Sharon Page Ritchie, Cheryl Clarke, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Audre Lorde, Gloria Akasha Hull, Margo Okizawa Rey, and Demita Frazier. The Combahee River Collective has frequently been called a Black feminist lesbian organization, but while a significant number of its members were lesbians, not all of them were. Nonetheless, the collective had a particular focus on sexuality. The collective is perhaps best known for developing “A Black Feminist Statement,” a key document in Black feminist history that is still used by political organizers and social theorists to this day.



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The Combahee River Collective evolved in connection with Black women’s demands for recognition within two movements during the 1960s and 1970s: the so-called second wave of the feminist movement, which due to racism and elitism obscured the participation of Black women, and the movements for Black liberation—particularly the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements—of which the members of the collective were active participants and whose male leadership also obscured the contributions of Black women. After attending the first National Black Feminist Organization’s (NBFO) regional conference in 1973, author Barbara Smith and other delegates initiated efforts to establish an NBFO chapter in Boston, which was an extremely racist and segregated city at the time. By 1974 the Boston chapter noted that its vision for social change was even more radical than that of the NBFO, which led to the decision to create their own organization, the Combahee River Collective. The founders of the chapter sought to create new platforms, strategies, and analysis that addressed the particular experiences of Black women as a whole, which members felt were not being addressed in the white feminism movement or the Civil Rights, Black nationalist, and Black Power Movements. This acknowledgment of the existence of simultaneous systems of oppression is one of the most important political and theoretical contributions of the collective. Indeed, the collective was created with the understanding that Black women’s relationship to the American political system has always been determined by their membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes and that their embodied existence represents an adversary stance to white and male rule. Wanting to draw attention to the long history of Black women’s struggle for liberation, the group named themselves after an 1863 antislavery raid led by Harriet Tubman at the Combahee River in South Carolina. Tubman’s guerrilla campaign freed more that 750 slaves and is the only known revolutionary guerrilla act in U.S. history directed and conceived by a woman. The name of the group was thus chosen to embody the revolutionary spirit of Tubman and evoke the long history of Black women fighting for freedom in a white supremacist capitalist political system. Members of the collective, particularly Demita Frazier and Barbara Smith, felt that it was crucial for the organization to address the needs of Black lesbians, not merely Black feminists, especially since most of the founders were lesbians who felt that heterosexual oppression was not being addressed by other Black feminist organizations. According to Smith regarding the creation of the collective, Combahee was really so wonderful because it was the first time that I could be all of who I was in the same place. I didn’t have to leave my feminism out the door to be accepted as I would in a Black conservative context. I didn’t have to leave my lesbianism outside. I didn’t have to leave my race outside,

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as I might in an all-white-women’s context where they didn’t want to know all of that. . . . In the early 1970s to be a Black lesbian feminist meant that you were a person of total courage. . . . It was just like no place for us. That is what Combahee created, a place where we could be ourselves and where we were valued. (Harris 1999, 11) The collective was politically active in the Boston Black community, providing critical support in several instances and organizing around issues concerning Blacks and women. Throughout the mid-1970s, members of the Combahee River Collective met weekly at the Women’s Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The group focused on consciousness-raising. Its members continued to desegregate Boston public schools and work in community campaigns against police brutality in Black neighborhoods and on picket lines demanding construction jobs for Black workers. Demita Frazier described the political climate of those times: “You can picture us in 1973 and 1974, coming together as women in a city where there was so much political activity going on. . . . There was a lot of discussion about race and about class. . . . There was a feeling that you could talk about nearly anything, and you could raise issues about just anything” (Harris 1999, 14). In this context, the Combahee women were involved in multiple campaigns and protest and intellectual endeavors that affected the lives of Black women. For instance, many of them belonged to the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA), which sought to address the issue of forced sterilization of women for “population control.” According to CESA, sterilization was performed on Black, Latina, and Native American women in disproportionate numbers. The Combahee’s efforts to end forced sterilization came at a time when women’s health was becoming an important issue in politics. Understanding the necessity of women’s reproductive rights, the collective participated in protests when a Black doctor from Boston City Hospital was arrested for performing legal abortions. Their support of legal abortions stood in contrast to Black nationalists who argued that abortion was a form of genocide against the Black community. But abortions were not sources of liberation either, as some white feminists had fervidly claimed. Black women had less access to education, employment opportunities, and quality housing, all of which impacted their health and reproductive decisions. The Combahee River Collective’s actions sought to make these connections more clear to movement participants. Similarly, when a Black woman was arrested for being in the vicinity of a murder, the collective distributed pamphlets and raised awareness around the issues of Black female incarceration and vicious encounters with the police and the justice system. The collective also participated in picketing, along with the Third World Workers Coalition, to ensure that Black workers would be hired for the construction of a high school in a Boston Black community. When the collective became involved with the case of L. L. Ellison—a Black woman



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who murdered a guard who was going to sexually assault her in prison—it subsequently became involved with people who were fighting the death penalty in Massachusetts. Thanks to this interaction they were able to tap into women’s church groups and discuss with them issues around violence against women. The topic of violence against women became especially relevant after the murders of 1 white woman and 12 Black women in Boston in 1979. The media attempted to dismiss the murders because the victims were alleged to be prostitutes. Black male community leaders claimed that the murders were racially motivated and completely disregarded the fact that all the victims were women. The Combahee River Collective responded by writing a pamphlet arguing that the murders were both sexist and racist crimes and calling for a recognition of violence against Black women. The pamphlet included lists of self-defense methods and organizations that worked on violence against women in Boston. Smith noted in a 1994 interview that this action moved the group into the wider Boston community like no other previous action. She recalled that “The pamphlet had the statement, the analysis, and the political analysis, and it said that it had been prepared by the Combahee River Collective. That was a big risk for us, a big leap to identify ourselves in something that we knew was going to be widely distributed” (Harris 1999, 20). The pamphlet mobilized hundreds of people to speak out about violence against women and garnered great support from community churches in Boston and also from the white feminist community, creating new opportunities to build a coalition around intersecting issues of race and sex. Apart from the collective actions described above, the Combahee River Collec­ tive held seven retreats between 1977 and 1980 to discuss issues concerning Black feminists. The Combahee Black Women’s Network Retreats helped to advance a growing nationwide movement of Black feminists. Those invited to the retreats were already engaged in consciousness-raising and other organizing efforts in their own communities, and the retreats were conceptualized as “sites for movement building through examination of theory and activist practice” (Springer 2005, 107). Goals of the first retreat were to assess the state of the Black feminist movement, talk about possibilities of organizing Black women, and share information about the participants’ political work. More than 20 Black feminists, predominately writers, including Cheryl Clarke, Lorraine Bethel, Audre Lorde, and Linda Powell, were invited to attend this first retreat. The space fostered political stimulation and spiritual rejuvenation, and creative work relevant to Black feminism was shared among participants. The subsequent retreats had similar agendas. Following the retreats, participants were encouraged to write articles for Conditions—the Third World feminist magazine with a focus on lesbian literature. In 1978 Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel edited the fourth issue of Conditions with the letters written by retreat participants.

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In 1979 at the fifth retreat, the importance of publishing was emphasized. The collective discussed contributing articles for a lesbian herstory issue of two journals, Heresies and Frontiers. Bethel and Smith also coedited Conditions 5: The Black Women’s Issue in 1979. That issue of Conditions was so successful that it led to the Black feminist text Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith in 1983. Several retreat participants commented on their excitement over the possibility of reaching more Black women with their ideas on feminism. The network members wanted to create a publication that could serve as an accessible workbook for Black women’s study groups. By the early 1980s several members had left the Boston area, and the collective gradually disintegrated. But in the early 1980s, retreat participants Lorde and Smith carried out the group’s dream of self-publishing by cofounding (along with writer Cherrie Moraga) the Kitchen Table Women of Color Press. Several members of the collective and the participants in the retreats contributed their prose, poetry, and fiction to Home Girls, which continued the important work of enhancing Black feminist visibility through service as a blueprint for identifying and creating Black feminist theory and praxis. Many of the Combahee River Collective’s members continue the work of the collective through poetry, writing, and their work at different universities across the country. Today, Black feminists from across the United States carry on the legacy of the Combahee River Collective. Carolina Alonso-Bejarano See also: Black Panther Party; National Black Feminist Organization; Smith, Barbara; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Cole, Johnnetta B., and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. 2003. Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities. New York: One World/Ballantine. Combahee River Collective. 1986. The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties. Albany, NY: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press. Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 1 (July): 1241–1299. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. 1995. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. New York: New Press. Harris, Duchess. 1999. “‘All of Who I Am in the Same Place’: The Combahee River Collective.” Womanist Theory and Research 3: 1. Harris, Duchess. 2001. “From the Kennedy Commission to the Combahee Collective: Black Feminist Organizing, 1960–1980.” In Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement, edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, 280–305. New York: New York University Press.



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James, Joy. Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics. New York: St. Martin’s, 2010. King, Deborah K. 1988. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs 14(1): 42–72. Smith, Barbara. 1983. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Springer, Kimberly. 2005. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Committee for Unified Newark (1968–1976) The Committee for Unified Newark (CFUN), led by Amiri Baraka, was the political vehicle for the Black agenda of the modern Black convention movement. CFUN was developed to implement the community’s agenda and grew from increasing frustration with the lack of action following Black Power conference resolutions. In the golden age of Black Power oratory, CFUN insisted that kazi (Swahili for “work,” that is, nation building) rather than “talking Black” was the Blackest of all. CFUN became an organization focused on awakening the Black community in the struggle for the levers of political power. Black America witnessed the full-fledged emergence of a new and distinctive style of expressive Black politics in Newark, combining agenda building and the development of New Nationalism. That expressive politics engaged the community in a range of communications techniques, including street theater and jazz concerts, political skits on flatbed trucks, and presentations on radio and television. While the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee informed Baraka about voter education in the comic books it created in Lowndes County, Baraka produced political education videos that were shown in the courtyards at public housing projects and outside public schools. CFUN formed during the 1968 racial crisis, which included the catastrophic assassinations of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy followed by 172 Black rebellions. Amiri Baraka together with the United Brothers, the Black Community Defense and Development, and the Spirt House opted to adopt a Black united front strategy, building alliances between Black Power and Civil Rights organizations and a mutual defense pact with Felipe Luciano’s Newark Young Lords. CFUN was the result of this merging. Meanwhile, the Black Arts Movement developed Black consciousness into a new and explosive force in American politics. CFUN amounted to a Black nationalist political party that stimulated African American nationality formation by its leadership, symbols, and mobilization for Black self-determination in the political arena. The symbolic politics of self-organization, work and study, and creative improvisation spread with the rise of the modern Black convention movement, reaching

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students, workers, teachers, attorneys, and tenant and welfare organizations. With CFUN, each community victory was linked to the larger aim of seizing municipal power. In the leadership of the Black Arts Movement, Amiri Baraka insisted that Newark was a slave ship that Black Power aimed to transform into a New Ark. At political rallies, the following slogan developed into call-and-response: “What time is it?” “It’s Nation time!” “What’s going to happen?” “The land’s going to change hands! The land’s going to change hands!” As the modern Black convention movement and the Black and Puerto Rican alliance galvanized the grassroots, CFUN built the Black community’s organizing and fighting capacity against the menace of white vigilantes led by Anthony Imperiale and right-wing police groups. The modern Black convention movement was a series of conferences and congresses taking place during CFUN’s existence, that developed a process of agenda building from the grassroots. Women’s roles in CFUN as full members was essential to revising the organizational structure. Amiri Baraka’s wife, Amina Baraka, had organized an informal discussion circle that insisted that CFUN should be better organized, especially in the administration of its headquarters and in the follow-through on its promises made at community meetings. Thus, when women came to the fore in CFUN, they introduced many organizational innovations, including standard operating procedures for regular functions once conducted haphazardly. Calling themselves the Malaika (True Believers), the women’s division swelled into the largest section of CFUN, including the most original and enthusiastic activists in the movement; they insisted that they were monuments to their ancestors and mothers of the revolution. The women’s division developed its new structures through work, study, and improvisation. The women decided that they were their own liberators. Seizing the initiative, the women’s division fashioned institutional arrangements necessary for their own political development. With an eye toward the full mobilization of women for Black liberation, their improvisation included new arrangements for the organization of housework, meals, and child care, including collective kitchens and 24-hour nurseries. With the growing demands of community mobilization and mass communications, CFUN was reorganized into departments: communications and culture, economics, security and self-defense, community organization, education, and politics. Furthermore, CFUN established a network of institutions, programs, and cooperative business operations: the Spirit House Movers and Players, for drama



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and poetry; the Young Lions, for youth development and self-defense; the African Free School, for early childhood education and Black studies; Jihad Productions, for book publications and posters; the newspaper Black Newark, for local reporting; Unity & Struggle, for national and international reporting; Black Newark radio and televisions programs, for weekly mass communications; Nyumba ya Ujamaa (House of Cooperative Economics), for book and clothing sales; Events, Inc., for public relations; Proposals, for development grants; and Kawaida Towers and the NJR-32 Project Area Committee, for urban planning as well as housing and community development. The Politics Department established the Political School of Kawaida to train activists from different cities to organize for community power. Similarly, the African Free School established the Teacher Training Institute, preparing instructors from across the country. The Young Lions defended Black political development and human rights. On election day in 1970 Anthony Imperiale’s vigilantes blocked entrance to the voting polls at the Columbus Homes public housing project; however, CFUN’s Young Lions cleared the path for the triumph of Black and Puerto Rican voters. Afterward CFUN went to court and overturned the congressional district lines that prevented African American representation from New Jersey in the U.S. Congress. CFUN wanted a voice in foreign affairs, especially on policies supporting African liberation from colonialism and apartheid. That 10th congressional district elected Donald Payne, a veteran of the National Black United Front, as U.S. representative, and he served as chair of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa and the Congressional Black Caucus. By 1974 the New York Times reported that Baraka was building a Black nation headquartered in Newark. In June 1970 CFUN led a successful mass movement to seize municipal power, electing Kenneth Gibson the first Black mayor in a major northeastern city. That Labor Day weekend, CFUN led a federation of Black Power groups, including Jitu Weusi’s The East in Brooklyn and Haki Madhubuti’s Institute of Positive Education–New Concept School in Chicago, to establish the Congress of African People at an international summit in Atlanta, Georgia. Black Power’s global message had reached as far as Australia, which sent a delegation to champion aboriginal rights against genocidal policies. CFUN proposed and initiated several important Black united fronts that federated groups dedicated to Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, including not only the Congress of African People but also the Black Women’s United Front and the National Black Political Convention. CFUN also served as the national headquarters for the National Black Political Assembly and the northeast regional headquarters for the African Liberation Support Committee. If the glue that held CFUN together was the new nationalism, then the solvent was communism. Most of the veterans of CFUN, especially its successful community

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organizers, resigned when CFUN became the Revolutionary Communist League and assigned them to organize in factories in 1976. Significantly, between 1968 and 1976 CFUN established a model for grassroots political success and community development against the high tide of police repression and political tyranny propelled by President Richard Nixon’s 1968 election and the right-wing triumph of the Republican Party, including its Southern Strategy. Komozi Woodard See also: African Liberation Support Committee; Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Congress of African People; Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee) Further Reading Baraka, Imamu Amiri. 1972. Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism. Chicago: Third World Press. Jeffries, Judson L. 2006. Black Power in the Belly of the Beast. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Theoharis, Jeanne, and Komozi Woodard, eds. 2016. Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980. New York: Springer. Woodard, Komozi. 1999. A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Woodard, Komozi. 2006. “Amiri Baraka, the Congress of African People, and Black Power Politics from the 1961 United Nations Protest to the 1972 Gary Convention.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era, edited by Peneil E. Joseph, 55–77. New York: Routledge.

Communist International and Black Power The Communist International played a significant role in the development of social and national liberation movements in the 20th century, including the Black Power Movement. The theoretical formulations of Black communists such as Harry Haywood and Cyril Briggs were studied by Black Power activists. Some revolutionary Black Power advocates also sought advice from elder communists. Marxism-Leninism is the philosophy of the world communist movement and played a powerful role in promoting the principles of Black Power in the Pan-African world. Its impact was both theoretical and practical and was most effective in the United States and South Africa. What did communism have to do with Black Power? The Communist Manifesto, published by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, called for working men of all countries to unite and revolt against their capitalist exploiters, seize political power, and collectivize the means of production. Marxist beliefs and revolutionary organizations spread widely throughout the capitalist world



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including the United States, where waves of revolutionary immigrants arrived after each failed revolution in Europe and radicalized the trade union movement. The first successful communist revolution took place in Russia in 1917. Vladimir Lenin, its leader, brought Marxism up to date with his sophisticated understanding of world imperialism. Russia was a mainly illiterate, underdeveloped, overwhelmingly peasant country with a small working class. It was destabilized by national and ethnic conflicts inherited from the czarist empire. The Russian communists turned the former czarist empire into the Soviet Union to give equal rights and self-determination to its oppressed nations and ethnic minorities. The Soviet Union fought a bitter, bloody war against invading armies of the capitalist countries while expecting the workers of the West European countries to rise up and help protect the first socialist revolution to seize power. They waited in vain. A series of strokes disabled Lenin, and he died in 1924. In the struggle for power after Lenin’s death Joseph Stalin, an extremely cruel and ruthless but eminently practical leader, defeated Leon Trotsky, who placed great hopes in a communist revolution in Germany, which never happened. Stalin denied that socialism could be built in one country and insisted that continuous revolution was necessary in all capitalist countries, because he had no faith that the Soviet Union could go it alone; he also neglected the colonized world. He believed that socialism could be built in the Soviet Union, which covered one-sixth of the global landmass, with a large population and many rich natural resources. Like Lenin, Stalin looked to the colonized world for help and support: to China, India, and Africa and its descendants in the diaspora for the most likely revolutionaries to destroy the world capitalist-imperialist system. As soon as the Communist International (Comintern) was founded in 1919, it focused on the revolutionary potential of the superexploited and oppressed Black population in Africa and the African diaspora. Two prominent Asian communist leaders, Sen Katayama of Japan and Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, spent years working in the United States and knew the oppression suffered by its Black population. Katayama, a powerful figure in the Comintern, played a major role in supporting Black Power and self-determination for Blacks in the United States. Future leaders of the colonized world were taught how to make revolution at Sun Yat Sen University, the University of the Toilers of the East, and the Lenin School in Moscow, including several key African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans who helped create the Pan-African and Black Power Movements. The Comintern trained and supported Black communist leaders, exposed the murderous outrages of imperialism, developed new strategies and tactics, and helped teach numerous Black people how to organize while enjoying substantial support from the world communist movement. In 1928 and again in 1930 the Comintern passed resolutions calling for self-determination for the oppressed Black nation in the Deep South of the United States and full equality for Blacks living in the North. The Comintern

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supported immediate independence for all the European colonies in Africa. In 1930, the Comintern established the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, which published the Negro Worker in several languages and distributed it along with other “subversive” literature smuggled clandestinely by Black merchant seamen landing in European and then African ports. The Comintern put great pressure on the communist parties in the capitalist world to support the independence movements in their own countries’ colonies and to fight against racism (called white chauvinism) in the communist parties of the West. The Comintern supported Black scholarship, art, and culture throughout the world and insisted that the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) focus its work on the extremely dangerous Deep South. Much attention was paid to Blacks in the United States as an oppressed internal colony in the wealthiest capitalist country in the world. Despite the Great Migration, 80 percent of the Black population still lived in the South in 1928. Many Blacks were a substantial majority of the population in the Black Belt, the former center of slavery where the betrayal of Reconstruction left many Blacks as sharecroppers, agricultural workers, and small farmers in debt servitude, deprived of all rights of citizenship, lacking any legal protections and terrorized by lynching and lynch laws, forced labor, and criminalization of innocent people to extend the unpaid chain gangs. This history was buried for many decades by Cold War historiography but was rescued by post– Cold War scholars mainly since Soviet archives have become available. The Comintern looked to Black communists from the United States as the main leaders of the global Black liberation movement. Several leaders from the United States were trained by and worked for the Comintern in Moscow and were actively involved in the world communist movement throughout their lives. Two prominent examples are Harry Haywood and William Patterson, who led the International Labor Defense. Both fought effectively to save the lives of the nine Scottsboro Boys, African American teenaged males falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama and immediately sentenced to death in 1931. Haywood and Patterson brought in prominent attorneys to defend the boys, who made legal history by bringing their cases to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that they did not have adequate legal representation and outlawed all-white juries. These two Black leaders helped organized huge international demonstrations with the slogan “They will not die.” The International Labor Defense quickly became a mass movement in the Black Belt and helped inspire the formation of the Sharecroppers Union, asserting its right to armed self-defense against mass murder and torture. The CPUSA continued to do heroic work in the Deep South, organizing interracial locals of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The National Maritime Union in the inland rivers and Gulf of Mexico ports and the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Union in Birmingham, Alabama, converted southern white workers into militant fighters against racism until these unions were destroyed by the Cold War



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during the late 1940s and 1950s. The CPUSA was destroyed by infiltration and disruption from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other U.S. intelligence agencies. The CPUSA renounced its support of self-determination for Blacks and dissolved itself in the South as well as all Black-led left-wing organizations throughout the country. The CPUSA endorsed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) purely legal courtroom tactics and joined in the NAACP’s attack on street demonstrations, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In addition, the CPUSA opposed the armed self-defense movement against the Ku Klux Klan in Monroe, North Carolina, led by Robert F. and Mabel R. Williams. Marxism-Leninism’s contribution to the Black Power Movement in the United States began in the 1930s and 1940s. Like Cyril Briggs, the founder of the African Blood Brotherhood, which brought most early Black communists into the CPUSA, Marxism-Leninism supported revolutionary nationalism within the United States led by the Black working class but opposed Black separatism as exemplified by Marcus Garvey and later the Nation of Islam. In addition, Marxism-Leninism supported the fight for self-determination and equal rights including the right to armed self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Haywood’s pamphlet For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question (1958) helped lead most Black, Puerto Rican, and maritime workers out of the CPUSA and into work in the Black community. The armed self-defense movement was key to Black Power and was ubiquitous in Mississippi after the murder of Emmett Till in 1954. The Deacons for Self-Defense and Justice was first organized in Jonesboro, Louisiana, in 1964 and moved to Bogalusa in February 1965, the year the armed self-defense movement spread all over the South and defeated the KKK during that period. Despite the demise of the CPUSA, it left a core of Black communist organizers who helped initiate the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power was in the same Alabama Black Belt counties where the Sharecroppers Union was born in 1930. Haywood worked in Harlem in 1964 with Malcolm X, Harlem Fight Back, and Josh Lawrence and Jessie Gray, fellow Black communist merchant seamen. Gray led the Harlem Riot of 1964 after organizing a mass movement of rent strikers and welfare mothers. By 1965 Haywood was in Detroit working with the young Black autoworkers who organized the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement, which evolved into the Black Workers Congress. Despite the crippling of the Left by the Cold War, William Patterson led the Civil Rights Congress, which published and presented to the United Nations the petition “We Charge Genocide” in 1951. Although the CPUSA was run largely by the FBI after Nikita Khruschev’s largely imaginative speech exposing Stalin in 1956, which was a push for his own political power, Patterson remained in the CPUSA and finally was able to give legal support to the Black Panther Party (BPP) and to Angela Davis.

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In Oakland, Haywood’s writings were published in Soulbook: The Revolutionary Journal of Afroamerica beginning in 1965. Soulbook was published by future Black Power activists such as Ernie Allen and Mamadou Lumumba (Ken Freeman) and included Black artists, novelists, and writers. Haywood’s theoretical writings had been distributed earlier in mimeographed form throughout California and the South. They helped inspire the BPP to form a Black Power Marxist movement. Thus, the Black Marxist-Leninists succeeded in focusing the Black Power Movement away from Black separatism and a back-to-Africa platform and inspired and organized the Black working class to fight for self-determination, the right of armed self-defense against the KKK, and full equal rights for Blacks in the United States by any means necessary. During the 1970s Haywood emerged as a major leader of the Maoist New Communist Movement. Almost all its many factions endorsed self-determination for the oppressed Black nation in the United States. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall See also: Black Marxism (Book); Black Panther Party; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); House of Umoja; Publications; Revolutionary Action Movement; Revolutionary Nationalism; Williams, Robert F. Further Reading Kelley, Robin D. G., and Betsy Esch. 1999. “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution.” Souls: Critical Journal of Black Politics & Culture 1(4): 6–41. McDuffie, Erik S. 2011. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Cone, James Hal (1938–) James Hal Cone, PhD, is a theologian as well as an ordained elder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He has often been called the father of Black theology. His theological writings since the 1960s were directly influenced by Black Power and in turn became a major influence that paved a road for Black Christians to enter the Black Power Movement with religious authenticity.

Biography Cone was born on August 5, 1938. He grew up in Bearden, Arkansas, a predominantly white rural community where, Cone (1982) writes, “two things happened to me in Bearden: I encountered the harsh realities of white injustice that was inflicted daily upon the Black community: and I was given a faith that sustained my



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personhood and dignity in spite of white people’s brutality.” Cone testifies that as a result of this dialectic between white racial injustice and Black faith, a tension was created in himself that he could not resolve. Cone expresses this unresolved tension in theological terms: “if God is good . . . and . . . powerful . . . why do blacks get treated so badly?” He hints that this existential question of suffering and faith are the basis for his eventual development of what has come to be called Black liberation theology. Cone grew up in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Bearden, where his family attended Macedonia AME Church. After graduating from high school in 1954, Cone began his college career first at a small two-year AME college and later a larger Methodist college in Little Rock, Arkansas. He first learned about the Montgomery bus boycott and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during these early college years. Cone writes that he also directly experienced the fight for school integration as it played out in Little Rock in 1957. It was the experience during his college years of witnessing the behavior of whites who claimed to be Christian yet fought so hard to maintain Black oppression and expressed racist hatred toward Black people that influenced him to “explore the complexity of this problem more deeply through a study of theology and history” (Cone 1982, 26–27). After graduating with a bachelor of divinity degree from the Garrett Biblical Institute (today the Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary), in Evanston, Illinois, Cone was encouraged to pursue a PhD in theology at the Garrett-Northwestern Seminary. Engaging in theological studies in a large metropolitan area in the Midwest in the early 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights struggle proved difficult, as some peers and even some family members challenged him to focus on the movement rather than his studies. It is also during his studies in graduate school, being faced with daily news of resistance to racism by Civil Rights activists and both subtle and overt racist aggressions from some of his professors, that Cone began to think about racism as a theological problem. While this was a personally critical theological question for him, he says that he chose not to pursue or write about this in his PhD studies in light of the hostile racial atmosphere at his school. Instead, in 1965 he completed his dissertation on the anthropology of Karl Barth. In 1966 while Cone was a professor at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan, and was struggling with his decision to become a theologian, a field that gave no recognition to the experience or reality of Black life and seemed more and more irrelevant in the context of a Black freedom struggle, he read a statement by the National Committee of Negro Churchmen in support of Black Power. This organization, which later became the National Committee of Black Churchmen, published its statement in the New York Times. This organized prophetic support of radical Black politics by an overtly Christian group encouraged Cone to focus on his ideas about racism as a subject for theological consideration.

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Initially writing a manifesto connecting the struggle for Black Power to the gospel of Jesus Christ, Cone eventually wrote the book that would be the basis of his work Black Theology and Black Power. Writing about the social and political conditions that were the context of this book including the assassination of Dr. King and growing racist violence against Black people in urban areas, Cone said that “The only option we Blacks have is to fight in every way possible, so that we can begin to create a definition of freedom based on our own history and culture” (Cone 1969, 47). By 1968 Cone was an affirmed advocate of Black Power and was committed to both defining and defending Black Christian support of and participation in the movement for Black Power.

Contributions and Significance to Black Power While Cone has continued to write, speak, and teach about Black theology throughout his career up to the present time, his first two published books, Black Theology and Black Power (1969) and A Black Theology of Liberation (1972), lay the foundation of his thinking and were the basis of his significance to the Black Power Movement. As a critique of the inherent racism and white supremacy of traditional Western theology, Cone declares that “theology is not universal language about God. Rather, it is human speech informed by historical and theological traditions, and written for particular times and places. Theology is contextual language—that is, defined by the human situation that gives birth to it” (Cone 1986, xi). After challenging the universality of white theology, he then asks the critical question for his own work: “what has the gospel of Jesus Christ to do with the black struggle for justice in the United States?” In line with the liberation theology being developed in Latin America almost concurrently with his Black liberation theology, Cone argued that Jesus’s identification with and social location among the poor and the oppressed was critical to the message of the gospel. Additionally, he declared that if Jesus was not actually Black, he was existentially Black because in experiencing the oppression and marginalization of imperial Roman domination and ultimately in suffering a lynching such as death at the hands of a dominant and oppressive Roman state, Jesus shared in the experience of Black people. Grounded in the systematic theology of Karl Barth and extending the Trinitarian belief that Jesus was in fact the human expression of God on Earth, Cone further boldly argued for the Blackness of God through the Blackness of Jesus. The Blackness of God means for Cone that the experience of racist oppression by Black people is also experienced by God, and in his Blackness God identifies and sides with the oppressed Black people. Ultimately this means for Cone that liberation is the central action of God for humanity. This also means that the

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resurrection of Jesus Christ is the central event of liberation. Cone argues that if in fact God does not identify with Black people in this experiential way, then God is not the God of liberation but rather the God of white supremacy. While there is expected pushback and criticism of Black liberation theology from traditional white theologians, which generally argues that true Christianity is nonpolitical and concerned with personal salvation and saving people’s souls for Heaven with no regard to race, class, gender, or other context, Cone’s Black liberation theology also has been critiqued from within the Black Christian community. The most significant critique of Cone’s initial work was from womanist theologians who challenged his lack of inclusion of the experience and wisdom of Black women as a theological ground. Cone acknowledged this weakness of his work in later years (1986) and began using inclusive language. While his work continues to be critiqued for its phallocentric stance, some womanist theologians such as Dolores S. Williams acknowledge his openness to criticism. Cone was also initially criticized for his parochial and limited approach to the struggle of Black people. His view seemed to give no recognition to the relationship between the antiracist struggle in the United States and the international struggle against colonialism and imperialism. Similarly, he was criticized for lacking a class and economic analysis in his theology, which he also has acknowledged and strived to correct in later years. Arguably the most influential theological criticism of Cone’s work was led by his own brother, Reverend Cecil Cone. The central point of this theological challenge was that James Cone failed to ground his theology in the experience of the Black church and the traditional theological ideas of Black people. The critics argued that Cone’s theology, while struggling with issues of racism and white supremacy, was still modeled and based in the systematic theology of Karl Barth and Paul Tillich. This pushed Cone to rethink his own understanding of Black people’s indigenous Christian theology and moved him to seek more authentic cultural sources for understanding Black God talk such as the spirituals and blues songs of Black southern musical tradition. This digging deeper led to the publication in 1972 of Cone’s book The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. Currently Cone is the Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. He continues to write, teach, and lecture on Black Theology. Makungu M. Akinyela See also: Black Churches; Religion and Black Power Further Reading Cone, James H. 1969. Black Theology and Black Power. New York: Orbis. Cone, James H. 1970. A Black Theology of Liberation. New York: Orbis.

286 | Congress of African People (1970–1979) Cone, James H. 1972. The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. New York: Orbis, 1972. Cone, James H. 1975. God of the Oppressed. New York: Orbis. Cone, James H. 1982. My Soul Looks Back. New York: Abingdon. Cone, James H. 1984. For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?). New York: Orbis. Cone, James H. 1986. Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology. New York: Orbis. Cone, James H. 1992. Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare? New York: Orbis. Cone, James H. 2005. Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968–1998. Boston: Beacon. Cone, James H. 2011. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Orbis: New York. Cone, James H., with Michael Harrington. 1980. The Black Church and Marxism: What Do They Have to Say to Each Other. n.p.: Institute for Democratic Socialism.

Congress of African People (1970–1979) Established in Atlanta in 1970, the Congress of African People (CAP) became an influential institution within the Black freedom struggle. The organization began as a united front of diverse Black nationalists, integrationists, artists, Pan-Africanists, intellectuals, and grassroots organizers. CAP sought unity for the purpose of accomplishing broad social and political goals. Amiri Baraka (1934–2014) was CAP’s chief theoretician and political leader. Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) was a celebrated, authoritative, and controversial writer. He gained the support of thousands of Black leaders during the years between CAP’s founding and the historic 1972 Gary National Black Political Convention. CAP reflected long-held Black political practices but also echoed the spirit of the times. CAP was a manifestation of Civil Rights Movement successes and limitations as well as prevailing Black Power sentiment. Black cultural nationalism formed the core of the organization’s values during the first half of its existence. Former CAP activist and Historian Komozi Woodard argues that part of a long tradition of Black conferences and meetings for gauging the state of the race and strategizing for liberation, CAP existed in part as a strain of the Black convention movement. The organization was formed in the aftermath of the 1960s urban uprisings of the long, hot summers and the assassinations of iconic liberal leaders Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy. Such watershed events shaped the early 1970s political climate. For many members of the Black community the dream of American liberalism had faded, and Black nationalism gained more appeal.



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Affiliates CAP was headquartered in New Jersey, where Amiri Baraka led its flagship chapter, Committee for a Unified Newark (CFUN). CFUN stood as a model of the possibilities for turning Black Power rhetoric into action. CFUN had the largest membership of any of the CAP branches, located in more than 25 states and in one foreign country during the early years of the organization. CAP was composed of locals from San Diego to Chicago, St. Louis, Brooklyn, and Houston. Reflecting the transnational aspect of CAP’s Black community concept, Suriname, South America, was also home to a CAP branch named the African Organization. Baraka galvanized leaders and rank-and-file activists alike with his articulation of the idea that African Americans existed as an oppressed nation within a dominant nation and with his brand of pragmatic nationalism. Baraka emphasized that only a long and aggressive struggle would bring about Black freedom. To advocates, CAP was an actualization of the activist/intellectual’s electrifying poem “It’s Nation Time,” which exhorted Black people to “get together,” “rise up,” “come out,” and “build a new world.” As such, CAP members worked to link local groups to national and international organizations to foster networks with the ultimate goal of developing an independent and self-determining Black nation.

Strategies and Goals In addition to self-defense, one of CAP’s immediate priorities included participating in electoral politics and winning office as forms of fostering greater selfgovernance. Many locals existed in cities with substantial Black populations, which had been historically dominated by white elected officials. Thus, CAP’s earliest initiatives included voter registration campaigns, endorsing slates of Black and Latino candidates for elective office, and community politicization. Forming united fronts, strategic alliances, and tactical coalitions with radical nonwhite organizations also became critical to CAP’s strategy. Such measures enabled CAP to amass political clout in the aftermath of several key 1970s elections, including that of Newark’s first Black mayor, Kenneth Gibson. Using its political capital, CAP worked with several entities to put on the 1972 Gary Convention. One result of the convention was the “National Black Agenda,” a document outlining various African American policy perspectives. CAP also engaged in other instances of mass mobilization. Members undertook activities such as protesting state and state-sanctioned brutality and supporting labor struggles. For instance, CAP led a local and national boycott of Budweiser to assist Black workers protesting racially motivated firings. Additionally, striking cab drivers used Newark CAP’s headquarters as a base in 1974. CAP constituents such as Brooklyn’s East organization engaged with other local groups through

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such efforts as picketing stores with abusive or neglectful policies that harmed patrons and community members. Other CAP initiatives included assisting the development of Black nationality formation. Institution building was a central component of this process. CAP members saw the formation and support of independent, progressive Black-owned enterprises as important ways to demonstrate core nationalist principles such as self-determination. Additionally, they recognized institution-building efforts and promoted economic and political development within Black communities. Kawaida Towers was an example. The apartment building was not only planned to provide housing for African Americans living in the overcrowded Central Ward area of Newark but was also aimed at opening construction, architectural, and engineering jobs for African Americans. Despite disruption at the hands of a corrupt city political machine, the endeavor stood as an example of concrete Black Power economic struggle. The institution-building component of CAP’s program inspired other projects from theaters, cultural centers, and student organizations to newspapers and publishing companies. CAP activists viewed work and study as basic building blocks of any revolutionary movement. Members implemented education programs throughout the community, including in public and independent schools. CAP academies often took the form of supplementary programs and private African Free Schools, which focused on using education as a tool of liberation in the tradition of those established to teach freed people and their children during slavery and Reconstruction. Affiliates operated African Free Schools in cities from Newark to New Orleans. CAP advocates also initiated after-school programs and day care centers, particularly as a way to support mothers’ involvement in movement work. CAP members also promoted various forms of Black Power cultural nationalism, including the African American celebration Kwanzaa and its related values. CAP advocates established other programs such as radio and television shows and communications training for young people. CAP attracted many advocates who believed that art and culture could be used to unify and transform African Americans. Artist-activists such as the poets Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) of Chicago and Kalamu ya Salaam of New Orleans supported CAP at various points in its existence. CAP was key in extending the reach and scope of the Black Arts Movement through the endorsement of arts, culture, and identity as important elements of the liberation struggle. Not solely focused on national issues, CAP also held an internationalist and Pan-Africanist outlook. Advocates viewed African Americans as part of a worldwide diaspora with a common homeland in Africa. Malcolm X’s globally focused theories influenced the organization’s agenda. As such, CAP became a United Nations nongovernmental association during the 1970s and established relations with several global liberation fronts from Grenada to Palestine. Members of CAP



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helped organize African Liberation Day and the African Liberation Support Committee to help end colonialism in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. CAP members involved themselves in the antiapartheid crusade and supported progressive African nations and anticolonial movements. CAP also stood with other groups of African American Pan-Africanists in the fight to influence U.S. foreign policy on the worldwide African community. Women played important roles in CAP. Female members were central to such activities as the National Black Political Conventions of 1972 and 1974 and African Liberation Day as primary staffers for the major united front events that CAP supported within the Black freedom struggle. As women grappled with sexism in the movement, they developed their own conferences, including the national African Women Unite conclave, and founded the Black Women’s United Front (BWUF) in 1975. The BWUF had members in multiple chapters who addressed issues of women’s inequality and articulated a broader vision for ending global oppression. Kawaida philosophy guided CAP during the first phases of its existence. Kawaida was a nationalist ideology based on African tradition and reason. Early forms of kawaida were overtly patriarchal and outlined marginal roles for women in the Black freedom struggle. Although faced with such a limited prescription for their movement participation, women in CAP emphasized the need to theorize and organize against sexism within the organization and the larger movement. Their activism helped modernize cultural nationalism by expanding movement roles for women, particularly in the area of leadership. Amina Baraka (December 5, 1942–) was a key contributor to women’s equality in CAP and the organization’s overall development. A writer, artist, dancer, singer, poet, and mother, she was born Sylvia Robinson in Charlotte, North Carolina. Robinson grew up in Newark, where she became a founding member of the Jazz Arts Society (JAS) in 1963. JAS was a group of local activist-artists. Robinson married Amiri Baraka and changed her name to Amina in 1967. A seasoned activist of and for the working class, she served as the only woman on CAP’s executive council for several years. Through her work with the organization’s governing board, she condemned practices that limited female equality, including polygamy. The example she set in Newark oriented institutional policy toward greater gender equity. Amina Baraka influenced women who would eventually serve as leaders in CAP organizations. Overall, CAP women’s activism helped radicalize female Black nationalists and challenged the cultural-nationalist and Pan-Africanist movements to fight sexism.

Decline Although CAP was impactful, the organization only existed for a short time. After going through phases during which versions of kawaida served as the organization’s

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guiding philosophy, CAP entered a period of internal turmoil in 1974. As Amiri Baraka’s thinking evolved, he emphasized scientific socialism as an essential path to Black freedom. CAP thus shifted from cultural nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and African socialism to the more leftist Marxism–Leninism–Mao Tse Tung (MLM) thought. This transition sparked intense debates between CAP constituents favoring African-centered philosophies and those desiring to enter existing networks of activists focused on class struggle. Many CAP members asserted that MLM emphasized class at the expense of important race-based issues. CAP’s turn to MLM thus prompted influential individuals and large CAP locals to withdraw from the organization. What remained of CAP became the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) in 1976. In 1980 the RCL merged with the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS). The merger with the LRS, a Marxist-Leninist organization of mainly Asian American and Latino activists, marked CAP’s official end.

Contribution to Black Power By the time of its demise, CAP had solidified its place in history as an organization that for a short time assembled thousands of African Americans within one of the most philosophically expansive movements in U.S. history. CAP was also significant for its impact on Black political power. The organization helped change the face of politics in northern cities at the executive level by assisting with the election of key African American and Latino candidates. Additionally, CAP made Black Power operational via such methods as developing political institutions and mass mobilization. In this way, CAP proved important to the struggle for African American autonomy as well as in the fight for greater justice and equality in the United States. Beyond challenging the political color line, CAP’s progressive and radical activism highlighted the need for activist public officials seeking fundamental change. A testament to the long-term impact of CAP’s theories and programs, Ras Baraka won office in 2014. Ras, the son of Amiri and Amina Baraka, added to a legacy of Black and brown Newark representatives lasting for more than four decades after the city’s first African American mayor was elected with CAP’s assistance. CAP was also impactful in other areas. CAP members were often among the first to sponsor local Kwanzaa events and other programs aimed at advancing Black nationalist values. CAP’s educational imprint can be seen in the persistence of the Black independent and supplementary school movement. CAP also functioned as a training ground for activists, both male and female, who continued to work for civil and human rights after affiliating with the organization. CAP’s blueprint for organizing has reached recent movements such as Black Lives Matter as activists such as Jamala Rogers (formerly of St. Louis CAP) mentor and lead new generations of activists. CAP did not achieve the goal of complete Black libera-



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tion; however, it helped strengthen democracy in the United States and contributed to greater self-determination for colonial subjects abroad. Kenja McCray See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Arts Movement; Committee for Unified Newark; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Kwanzaa; National Black Political Assembly Further Reading Farmer, Ashley. 2014. “Renegotiating the ‘African Women’: Women’s Cultural Nationalist Theorizing in the Us Organization and the Congress of African People, 1965–1975.” Black Diaspora Review 4(1): 76–112. Fletcher, Bill, Jr. 2015. “From Hashtag to Strategy: The Growing Pains of Black Lives Matter, Movement Activists Discuss Strategy and Tactics in #BlackLivesMatter.” In These Times, September 23, http://inthesetimes.com/article/18394/from-hashtag-to-strategy-the -growing-pains-of-black-lives-matter. Simanga, Michael. 2015. Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People: History and Memory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Woodard, Komozi. 1999. A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Woodard, Komozi. 2006. “Imamu Baraka, the Newark Congress of African People, and Black Power Politics.” Black Power in the Belly of the Beast, edited by Judson L. Jeffries, 43–66. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Congress of Racial Equality The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), formed in 1942, was first titled the Committee of Racial Equality. CORE began as an interracial student organization, established by a group of African Americans and white students at the University of Chicago. The initial group of 50 students consisted of 28 men and 22 women. The majority of the early membership was white college students. Two key African American leaders of CORE were James L. Farmer Jr. (1920–1999) and Bayard Rustin (1912–1987), who were also part of a forerunner organization called the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Indeed, the two groups’ membership, of CORE and FOR, was interlinked with shared goals and practice. Influential white participants were George Houser (1916–2015), Bernice Fisher (1916–1966), and Homer A. Jack (1916–1993). These individuals, apart from James L. Farmer Jr., have not been given the recognition often granted to other pioneers in nonviolent civil disobedience strategies working toward Civil Rights and racial justice. CORE was a forerunner in civil disobedience and nonviolent protest influenced by the Hindu Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948).

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CORE demonstrators encounter police at the Board of Education building in Brooklyn, New York, while picketing on behalf of a 14-year-old African American student who was refused permission to transfer to a school out of his district in Brooklyn. (AP Photo/John Lindsay)

As one of the first U.S. Civil Rights organizations to employ nonviolent protest methods in the 1940s to fight against racially segregated public facilities, CORE engaged in sit-ins and other nonviolent direct action to accomplish its goal of integrating Chicago restaurants and public businesses. CORE’s prominence was recognized more than a decade before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) in 1955 and established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957. Unlike the MIA and the SCLC, which focused on overcoming segregation mainly in the southern states, CORE began its work in northern states.



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After the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregated public schools and ushered in a major blow to the 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision on separate but equal public facilities, Civil Rights organizations that operated in different regions began to work together. Southern-based organizations had emphasized dismantling de jure (in law) segregation throughout the South, while segregation operated largely on a de facto (not in law but existing anyway) basis in the North. CORE’s activism was central to the effort. The Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) was aided by CORE’s leaders Bayard Rustin and George Houser, who taught southern-based activists the method of nonviolent direct action. In short, it was both local community activists in Montgomery and broader Civil Rights organizations such as CORE that brought an end to segregation on the buses in Montgomery and culminated in a Supreme Court mandate on November 13, 1956. This was a victory in many ways not just for African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama; it was a massive vindication of CORE and its strategy. In a sense, it gave victory to past attempts by CORE to end segregation on the Greyhound and Trailways buses. For instance, the Journey of Reconciliation begun in 1947 was a CORE nonviolent protest to end interstate segregated travel. Again, this was a forerunner of civil disobedience in what would come later with the emergence of the Freedom Rides of 1961 and 1962. During the decade 1956–1966 particularly under James Farmer and Bayard Rustin, CORE developed a strong bond with Dr. King and the SCLC, which led to further collaboration in the fight for social justice. Along with sit-ins in segregated restaurants in the southern states, they worked together to undermine segregated public schools, increase voting and voting rights in the South, and demand freedom of movement via interstate bus travel. In the spring of 1961, the first Freedom Ride occurred. From Washington, D.C., en route to Alabama, two buses were integrated with CORE activists, seven Blacks (among them was John Lewis, who would later lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC]) and six whites. The objective was to test the strength of the Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregated interstate bus and rail travel to be unconstitutional. The Freedom Riders were met with violent mobs in the Deep South. Not far from Anniston, Alabama, one of the buses was burned and gutted, and the occupants were severely beaten. The brutality, which was broadcast on national news programs, shocked the nation. However, the publicity turned out to be a great boon for the CORE activists because citizens began to pressure those in power to make meaningful change, so they struggled with enduring violent responses from white mobs in Alabama and later in Mississippi. Throughout the summer of 1961 the riders inspired other activists to join their cause, which in turn increased the media spotlight on the public transportation companies. The outcome of the Freedom Rides was a hard-fought

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victory that culminated in the Interstate Commerce Commission ruling in late 1961 that segregated transportation facilities throughout the South would be prohibited. In February 1961, James Farmer became the national director of CORE. He was also a key player in Civil Rights organizing. Famously coined the “Big Six” by Malcolm X (1925–1965), the other Civil Rights leaders and organizations during this period were the SCLC led by Dr. King, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People led by Roy Wilkins (1901–1981), the National Urban League led by Whitney Young (1921–1971), and SNCC led by John Lewis (1940–). Finally and symbolically, A. Phillip Randolph (1889–1979) was to lead the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Farmer and the aforementioned leaders were instrumental in making the March on Washington a success on August 28, 1963. Most noted was the astute organizational skills of Bayard Rustin within CORE, who should take the lion’s share of the credit for its success. He organized a small army of CORE field-workers who marshaled the event impeccably. In 1964, CORE was heavily involved in the Freedom Summer drive to get voters registered in the Deep South. Arguably, the organization’s biggest tragedy was the murder of three young voter registration field-workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi. James Chaney (1943–1964), Andrew Goodman (1943–1964), and Michael Schwerner (1939–1964) were murdered by a combination of the local police force and members of the Ku Klux Klan. The callous murders brought home the truth and extent of racial hatred and bigotry. Moreover, because these young men were a symbol of CORE’s philosophy of interracial struggle, as Goodman and Schwerner were Jewish and Chaney was of African American heritage, it hurt more deeply. By 1966 after suffering from the extreme brutality of white supremacy and/or indifferent police forces in the southern and northern states that turned a blind eye to the assaults on Civil Rights activists, younger and more militant Civil Rights activists began to challenge the efficacy of the nonviolent method. Black youths in urban settings were increasingly moving away from Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolent struggle to an approach that advocated self-defense and self-advocacy outside of the mainstream. Led by young leaders such as Floyd McKissick (1922–1991), the militant membership of CORE argued for a more vigorous approach to fighting against racism. That approach, which centered on the notion of Black Power and self-determination, was accepted by CORE’s membership. McKissack also challenged the moderate leadership of James Farmer and in January 1966 took over as the head of CORE, transforming the organization dramatically from traditionally interracial to a group that openly advocated for Black Power. McKissick worked closely with Roy Innis (1934–), the leader of CORE in Harlem, to push an agenda that promoted Black empowerment via political and economic control of Black communities. In short, CORE adopted a form of Black nationalism that drew from the ideas and philosophy of Malcolm X. In 1968 McKissick left CORE, and



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Innis took over the leadership. Under Innis’s leadership, CORE continued to push a Black nationalist economic perspective that, ironically, embraced the ideas of President Richard Nixon, who advocated for Black capitalism. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, brought disarray to many of the Civil Rights organizations. CORE had a series of internal battles over its ideology and practice. However, as of September 2015 and at 81 years old, Roy Innis continues to be the national chairman of CORE. Mark Christian See also: King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X; Parks, Rosa Further Reading “Freedom Rides: Traveling to Promote Civil Rights.” 2016. CORE, http://www.congre ssofracialequality.org/freedom-rides.html. “Freedom Summer: Three CORE Members Murdered in Mississippi.” 2016. CORE, http://www.congressofracialequality.org/freedom-summer.html. Meier, A., and E. Rudwick. 1975. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Schumach, M. 1968. “Martin Luther King Jr.: Leader of Millions in Nonviolent Drive for Racial Justice.” New York Times, April 5, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general /onthisday/bday/0115.html.

Council of Independent Black Institutions The Council of Independent Black Institutions (CIBI) is the oldest professional association of Pan-African nationalist educators in the United States. CIBI educators were the creators and the first practitioners of the African-centered approach to education, which revitalized schools in African American communities during the 1980s and 1990s. CIBI was founded at Penn Center, South Carolina, in 1972 and emerged as the product of a series of meetings, workshops, conferences, and other efforts employed by African and African American educators that rejected the existing educational options available to children of African descent in urban centers throughout the United States. CIBI architects had asserted earlier corrective efforts by their participation in the community of schools movement, which spanned from 1966 until 1970. Ultimately deeming community control of schools as a limited strategy to effectively educate children of African descent, the architects of CIBI called for the creation of independent African-centered schools. Several meetings were convened from 1970 until 1972, which led to the formal inception of CIBI. The first meeting was a three-day conference hosted by the California Association of African American

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Education and the Nairobi Day School and College that focused on the strategies and methods of sustaining independent, community-controlled schools. In an educational plenary session of the inaugural convention of the Congress of African People held in Atlanta, Georgia, from September 3–7, 1970—often called the Fifth Black Power Conference—participants called for the need to control the educational institutions that African people attended. The New York–based African American Teachers Association hosted a three-day conference during April 21–23, 1972, that focused on planting the seeds for a national Black education system devoted to liberatory political objectives and dedicated to excellence. The culmination of the work resulted in CIBI, which formed during a national meeting held at Penn Center in Frogmore, South Carolina, from June 29 to July 3, 1972. This meeting was attended by 65 African American educational activists representing 23 schools. Expanding upon the 200-year legacy of African American independent schools, CIBI’s efforts were enhanced by the emergent ideologies of the Black Power Movement, Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and self-determination. Along with a commitment to academic excellence was the organization’s commitment to self-reliance, self-definition, and nation building rather than mainstream integration. CIBI’s governing body is called Ndundu, which draws from a traditional African model of governance of the Gikuyu people of East Africa. The Ndundu’s purpose is to provide consistency regarding the interpretation of CIBI’s role and mission in the overall context of the African and African American community. The Ndundu is composed of several entities including the executive committee, regional conveners, and up to five at-large members. During its tenure, CIBI has had several executive directors. These include Jitu Weusi, 1972–1976; Kofi Lomotey, 1976–1987; Naima Olugbala, 1987–1990; and Mwalimu Shujaa, 1990–2000. In 2000 CIBI shifted its leadership model to one that incorporated the African concept of duality and included one male and one female as coexecutive directors. The first of these were Yaa Asantewa Akoto and Kwasi Konadu, who served from 2000 to 2007, and then Baye Kemet and Rehket Si-Asar, who served from 2007 to 2010. CIBI is currently led by Baye Kemet, who has served as facilitator from 2010 to the present. CIBI has an open membership, which is composed of parents, students, teachers, and community activists who are committed to African-centered educational philosophy and practice. Operating as the collective vanguard organization of African-centered institutions and educators, CIBI has a wealth of accomplishments that have contributed to the growth and development of the African-centered education movement. These accomplishments included a biannual international conference (for members and interested persons), an annual science fair (focusing on science projects designed to address issues of the African world community), the Walimu Development Institute (focusing on teacher training), an evaluative criteria regarding African-centered



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standards for educational institutions, and a process of African-centered certification for prospective member schools. CIBI has consistently served as the educational vanguard of the Black Power Movement. Having survived the Black Power era, CIBI has persistently prevailed over the challenges that undermined the broader Black Power Movement and related organizations. During the mid-1990s, CIBI was faced with two major challenges: the emergence of the charter school movement and the need for the intergenerational transition of leadership within the organization. Several member schools of the organization opted to adopt public school charter status, which challenged the principle of independence—the founding principle of African-centered educational philosophy. This challenge led to an ideological rupture within the organization and resulted in a series of debates and discourse that lasted for five years (1995–2000). These debates resulted in a compromise that allowed the existing schools to remain in CIBI but prohibited the admission of new member schools that were chartered until subsequent studies were conducted. The dissenting schools ultimately resigned from the organization. However, CIBI has retained independence as an essential principle for membership within the organization. The generational transition of leadership was resolved in 2000 by the adoption of a new leadership model and the election of a younger person to direct the organization. CIBI is the oldest and most consistent organizational proponent of African-centered educational philosophy and practice. Kefentse Chike See also: Pan-Africanism Further Reading Chike, Kefentse. 2011. “From Black Power to the New Millennium: The Evolution of the African Centered Education Movement in Detroit, MI, 1970–2000.” PhD dissertation, Michigan State University, East Lansing. Doughty, James. 1973. “A Historical Analysis of Black Education: Focusing on the Contemporary Independent Black Education Movement.” PhD dissertation, Ohio State University. Hotep, Heru. 2001. “Dedicated to Excellence: An Afrocentric Oral History of the Council of Independent Black Institutions, 1970–2000.” PhD dissertation, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh. Konadu, Kwasi. 2005. Truth Crushed to the Earth Shall Rise Again. Trenton, NJ: African World.

Counterintelligence Program The Black Power Movement spanning from 1965 to 1975 was characterized by radical Black revolutionary organizations fighting for Black liberation who faced

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Closeups of the Chicago 8: (top L-R) Jerry Rubin (1938–1998), Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989), Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, (bottom L-R) Bobby Seale, Lee Weiner, John Froines, and David Dellinger (1915–2004), ca. 1968. The Chicago 7, as they were called after Seale was severed from the case, were indicted for conspiracy and inciting a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. During the trial, Bobby Seale was chained and gagged. Froines and Weiner were acquitted on all charges. The other five were convicted of inciting to riot, but the convictions were overturned on appeal. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

unprecedented political repression. The end goal of this political oppression was to effectively neutralize all left-leaning radical organizations as well as specific individuals whom officials believed could pose a significant threat to the United States. In the 1960s the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), under the leadership of Director J. Edgar Hoover, expanded its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to include the surveillance, disruption, and defamation of Black Power organizations and activists. Tactics utilized by the FBI included illegal surveillance (i.e., wiretaps), manufacturing discord among organizations through the use of fabricated mail, discrediting organizations and individuals through disinformation to the press, harassment through arrest, infiltrators, fabricating evidence for criminal prosecutions, and assassinations. FBI field agents typically worked with local and state law enforcement to neutralize Black Power organizations, but



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the agents’ activities were often illegal, abridging the First Amendment rights of American citizens. According to the FBI, all COINTELPRO operations were ended in 1971. Five years later, Congress convened the Church Committee to investigate the activities of intelligence agencies including the FBI. In 1956 the FBI instituted COINTELPRO to interfere with the activities of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). With the rise of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the program was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Black Panther Party (BPP), Students for a Democratic Society, and the American Indian Movement. Hoover justified this expansion by claiming that the Civil Rights Movement was infiltrated by communists. The FBI also targeted key leaders of the era including Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, and Martin Luther King Jr. Offices across the country participated in the program, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Indianapolis, Newark, San Diego, and Seattle—a clear indication of the national reach of FBI efforts to prevent the Black Power Movement’s aims and agenda. COINTELPRO used several malicious tactics to discredit and destroy targeted groups and leaders in the movement. A common method to obtain information about organizations and activists was to hire informants who were already affiliated within movement participants. Agents also infiltrated organizations to gather information. At times, infiltrators provoked and instigated Black Power activists to participate in illegal activities, which ultimately helped the FBI accomplish its goal of tarnishing Black Power organizations. Other strategies included exploiting jealousy and insecurities among activists, giving the media false stories about the activities of organizations and activists, forging anonymous letters and making telephone calls that served to create discord within targeted groups, and creating fabricated flyers and organizational documents. Agents also surveilled activists’ families, children, neighbors, friends, and associates. These tricks had a psychological effect on the movement and its participants so that distrust spread throughout and among targeted groups. Law enforcement working with the FBI aided in the harassment and criminalization of Black Power activists. They constructed bogus charges that led to countless arrests and imprisonments, fabricated evidence, committed perjury, and paid witnesses to give false testimony. These illegal methods led to the disruption of organizations’ ability to conduct their programs and serve their constituents, the assassination of activists, and the murder of witnesses, bystanders, and law enforcement officers. By the middle of the 1960s the Black Power sentiment was being felt across the country, and some activists in the movement no longer believed that turning the other cheek was a sustainable tactic in the face of constant terror that was especially rampant in the Deep South. Stokely Carmichael did not coin the phrase

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“Black Power” but is responsible for introducing the rally cry on a national stage. He participated in the March Against Fear in the summer of 1966 at which he delivered a passionate speech declaring that Black people were no longer going to beg for their rights and proudly proclaiming “What the people are going to start saying now is BLACK POWER!” The political climate was tense; uprisings were spreading through the North and the West as a response to generations of segregation, rampant police brutality, limited housing options, subpar educational opportunities, and job prospects. Radi­ cal Black activists began calling for armed resistance to political repression and revolution. J. Edgar Hoover targeted Black nationalist organizations, which he deemed “hate groups.” Included in this group was RAM, founded in 1962 by students at Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio. One of RAM’s founders, Max Stanford (Muhammad Ahmad), was particularly singled out by the FBI. Hoover once referred to Stanford as “the most dangerous man in America.” Because of RAM activities, Stanford was arrested with 17 other RAM members and associates on conspiracy charges in 1966. Although they were ultimately released, they would not easily escape the brute force of COINTELPRO’s repressive agenda. In 1967, Stanford was arrested again for conspiracy. As a result of the FBI’s device tactics and fearing for his life, Stanford decided to go underground in 1968—meaning he lived undercover and under the radar of surveillance. Although he lived underground, Stanford continued to organize with RAM and write articles that appeared in Black Power publications. Because of the repressive forces of COINTELPRO efforts, RAM disbanded. In Oakland, California, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale cofounded the BPP, whose platform centered on a 10-point agenda for Black liberation in 1966. Armed with guns, black berets, and Black consciousness, the Panthers patrolled their own communities and implemented projects such as the Free Breakfast Program, health clinics, and schools designed to empower and serve the community. The BPP attempted to disrupt and ultimately destroy the status quo of America. This commitment to vigorously condemn and destroy American values—white supremacy, racism, sexism, patriarchy, imperialism, and colonialism—deeply disturbed government officials, especially the director of the FBI, Hoover. In 1968 Hoover described the party as “the greatest threat to American society” in a memorandum and beseeched his field agents “to exploit all avenues of creating . . . dissension within the ranks of the BPP.” In Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (1988), authors Churchill and Wall offered a detailed analysis of the ways in which the FBI conspired with local police departments across the country to ultimately destroy targeted groups, including the BPP. This call to action resulted in the assassination of the Illinois chairman of the BPP Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969. William O’Neal, Hampton’s bodyguard



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and an infiltrator on behalf of the FBI, provided a floor plan of his apartment to police. In an early morning raid, the police shot Hampton while he was asleep in the bed with his pregnant partner. In the raid 99 shots were fired; only 1 shot came from a Panther, Mark Clark. While asleep in a chair, Clark’s body was riddled with bullets; the single shot fired from his gun was a bodily reaction. Three other Panthers who were in the apartment during the assassination were also shot and arrested for attempted murder and aggravated assault. Other Panthers were targets of COINTELPRO. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, both leaders in the BPP, were charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder in 1969. Both Seale and Huggins were incarcerated for an extended amount of time before they were finally released. Those charges were later dismissed in 1971. George Jackson, an incarcerated member of the BPP, was assassinated in Soledad State Prison, and his death is believed to have been orchestrated by the FBI. In her autobiography A Taste of Power, former chairman of the BPP Elaine Browne provided a detailed account of those turbulent years in which she was subjected to death threats by local police and arrested during a raid of one of the Panther headquarters. When members were able to manage not getting killed through “routine” traffic stops, they also could be falsely accused of crimes they did not commit and subjected to extraordinary bail amounts. There are several other members of the party who were subjected to similar tactics employed by COINTELPRO. If They Come in the Morning (1971), a collection of letters edited by Bettina Aptheker, highlights the link between political prisoners and Black liberation in American prisons. Due to Angela Davis’s membership in the CPUSA and political speeches she made while serving as a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles, she was a political target of COINTELPRO. Davis was also condemned by the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who demanded that the university dismiss Davis from her position. In 1970 Davis was falsely accused of kidnapping and murder, both capital offenses. The charges stemmed from a hostage situation in a California courtroom in which a federal judge was killed. Davis was accused of providing the guns for the attack. Despite the fact that “Albert Harris, the State Prosecutor, publicly admitted on August 13, 1970 that the State had no case against Angela,” she was tried in a courtroom in California (Davis 1971). Davis’s trial garnered international attention and support, and she was found not guilty. Another targeted individual was Assata Shakur, a member of the Black Liberation Army who was convicted of the murder of a New Jersey state trooper. On November 2, 1979, with the help of other revolutionary activists, Shakur escaped from a New Jersey prison. In the 1980s she received political asylum in Cuba. Shakur remains on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list. For those falsely imprisoned, they were usually subjected to solitary confinement while incarcerated as a form of cruel and unusual punishment for their political activity.

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The FBI surveilled, harassed, and targeted several individuals in the movement including Gloria Richardson, James and Grace Lee Boggs, Robert F. Williams, Mae Mallory, Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, and H. Rap Brown as well as such organizations as the National Black Feminist Organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the Third World Women’s Alliance. Agents’ investigations rarely were limited to progressive activists in the movement and often included family, acquaintances, friends, coworkers, and children. The FBI’s attempts to destroy the movement often had a damning impact on entire families and communities. The political repression performed through raids, assaults, arrests, and assassinations by the federal government took a toll on the Black Power Movement and its most fervent advocates. The political repressed forged international relationships with other liberation struggles. Some Black revolutionaries found refuge in other countries such as Cuba, Algeria, and China. These international relationships reflect the influence of organized, collective action by an oppressed people against a white supremacist, imperialist empire whose recognition as a global superpower rested on the oppression and exploitation of its most marginalized citizens. The various forms of political repression not only weakened radical Black organizations but also had an impact on the psychological well-being of targeted individuals. Black communities were further marginalized and occupied by local and state authorities. The Richard Nixon administration in response to the political unrest campaigned on the promise of “law and order,” a coded language that promised to restore order in Black and brown communities. This aligned well with Hoover’s commitment to eliminate any internal threats to the federal government. In 1971 a group of anti–Vietnam War activists broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole about 1,000 documents. They discovered within these documents that the FBI had been waging a war on American citizens. The program was terminated, and a congressional committee was convened to investigate the illegal actions of the FBI. Takiyah Tuggerson See also: Assassinations; Black Panther Party; Brown, Hubert “H. Rap”; Davis, Angela Yvonne; Revolutionary Action Movement; Stanford, Max (Muhammad Ahmad) Further Reading Brown, Elaine. 1994. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. 1st Anchor Books ed. New York: Anchor Books. Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. 1990. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Corrected ed. Boston: South End Press.



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Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. 2002. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston: South End Press. Davis, Angela Y. 1971. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. New York: Third Press. Jones, Charles E. 1988. “The Political Repression of the Black Panther Party 1966– 1971: The Case of the Oakland Bay Area.” Journal of Black Studies 18(4): 415–434. Moore, Dhoruba. 1981. “Strategies of Repression against the Black Movement.” Black Scholar 12(3): 10–16.

Cuban Revolution (1953–1959) The Cuban Revolution was initiated as an anti-imperialist rebellion led by Fidel Castro against the military regime of Fulgencio Batista. After seizing state power, the Castro-led anti-imperialist, revolutionary, nationalist rebellion transformed into a socialist revolution, upsetting Cuban elites and their capitalist neighbors in the United States. On the other hand, the Cuban Revolution has historically inspired and expressed solidarity with elements of the Black Power Movement. On July 26, 1953, approximately 100 armed rebels led by Fidel Castro marched to Santiago de Cuba and launched an attack on Fulgencio Batista’s military headquarters, the Moncada Barracks. Their original plan was to arrive in a 16-car caravan (giving the impression of larger forces and substantial backing) and break off into teams to take the civilian hospital, the justice building, and the barracks, with its radio transmitter. However, the caravan began to break up, as the heavy artillery car got lost and Castro’s car crashed, sounding the alarm. The resulting skirmish, where Castro’s forces were severely outnumbered, left casualties on both sides. Eighteen of Castro’s rebels were captured and executed, and days later Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, and 27 rebels were captured and sentenced to 15 years in prison. In 1955 Fidel Castro was released from prison and fled to Mexico, where he met an Argentinian doctor named Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who joined their second attack on Batista. Upon returning to Cuba aboard their ship, the Granma, on November 26, 1956, the rebels began planning their next insurgent campaign against Batista’s forces. On January 17, 1957, Castro’s guerrillas successfully took a Batista outpost on the south coast and began generating substantial popular support from followers in Cuba and abroad. Though university students failed in their attempt to attack the Presidential Palace in Havana on March 13, 1957, Castro’s 26th of July Movement seized a Batista army post on May 28, 1957. After the group’s urban coordinator Frank Pais was murdered by police in Santiago de Cuba while campaigning for the overthrow of Batista, Castro opened new fronts on the north coast and called for a general revolt on March 17, 1958.

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The United States cut off arms support to Batista, and by the end of 1958 Castro’s forces were overcoming Batista’s, as Guevara and his men seized the city of Santa Clara (the capital of the Cuban Province Villa Clara) while Camilo Cienfuegos’s unit secured revolutionary victory in the municipality of Yaguajay. With promises of agricultural and educational reform, Castro became popular with peasants, workers, and farmers, while Batista forcibly removed peasants from their homes and used torture and violence to control urban revolts. Castro’s popular support continued to grow, and as the United States discontinued its support of Batista, Cuba’s economy began to collapse. Tourism came to a halt, and businessmen began to fund Castro. Militant groups all across Cuba rose up against Batista. Despite a lack of experience in irregular warfare, Batista dispatched his forces in an all-out attack (Operation Verano) on the revolutionary stronghold in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. In true guerrilla fashion, Castro avoided direct confrontation and chose instead to utilize land mines and small ambush teams to halt the enemy offensive. Many of Batista’s soldiers defected to the rebel forces when they saw the massive human rights violations that Batista required of them. Operation Verano saw 12,000 men defeated by 300 revolutionaries. While the United States had pulled support for Batista, there was a fear that Castro’s socialist leanings would undermine U.S. interests. Subsequently, U.S. leaders aided Batista’s removal by supporting rightist military leader General Eulogio Cantillo. Cantillo secretly met with Castro, and though they had agreed to a cease-fire culminating with the apprehension of Batista as a war criminal, Cantillo warned Batista, who resigned on December 31, 1958, and fled to the Dominican Republic with a large sum of U.S. dollars. Cantillo took Havana’s Presidential Palace, and Castro ended their cease-fire, pushing his offensive and refusing to acknowledge the provisional government. Castro’s forces took over Santiago de Cuba on January 2, 1959, and the revolutionary forces led by Guevara and Cienfuegos entered Havana at the same time, encountering no opposition all the way from Santa Clara to Cuba’s capital city. On January 6, Castro arrived in Havana at the end of a long victory march. He seized control and placed lawyer Manuel Urrutia Lleo in the role of president, leading a provisional government in the aftermath of the failed Batista regime. It was amid immodesty and degeneracy that the former elected president-turneddictator Fulgencio Batista rose. Though the indecency of the Cuban tourist market was of note, it was the widespread political corruption and economic exploitation of the Cuban people that was most devastating. During these turbulent times a young Fidel Castro was quickly growing up. Castro, who at the age of 13 had helped to organize a strike among the laborers on his father’s sugar plantation, was trained by the Jesuit priests of the El Colegio de Belen. These priests instructed Castro from the perspective of a religious nationalism, which saw the AngloSaxon–controlled western world as an affront to Hispanic orthodox Catholic



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values. By the time Castro began studying law at the University of Havana, he was well versed in Cuban nationalist values and added to this foundation a thorough knowledge of Cuban history. He felt that Cuba was not in control of its own history and blamed the United States for this. It was clear to Castro that the darkening of Cuban society was the result of the shadow cast upon it by America. No one typified this darkness more than the American-backed Batista when he seized the Cuban presidency in a coup during the 1952 elections. Though Batista originally had ties to the Communist Party in Cuba, as he began to consolidate power his allegiances completely shifted, granting him favor from the United States. (President John F. Kennedy would later remark in a 1963 interview with Jean Daniel that “Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States.”) Castro, who was garnering his reputation as an upstart lawyer and activist, immediately petitioned for the overthrow of Batista on civil terms. Castro’s cries were ignored as the Cuban courts dismissed his claims. By the end of 1952 Castro and his younger brother Raul had formed a paramilitary organization known as The Movement. Around 1,200 discontented working-class Cubans joined the Castro brothers as they began stockpiling weapons in preparation for armed revolution. Fidel and Raul Castro, along with 123 Movement guerrillas, planned their multipronged attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago, Cuba. On July 26, 1953, they launched their attack and met defeat at the hands of Batista’s regime. Many of the revolutionaries were imprisoned, tortured, and executed on the same day of the attack, but Fidel and Raul lived. It was during his politicized trial that Fidel made his now-famous defense statement “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.” Though he was sentenced to 15 years, with some political pressure and assistance from his Jesuit teachers Fidel and Raul Castro and other political prisoners were released by the Batista regime. By June 1955 the Castro brothers had resumed their revolutionary path, and along with their newfound allies Alberto Bayo, a Spanish Civil War leader, and Guevara, they renamed themselves the 26th of July Movement in honor of their initial campaign against Batista at the Moncada Barracks in 1953. Aboard the Granma, the 26th of July Movement landed in Cuba on December 2, 1956. Eightytwo armed revolutionaries made their way into the Sierra Maestra Mountains but were ambushed by Batista solders. Then, only about 20 fighters remained. The Castro brothers along with soldier Camilo Cienfuegos, Guevara, and a number of female revolutionaries including Celia Sanchez and Haydee Santamaria worked with poor Cubans to reorganize the revolutionary efforts. Other revolutionary groups, such as the anticommunist Student Revolutionary Directorate, also attempted to end Batista’s reign. Batista’s regime became increasingly violent in its attempts to maintain control, but from its strongholds in the Sierra Maestra Mountains the 26th of July Movement

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along with armed resistance from various revolutionary factions and anti-Batista propaganda continued to weaken the regime. Castro and the 26th of July Movement set up a pirate radio station called Radio Rebelde (Rebel Radio), which allowed them to broadcast their revolutionary media throughout enemy territory. This particular model of resistance would surface again when Fidel Castro granted asylum to African American revolutionaries Robert and Mabel Williams, allowing them to broadcast their revolutionary radio program Radio Free Dixie from Havana, Cuba. The aftermath of the Cuban Revolution was not limited to the sociopolitical landscape of Cuba. The Cuban revolutionaries changed the face of global politics. Cuban-American foreign relations were revolutionized. America feared that Castro’s Cuba would lead to the global spread of communism. Castro resented America for its support of Batista. The new revolutionary government nationalized all U.S. property in Cuba, while America’s Dwight D. Eisenhower administration froze all Cuban assets on American soil, severed diplomatic ties, and tightened trade embargoes already in place. America even attempted to destroy the revolutionary Cuban government by backing counterrevolutionary forces in the historic Bay of Pigs assault.

The Cuban Revolution and Black Power The Cuban Revolution is historically situated in a broader context of international independence movements. Black nationalists such as LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) came of age during the period between the Chinese Revolution (1949) and the Cuban Revolution (1959). Baraka supported the Cuban Revolution as well as other international resistance movements in Nigeria, Guinea, and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana (Ghana was just one of the countries that received aid from Castro’s Cuba). Once Castro’s revolutionary government was in place, it offered aid to many other countries struggling under the yoke of colonialism. Elements of the Black Freedom struggle, including Jones, Robert Williams, and historian John Henrik Clarke, joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in solidarity for the Cuban Revolution in response to counterrevolutionary activity in the United States organized by anti-Castro Cubans. Jones, Williams, and Clarke traveled to revolutionary Cuba with the Fair Play for Cuba group in 1960. Williams and his family had fled persecution and certain death in North Carolina to Castro’s Cuba, where they would find refuge sponsored by the Cuban Revolution. While in Havana, Williams and his wife Mabel were granted 50,000 watts from which they broadcast editorials by militant Black activists such as Reverend Albert B. Cleage Jr. as well as Robert himself. The programming also featured news segments and music related to the struggle for liberation, particularly the blues and new jazz. The effects of the Cuban regime resonated globally, threatening U.S. interests in Latin America, Africa, and beyond.



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The Cuban Revolution served as an inspiration to Black militants and revolutionaries. For example, inspired by Castro’s Cuba, radical Black intellectual Harold Cruse would go on to publish the essay “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American.” In addition to providing asylum to Robert and Mabel Williams, Cuba also offered shelter to members of the Black Panther Party, including Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Assata Shakur, and members of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa. In 1974, Fidel Castro sent thousands of Cuban troops to Angola to aid the revolutionary government of Angola in its struggles against the racist South African Army. Castro sustained his support of Angola for over a decade, despite constant American hostility, and on many occasions since then Castro’s Cuba has sacrificed friendly relations with the United States for its principles on sovereignty and anticolonialism. Although in 2015 there were renewed talks of reconciliation between the United States and Cuba, the revolutionary island nation’s principles are still an issue for the American empire. America’s embargo (ban on any commercial trade) against Cuba remains the longest-running foreign policy in U.S. history, and Cuba currently retains the political asylum granted to political activist Assata Shakur in 1984. Tarell C. Kyles See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Newton, Huey P. Further Reading Bonachea, R. L., and M. San Marta-N. 1974. Cuban Insurrection, 1952–1959. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Bunck, J. M. 2010. Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba. State College, PA: Penn State Press. Joseph, Peniel E. 2006. The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era. New York: Routledge. Karol, K. S. 1971. Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution. New York: Jonathan Cape. Williams, R. F. 2013. Negroes with Guns. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books.

Cultural Nationalism Cultural nationalism is a belief system and set of practices rooted in the idea that a people’s distinctiveness is based on cultural elements such as shared values, ways of life, and aesthetics. Black cultural nationalism holds that people of African descent have a unique style of art, sense of beauty, and communal spirit emanating from their contemporary folkways as well as their collective history. Black cultural

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nationalists emphasize family, institution, and community building as principal tools for identity development and asserting the right of Black self-determination. Distinctions between nationalist expressions are subjective and often overlap and gained prevalence in different ways and at varying times. During the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, cultural nationalism involved the processes of defining, expressing, and defending a Black aesthetic and value system, particularly as key components of independent nationhood. Black Power–era cultural nationalism, however, evolved from centuries-old traditions. Basic forms of Black nationalism entailed the impulse toward autonomy as expressed through acts of resistance, rebellion, and marronage during the brutal 16th- and 17th-century Atlantic system of enslavement. Though not defined or systematized at the time, the earliest elements of cultural nationalism grew as Africans from various origins forged a mutual sense of Blackness. Historian Michael Gomez described the process as exchanging specific African ethnic identities for racialized conceptions based on the shared experiences of enslavement and forced migration. Creolized communities of African and African-descended people exhibited forms of self-identification through commonalities such as rituals, music, dances, and aesthetics, which were often based on tradition but shaped within the crucible of Atlantic world slavery. During the mid-19th century more organized, classical Black nationalisms grew out of earlier protoexpressions. The classical forms advocated a separate Black nation-state and included emigration to other countries, migration to free states, colonization, and the development of Black-led institutions and communities in the United States and abroad. Though the classical forms have been described as heavily focused on a “civilizing” and Christianizing mission in Africa, pioneers from Martin Delaney to Alexander Crummell formed the legacy upon which most influential nationalist thinkers of the 20th century would rest their practices. The classical era lasted through the heyday of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) during the 1920s. Modern configurations of Black nationalism arose in the post-UNIA 20th century. Modern Black nationalism developed several expressions, including religious, economic, territorial, political, revolutionary, and cultural forms. The second half of the 1960s particularly witnessed a renewed sense of cultural awareness, which sparked a surge of nationalism and provided a catalyst for the Black Power Movement and its Black Arts sibling. As one of the many Black nationalist expressions, cultural nationalism grew in popularity during the era. This acceptance was partially because African Americans increasingly questioned and resisted myths of white supremacy and Black inferiority. Cultural nationalism in its modern manifestation was different from classical formulations in certain ways. One defining characteristic was that modern cultural nationalism encouraged interest in and respect for African-inspired expression and aesthetics. Having studied the work of



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Third World anticolonialists such as Frantz Fanon, modern cultural nationalists challenged Eurocentric ideas within the dominant culture. They also questioned older African Americans’ middle-class, integrationist aspirations as well as their beliefs about respectability, grooming, and beautification practices, which cultural nationalists thought reflected the mind-set of a colonized people. Cultural nationalists sought to help lead the Black revolution by advancing alternative aesthetics, practices, and values. Many proudly donned resistive Africaninfluenced fashions during the Black Power era. Cultural nationalists shunned conservative mainstream styles, which often reinforced the marginality of African American culture. Employing descriptors such as “soul,” cultural nationalists embodied Black pride, a kinship between various African and African-descended peoples, and rebelliousness against a conformist status quo. They eschewed straightened hair, which reflected beliefs about the unattractiveness of tightly coiled tresses, and openly embraced natural styles such as Afros and braids. Cultural nationalists were known for wearing such iconic clothing as the dashiki, a brightly colored loosefitting African shirt. They also learned and taught elements of various continental languages, augmenting everyday speech with African and African-influenced terms. Like others of their nationalist forebears and peers, cultural nationalists often replaced, refashioned, or augmented slave names with African and Arabic names. Harlem’s Mau Maus (New York) and the Yorubas of Oyotunji Village (South Carolina) have been counted among the various Black Power–era cultural nationalists. However, Maulana Karenga (formerly Ron Everett) and members of the Us organization in southern California were noted as premier theorists and advocates of cultural nationalism during the Black Power Movement. The Us organization arose in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Us consisted of a small committed group of activists, artists, and students united for the purpose of helping achieve Black revolution. Karenga and Us members articulated the cultural-nationalist ideology kawaida, a Kiswahili word interpreted to mean “tradition and reason.” The African American holiday celebration Kwanzaa is one of the best-known expressions of Us’s brand of cultural nationalism. The work of the Us organization influenced various individuals, including poet and cultural leader Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) of Newark, New Jersey. Baraka expanded and operationalized Black Power cultural nationalism, particularly through a series of assemblies that the 1960s urban uprisings energized. A prominent intellectual and activist, he was particularly influential in shaping and disseminating the cultural-nationalist politics of the day through his leadership of the Congress of African People (CAP). CAP was a united front organization that grew out of a 1970 Black assembly in Atlanta. CAP’s purpose was fostering solidarity among a diverse network of Black entities to accomplish wide-ranging social and political aims. CAP constituents sought to accomplish these goals through the formation of coalitions and alliances as well as via participation in electoral

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politics and institution building. CAP was important in broadening the range and scope of a pragmatic, modernized form of cultural nationalism, which reached its zenith during the 1972 Gary National Black Political Convention.

Debates Activists and intellectuals have debated the meaning, significance, and purpose of nationalism. Some emphasized strict differences between various strains and often viewed cultural expressions as insignificant or secondary to economic and political forms. Other revolutionaries and scholars, however, have defined various nationalist expressions as different branches of the same tree. Still others have highlighted the importance of focusing on cultural factors as essential to all expressions of nationalism, especially in the face of enduring white supremacist attacks on the beliefs, norms, and customs of African and African-descended people. Emphasizing the importance of such values, kawaida advocates propagated the idea that self-conscious, self-determined cultural transformation based on what were perceived as the best elements of African traditions were indispensable for Black political empowerment and revolution. The Quotable Karenga is a booklet in which Us advocates outlined culturalnationalist principles. Karenga’s theories stressed the centrality of cultural work to African Americans and the Black Power Movement and were published in the pamphlet. Not endorsing nonviolence, Karenga specifically highlighted the idea that the success of the Black liberation struggle depended on the ability to wage a cultural revolution before armed struggle and political insurrection could occur. He also maintained that the entire society required radical transformation. The aim of forwarding such goals was to transform African Americans’ consciousness as they struggled for independence and secured assets such as land. Changing the consciousness of a people was thought to be a method of avoiding the reproduction of oppressive systems in the aftermath of revolution. Karenga asserted that kawaida advocates did not define cultural nationalism as the opposite of revolutionary nationalism but argued that both forms were integral to bringing about Black liberation. Various individuals and groups conversely asserted that cultural and revolutionary nationalism represented two fundamentally different approaches to achieving Black power. Certain elements of Black Panther Party leadership and the Revolutionary Action Movement were among the critics of cultural nationalism. They contended that cultural nationalists’ emphasis was too narrow. Self-titled revolutionary nationalists argued that it was impossible to resolve African Americans’ problems within capitalism. Revolutionary nationalists charged that cultural nationalists lacked adequate focus on political activism. They also pronounced that cultural nationalists were overly focused on race, did not have an



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appropriate analysis of class-based struggle, and never intended to aggressively confront imperialism. Cultural nationalists had no sustainable economic resources or coherent plans for thwarting efforts to undermine the Black freedom struggle, argued naysayers. More pointedly, some charged that cultural nationalists were anti-Marxist and that their “Buy Black” campaigns amounted to nothing more than Black capitalism. Critics lambasted the programs that cultural nationalists promoted, from allBlack settlements to African festivals, holidays, and fashion shows. Revolutionary nationalists charged that these were not concrete programs of immediate relevance to the Black community and did not go far enough to bring about Black Power. Detractors noted that all-Black enclaves and independent African nations were never self-sustaining, particularly in the economic sense. Skeptics also believed that cultural nationalists emphasized African culture in ways that were contradictory to movement goals, backward, and unrelated to the Black masses. Feminists observed that cultural nationalists often drew from the very conservative mainstream values that they denounced. As such, they cited cultural nationalists for reinforcing male dominance and heterosexism and advocating retrograde gender roles for women. Other critics branded cultural nationalists racist and antiSemitic. Still others pointed out the faultiness of the idea that an inherent common culture based on the subjective and ever-changing category of race would result in a unified struggle and collective empowerment.

Organizational Decline Negative appraisals were not the only issues that Black Power–era cultural nationalista faced. By the mid-1970s, cultural-nationalist organizations also experienced a period of institutional decline and loss of leadership under the pressure of multiple elements. Internal conflict was one factor that debilitated cultural-nationalist groups. For example, CAP’s turn from cultural nationalism to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism led to its weakening and ultimate absorption by the League of Revolutionary Struggle, a group mainly consisting of Asian American and Latino Marxist-Leninists. Oyotunji Village, founded in 1970, experienced a peak population in the mid to late 1970s but thereafter faced more than three decades of decline, partly due to its rural locale and lack of economic viability. Internal and intergroup conflict was on the rise within the Black freedom struggle, particularly in the face of state repression; however, external pressures also crippled the liberation struggle. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) covert Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and Karenga’s incarceration caused a fragmentation and transformation of the Us organization. The FBI surveilled, incapacitated, and destroyed organizations in an effort to repress the entire liberation movement. Among other tactics, agents used propaganda to provoke and worsen conflicts such as those occurring between and within

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cultural and revolutionary-nationalist organizations. Throughout the 1970s the general climate of American political conservatism grew, even as the Black middle class expanded and greater numbers of African American public officials won public office.

Legacies Changing times may have impacted the viability of their organizations, but Black Power cultural nationalists nevertheless left important legacies. In addition to supporting African liberation movements and Third World groups through such programs as the African Liberation Service Committee, cultural nationalists contributed to institution building and education reform as well as challenging state and state-sanctioned violence, increasing political participation, and electing officials through Black political power coalitions such as the 1972 Gary Black Political Convention. Cultural nationalists introduced new aesthetic values and culturally relevant forms of artistic expression, which were key tools for spreading Black Power philosophies of pride and self-determination. Although African Americans experienced increasing poverty, a skyrocketing drug trade, and soaring crime rates in the face of rising 1980s conservatism, many cultural nationalists continued to struggle within groups such as a renewed Us organization, the National Black United Front, and the New Afrikan People’s Organizations. Such groups provided continued spaces to struggle for Black liberation although the Black Power Movement had diminished, albeit with greater emphasis on such issues as women’s rights. Cultural nationalists’ focus on fashion, ritual, symbolism, language, religion, and the visual and performing arts elevated the idea that these elements were essential to fully achieving Black liberation. Additionally, historian William Van DeBurg asserted that culture had popular appeal as a vehicle for movement ideas and thus provided a basis for broadly spreading Black Power tenets. Use of such a platform enabled nationalists to imprint African American culture with Black Power principles. Their impact was felt even after the movement’s political agenda had been thwarted. Dispersed cultural-nationalist institutions gave way to persistent multigenerational groups of activists committed to continued struggle for Black self-determination and empowerment, particularly through their work with various progressive organizations and educational programs such as independent and supplemental schools and higher education programs such as Black studies. African American studies scholar Molefi Asante noted that kawaida contributed to various ideologies, practices, and pedagogies, which ascended in the aftermath of the Black Power Movement. One theory was Afrocentricity, which entailed the process of examining the world from a perspective that centered African culture, aesthetics, history, and people. Although originating in older Black intellectual



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traditions, Afrocentricity peaked in the 1980s and 1990s. Afrocentricity fostered a resurgence of Black pride and cultural-nationalist expression, particularly among college students and in popular culture. Asante further observed that culturalnationalist symbols continue to permeate African American communities, surfacing in names such as Nia (meaning “purpose”) and Imani (meaning “faith”), in enterprises called Kuumba (meaning “creativity”), and in programs labeled “Umoja” (meaning “unity”). Cultural-nationalist practices also persist in African Americans’ embrace of African and African-influenced religions such as Ifa and Vodun. Historians have pointed out that the most successful aspects of Black Power include cultural effects on the hearts and minds of the many African Americans who reject aspects of European-centered thinking, embrace forms of African-influenced selfexpression, and proudly proclaim that “Black is beautiful.” Kenja McCray See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Panther Party; Black Studies; Congress of African People; Fanon, Frantz; Kwanzaa; Revolutionary Action Movement; Us Organization Further Reading Gomez, Michael. 1998. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2014. “Kawaida, Cultural Nationalism and Struggle: Setting the Revolutionary Record Straight.” Journal of Pan African Studies 7 (October): 1–6. Van Deburg, William. 1992. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

D Davis, Angela Yvonne (1944–) Angela Yvonne Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in Jim Crow–governed Birmingham, Alabama. She came of age during a period that would eventually set the stage for the Civil Rights and Black liberation movements. Davis witnessed tragedy born of hate, which motivated her to fight for equality as an activist, a professor, and an author. Davis had been conditioned to fight for equality and stand in solidarity with oppressed people from a very young age. Her mother, Sally Davis, and father, Frank Davis, were active members of several organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Both of Davis’s parents were schoolteachers in the Birmingham system. Frank Davis eventually purchased and ran his service station, while Sally Davis worked on the Scottsboro Boys case in which nine African American boys were wrongly accused of raping two white women in Alabama during the Great Depression (Nagel 2015). Sally was a leading member of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, a youth group affiliated with the National Negro Congress whose members supported communism. During her formative years, Angela Davis and her parents often spent their summers in New York, traveling back and forth between there and Birmingham. At age 15 Davis was offered early admissions to Fisk University to study medicine. Had she chosen to attend, she might have practiced medicine by the age of 21. Instead, she remained in New York to complete high school at the Elisabeth Irwin High School, a Quaker institution where social justice was a tenet of her schooling. As a young person, Davis was encouraged to stand up for those fighting against state repression and for equality by her parents, teachers, and community. By the age of 16, Davis already had connections to Gloria Steinem and the feminist movement. When Davis was 19 years old her hometown was shaken by the tragic church bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 that resulted in the murder of four African American girls. White racists who sought to terrorize supporters of the Civil Rights Movement were responsible for bombing the church. It is likely that this event also contributed to Davis’s revolutionary development. After graduating from high school Davis attended Brandeis University, a Jewish and predominately white institution. There she worked under her mentor Herbert

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Communist professor Angela Davis speaks at the Embassy Auditorium in Los Angeles after being acquitted of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. (Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge)

Marcuse, a Marxist philosopher. When her undergraduate work was complete in 1965, she followed Marcuse to the University of California–San Diego (UCSD), where she earned her master of arts degree in philosophy. Davis immediately began her doctoral work at UCSD. Intermittently she traveled abroad to study, attending the Sorbonne University in France during her undergraduate work and the University of Berlin in Germany during her graduate work. In 1969 Davis moved to southern California and accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA). In an interview, she said that she chose Los Angeles in search of an opportunity to live in a Black community as she continued her work. She joined SNCC and the Black Panther Party (BPP), a forerunner to the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Her involvement with SNCC and BPP did not last; both organizations disregarded the power and contribution of women, which pushed her to leave. Davis also joined the Che Lumumba Club, a Black chapter of the CPUSA, where she remained affiliated for two years. By this time, Davis’s affiliation with the CPUSA had become well known. Thus, she found herself bearing the weight of the McCarthy era and the war against people in the United States who were affiliated with communism. The Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 defined a communist as someone who wanted to overthrow the government. Because of her involvement in communist organizations, Davis was eventually fired from her position at UCLA. Still, she would not



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deny her political beliefs. She publicly defended her membership in the CPUSA and after public outcry from her colleagues and community was reinstated. In addition to her work within the Black community and with students, Davis supported prisoners’ rights and political prisoners. By 1970, she had joined the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee for Black Prisoners at Soledad State Prison, California. Her work on behalf of the Soledad Brothers, including speeches and fund-raising, was public. As a result, Davis was once again released from her position at UCLA; her behavior was deemed unbecoming of a university professor. She was even publicly targeted by California governor Ronald Reagan, who swore that Davis would never work in a state institution again. Davis’s work on the Soledad Brothers defense team not only led to her dismissal from UCLA but also created the atmosphere for her own political imprisonment. One of the Soledad inmates was George Jackson, a Black man imprisoned for one year to life as a result of a gas station robbery of $70. While working on Jackson’s case, Davis became familiar with his family, and Jonathan Jackson, George’s younger brother, served as her bodyguard. On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson staged a takeover of the Marin County Hall of Justice to negotiate the release of his brother and other political prisoners. During the seize, several people were killed or injured. During their investigation, the police claimed that several guns used by Jackson were registered to Davis. A warrant was issued for her arrest, and she was placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “Most Wanted” list. Facing charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide, Davis believed that she would not receive a fair trial. She went underground but was captured two months later. Davis was placed in solitary confinement for the 16 of 18 months she served at the Women’s Detention Center in New York. While in prison, she remained an activist. For instance, she helped create a bail bond program and raised funds for fellow inmates. Once released, the women were to help raise funds and provide communal support for the release of additional inmates. Davis also obtained a federal court order that helped end the deplorable conditions she witnessed in general population. And she was able to set a precedent with her case, convincing a judge that she was entitled to both represent herself and have counsel when in court. Finally, after a worldwide “Free Angela” campaign helped to spark support for her case, Davis was exonerated of all charges. After obtaining freedom from prison, Davis ramped up her work in support of prison abolition. In 1973 she founded the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. The following year she released the book Angela Davis: An Autobiography. In 1980 and 1984 Davis ran as a vice presidential candidate on the CPUSA ticket. In the 1990s she broke her ties with the CPUSA in order to join Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an organization she cofounded to advance the discussion on CPUSA reform. In 1998 she also

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founded Critical Resistance. During this period, Davis reentered the professorate as an instructor at the University of California–Santa Cruz in the History of Consciousness Program. There she served as chair of African and feminist studies and continued her revolutionary work. When asked about the importance of movements as opposed to the individual, Davis once said that “It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle” (Barat 2014). Davis believes that Black Power is relevant even today, as an overwhelming number of Black people are still subject to economic, educational, and cultural racism perhaps to a greater extent than during the pre–Civil Rights era. Davis is characterized as a woman who understands that the struggle against oppression takes place in the streets. Since the 1960s, she has challenged traditional power structures in the United States. She urges folks to challenge the way we think, the way we act, and the way we formulate methodologies within institutions of power. Throughout her life, she has remained adamant that class, gender, and race are interconnected and impossible to separate. As is evident by her varied affiliations, Davis’s politics and affiliations remain fluid as she continues to grow. She fully acknowledges that her continued work on behalf of prisoners was directly influenced by her upbringing and time in prison. Davis remains vigilant on issues of political prisoners, prison repression in a broader context, and prison abolition. She affirms that a feminist approach to struggle can provide a deeper, more productive understanding of our system. Davis remains interested in linking various struggles, since human identities are intersectional. Throughout her career, despite castigation and imprisonment, she remained a boisterous advocate on behalf of women’s rights, prisoners’ rights, and so much more. Dr. Angela Davis said that when we “engage in the quest for freedom, . . . we must be willing to embrace the long walk” (Barat 2014). Estella Owoimaha-Church See also: Black Prisoner Activism; Che Lumumba Club; Communist International and Black Power Further Reading Barat, Frank. 2014. “Q & A: Angela Davis.” The Nation, September 15. Davis, Angela Y. 1974. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York: Random House. Davis, Angela Y. 1988. “Radical Perspectives on the Empowerment of Afro-American Women: Lessons for the 1980s.” Harvard Education Review 58(3) (August): 348–354. “Davis, Angela Yvonne.” 2005. West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, http://www .encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2–3437701278.html. Locke, Angela. 2007. “Angela Davis: Not Just a Fair-Weather Activist.” Off Our Backs 37(1): 66–68.



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Nagel, Mechthild. 2015. “Angela Y. Davis and Assata Shakur as Women Outlaws: Resisting U.S. State Violence.” Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s & Gender Studies 13 (Summer): 43–78. Platt, Tony. 2012. “Interview with Angela Davis.” Social Justice 40(1–2) (November): 37–53.

Deacons for Defense and Justice The Deacons for Defense and Justice (DDJ) was an African American self-defense organization that protected Civil Rights activists against racist terrorism during the mid-1960s. The DDJ attracted national attention for its paramilitary stance and willingness to openly protect Civil Rights Movement demonstrations and African American communities in the South, particularly in Louisiana and Mississippi. The DDJ became an inspiration and forerunner to Black Power defense groups in organizations such as the Black Panther Party, the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The history of the DDJ began in the small town of Jonesboro, Louisiana. In June 1964, organizers of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and local African American activists launched nonviolent protest campaigns and voter registration drives to challenge the town’s tradition of white supremacy. When white residents and the area’s Ku Klux Klan (KKK) responded with a wave of violence and intimidation, a group of armed Black men began to guard the CORE office against white attacks. Although Jonesboro’s police department deputized five African American men, ostensibly to provide more security, the new police officers could do little to stop white violence. When members of the KKK staged a nightly parade through Jonesboro’s African American neighborhood in late July 1964, members of the informal protective squad decided to establish an official defense unit to halt the KKK’s terrorism. This organization came to be known as the DDJ. In the following months, the DDJ evolved into a highly sophisticated and disciplined protection agency. The DDJ consisted mostly of working-class military veterans who had to conform to strict membership criteria. The organization’s president, a stockroom worker named Percy Lee Bradford, and cofounder Earnest Thomas, a mill worker and handyman, accepted only American citizens who were at least 21 years old. They preferred married men and registered voters. Applicants who had a reputation for being hot-tempered were quickly rejected. In this strictly defensive spirit, the new organization continued to guard the CORE headquarters and began to patrol the African American neighborhood with rifles and shotguns. Armed men also guarded Civil Rights meetings and provided escorts for white and Black activists who were canvassing in the

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Charles Sims, head of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, displays replicas of Ku Klux Klan robes in Bogalusa, Louisiana. (Bettmann/Getty)

dangerous areas of the surrounding Jackson parish. Walkie-talkies facilitated the coordination of guard duties. When Jonesboro’s police department disbanded the group of Black deputies in October 1964, the DDJ remained the only protection against white violence. Ultimately, the DDJ’s activities put an end to KKK intimidation in Jonesboro and effectively stemmed the tide of white harassment. The formation of another DDJ chapter in Bogalusa, Louisiana, marked the beginning of the defense unit’s rise to national fame and notoriety. Located 60 miles north of New Orleans, the city was a stronghold of the KKK. As in Jonesboro, segregationists resorted to violent terror when in January 1965 local African Americans sought the assistance of CORE to challenge Jim Crow. In February, the necessity of protecting the African American community and CORE’s field-workers from KKK violence prompted several men to organize a DDJ branch in Bogalusa. The Jonesboro DDJ assisted in the formation and, after receiving a charter from the state of Louisiana in March 1965, granted the new branch an official certificate of affiliation. Although protection was the key rationale behind its activities, the defense group also became an enormous source of pride among Black activists. Defying the southern myth of the submissive and contented “Negro,” the DDJ powerfully asserted African Americans’



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dignity and their legitimate claim to the rights of American citizenship. Its members considered their armed actions an important affirmation of African American manhood. In April 1965 when a new round of nonviolent demonstrations exacerbated racial tensions in Bogalusa, a shootout between KKK members and a group of Deacons catapulted the defense squad into the national spotlight. By that time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had launched a large-scale investigation into the activities of the defense squad. Although FBI agents and white journalists tended to regard the militant group as the harbinger of racial warfare, the Bogalusa DDJ worked side by side with CORE, complementing its nonviolent protest campaigns and ultimately enhancing its effectiveness in Bogalusa. In part, white concerns stemmed from the defense unit’s strategy to exaggerate its actual strength to deter white terrorists. Media accounts put the DDJ’s membership at several thousand in 59 chapters across the South, but the real number of members was never larger than several hundred, and the DDJ established only 3 official chapters in Louisiana. Despite its hyperbole, the DDJ did have expansionist ambitions and inspired the formation of loosely affiliated groups in 14 southern and 4 northern cities. Amid the media frenzy about the defense unit, CORE was hard-pressed to justify its alliance with the DDJ. CORE’s leadership accepted self-defense but reassured the concerned media of the organization’s unwavering commitment to nonviolence. Until the summer of 1967, the Bogalusa DDJ continued to patrol the city’s Black neighborhood and guarded a last round of nonviolent demonstrations. By November 1967, the Bogalusa DDJ no longer held official meetings. Four months later, the FBI ascertained that the DDJ and affiliated chapters had ceased their activities. This author argues that by 1968, however, as segregation and disfranchisement were on the wane and state and local authorities in the South finally appeared to take seriously their responsibility to protect Civil Rights protests, African American self-defense groups such as the DDJ had outlived their usefulness. Historian Akinyele Umoja (2013) challenges this assertion and argues that the DDJ declined because of the achievement of African American voting rights and political empowerment. In some communities, African Americans joined municipal and county law enforcement agencies in southern communities due to the increase of their electoral power. Because their neighbors where now in law enforcement some Blacks believed that there was no longer a need for paramilitary organizations. Umoja also argues that due to the continued threat to Black lives after 1968, it is questionable whether the DDJ outlived its usefulness. In fact, Blacks persisted in self-defense activities in some southern communities more than a decade after 1968. Simon Wendt

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See also: Black Panther Party; Congress of Racial Equality; Revolutionary Action Movement; Williams, Robert F. Further Reading Hill, Lance E. 2004. The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Honigsberg, Peter Jan. 2000. Crossing Border Street: A Civil Rights Memoir. Berkeley: University of California Press. Umoja, Akinyele. 2013. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: New York University. Wendt, Simon. 2004. “‘Urge People Not to Carry Guns’: Armed Self-Defense in the Louisiana Civil Rights Movement and the Radicalization of the Congress of Racial Equality.” Louisiana History 45(3) (Summer): 261–286.

Douglas, Emory (1943–) Emory Douglas was the minister of culture for the Black Panther Party for SelfDefense (BPP) from 1967 until the dissolution of the party in the 1980s. His artwork appeared in almost every issue of the BPP newspaper Black Panther, and his prints became synonymous with the Black Panthers. He was the unofficial artistin-residence of the party. Douglas was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on May 24, 1943, and migrated to northern California with his family when he was just 8 years old. Like several early members of the BPP, he came of age in the San Francisco Bay Area. He experienced segregation in San Francisco, and the Fillmore District in which he lived that had a curfew for only Black people. At the age of 13, Douglas was arrested and incarcerated at the Youth Training School in Ontario, California. His first steps toward learning graphic design began in the print shop of the Youth Training School. He was told that if he wanted to pursue graphic design further he could attend school for it after his short stint in juvenile detention. After his stay he enrolled at the City College of San Francisco, where he learned how to merge art and messages as well as bookmaking. At City College, Douglas became involved in the Black Arts Movement. In March 1967 when he was working on props for Amiri Baraka’s theater workshop, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, founders of the BPP, came to a meeting to discuss security for an upcoming visit by Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow. Seale invited Douglas to join the party as its revolutionary artist. When he became involved with the party, he had only experienced Civil Rights as a southern issue on the television and did not see it as a Black urban struggle. His experiences in the BPP changed his perspective. Douglas would travel to Oakland to go on patrols with Newton and Seale.



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Along with Eldridge Cleaver and Seale, Douglas helped on the inaugural issue of the Black Panther, the newspaper for the party. The first issue was published on April 25, 1967, and featured an editorial on the murder of Denzil Dowell. Douglas’s images were based on the BPP’s 10-point program and thus articulated through artwork their powerful political message. His images informed, educated, and politicized Black communities. The newspaper stressed Black people’s culture based on a shared sense of resilience, defiance, and self-determination. The 25-cent newspaper’s circulation reached 200,000 at its height. The style that Douglas developed, of bold stark colors, was born out of necessity because initially the Panthers could only afford one color of ink to complement black ink. His images were important for a community with varying levels of literacy. Although Douglas’s style looked like woodcuts, his medium was the simple marker, which he used to mimic the woodcut style. His work thus provided a captivating medium for telling Black readers stories meant for them. Douglas’s work reflected the specific grievances of the Black community including America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. Similar to Muhammad Ali’s controversial statement “No Viet Cong ever called me Nigger,” Douglas’s images likewise stated that “Our fight is not in Vietnam” over the image of a Black soldier crying. In one potent image, an American soldier’s helmet was replaced with a photographic collage of police brutality in the United States. For readers, the poster’s message was clear: the violence afflicted on the people of Vietnam by the United States had parallels for Black people’s experiences of police brutality in America. Other iconic posters created by Douglas reflected the party’s position on women. Although gender issues proliferated in the party, the organization made several attempts to address patriarchy and “male chauvinism,” as they called it. Douglas’s work often put armed women at the forefront of the Black liberation struggle. For him, placing strong women on the cover reflected the belief that women guerrilla fighters in Africa and the Middle East should be replicated in the United States. Douglas’s artwork helped to spread the message of the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children program in Oakland. The food program established by the Black Panthers was one of their most successful programs. Douglas’s paintings also reflected strong children playing and protesting together. Douglas’s art was one of the most potent elements of the Black Panthers’ appeal to Black people and its most visible threatening sign to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). For instance, the use of the anthropomorphic pig suggested by Huey Newton was especially enraging for police. Douglas’s image of the pig became a symbol of the anticolonial imperialist police state. Although the illegal operations of COINTELPRO successfully destroyed the BPP, Douglas continued to work in publishing, working for Sun Reporter in San

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Francisco. Since the late 2000s there has been a resurgence of interest in Douglas’s work, with exhibits at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2007– 2008); the Urbis exhibition and museum in Manchester, England (2008–2009); and the Urban Justice Center in Manhattan (2016). Paul J. Edwards See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Arts Movement; Black Panther Party; Newton, Huey P.; Police Brutality; Seale, Bobby Further Reading Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. 2013. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press. Doss, Erika. 1998. “Imaging the Panthers: Representing Black Power and Masculinity, 1960s–1990s.” Prospects 23: 483–516. Doss, Erika. 1999. “‘Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation’: Emory Douglas and Protest Aesthetics at the Black Panther.” New Political Science 21(2): 245–259. Douglas, Emory. 2014. Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas. New York: Rizzoli. Dress Code. 2015. Emory Douglas: The Art of the Black Panthers. Vimeo, May 21, https://vimeo.com/128523144/. Jones, Charles Earl. 1998. The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered). Baltimore: Black Classic Press. McKinley, Angelica, and Giovanni Russonello. 2016. “Fifty Years Later, Black Panthers’ Art Still Resonates.” New York Times, October 15, https://www.nytimes.com /2016/10/16/arts/fifty-years-later-black-panthers-art-still-resonates.html. Rayner, Alex. 2008. “Fight the Power.” The Guardian, October 24, https://www.the guardian.com/artanddesign/2008/oct/25/emory-douglas-black-panthers. “The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, Black Panther.” 2008. The Guardian, October 27, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2008/oct/28/emory-douglas -black-panther.

E Edwards, Harry (1942–) Born in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1942, Harry Edwards is an activist, author, and sociologist. He is foremost known for his work during the Black Power Movement as the engineer of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), which produced the Black Fists protest demonstration at the 1968 Olympics. Edwards also pioneered the academic subfield of sports sociology. Harry Edwards was a student-athlete in track and field and basketball at San Jose State College (SJS) in the early 1960s. He became involved in the local Black student movement after experiencing racial bias on campus and in the local community. Of the approximate 70 Black students at SJS, more than 95 percent were student-athletes or former student-athletes who had been recruited to boost their school’s athletic reputation. But despite their celebrity on campus, Black students routinely experienced discrimination: nearby white landlords refused to rent to Blacks, their coaches were generally racist or racially insensitive, and the athletic department forced most of them to major in physical education so as not to jeopardize their academic eligibility for sports. Literature on the conditions of Black athletes in white-controlled sports institutions in the 1960s demonstrates that such practices were widespread. After graduating from San Jose State College, Edwards earned a master’s degree in sociology from Cornell University. He then returned to San Jose State College and began teaching sociology as a part-time instructor. Edwards soon discovered that racial bias was still prevalent and became even more determined to confront it. During the fall of 1967 with the aid of Ken Noel, a graduate student and former student-athlete, Edwards organized a campus protest that ultimately led to the cancellation of the opening football game because of fear of an armed clash between opposing factions. The resulting national press and loss of money motivated the university to investigate and eventually begin rectifying the conditions. After realizing the potential of protest in sports to raise awareness of racial discrimination and force change, Edwards and Tommie Smith—an SJS studentathlete who held nine world records in sprinting—met with other local athletes to call attention to racism in sports by organizing a Black boycott of the 1968 Olympics. The idea of a boycott of the Olympics had been circulating in the Black community. In July 1967, the National Black Power Conference passed a

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Harry Edwards, organizer of a boycott by Black athletes at the Olympics, speaks at a press conference, 1967. (AP Photo)

resolution appealing to African Americans to boycott boxing and the Olympics in protest of the U.S. government’s persecution of Muhammad Ali for speaking out against U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam and for his refusal to join the military. Like Edwards, the conference agreed that annulling institutionalized racism, structural racism, and poverty, the issues that denigrated Black communities despite the outlawing of legal discrimination, was necessary to realize Black equality. The campaign, eventually titled the Olympic Project for Human Rights, obtained significant support from Black Power activists across the country. The OPHR’s plan was announced Thanksgiving weekend 1967 at a Los Angeles Black Youth Workshop, a regional follow-up to the national Black Power Conference. The mainstream media, moderate Civil Rights organizations, and the sports establishment opposed the boycott and condemned it as militant and unpatriotic. To build support, Edwards, with the aid of mentor Louis Lomax, a noted journalist, obtained several notable endorsements for the boycott and linked the OPHR to other antiracist campaigns. For example, in December 1967 Martin Luther King Jr., who was organizing a Poor People’s Campaign to force the government to combat poverty, endorsed the boycott and its mission of raising awareness of institutionalized racism. The protest also gained the endorsement of Jackie Robinson, the Black player who integrated Major League Baseball. In February 1968, Edwards and several New York City area Black progressives organized a successful Black boycott of the prestigious annual New York Athletic Club (NYAC) track and field meet. The OPHR also joined the international antiapartheid movement’s



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effort to prevent the apartheid nation of South Africa from participating in the Olympics. Consequently, international antiapartheid activists endorsed the OPHR as a significant component of their movement. Edwards also capitalized on the media’s fascination with militants. During speeches and press conferences he wore a dashiki and donned a black beret, a symbol of the Black Panther Party. He also publicly appeared with other Black militant activists and used rhetoric calculated to outrage. For instance, Edwards referred to the presidents as “Lynchin’” Baines Johnson and that “cracker [Richard] Nixon.” At a press conference in February 1968 Edwards stood with H. Rap Brown, who responded that an alternative to boycotting the NYAC would be to burn down its venue, Madison Square Garden. Following the assassination of King in April 1968, Edwards openly suggested that as a show of good faith to Blacks the federal government should put all racist whites to death with a dull ax. The endorsements, links with other campaigns, and controversial rhetoric kept the campaign viable and newsworthy throughout 1968. Several political hopefuls for president condemned the boycott, and the mainstream media portrayed Edwards as notorious. However, in Black, leftist, and student activist communities, Edwards was well regarded, speaking on hundreds of campuses in 1968–1969 and sharing forums with credible public figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., C. L. R. James, and Charles V. Hamilton. The organizing efforts of the Organization of African Unity led to the Inter­ national Olympic Committee’s expulsion of South Africa from the 1968 Olympic Games. That action, coupled with the OPHR’s failure to contact all potential Black Olympians and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s and the state’s repression of the OPHR, caused the campaign to lose support. Unsure about enough participation from athletes, Edwards terminated the proposed boycott in August 1968, two months before the games opened in October. Several Black athletes, committed to the ideas that spawned the boycott, protested at the games anyway. The most famous image of the protest was that of sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who finished first and third, respectively, in the 200-meter dash. During their victory ceremony they each thrust a black-gloved fist high, disrupting the U.S. national anthem and attracting international media attention. After completing a doctorate in sociology, Edwards engaged in a well-publicized battle for tenure at the University of California–Berkeley in the mid-1970s. In 1970, conservative California governor Ronald Reagan and several administrators and faculty opposed his hire as a tenure-track sociology professor at the university, and later after he refused to assure the administration that he would not agitate, they attempted to illegally fire him from the post. In 1977 despite Edwards exceeding department standards in all areas by teaching 25 percent of all undergraduates at the university, authoring a genre-defining manuscript in the field of sports sociology, and publishing more than 20 academic articles, the university

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initially denied him tenure. He launched a public campaign that brought international scrutiny to the university, resulting in a reversal of the decision by the chancellor. Edwards eventually earned professor emeritus at Berkeley before retiring in 2000. He remains involved in sports and served as a counselor for athletes for several Bay Area professional sports franchises. Dexter L. Blackman See also: Ali, Muhammad; Black Panther Party; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Olympic Project for Human Rights; Vietnam War Further Reading Edwards, Harry. 1968. “Why Negroes Should Boycott Whitey’s Olympics?” Saturday Evening Post (March 9): 6, 10. Edwards, Harry. 1969. The Revolt of the Black Athlete. New York: Free Press. Edwards, Harry. 1973. Sociology of Sport. Belmont, CA: Dorsey. Edwards, Harry. 1979. “The Olympic Project for Human Rights: An Assessment Ten Years Later.” Black Scholar 10(6–7): 2–8. Edwards, Harry. 1980. The Struggle That Must Be: An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan.

Electoral Politics and Black Power In his 1964 speech “The Ballot or the Bullet” and in the founding documents of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm X articulated a clear position on electoral politics: African Americans must control the politics and the politicians in the Black community. Organizers in the Black Power Movement fought to apply and extend that idea as an objective of self-determination, a foundational principle of Black Power. Throughout the movement, activists engaged in electoral politics as an important strategy for transferring power to African American communities by taking control over city and county governments, school boards, and other institutions to gain access to government resources, jobs, services, education, community development, and housing. It was also a method for representing Black political and economic interests in state legislatures and Congress to ensure that issues of importance to the African American community would be presented and fought for. To accomplish those goals, Black Power activists organized voter registration and education drives, built local political organizations, and ran and supported candidates for office. While success was varied, the electoral campaigns provided platforms for building community organizations, alliances with other communities



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Ohio legislator Carl Stokes addressing an NAACP work session on political action at an NAACP convention, 1966. He was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1967. Stokes was the first Black mayor of a major city in the United States. (Julian Wasser/The LIFE Images Collection /Getty Images)

of color, political consciousness, and intracommunity united fronts. It also resulted in the election of thousands of African Americans to political office. Prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there were fewer than 200 Black elected officials in the entire United States. During the Black Power era, that number grew to more than 3,000 African Americans elected to local, state, and national offices. In 1964 the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenge to the Democratic Party of Mississippi was a critical example of local Black political organizing that inspired other efforts in the South and the North. In 1965 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) helped form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) in Lowndes County, Alabama, where the population was 80 percent Black yet none held elected office. Under the banner of its black panther symbol, the LCFO conducted extensive voter registration and education and challenged the oppressive historic white political monopoly. Although unsuccessful in electing Blacks during the campaign of 1965–1966, it was a critical battleground for asserting Black Power and provided lessons in how to build local independent Black political parties, which occurred throughout Alabama and other states. By 1970 many of those local organizations successfully elected Black candidates to office. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated, but his intellectual and political influence on Black Power was growing. The first major urban uprising of

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the era erupted in Watts. In its wake, the Black Power organization Us was formed under the leadership of Maulana Karenga in Los Angeles. The Voting Rights Act was passed later that year, and Black artists were advocating Black consciousness through their work and actively building the Black Arts Movement. In California, the Oakland-based Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was formed in 1966, and the first of the four Black Power Conferences was convened in Washington, D.C., by Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Black congressman from New York. In Gary, Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio, Black Power activists, community organizers, Civil Rights leaders, and others formed united fronts to run candidates for mayor. All of these elements contributed to the momentum of the electoral strategies and actions of Black Power organizations in demanding that Black candidates be accountable to the community and advance an agenda that would move the struggle for self-determination forward. In 1967 more urban rebellions occurred, with Newark and Detroit as the most explosive. The demand for Black Power resonated in the political aspirations of African American communities nationwide. In Gary, Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio, the first campaigns for mayor of northern majority Black cities were under way. In Gary, Richard Hatcher, a Civil Rights activist and lawyer, ran for mayor and won with the backing of a broad united front of the Black community and almost universal opposition from the white community. In Cleveland, attorney Carl Stokes, the first Black person elected to the Ohio legislature as a Democrat, was elected the first Black mayor of a major American city. In 1968 both Hatcher and Stokes were sworn in. In 1970, perhaps the most important mayoral campaign in the Black Power era happened in Newark, as it was the direct result of Black Power activism led by Amiri Baraka and others who formed a Black united front. They also built an alliance with Puerto Rican activists to elect Ken Gibson as the city’s first Black mayor. That campaign established a blueprint for Black Power activists to organize and successfully execute political campaigns. The Newark election was followed by the convening of the National Black Political Convention, in which several thousand Pan-African nationalist Black Power activists over Labor Day weekend in Atlanta, where the Congress of African People (CAP) was formed. The convention’s programmatic objectives included using electoral politics to advance a Black Power agenda. CAP also called for an independent Black political party. In 1965 when the Voting Rights Act passed, there were 6 Black members of Congress. In 1971 there were 14, who founded the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and submitted a list of issues of concern from the African American community to President Richard Nixon. Among the founders of the CBC was Shirley Chisholm from New York, the first Black woman elected to Congress (1968). She was also the first woman to run for the Democratic nomination for president (1972). By 1975 there were 18 members in the CBC including progressive activists Ron



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Dellums and John Conyers, who would continue to raise the issue of Black reparations into the 21st century. The CBC would later include John Lewis (Atlanta), one of the founders of SNCC, and Bobby Rush (Chicago), a former Black Panther. In 1972 the most significant Black Power gathering occurred in Gary, Indiana. It was a broad-based united front effort that had been initiated and driven by Black Power activists. As a practical and symbolic demonstration of the united front principle, the National Black Political Convention was convened by Mayor Richard Hatcher, Detroit congressman Charles Diggs, and the then Black nationalist leader, Imamu Amiri Baraka. It drew 8,000 activists including elected officials, Pan-African nationalists, Civil Rights organizations, labor organizers, and others. Called for at the Congress of African People’s conference in Atlanta, an intense two-year period of organizing resulted in one of the most important conventions of the long Black freedom struggle. The intent of the National Black Political Convention was to develop and approve a national Black agenda that would galvanize the African American community, create a platform for assessing and supporting Black candidates, create a national independent political structure to run progressive Black candidates for office, and unify the Black nation under the convention slogan “It’s Nation Time!” In 1972 and 1973, the BPP engaged in voter registration drives and ran Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown as candidates for mayor and city council, respectively, in Oakland. Although unsuccessful in getting elected, they received significant support as a continuation of the BPP commitment to serve and transform the Black community. Detroit and Atlanta both elected their first Black mayors in 1972. In the campaigns of Coleman Young in Detroit and Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, Black Power advocates fought for police reform as part of the mayoral campaigns and in the new Black administrations. Over the next several years, the struggle for Black Power through electoral politics yielded important advances for the Black community. For the first time since Reconstruction, African Americans had political power to pass laws and make policy that could benefit the Black community. Elected office also provided previously denied access to resources and services. The first wave of Black elected officials consisted mostly of people who had some association with the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. They usually came through some form of community vetting and had a record of involvement in issues important to Black people. Their elections were successful because of the high percentage of Black voters, many of whom were voting for the first time. Those elections carried with them the aspirations of Black people for self-determination that was also pursued while continuing to build independent community-based organizations, united fronts, Black progressive institutions, mass actions, and other forms of struggle. As the Black Power Movement waned, fewer and fewer Black elected officials had experience with or connections to social movements and commitment to a

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Black Power agenda. By the 21st century, a political class of professional politicians emerged who lacked a community-based process of vetting and approval prior to running for office. However, there were exceptions in cities such as Jackson, Mississippi, and Newark, New Jersey, where candidates for mayor won in 2013 and 2014 in large part because of the deep involvement and connection they had to grassroots movements and their historic ties to the Black Power Movement. Jackson mayor Chokwe Lumumba and Newark mayor Ras Baraka both built their campaigns on platforms and organizing practices that were influenced by the Black Power era. The impact of Black Power can also be seen in other communities across the United States where local progressive political movements, candidates, and campaigns emerged. Many grew out of mass resistance to state violence, racist national politics, and the resurgent demand for Black liberation. In those local movements, self-determination and the necessity of building an independent Black political movement remain as evidence of the importance and influence of Black Power in electoral politics of the 21st century. Michael Simanga See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Brown, Elaine; Lowndes County Freedom Organization; Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; Seale, Bobby Further Reading House, Gloria. 2010. “We’ll Never Turn Back.” In Hands on the Freedom Plow, edited by Faith S. Holsaert, 503–514. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Jefferies, Hassan. 2010. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. New York: New York University Press. Joseph, Peniel. 2006. Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Owl Books. “National Black Political Convention Collection, 1972–1973.” 2004. Indiana Historical Society, March 9, http://www.indianahistory.org/our-collections/collection-guides /national-black-political-convention-collection.pdf. Simanga, Michael. 2015. Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People: History and Memory. New York: Palgrave.

F Fanon, Frantz (1925–1961) Frantz Fanon, one of the significant international contributors to Black Power theory, was an African Caribbean revolutionary, psychiatrist, and philosopher born on the French colonial island of Martinique. Through his writing on issues of racial identity and anticolonial resistance, he is one of the most influential architects of Pan-Africanism, revolutionary nationalism, anticolonialism, and Black Power in the 20th century. He continues to be influential in the 21st century in postcolonial theory, critiques of neoliberalism, and African-centered political theory. Born on July 25, 1925, Fanon grew up in an upper-middle-class family on the West Indian island of Martinique, which today is a department of the French Republic and was a colony of France at the time of his birth. By all accounts Fanon was a precocious and active child and youth who joined the colonial French Army to fight in France in World War II at 19 years old. While he left his island home as an optimistic youth excited about visiting the home country of France, his experience as a colonial soldier soon hardened him and made him cynical about France and about his relationship to the country as a Black person. Fanon was seriously injured in combat and received the French Croix de Guerre for bravery. He came to realize that he was more willing to fight and give his life for French freedom from Nazi Germany than were the French peasants who lived in the country. It was also during this time that he realized that he was looked on by white French citizens as a “nigger” before they recognized him as French. After the war Fanon first considered a career in dentistry, but he later decided to enter medical school and specialize in psychiatry. He studied in the French city of Lyon, where he also began to write his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, which he initially hoped would be his medical school dissertation. However, when it was rejected he chose to write on a less controversial subject. Fanon served a residency in psychiatry under the mentorship of François Tosquelles, a radical psychiatrist who helped Fanon focus on the relationship between culture and psychopathology. This enabled Fanon to make significant contributions to liberation psychology, though he remains best known for his political writings. After a short period of practicing psychiatry in France, Fanon was assigned to head the psychiatric hospital in Blida-Joinville in Algeria, North Africa. In Algeria, Fanon was able to practice and perfect his radical liberatory methods of psychiatric work, which included doing away with confining patients in the

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hospital to chains and straitjackets. He initiated sociotherapy practices focused on patients’ cultural context. He also created space in the hospital that would allow family members of Algerian patients to visit and stay with patients to create a more normal sense of lived experience for them. He instituted work programs to allow patients to exercise creativity and productivity, and he insisted that they be treated with respect and civility. When the war for the liberation of Algeria began in 1954, Fanon secretly joined the Algerian National Liberation Front (FALN). By 1956 as the fight for liberation increased, he wrote a letter of resignation from his hospital position and committed himself totally to the fight for Algerian independence while making a total break with his identity as a colonial subject of France. By 1957 he was deported from Algeria by the French government. After secretly returning to Algeria through Tunis, he joined the editorial board of El Moudjahid, the newspaper of the FALN. It was a position he held until his death. His book Toward the African Revolution is composed of many of his shorter writings for El Moudjahid and was posthumously published. Fanon rose to leadership in the FALN. He was appointed as the ambassador to Ghana for the Provisional Algerian Government. This was significant because Algeria was his adopted country, and he was not a Muslim. Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia after a period of international travel for the FALN. After medical treatment in the Soviet Union proved unsuccessful, he was admitted to the United States for further treatment under the auspices of the Central Intelligence Agency. While in his hospital bed he penned—with the aid of his wife, Josie—his final and best-known book, The Wretched of the Earth. Frantz Fanon died in December 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland. He was buried with honors in his adopted country of Algeria. Fanon is arguably one of the most critical contributors to Black Power thought of the 1960s. While his active participation in the Algerian War and his commitment to anticolonial African nationalism are central to the respect he garnered in the United States among proponents of Black Power, it was his writings on race theory and anticolonial political philosophy that propelled him into the pantheon of Black Power thinkers and influencers, such as Malcolm X and Kwame Ture. In his short life Fanon published four important books, two of which, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, can be viewed as essential reading for understanding the ideas and practices of the Black Power Movement of the late 20th century. While these two books define two distinct periods and shifting worldviews over Fanon’s life, they were and continue to be his most enduring and influential productions. Like many young Black intellectuals of the Francophone African diaspora, Fanon was very much influenced in his early years by the negritude philosophy initiated by Black Francophone writers such as Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Negritude was a literary movement with beginnings in



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the 1930s and 1940s that focused on and asserted the centrality of Black identity and African cultural heritage. Some have argued that the negritude movement was a predecessor to the cultural nationalist movement of the 1960s and the Afrocen­ tricity movement beginning in the 1980s. Though Fanon clearly repudiated many of the racialist ideas of negritude in later years, the philosophical focus on Black identity and consciousness seems to be critical to the ideas of Black Skin, White Masks, which is an exploration of the psychological impact of racism and white supremacy on the lived experience of colonized Black people. Intending this to be his doctoral dissertation, Fanon closely examines the relationship of colonization and dehumanization to emerging Black consciousness. Relying on his training in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory, he posits that Black consciousness is mediated by the white gaze. Making an argument similar to that of W. E. B. Du Bois (2008), Fanon argues that under the white gaze, Blacks experience a divided consciousness and a sense of inferiority and subordination to whites. He argues that from the perspective of colonized Black life, true humanity can only be attained through imitations of white language, culture, and values, though even these attempts are experienced as inferior imitations, which he explains in the metaphor of the white mask. For advocates of Black Power, Black Skin, White Mask became a powerful analysis and explanation of the psychology of white supremacy and its impact on Black colonized subjects. Even more significant than Fanon’s first book, his last, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), is not only one of the most significant contributions to Black Power philosophy of the 20th century but also continues to be a critical text for postcolonial theory of the 21st century. This final and most significant text is an in-depth forensic examination of colonialism and resistance to it. In the book, Fanon begins with an interrogation of the significance, meaning, and real-life impact of violence on the relationship between the European colonizer and the colonized. A Dying Colonialism, Fanon’s analysis of the Algerian War and the dialectic of culture and political development to emerge from that war, contributed strongly to revolutionary Black nationalist theory of culture and politics, while Toward the African Revolution documents Fanon’s political thought as he wrote political analysis and commentary for the FALN’s political paper El Moudjahid. Together these books provide the theoretical basis for an internationalist and Pan-Africanist understanding of Black Power and the relationship of the Black revolution in the United States to the worldwide anticolonial nationalist struggles of the late 20th century. Though Fanon died before he was 40 years old, his body of work and his documented action as a nationalist and internationalist ensured his place in the list of honored Pan-Africanists and revolutionaries of the anticolonial nationalist struggles and the theories that had the greatest impact on the Black Power Movement of the 1960s. Makungu M. Akinyela

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See also: Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Pan-Africanism; Revolutionary Nationalism Further Reading Bulhan, H. 2010. Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression. New York: Plenum. Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense. 2015. Göran Hugo Olsson (filmmaker), DVD, Sweden. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. 2008. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1965. A Dying Colonialism. English translation. New York: Grove. Fanon, Frantz. 1994. Toward the African Revolution. English translation. New York: Grove. Fanon, Frantz. 2005. The Wretched of the Earth. English translation. New York: Grove. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. English translation. New York: Grove. Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask. 1996. Isaac Julien (filmmaker), DVD, England. Macey, D. 2002. Frantz Fanon. New York: Picador. Wyrick, Deborah. 2014. Fanon for Beginners. n.p. Amazon Digital Services.

Forman, James (1928–2005) Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1928, James Forman was an activist, political organizer, and author. He is most notable for his work and leadership with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s, which produced the Black Power political programs in the South, and for ushering in the Black Power Movement with the call of “Black Power” during James Meredith’s March against Fear in June 1966. During the Black Power era, Forman became primarily known for his role as the chief architect of the controversial document the Black Manifesto, which charged church organizations for their role in slavery, and for his demand for financial reparations to African Americans and their descendants who were affected by chattel slavery. Forman’s early upbringing began with his maternal grandmother and his aunt in Marshall County, Mississippi, during the Great Depression. While in the South, Forman received his initial academic tutelage from his aunt, a schoolteacher who identified Forman’s penchant for learning and analytic skill. It was also during this time in the South for Forman that he received his first experiences with Jim Crow and witnessed the horrors of lynching. By 1935, he returned to Chicago to live with his mother. He became an avid reader of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T.



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Washington, and the Chicago Defender, through which he received early politicization from reading the articles and commentary on the happenings of Black people in Chicago and around the globe. After a challenging start as an adolescent during his early high school years, Forman excelled academically to become an honors student. He completed his high school experiences with ROTC training and graduated at the rank of lieutenant. Upon graduation, Forman joined the U.S. Air Force in Okinawa during the Korean War for a period of four years. After his discharge he enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he stayed for one semester before leaving due to being arrested and brutally beaten by police while under suspicion for burglary. In 1954 Forman returned to Chicago and enrolled at Roosevelt University. There he developed a greater sociopolitical awareness and became active in social causes at Roosevelt and around the city of Chicago. Encouraged through this relationship with the anthropologist and sociologist St. Clair Drake, Forman delved into the study of Africa and motivated other Roosevelt students to form study groups on African history, imperialism, and colonialism. Drake’s mentorship and the hotbed of political climate that was encouraged through debate among students and faculty at Roosevelt University gave Forman an early training ground to hone his skills as a young radical. Additionally, during Forman’s tenure at Roosevelt he advanced to become president of the student body and graduated in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in public administration. Encouraged and recommended by Drake, Forman decided to attend Boston University following his time at Roosevelt University. Drake, who identified Forman’s potential for leadership, encouraged Forman to hone his academic skills and further develop his talents as a writer. His writing skills had become strikingly apparent during Forman’s time as a staff writer for the university’s school newspaper. Forman attended to Drake’s suggestions, applied, and was accepted into the African Research and Study Program at Boston University. Forman, who desired to engage in the Civil Rights struggle full-time, was ambivalent about Boston University and redirected his motivations toward the liberation of Black people, both domestically and abroad. He then left Boston and headed back to Chicago to resume his role as a journalist for the Chicago Defender. While working for the Chicago Defender in 1958, Forman was sent to the South to cover the events in Little Rock, Arkansas: the dismantling of school segregation and the general milieu of education and life for Blacks in the South. While he was in Little Rock, his activist motivations were further inspired by the social injustices he witnessed in the South. Determined to not vacillate from his stance of becoming actively engaged in the Civil Rights struggle, Forman became intentional in his avoidance of being labeled as an armchair activist. Thus, he became active with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and later in 1960 he became a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and worked for its

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Emergency Relief Committee, writing press releases for the Chicago Defender and continuing to advocate for the rights of Black workers on a national scale. Forman returned to Tennessee to advocate for sharecroppers who had been evicted from their homes for their political participation and for registering to vote. During that same year and while still a member of CORE, he came in contact with several Freedom Riders of SNCC who began to recruit him to utilize his expertise for the greater benefit of SNCC. One year later in the fall of 1961, Forman moved to the South and began to work with SNCC full-time as the executive secretary. He intended to dedicate himself to the overarching cause of social justice in the Civil Rights Movement as a member of SNCC. As the executive secretary of SNCC, which was arguably the most significant position in the organization, Forman was charged with coordinating projects and their development at various project sites, facilitating and maintaining communication among the various chapters, and fund-raising and establishing support networks across the nation to ensure the life of the overall organization. Because of the experiences Forman acquired as an officer in the military, a journalist, a business administrator, an elementary school teacher, a student leader, and a graduate student with proclivity for African history and anti-imperial liberation movements across the globe, he was primed to provide his leadership to assist in propelling SNCC into the vanguard of the national student movement. While executive secretary for SNCC, Forman worked for voter registration drives across the South with an emphasis in Mississippi for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and in Alabama for the Lowndes County Freedom Party. Not one to shy away from confrontation and critique or the rampant violence and terror in the South that threatened the lives of SNCC members, Forman was charged with violating riot laws stemming from demonstrations in Georgia. He continued to act as executive secretary until 1966, managing worker activity and coordinating activities around food, transportation, and housing for student volunteers. During his time as executive secretary, Forman was responsible for establishing the Friends of SNCC network that was highly significant in providing SNCC with funds and additional resources coming from northern cities and states. As SNCC leadership evolved to become more militant after the call for Black Power in 1966, Forman found himself increasingly at odds with SNCC leaders H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. Additionally, in 1967 after Forman’s failure to negotiate a merger with the Black Panther Party and SNCC, Forman began to shift his political and activist intentions as he became the international affairs director, traveling throughout the African continent, and began to develop relationships with other Black organizations. Upon Forman’s return to the United States from a meeting at the Organization of African Unity, he was asked to deliver the



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keynote address at the Western Regional Youth Conference in Los Angeles on November 23, 1967. The first Black Power Conference held earlier in July of that same year in Newark, New Jersey, inspired the conference and theme “Liberation Will Come from a Black Thing.” The western version brought together over 800 Black youths from the western regions of the United States. Addressing the conference goers, Forman, who had undertaken vigorous study of Frantz Fanon, began his speech with a quote from Fanon on colonization that dovetailed into a poem, “Liberation Will Come from a Black Thing”; transitioned into Forman’s appeal to the crowd for Black revolution; and continued on through a serious analysis of colonialism and imperialism. The conference also produced the first plans for Black athletes to boycott the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. By the end of 1968, Forman transitioned out of SNCC and began to seek out political ideologies and complementary activism that mirrored his evolving perspectives. Thus, he relocated his energies and shifted perspectives on the movement to Detroit, where he began to work with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). While Forman was in Detroit with members of the LRBW, he developed and delivered the Black Manifesto at the Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit in April 1969. The manifesto, a reparations document, called for religious groups to pay $500 million for their roles in the chattel slavery of Blacks in America. Forman later delivered the Black Manifesto in May of that same year when he interrupted a Sunday service at the Riverside Church in New York City. Forman’s actions, though viewed by many as revolutionary, stimulated an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for extortion. A few years later in 1974 Forman developed a nonprofit social action organization, the Unemployment Poverty Action Committee, which served as a platform to support his political and activist endeavors. By 1980 Forman settled in Washington, D.C., and throughout the early 1980s he dedicated himself to academia, obtaining a master’s degree from Cornell University in African and African American studies and later a PhD in philosophy from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities in Cincinnati, Ohio. While living in Washington, Forman founded the Washington Times newspaper as well as the Black American News Service. As a prolific writer, Forman published several works, including Sammy Younge, Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement, The Political Thought of James Forman, and his memoir, The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Forman died after a bout with colon cancer in January 2005 at age 76. Richard D. Benson II See also: Black Panther Party; Congress of Racial Equality; League of Revolutionary Black Workers; March Against Fear; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

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Further Reading Carson, Clayborne. 1995. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Forman, James. 1968. Sammy Younge, Jr.: The First Black Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement. New York: Grove. Forman, James. 1997. The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Wilkins, F. C. 2007. “The Making of Black Internationalists: SNCC and Africa before the Launching of Black Power, 1960–1965.” Journal of African American History 92(4): 468. Zinn, Howard. 1964. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Boston: Beacon.

Fuller, Hoyt (1923–1981) Hoyt Fuller was a magazine editor, publisher, writer, and Black Power activist who used his skill and expertise to give Black Americans a platform to tell their stories. Fuller set the stage by focusing his efforts on the poetry and writings of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Fuller made his name in the communications industry as the editor of Negro Digest, a magazine produced by John H. Johnson of the Johnson Publishing Company. Fuller had a desire to uplift the beauty of Blackness and demonstrated this commitment by his actions throughout his career.

Career Highlights Fuller was mentored by Johnson in Chicago, which led to Fuller’s appointment as editor of the Johnson Publishing Company’s Negro Digest. Fuller served as Negro Digest editor from 1961 to 1976. The politically moderate reputation of Negro Digest was transformed to a platform for more revolutionary debate through Fuller’s involvement (Nishikawa 2016). Progression in the publication was achieved through highlighting the vast creativity of the Black Arts Movement. Also referred to as the Black aesthetics movement, this period of time during the 1960s and 1970s celebrated Black culture in the form of poetry, theater, and visual arts. This art was created while reflecting the racial tension of the times. Fuller was devoted to supporting the Black Arts Movement by placing it on a national stage in addition to local community efforts in Chicago and throughout the nation. Fuller’s ambitions of supporting the Black Arts Movement expanded through the creation of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) in Chicago. The OBAC was cofounded by Fuller and other like-minded individuals as a



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vehicle to support BAM artists and their endeavors to spread their message of Black excellence. One of the ways OBAC promoted that effort was through the creation of another magazine, titled Nommo, which Fuller also edited from 1969 to 1973. With influence in both Negro Digest and Nommo, Fuller had the opportunity to emphasize BAM through a large readership in Negro Digest and on a smaller scale with Nommo.

Contributions to Black Power Although the state of race relations in the United States has a long, sordid history, Fuller became totally disheartened in 1957 as a result of the Little Rock Nine crisis. Nine Black high school students faced angry, violent protests as they attempted to satisfy the Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) decision and integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. This egregious historical event caused Fuller to take a sabbatical from “American apartheid” (West 2012). Fuller spent most of his time away in Europe working as a journalist and also spent a short symbolic stint in Africa for cultural renewal. Fuller’s travels benefited his Negro Digest editing duties, as new perspectives and connections assisted in his efforts to universalize the Black experience. Once he returned to the United States, Fuller continued to place his energy into promoting BAM through grassroots artistic programming in Chicago, often advertised and reported on in Nommo. He posited that progress would not take place in isolation, and in that vein the OBAC integrated the community into the movement through programs such as the Young Writer’s Workshop. The Young Writer’s Workshop cultivated community youths through teaching and learning sessions as well as allowing young writers the opportunity to share their work through performances. It was through these actions that Fuller sought to build a foundation in defining the Black aesthetic for Black youths. Since the principal theme of the Black Arts Movement concentrated on the discovery of personal political consciousness (Nishikawa 2016), Nommo-supported programs such as the youth workshop were quite apropos. While Nommo had a strong focus on community efforts, Fuller renamed Negro Digest as Black World in 1970 and insisted on continuing to concentrate on the political nature of the times, highlighting the work of BAM artists on a national scope. Fuller asserted that “the black revolt is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets, and if it has not yet made its impact upon the Literary Establishment, then the nature of the revolt itself is the revolt” (Nishikawa 2016). The content of Black World reflected this sentiment, containing selections of poetry, song lyrics, excerpts from plays, biographies, reviews, political cartoons, and even excerpts from church sermons. The publication covered subjects such as the presence of Blacks on television, Pan-Africanism, capitalism, and politics related to the United States and the

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African diaspora. Black feminism was also addressed—in fact, Black female writers often shared their voices as contributors to articles within the publication. In keeping with the movement’s unity objective, advertisements in the publication reflected products important to the Black community. The inside back cover of Black World led with the headline “Down Deep, We Should Know” followed by a closing message. Universality was discussed, demonstrating how Black World was distributed internationally and how the resiliency and creativity of Black Americans are paramount. Reverence was given to the Black Panthers and their show of selfdetermination with a clinched fist and also how Black Americans should protect our lives and institutions from the ravages of Euro-Americans. The sentiments ended by stating that our charge was not to prove to the world our worth but instead to prove it to ourselves. The final copy line read “Knowledge is the Key to a Better Tomorrow—Read Black World—On Sale at your Favorite Newsstand.” Letitia Thornton See also: Black Aesthetic; Black Arts Movement; Publications Further Reading Fuller, Hoyt, and Dudley Randall. 1984. Homage to Hoyt Fuller. Detroit: Broadside. Fuller, Hoyt W. 1971. Journey to Africa. Chicago: Third World. Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay. 1996. “Hoyt Fuller.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1852–1858. New York: Norton. Nishikawa, K. 2016. “Between the World and Nommo: Hoyt W. Fuller and Chicago’s Black Arts Magazines.” Chicago Review (4): 143. Sandiford, Keith A. P. 2008. A Black Studies Primer: Heroes and Heroines of the African Diaspora. London: Hansib Publications. West, M. O. 2012. “Little Rock as America: Hoyt Fuller, Europe, and the Little Rock Racial Crisis of 1957.” Journal of Southern History 78(4): 913–942.

G Garvin, Victoria “Vicki” Ama (1915–2007) In notes for a talk for the National Black United Front, a leading Black Power organization of the 1980s, Vicki Garvin outlined her analysis of gender and race as intersecting forces in the struggle for Black liberation, asserting that “Our men also are victims of racial discrimination, exploitation & oppression. But women as a whole bear an additional burden of male supremacy & inequality with men.” For Garvin, the question of gender inequality had “been and will continue to be a long, tough and complex battle,” but it was a battle that Garvin viewed as central to Black liberation. Garvin’s perspective on the “woman’s question” and the struggle for Black liberation had been shaped by over five decades of revolutionary politics and strategic leadership in a range of organizations and across three continents. Moreover, as a self-proclaimed “Pan-Africanist . . . [and] proletarian, working class, internationalist,” Garvin helped articulate a vision of Black Power with Black feminist, diasporic, and working-class ideological and political commitments at its core. Garvin represents a unique form of Black Power politics that was honed over a lifetime of political work. She was involved in the 1930s radical milieu of Harlem, held membership in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), organized labor with the National Negro Labor Council in the 1940s and 1950s, and was an expatriate in Accra, Ghana, and in communist China in the 1960s. Garvin’s capacious politics, critical analyses, and long-standing Black feminist and nationalist leanings were developed through her formal and informal education in Marxist theory, her training in trade union work, and her membership in New York’s Black Left. Indeed, Garvin can be counted among a network of veteran Black leftists who advocated a class-conscious Black Power politics during the 1940s and 1950s and would go on to mentor and find common cause with a range of Black Power activists and organizations during the late 1960s and 1970s. Garvin was born into a working-class family in Richmond, Virginia, in 1915. Her belief in Black liberation and socialist revolution as well as her long-standing Black feminist and nationalist leanings were developed through labor and feminist politics, her training in trade union work, and New York’s Black Left. When Garvin was 10 years old her parents moved her and her younger sister to New York in search of better opportunities. Arriving on the cusp of the Great Depression, Garvin’s parents struggled to find employment, and her father, a skilled plasterer,

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and her mother were both forced to accept menial low-paying work to sustain the family. Garvin’s experiences in Harlem and her parents’ encounters with the employment color line had a lasting impact on her class politics. These beliefs also took shape during her time in the politicized atmosphere of Hunter College, where she studied political science, as well as the streets of Harlem, where she joined her first picket line in the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” protest, which demanded employment for Black workers in the shops along 125th Street. By 1936 as a newly minted college graduate, Garvin begin to deepen her involvement with the U.S. Left as she took a job as a switchboard operator for the CPUSA-affiliated American League for Peace and Democracy and became an active union member in the Left-led Congress of Industrial Organization’s United Office and Professionals Workers of America (UOPWA). These affiliations would lead Garvin to graduate study, as she was invited to study economics at Smith College under the mentorship of Marxist economist Dorothy Douglass. Garvin graduated in 1942 with a master’s degree in economics and a new perspective on politics and the world. Seeking employment during World War II, she became a wage stabilization officer for the National Labor War Board and by 1946 moved on to full-time union work as the national research director for the UOPWA. Although Garvin followed a circuitous route, these early years of activism eventually led her to join the CPUSA in 1947, and she emerged as a respected voice in New York’s Black Left during the 1950s. Garvin would combine her trade union work with activism in a number of Black women–led and CPUSA–affiliated united front organizations, including as leadership in the Manhattan chapter of the National Negro Congress directed by Thelma Dales and in the United Women’s Committee to Save the Ingram Family with Harlem activist Audley “Queen Mother” Moore. As Cold War anticommunism and government surveillance threatened the U.S. Left, progressive unions, and Black political organizations more broadly, Garvin and many Black leftists were purged from trade union jobs. Garvin and the Black Left turned these concerted attacks into opportunity as they created a powerful network of Black-led leftist organizations, exemplified by the founding of the National Negro Labor Council (NNLC) in Cleveland in 1951. For Garvin, the NNLC proved to be one of her most profound experiences of collective action and political community, as it fought for Black workers’ leadership and rights with particular attention to the struggles of Black women workers. In this space Garvin not only organized alongside committed Black radicals, but as an interracial labor organization under Black leadership, the NNLC’s success demonstrated to Garvin that “white workers will unite with us [Black workers] under our leadership” and provided “concrete proof that despite pressure and hysteria [of Cold War anticommunism] Negro people will remain firm in their support of genuine struggles for progress.” The broader community of New York’s CPUSA-affiliated Black Left included William Patterson of the Civil Rights Congress; leading Black intellectuals Paul



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Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Louis Burnham who all worked on the Freedom newspaper; and a powerful community of Black women radicals that included Shirley Graham Du Bois, Thelma Dale, Louis Thompson Patterson, Lorraine Hansberry, and Alice Childress. These leftists placed front and center a sharp critique of U.S. racial and economic oppression and imperialist policies as they created space to sustain a Black radical politics. It was in her role as a central figure in this network, including as a contributor to Freedom and a supporter of the Civil Rights Congress, that Garvin first met Robert and Mabel Williams a few years before their embrace of armed self-reliance in North Carolina and mentored Malcolm X in his pre–Nation of Islam days. Indeed, this dynamic network of Black leftists helped to set the political groundwork for the Black Power and Black feminist movements that would emerge years later. By 1956 many of the CPUSA-affiliated organizations that fueled Garvin’s activism in the Black freedoms struggle had closed their doors because of government-led anticommunist attacks. Yet, Garvin and the dynamic group of New York Black leftists continued to seek out new sites for activism both in the United States and abroad. In 1960 Garvin was central in the formation of the Negro Women’s Action Committee, which counted Louise Thompson Patterson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Maude White Katz among its members. These Black women, “having persevered in [the] past,” committed themselves “anew to march forward in supporting our youth in whatever form and manner possible.” The organization also had an explicitly anticolonial and diasporic politics, even as it was less explicit about its communist affiliations. Indeed, the continuation of anticommunist red-baiting that saturated the Civil Rights Movement and the broader U.S. political landscape led Garvin to look outside the United States for other sites of Black revolutionary struggle. In 1961 she moved to Nigeria and soon after relocated to Ghana, where she joined Shirley Graham, W. E. B. Du Bois, and a host of other Black radicals in support of Kwame Nkrumah’s Pan-African– and socialist-inspired nation-building vision. In Accra, Garvin joined strategic efforts to articulate the transnational solidarity between Black liberation in the United States and decolonizing countries on the continent and to make visible the U.S. government’s attempts to contain and disrupt these efforts. It was also in Ghana that Garvin reconnected with Malcolm X, as she, Alice Windom, and Maya Angelou organized his visit to Accra. Although Nkrumah’s socialist project failed, Garvin continued to view her transnational solidarity work in revolutionary anti-imperialist countries as a valuable learning experience and contribution to the Black freedom struggle. In 1964 she accepted an invitation to live and work in Shanghai as an English-language teacher. Garvin’s investments in China’s revolution were shared by a number of Black radicals including Black Power luminary Robert Williams and his wife Mabel, who arrived in China in 1964 following years of political exile in Cuba. In

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China, Garvin served as a representative of the African American and women’s liberation struggles in the United States and affirmed the Chinese Communist Party as a global leader of the revolutionary movement and Mao Zedong’s support of Black liberation. As such, Garvin provided a transnational conduit between China and a burgeoning U.S. Black Power Movement that looked to decolonizing countries for revolutionary models, even as she witnessed firsthand the brutal process of revolutionary change during the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Garvin left China in 1970, returning to the United States as many social movement organizations were embracing revolutionary politics and Marxist theorizing. Entering a political landscape deeply engaged in Black revolutionary and communist politics, Garvin drew on her years of experience as a strategic thinker, organizer, and foot soldier in the Black freedom struggle to engage with a range of leftist and Black Power organizations, including briefly joining the Maoist-oriented Revolutionary Communist Party, mentoring a younger generation of Black revolutionary activists, and reconnecting with many of her comrades from the Black Left of the 1950s. Indeed, Garvin would remain active for much of her life, as she “retired from paid employment but not political activity” and remained relevant as a veteran activist well into the 21st century in organizations such as Black Workers’ for Justice, Sisters Against South African Apartheid, and the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. Garvin’s lifelong commitment to “educate, organize and agitate” not only situates her role as a long-distance runner but also highlights her brand of Black Power politics, informed by Black feminist and Black workingclass solidarity, as a political vision that helped sustain the Black liberation struggle for more than half a century. Dayo F. Gore See also: Communist International and Black Power; Malcolm X; Mao Zedong; Williams, Mabel Further Reading Elbaum, Max. 2002. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. New York: Verso. Gaines, Kevin K. 2006. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Garvin papers, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Gore, Dayo F. 2011. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York: NYU Press. McDuffie, Eric, and Komozi Woodard. 2012. “‘If You’re in a Country That’s Progressive, the Woman Is Progressive’: Black Women Radicals and the Making of the Politics and Legacy of Malcom X.” Biography 36(3) (Summer): 507–539.



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William, Rhonda Y. 2015. Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century. New York: Routledge.

Giovanni, Nikki (1943–) Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. was born on June 7, 1943, to Yolanda and Jones Giovanni in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her older sister called her Nikki. Although born in Knoxville, Giovanni and her family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. During the summer months Nikki returned to Knoxville to visit her grandparents. In 1958, she permanently moved there to live with them. Of her childhood Giovanni recalls being a sickly child who stayed home. However, staying home due to illness meant that she could read from her mother’s library, which included Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and John Hershey. In addition to reading, Giovanni also enjoyed music. She listened to all types of music regardless of race, including the spirituals and the operatic voice of Leontyne Price. These early memories would be foundational in Giovanni’s development as a writer and poet. She became one of the most celebrated poets of the Black Arts Movement, known for expressive and emotional writing on love, loss, family, gender, racism, activism, and revolutionary perspectives.

Education Giovanni began writing as a child. She would read various types of books and watch B movies and then write stories and hide them. As Giovanni continued to come of age, her writing would not remain hidden. During her formative year, she attended several schools. Her middle school years at St. Simon’s School were very important because it was there where she met Sister Althea Augustine, who ultimately became a lifelong friend. In the ninth grade Giovanni attended the allBlack school Lockland High in Cincinnati and subsequently attended Austin High School after moving to Knoxville with her grandparents. She then received early admittance into Fisk University in 1959. After disagreements with the dean of women, Giovanni was dismissed in February 1961 but then returned after a sojourn back to Cincinnati. It was during her return to Fisk that Giovanni’s brilliance and political activism became apparent. She organized a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chapter and ultimately completed her undergraduate degree in history with honors. Giovanni also received a Ford Foundation Fellowship and entered the University of Pennsylvania and then later enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts Program at Columbia University. Of Columbia she says “No degree there either but Columbia does owe me. The requirement was ‘in two years you

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must write a book.’ I wrote a book in a bit less than a year. I wanted my degree and to go on. It’s still a discussion Columbia and I have though I admit I keep losing” (Nikki Giovanni n.d.). The late 1960s saw a rise in the Black Arts and Black Power Movements. In 1967 Giovanni became an organizer of the Black Arts Festival in Cincinnati. Then in 1968 she borrowed money and published her first volume, Black Feeling, Black Talk, and distributed it herself. After the success of her first book, Giovanni secured funds and published Black Judgement in 1969. These first two volumes of poetry were personal in nature but also reflected the perspectives of the Black community. Giovanni wrote about growing up in Knoxville and the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Robert Kennedy. Other early works by Giovanni includes Re: Creation, published by Broadside Press in 1970. In addition to politics, Re: Creation reflects Giovanni’s musings around identity and womanhood inspired by her pregnancy and the ultimate birth of her son. In 1971 Giovanni published Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Poet. In this short book, she reflects on her family history, her childhood, and becoming a writer in the midst of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. Giovanni further offers ideological insights on being Black in the United States during that tumultuous era. She identifies as a revolutionary poet and notes that “We, as beginning revolutionists, ought to understand that . . . facts are only tools to gain control over yourself and other people. So white folks develop facts about us; we are developing facts about them. In the end it’s always a power struggle.” Giovanni further elaborates on Blackness, which she sees as a symbol of spirituality within. She also states that “when Black people have been recorders we have sought truth; when white people used these tools they sought dreams.” Giovanni also became a well-known figure on the lecture circuit. Some of her earnings were used to support her writing but also to maintain Encore American and Worldwide News, a published newspaper of which Giovanni served as editor. She also became editor of Night Comes Softly, an anthology of Black female writers featured on the television program SOUL! Giovanni’s dedication to Black Arts resulted in local and national coverage, which hailed her as a poet of the Black Arts Movement. As with all public figures, Giovanni has received criticism. Of note is her waning differences with poet Amiri Baraka. For instance, she was not included in Amiri and Amina Baraka’s anthology Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, published in 1983. “The exclusion was explained in a footnote as action taken because she had traveled in South African in 1982” (Fowler 1992). This is following the exclusion of Giovanni in the 1968 anthology Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writers, edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal. Giovanni also faced criticism from the literary establishment. Fowler notes that “To many in the literary establishment, her popularity among ordinary people has



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been sufficient evidence that her work is second-rate.” These criticisms did not and have not deterred Giovanni from continuing to write and publish her work. Nikki Giovanni has had an illustrious career as a poet. To date, she has published anthologies and children’s literature and has recorded her poems onto albums to the backdrop of spirituals and the blues. Her work continues to be influenced by her life and politics. Giovanni’s poetry was recently included in the anthology SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (2014), edited by John H. Bracey, Sonia Sanchez, and James Edward Smethurst. Giovanni is currently a distinguished professor and a recipient of numerous awards including the NAACP Image Awards, and she was a finalist for a Grammy in the category of Best Spoken Word at the 46th Annual Grammy Awards. She also received the first Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award (2002) and the National Parenting Publications Gold Award for her book Hip Hop Speaks to Children. T. J. Robinson See also: Bambara, Toni Cade; Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Arts Move­ ment; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Fowler, Virginia C. 1992. Nikki Giovanni. Twayne’s United States Authors Series, Tusas 613. New York: Twayne. Giovanni, Nikki. 1970a. Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement. New York: W. Morrow. Giovanni, Nikki. 1970b. Re: Creation. Detroit: Broadside. Giovanni, Nikki. 1976. Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet. 1972; reprint, New York: Viking. Nikki Giovanni. n.d. http://www.nikki-giovanni.com.

Group on Advanced Leadership (1961–1965) In 1961 Reverend Albert Cleage Jr. (Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman) and the Henry brothers, Milton (Gaidi Obadele) and Richard (Imari Obadele) formed the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL) in Detroit, Michigan. As an all-Black organization, GOAL functioned as a radical alternative to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. GOAL published Illustrated News, an independent community newspaper that discussed issues related to discrimination and employment. It was also well known for its castigation of so-called Uncle Toms, African Americans who chose party politics and self-interest over the collective needs of African Americans. When GOAL formed, its publicist and president, Richard Henry, was employed by the U.S. Tank-Automotive Center in Warren,

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Michigan, as a technical manuals writer. Reverend Cleage was the pastor of Central Congregational Church, which he later renamed Shrine of the Black Madonna. And finally, Milton Henry was a lawyer and businessman. Milton Henry often used his legal expertise to litigate on behalf of GOAL. Cleage and C. L. Franklin were members of the liberal Detroit Council of Human Rights (DCHR). In 1963 the DCHR organized the Northern Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC), a partner to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Cleage and Franklin parted ways over attempts to form the NCLC as the equivalent of the SCLC. Cleage wanted to invite activists who were associated with radical groups, including the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Nation of Islam, and UHURU. In response to the DCHR and Franklin’s opposition to his invitations, Cleage abandoned the DCHR to organize a rival meeting that welcomed a wide range of Black radicals. This new assembly, the Northern Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference, was a grassroots effort to distinguish the Civil Rights establishment that was associated with Franklin from the growing Black radical moment that was percolating on the ground. This conference was especially important to the intellectual development of the Black Power Movement. During this conference, Malcolm X delivered his speech “Message to the Grass Roots.” In this speech he challenged the wisdom of nonviolence as a philosophy and tactic. He laid bare the differences between liberal and nationalist goals of the Black freedom movement and charged Black radicals with thinking in revolutionary and international terms. Although GOAL is most recognized for its affiliation with Malcolm X, the organization was also important in the struggle to bring African American candidates into city politics and to community organizing around police brutality, housing, and racial segregation in public schooling. GOAL was heavily influenced by Cleage’s Black radicalism and Black Christian nationalism. In his position as a leader of GOAL, Cleage used the organization to increase the presence of African Americans in electoral politics. In 1961, GOAL utilized its political clout in the Black community to win Democratic candidate Jerome Cavanagh the mayoral election. As a challenge to the Democratic political machine in Detroit, GOAL also ran its own candidates on an independent slate. These were largely candidates with grassroots commitments, such as Frederick Yates. In 1962, GOAL filed a lawsuit against the Detroit Board of Education because school officials had gerrymandered school boundaries, which led to majority white schools transitioning into majority Black schools over the course of a decade. The suit demanded the hiring of additional Black teachers and administrators and claimed that textbooks should prohibit the use of derogatory and stereotypical images of African Americans. The lawsuit never went to trial, since some progress had been made in desegregating the schools. GOAL also organized the Black community to oppose the Board of Education’s request to increase the



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millage tax, which would have provided additional funding for Detroit Public Schools. According to Cleage, Black Detroiters had supported such measures in the past but had yet to receive their fair share of the funding. The bond and millage election failed to garner enough support at the polls to pass. This opposition was a form of protest against second-class education for Black children. The organization initiated two lawsuits against urban renewal in Detroit, or what they termed “Negro removal.” Urban renewal policies of the early 1960s sought to clear blighted areas throughout the city and produced privately owned housing projects that required exorbitant rental rates. This practice made new housing inaccessible to a large swath of Black Detroiters. GOAL questioned whether the city had a constitutional right to implement the Urban Renewal Redevelopment Program because it destroyed citizens’ homes to make way for a private housing market. The first lawsuit challenged an urban renewal project that would have uprooted Black businesses along Eight Mile Road. Developers had planned to replace this strip with a mall that would have likely refused to offer space to Black businesses. The second lawsuit challenged the development of the medical center, which would have taken property away from Black churches and businesses without uprooting white businesses. In addition to its engagement with municipal politics, GOAL helped to develop the leadership of UHURU, a youth-led Black nationalist group. UHURU was led by General Gordon Baker, Charles Johnson, Gwendolyn Kemp, Luke Tripp, John Williams, and John Watson. In 1963, UHURU was charged with hissing and jeering at city officials during a committee meeting that sought to bring the 1968 Olympics to Detroit. As the group’s defense attorney, Milton Henry won an acquittal of their charges. UHURU would also help GOAL organize the Black community to protest the police killing of a Black woman named Cynthia Scott. In addition to its work in electoral politics, education, and housing, GOAL fought against police brutality in Black communities. In 1964 Scott, a Black sex worker, had a confrontation with Detroit police officers who charged her with soliciting. According to police reports, Scott charged at the officers with a knife. They shot her twice in the back and once in the stomach. Milton Henry, along with other GOAL lawyers, helped Scott’s mother file a $5 million lawsuit against the police department and the offending officers. UHURU and GOAL organized protests during the Scott case to call for an end to police brutality and pressured the Detroit Police Department to end discrimination in hiring for the department. That same year GOAL formed the Medgar Evers Rifle Club, one of many such clubs in the long tradition of Black armed self-defense. GOAL also supported the Fox and Wolf Hunt Club, which was initiated by Richard Henry. In Henry’s estimation, every Black family in Detroit should own a gun. By the end of the decade, Cleage and the Henry brothers split over ideological differences. Cleage’s brand of Black nationalism had failed to demand land for

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Black Americans, while the Henry brothers’ conceptions of nationalism placed such calls at the center of their politics. Cleage saw the Black nation as a political, cultural, and spiritual entity, not a physical one. Years later, Milton and Richard changed their names to Gaidi Obadele and Imari Obadele and formed the Malcolm X Society and ultimately the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa. Dara R. Walker See also: King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X; Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry); UHURU Further Reading Dillard, Angela. 2007. Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Fine, Sidney. 2007. Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Joseph, Peniel E. 2006. Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. Reprint ed. New York: Holt Paperbacks. Mirel, Jeffrey. 1993. The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1907– 1981. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Smith, Suzanne. 1999. Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

H Hampton, Fred, Sr. (1948–1969) Fred Hampton was one of the greatest young political activists to emerge during the Black Power Movement. Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), was brutally murdered in his prime by the Chicago police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Fred Hampton Sr. was born in Blue Island, Illinois, on August 30, 1948. He started his political career while he was a student at Proviso East High School. He helped found the Maywood chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was admired by both Blacks and whites as an influential youth leader. He attended Triton Junior College in 1966 and by the fall of 1967 had attended Crane Junior College on Chicago’s West Side. Crane Junior College, later known as Malcolm X College, was a central meeting place for Black activists. In 1968, Hampton founded the Illinois and Chicago chapters of the BPP. The BPP was a national organization dedicated to the liberation of Black people. Hampton was a gifted leader who made the Chicago BPP one of the most prominent branches in the country. He strove to alleviate the oppression of Black people and improve their living conditions. He established several community service programs that included free breakfasts for children, a free medical clinic, and political education classes. Hampton was a charismatic public speaker who instilled hope and pride in many Chicagoans throughout the city. He spoke out against police brutality and advocated that members of the community defend themselves. Hampton created coalitions with other socially active groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society. He also reached across racial boundaries to build coalitions between Black, white, and Latino street gangs. Hampton and other BPP members gained national attention because they publicly advocated the use of weapons for self-defense and patrolled the community in an effort to prevent abuse by the police. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, stated that the BPP was “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” The FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was established to neutralize Black political activists and destroy their organizations. Many activists were killed or unjustly incarcerated as a result of COINTELPRO. Hampton was sent to Menard Prison for an alleged theft charge but was released on appeal after only a few months.

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Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, speaks at a rally, 1969. The rally was part of a protest against the trial of the Chicago 8, who were accused of conspiracy to cause a riot during the Democratic National Convention in 1968. (AP Photo/stf)

As a result of COINTELPRO, the Chicago BPP headquarters, located at 2350 W. Madison, was ransacked several times by the police. On December 4, 1969, Chicago police raided a nearby apartment at 2337 W. Monroe, where many BPP members slept. The police fired shots into the apartment to deliberately kill BPP leaders. Mark Clark, BPP defense captain of the Peoria, Illinois, branch, was killed first with a single shot to the heart. Hampton was killed next. Fellow BPP members heard two shots immediately before the police confirmed that Hampton was dead. There were seven survivors of the raid, including Hampton’s beloved Deborah Johnson, who was pregnant with their son. Johnson was uninjured, but four other members sustained gunshot wounds. All of them were arrested and charged with attempted murder. Thousands of community members visited the crime scene and were appalled by the apparent slaughter of these young leaders. Many concerned citizens demanded an investigation. The initial investigation, however, exonerated the police. Although no law enforcement officials were ever convicted of the crimes, subsequent investigations established that the raid was in fact a successful assassination attempt that was approved and sanctioned by the FBI. Eventually, 25,000 pages emerged that confirmed that FBI involvement had been suppressed from the evidence.



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The investigations also proved that FBI informant William O’Neal was paid handsomely for his efforts and avoided incarceration for prior criminal activity. O’Neal infiltrated the Chicago BPP and served as the chapter chief of security and Hampton’s bodyguard. O’Neal supplied the FBI with a floor plan of the apartment that was critical in the assassination plot because it indicated where members slept. Many BPP members believed that O’Neal drugged Hampton so that he would be unable to defend himself during the raid. Ballistics evidence proved that the police shot at least 200 bullets into the apartment. BPP members were ambushed and therefore unable to successfully defend themselves. As a result of the findings, the murder charges against the BPP members were dismissed. The Clark and Hampton families filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit that was eventually settled for $1.85 million. Deborah Johnson, now known as Akua Njeri, and Fred Hampton Jr. work together with the December 4th Committee to keep Fred Hampton Sr.’s legacy alive. Claudette L. Tolson (Ayodele Shaihi) See also: Black Panther Party; Counterintelligence Program Further Reading December 4th Committee. 1989. Fred Hampton 20th Commemoration. Chicago: Salsado. Hampton, Fred. 1979. We Don’t Want You Coming Here Clapping and Leaving Here Not Doing Nothing—You’ve Got to Make a Commitment! Chicago: Peoples Information Center. Hampton, William E., and Rini Templeton. 1994. The Essence of Fred Hampton. Chicago: Salsado. Madhubuti, Haki R. 1969. One Sided Shoot-Out (for Brothers Fred Hampton & Mark Clark, Murdered 12/4/69 by Chicago Police at 4:30 AM While They Slept). Detroit: Broadside.

Hare, Nathan (1933–) Nathan Hare is credited with being one of the most influential activists during the Black Power Movement for his work on college campuses. Most noted for his influence in the development of the first African American studies department in the United States, Hare’s leadership elevated the ways Blacks were portrayed, understood, and educated in academic spaces. Born on April 9, 1933, in Slick, Oklahoma, Hare knew the plight of African Americans very well. He attended L’Ouverture Elementary and High Schools, an institution named after the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture. These

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schools were a part of the city’s “Slick Separate Schools” of the late 1930s. In high school, Hare was selected to represent his class at the annual statewide Interscholastic Meet of Black students held at Langston University. Although Hare wished to become a professional boxer, his principal persuaded him to further his education after he won many scholastic competitions. Upon entering Langston University in 1950, Hare became immersed in the experiences of Black people and wished to alter their position within American society. He received an AB in sociology from Lincoln in 1954 and his first PhD from the University of Chicago in sociology in 1961. Also in 1961, Hare began working at Howard University. As an associate professor of sociology at Howard University, Hare became heavily involved with student activist groups, often advocating for the positions taken by students. For example, during the spring of 1967 he invited worldrenowned boxer Muhammad Ali to give a speech at Howard. During this period Ali had become increasingly vocal about racial discrimination and the drafting of Blacks to serve in the Vietnam War and had even declined to serve in Vietnam after ordered to do so. The university administration frowned on Hare’s invitation to Ali, seeing Howard’s association with Ali as detrimental to its image. Even still, Ali spoke at Howard before a large audience. A second example of Hare’s radical nature can be identified in his composition of the “Black University Manifesto.” On February 22, 1967, Hare held a press conference and read the document, which called for the overthrow of the Negro college with “white innards.” After several other altercations with the administration of Howard University, Hare was released from his position in 1967. After being released from Howard University’s faculty, Hare was recruited by the president of San Francisco State University (SFSU) and the Black Student Union leader of SFSU in February 1968. Upon arrival, Hare began working with the university’s Black Student Union to establish a department of Black studies at the university. For five months Hare, students, and other faculty members organized strikes and protests in order to create this department. In 1969 SFSU, through tremendous resilience, self-determination, and passion, became the first institution to have an established African American studies department (originally named the Black Studies Department), with Nathan Hare as the first chairman. The student and faculty strikes disrupted campus operations and led to the dismissal of many administration members. Unfortunately, for his role in the campus protests Hare was fired from San Francisco State University in the summer of 1969. With a long history of advocating for Blacks within American society and abroad, Hare continued his advocacy and research after being released from Howard and San Francisco State. In 1969 he partnered with colleagues Robert Chrisman and Allan Ross to found the journal Negro Scholar (renamed Black Scholar: A Journal of Black Studies and Research). According to author Mel



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Watkins, the founders of Negro Scholar wished for the journal to be a publication informed by community activism but also to serve as a hub for further activist work that addressed social inequalities based on gender, race, and class in America and abroad. Negro Scholar featured several prominent activists and scholars such as Eldridge Cleaver, Shirley Chisholm, and Stokely Carmichael. The publication was a public forum for artists, scholars, and activists that previously was unavailable to discuss issues most pertinent during the movement. Eventually Hare split from the Negro Scholar for various reasons and continued his work for social justice and change with his wife Dr. Julia Hare. After earning his second PhD in clinical psychology in 1975 from the California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco, Hare and his wife founded the Black Think Tank. The Black Think Tank served as a publisher of books, reports, and monographs in 1979. For a time it published a journal on Black male/female relationships. As a result, Hare set up a private practice of psychotherapy, with offices in San Francisco and Oakland. With his new practice he also worked on developing a movement for a better Black family. In 1985 Black Think Tank published a small book, Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood, about masculinity within the Black community. This was among numerous publications dealing with Black male youths and contributed to the development of a 1980s movement for rites of passage for African American boys. The impact of Nathan Hare’s work with students and community groups can be seen throughout educational systems across the country. The establishment of the Black Studies Department at San Francisco State University foreshadowed the development of African American studies programs nationwide. Although under various names such as Black studies, Afro-American studies, African American studies, Africana studies, a primary objective of all of these programs was Black progression through properly educating Blacks on their experiences within society and an emphasis on the Black experience as told for and by Black people. With the development of these departments, Black students learned about Black history, culture, philosophy, religion, and African languages. Students pushed for greater Black presence not only in the student body but also in every facet of academia, demanding Black administrators and faculty. With the formation of these departments at predominantly white institutions, there was a shift in the racial climate of these institutions. This contrasted tremendously with the hegemonic tendencies of the educational system during this time. In 1969 Nathan Hare said that “We can only conclude that a change has got to come within colleges as a whole; that any genuine and significant change will be resisted to the death by the powers that be; and that those of us concerned with the salvation of the Black race and humanity have a lot of work to do” (Hare 1969, 736). Fully aware of the task at hand, he fought and succeeded in helping shape

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the emergence of Black studies. From the efforts of scholars and activists such as Hare, the Black Power Movement successfully changed the academic world forever. Marquis E. Baker See also: Black Studies; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Chisholm, Shirley; Publications Further Reading Biondi, M. 2014. Black Revolution on Campus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hare, N. 1969. “Questions and Answers about Black Studies.” Massachusetts Review 10(4): 727–736. Rogers, I. X. 2012. The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rojas, F. 2010. From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. T’Shaka, O. 2012. “Africana Studies Department History: San Francisco State University.” Journal of Pan-African Studies 5(7) (October): 13–32. Watkins, Mel. 1971. “The Last Word: The Black Scholar.” New York Times, May 30.

Hatcher, Richard (1933–) Richard G. Hatcher was one of the leaders of Black electoral politics during the Black Power era. Hatcher emerged on the national scene and in the Black Power Movement when he was elected the first African American mayor of majority Black Gary, Indiana, in 1967. He also became a supporter and spokesperson for initiatives for Black political power throughout the United States. Born in 1933 during the extreme racist oppression of the Jim Crow era, Richard Gordon Hatcher was the son of working-class parents. He and his 12 siblings were raised in difficult and challenging economic and social conditions in Michigan City, Indiana. Hatcher earned an athletic scholarship to Indiana University and graduated in 1956, 2 years after Brown v. Board of Education, 1 year after the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till and the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 4 years before the student sit-ins, and 10 years prior to Black Power as the rallying cry of the Black liberation movement. As a college student, Hatcher began a lifelong practice as an activist advocating for Civil Rights and self-determination of the Black community. Inspired by the surging Civil Rights Movement and deeply committed to the empowerment of the Black community, he enrolled in Valparaiso Law School and continued organizing students to challenge the segregationist practices in the Jim Crow North.



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Mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, stands in front of the city’s Municipal Building, ca. 1970. Hatcher became the first elected African American mayor in the state of Indiana in 1968. (Bettmann/Getty)

In 1959 Hatcher earned his law degree, passed the Indiana bar, and moved to Gary, Indiana, where his politics led him to become one of the most important and influential elected officials of the Black Power era. As a lawyer he fought for Civil Rights, social justice, fair housing, and political power for the Black community. His advocacy led him to a successful 1963 run for city council, where he was also elected its president and from that position continued to address issues of importance to the African American community. He was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and the heroic struggle of Black working-class people engaged in difficult and bloody campaigns in Mississippi, Birmingham, Selma, and other places. Hatcher was also increasingly influenced by the emerging ideas of Black self-determination, Black consciousness, and Black Power, articulated most forcefully by Malcolm X and taking root among the working-class masses and young Black people in urban areas such as Gary. After passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the assassination of Malcolm X, the Black liberation movement transitioned from Civil Rights as the dominant theme to Black Power as its central thrust and demand. Hatcher became a driving force in the local and national political movement to gain Black Power, using electoral politics as a critical tool and strategy.

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Hatcher’s reputation as a Civil Rights lawyer, his leadership of the city council, and his deep network of activists, churches, and community organizations provided him the support necessary to challenge Gary’s white political establishment. Hatcher was an early Black Power advocate and by the mid-1960s had already been engaged in building the political structure needed to mobilize the Black community of Gary. His and the community’s goal was to take political control of the city where they were the majority but had been ruled by a white minority. In the 1967 election for mayor, Hatcher won with 95 percent of the Black vote and almost universal opposition from the white community. He and Carl Stokes in Cleveland were elected that year as the first Black mayors of major U.S. cities. From his position as mayor of Gary, Hatcher engaged in several initiatives to gain control of Black majority cities through community organizing and electoral politics. He supported Black candidates in other cities for local and national office. At the invitation of Imamu Amiri Baraka, Hatcher campaigned in Newark in support of the Pan-Africanist nationalist-led united front to elect Ken Gibson as mayor and several Black and Puerto Rican candidates to the city council. Gibson won, becoming the first Black mayor of Newark. His election also propelled the poet Baraka into the national political leadership of Black Power because it was the first successful mayoral campaign in a major city organized and led by Pan-African nationalists. Out of the Black Power Conferences (1966, Washington, D.C.; 1967, Newark; 1968, Philadelphia; and 1969, Bermuda) came the call to convene a Congress of African People in Atlanta (1970). While organized by Pan-African nationalists, the conference also attracted Civil Rights and newly elected Black leaders including Hatcher, who gave a rousing speech laying out the historical and contemporary context for Black Power. In addition to key speeches on Black Power and the working sessions on a variety of issues, perhaps the most important resolution to come out of the Congress of African People was a call for a national political convention to develop an agenda and a structure for Black electoral organizing. To carry out the resolution, along with Imamu Baraka and Detroit congressman Charles Diggs, Hatcher became one of the three coconveners of what many consider one the most important national gatherings of the Black Power era. Over the next 19 months (October 1970–March 1972) the national Black Power community worked to select delegations, prepare resolutions, and organize the logistics to attend the National Black Political Convention to be held in Gary, Indiana, and hosted by its first Black mayor, Hatcher. More than 8,000 activists traveled from all across the United States to participatem including Pan-African nationalists, elected officials, Civil Rights organizations, workers’ rights organizations, artists, faith leaders, and many others. The Congress of African People



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emerged from its founding conference in Atlanta as a national organization, and its immediate campaign was to pull the Black nation together and get Blacks to Gary by building a united front within the Pan-African nationalists and with every possible sector of the Black community. As a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, the presence of Congressman Diggs as a coconvener had important symbolic value in demonstrating the broadness of the united front. The hope was that he would also help organize other national political figures to attend the convention. While he played less of a role than expected, other congressional leaders came to the convention including Ron Dellums and John Conyers. Hatcher’s contribution to this historic event is immeasurable. By coconvening and hosting the 1972 National Black Political Convention, Hatcher was not only publicly endorsing a Black Power perspective of electoral politics; he was also demonstrating a commitment to take the political risk associated with that action. There is no other city in 1972 where the convention could have been held where there was a Black majority and a Black mayor who would put the resources of the city in service of a Pan-African Nationalist–led Black Power Conference of thousands of activists to develop an agenda built around Black interests and demands. Hatcher was not a passive host. He was an active organizer and proponent of the development of Black independent political action inside of the two major parties, especially the Democratic Party with which most Black people voted. He was also a vocal advocate for a Black independent political party. In that way, Hatcher was different from many of his contemporaries in that he was an elected official uncompromisingly on the side of African Americans organizing themselves politically as an assertion of Black Power. He refused to be intimidated or forced to be neutral in the major developments occurring in the Black Power Movement. The organizing and convening of the National Black Political Convention was the first of three major accomplishments from this initiative. The other two emerged from the work of the delegates at the convention. First was the creation and ratification of the National Black Agenda. It is one of the most important progressive documents in the history of Black political movements and other social justice movements. Included in its scope are demands for Black self-determination, universal health care, workplace child care, support for an anti-imperialist global perspective, and liberation of the African world. It proposes standards for supporting those running for office and expectations for what they must do when elected to office. In the 21st century, the National Black Agenda remains a blueprint for Black progressive politics. In addition to the agenda, the National Black Political Convention also initiated a national political structure, the National Black Assembly. Organized as state assemblies, it was an attempt at local political organizing and national coalition that

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included many of the diverse forces that attended the convention. It was a critical vehicle for mobilizing local Black communities to support and participate in voter registration and education drives, national campaigns against police violence, African liberation support work, African Liberation Day, local Black worker campaigns, the rights of prisoners, and support for political prisoners. Although the National Black Assembly had uneven success electing and holding candidates accountable to the Black community and only existed as a functioning structure for approximately five years, it remains an important model that deserves to be studied for the lessons it can provide for independent progressive political organizing. Hatcher was an active promoter of the National Black Agenda and remained an active leader in the National Black Assembly. His commitment to independent Black political organizing, including within the Democratic Party, never waned. As an example, in the 1980s he attempted to rally other prominent Black Democrats to support a Black candidate for president and was one of the few Black mayors who chose to support Jesse Jackson’s historic run for the Democratic nomination in 1984. Consistent with his organizing history, Hatcher was not a passive supporter of Jackson’s bid; he became chair of the campaign. The decimation of its manufacturing base and the resources drained by white flight sent Gary, Indiana, like other Black cities into a downward economic and social spiral. As much as he tried, Mayor Hatcher and his group of Black Power activists could not reverse the trend. He served as mayor for 20 years, and after a defeat at the polls, he retired from electoral politics, returned to advocacy law, and became a professor of African American studies at Indiana University. He continues to speak and write about Black political empowerment. Michael Simanga See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Congress of African People; Electoral Politics and Black Power; Pan-Africanism Further Reading Bernard, Sheila C. 1988. “Interview with Richard Hatcher.” Washington University Digital Gateway. December 12, http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eii/eiiweb/hat5427.0852.065 richardhatcher.html. Hatcher, Richard. 1972. African Congress. New York: William Morrow. Joseph, Peniel. 2007. Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Holt Paperbacks. “National Black Political Convention Collection, 1972–1973.” 2004. Indiana Historical Society, March 9, http://www.indianahistory.org/our-collections/collection-guides/national -black-political-convention-collection.pdf. Woodard, Komozi. 1999. A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Primary Document Sheila Bernard, Interview with Richard Hatcher, 1988 Richard Hatcher served as the first Black mayor of Gary, Indiana, in 1968. On December 12, 1988, Hatcher sat down with Sheila Bernard of Blackside, Inc., to speak about his role in the historic National Black Political Convention of 1972, held in Gary. Interviewer: Sheila C. Bernard Production Team: C, A Interview Date: December 12, 1988 SHEILA C. BERNARD: How did this notion that the nationalists had at Atlanta grow into the Gary convention? What were the steps that led people to come together? RICHARD HATCHER: I think several things were happening. Ah, the national­ ists were very active, ah, around the country. And they were talking to people, and people were listening. And, they had this wonderful sense of history, and of Africa, what Africa really should mean to us. And, much more so I think than many of us who were elected officials. Ah, ah, the nationalists were thinking in terms of where we ought to go and where we ought to be in terms of power in this country. While I think many of us who were elected officials felt that we had already arrived. That, that after all, we’d become mayors, we’d become congr—members of Congress. And so we really were there. But the nationalists understood, ah, better than we did that there was still a very long ways to go and much that needed to be done. And so the idea of this national convention, ah, to really talk through these things and to plan a political strategy, ah, for our people, ah, evolved out of these meetings. Ah, the meeting in Atlanta, and, ah, some of the, ah, Black Power conferences that had taken place in the ’60s, dur­ ing the ’60s. Ah, and, ah, there, there was this feeling that we must come to­ gether and, and somehow, ah, fashion, ah, our, ah, our destiny, fashion, fashion our future. As I said, much better understood, ah, but the nationalists, ah, than we. And the other side of it was that nationalists seemed to know a lot more about Africa, and, ah, understood African institutions, ah, better than many of us who had been, ah, ah, pretty much, ah, weaned on, on American institu­ tions as such. And so, ah, they brought all of that to the table. And people, it

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was an exciting notion, and people responded to it. And, and, and in some sense, without being critical of elected officials, I was one, ah, myself, but in some sense, it was a matter of kind of catching up, because it was clear that the people were moving in that direction, were moving towards the idea of Black unity, of, of, relating to Africa and all of that. And so, ah, for many elected of­ ficials, it was a matter of saying, “There go my people, I must catch up and lead them.” Ah, what eventually evolved in terms of the Gary convention, the National Black Political Convention, was that, ah, the elected officials, the civil rights leadership, ah, pretty much took over the planning of that Gary conven­ tion for 1972. And, ah, at one point there was even some question as to whether nationalists would be, ah, permitted to be a part of the planning, ah, which is ironic since it was probably more their idea than, ah, ours to begin with. . . . SHEILA C. BERNARD: You and Congressman Diggs and Amiri Baraka were a kind of fascinating trio to come together and lead this convention. How did that come about, and how did you work together? What was it like? RICHARD HATCHER: Well, it was interesting. At the point where there pretty much was a consensus that this convention should be held, ah, the meeting, the last meeting that I recall was in Washington, D.C. And there was a, a group of, of Black leaders in that meeting. And the decision was made that there ought to be three conveners. Congressman Diggs was, ah, at that time a very prominent member of Congress. He had founded, ah, the Congressional Black Caucus, ah, 1970. Ah, he was a, ah, a logical person to select, if you were talking about an elected official at the federal level. Ah, Amiri Baraka, ah, was clearly at that time the leader of the nationalist movement in this country, although, ah, Maulana Karenga was also very prominent and, and very active in that, in that movement. Ah, so the selection of Baraka basically said that the nationalists were in. Selection of Diggs said that elected officials were in. Ah, aside from the fact that the decision, ah, was made subsequently, ah, to hold the meeting in Gary, ah, I’m not quite sure why I was selected as sort of a third or the in-between person, other than, ah, as I indicated, ah, this feeling that I felt comfortable talking to both sides, and relating, relating to both sides. And so it was, ah, a kind of way I guess of putting a moderating influence between these two, ah, these two, ah, ah, groups, ah, representa­ tives of groups. SHEILA C. BERNARD: How did your working relationships evolve? How, did you work together well?



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RICHARD HATCHER: We, we absolutely worked together. Ah, I recall one time that we felt it was very important that John Johnson of Johnson Publications be supportive of this because we wanted him to do stories in Ebony and Jet about this upcoming convention. And so we thought it was really very impor­ tant to go see him personally. Which we did. The three of us went, went to see him. And, ah, the, ah, ah, this incredibly plush office and Mr. Johnson was very gracious, and which turned out to be a surprise to us. Because, ah, going in, ah, we really felt that he might not be so receptive to the idea of this kind of convention with this mixture, this volatile mixture of, ah, different, ah, parts of the Black community. But he, on the contrary, was very responsive and very supportive. And, but we did that together, and that required us being together and talking to each other. And then, ah, as the planning continued, ah, it just necessitated almost a day to day, ah, contact between us. And we were, ah, when you think about it, it’s pretty incredible. This convention was pretty much put together over a period of a little over a month. And, ah, to put together a convention that ultimately brought close to 10,000 people, of, of the broadly disparate backgrounds and so forth together, ah, now that I look back at it, it was pretty, pretty incredible. There was some distress, I must say. Ah, we did not know each other, the three of us did not know each other very well. But, in this process we got to know each other, ah, very well. And I think, ah, we got to like each other, ah, quite a lot. We understood each other better, and, ah, I think particularly between Congressman Diggs and, ah, and Amiri Baraka, that, whereas they had been divided before, I think they came much closer together. Ah, there were still things that they disagreed with each other on, and I’m sure they disagreed with me on just about everything, but, ah, I think we really became friends. And it’s a friendship that, ah, has survived, ah, over the period of the last 20, ah, 20 years or so. Ah, so, ah, that was one of the, the wonderful, ah, ancillary benefits, of, of this convention for me personally. SHEILA C. BERNARD: What, what was Baraka’s role? What, what was Baraka doing to make the convention possible? RICHARD HATCHER: Amiri Baraka was, first of all, one of the hardest work­ ing people that, that, that I have, have ever had the opportunity to work with. Ah, secondly, he really understood. I, he, he was a person, he was a very liter­ ate person, and he really understood power relationships, and, and how im­ portant a meeting such as this could be. And as a consequence, I think he really committed himself, and all of the resources at his disposal. So while I, as mayor of the city of Gary was in fact able to utilize much of my staff, ah,

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the city police department, and other, ah, resources that were available to me, he also had resources in terms of people, ah, who could write, who could type, who could put things together. Ah, who were willing to stay up all night, and work all night if that, that’s what was required. And so he put all of that into this convention. And, and in many ways, ah, that was critical to the suc­ cess of the convention. There certainly were other people, I, I, I keep thinking again of Carl Holman and how important a role he played in helping to, ah, put the logistics of this convention together. And there are people in Washington, ah, Ivanhoe Donaldson I remember, sent, ah, at least two staff persons that he had to Gary, ah, for about two weeks before the convention to work on the organizing of this convention. Ah, the support, the support was tremendous, that, ah, through it all, especially while the convention was un­ derway, ah, Baraka, and, and, and the people that he brought in, ah, really kept things moving. When papers, ah, had to be, resolutions had to be typed overnight, ah, in many instances he’s the one that got it done. And, ah, ah, he was the head of the, ah, resolutions committee. He was chair of the resolu­ tions committee, and, ah, that was a lot of work. Ah, but he was able, able to get that done. SHEILA C. BERNARD: You described his staff and how they worked together. Can you tell, describe a picture of that? RICHARD HATCHER: Well, just to give you an example, as I said, they were very hard-working, and would work for hours on end, ah, ah, without, ah, any real relief. And, ah, but if you watched them back in the rooms at this huge high school, ah, where the convention was held, ah, they would work, ah, for maybe an hour or two hours. Then they would take a 15 minute break, and the break would be to form a circle holding hands, and then they would begin to do chants and sing, for about 15 minutes. And it seemed that the music, the singing, the chants refreshed them, and then they would go back to the type­ writers and work for another two hours. Ah, it was a pretty incredible sight. Ah, most of them, ah, wore these long White, ah, full-length gowns and turbans. Ah, they were just incredible people, and they, ah, they produced, ah, work that made it possible for that convention to go on and, ah, ah, for us to have the documents we needed when we needed them. SHEILA C. BERNARD: I want to ask you about the city of the Gary. Once the decision was made to meet in Gary, and then how did your city at first, and then as things evolved?

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RICHARD HATCHER: The decision was made, ah, I believe in a meeting in Washington, and there were I suppose lots of reasons. Ah, it, it, it came as a great surprise to me when, when someone said, “Well, we should do this in Gary.” Ah, I think the reason given was that we should do it where we have a Black mayor, and Gary was one of the few cities in the country at that point that had a Black mayor. And, ah, we should do it, ah, at a place where Blacks from all over the country could come and feel comfortable. Wouldn’t have to worry about the police, ah, beating them. Ah, wouldn’t have to worry, ah, about getting cooperation from city officials. And, ah, so the judgement, and also the fact that Gary was located geographically pretty much in the center of the country, so that people coming from the West Coast as well as from the East Coast, ah, and from the South, ah, had roughly the same, same distance to travel. So all of those things were factors. Now there were some real negatives about doing it, ah, in the city of Gary. You were talking about a convention of thousands of people, and Gary, ah, had one viable hotel, ah, with 300 rooms. Ah, and that, ah, that was a real problem. There were, ah, a number of small motels, but there, there was nothing approaching the capacity, the hotel capac­ ity to accommodate the thousands of people who were invited or anticipated coming to this convention. But the decision was made that the positives out­ weighed the negatives, and then of course, ah, once we knew that there was interest in coming to Gary, ah, city officials and civic leaders in Gary, ah, as­ sured the leadership of the planning, ah, committee that they would do what ever was necessary to accommodate this meeting. SHEILA C. BERNARD: You’d said that— SHEILA C. BERNARD: That’s great. RICHARD HATCHER: Once it became clear that the leadership wanted to have the meeting in Gary, another problem developed, and that was basically that the White business community in Gary, ah, had these extreme fears about this large number of Blacks coming to town. They thought in terms of crime, and, ah, all kinds of horrible things. It was almost as if the—someone had just announced that the Vietcong was coming to Gary. And, ah, their initial reac­ tion, ah, was very apprehensive, and there were a number of meetings held, and, ah, discussions about this. And, ah, ah, eventually, ah, they, ah, said, “Well, we’ll see what happens.” Ah, the fascinating thing is that it ultimately turned out that the White business community as well as the, ah, leadership of the Black community in Gary, ah, opened their arms and welcomed, ah, the

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delegates to town. Ah, the Chamber of Commerce prepared a wonderful, ah, pouch or folder for people to keep their papers in. Ah, it was a leather, ah, pouch, that had the names, the thousands of names of delegates of the conven­ tion on that, on that pouch, and gave one to every delegate coming to the convention. So, ah, first of all, their attitude did in fact, ah, change in that re­ gard. And secondly, ah, the marvelous thing was that during the course of the four or five days that the thousands of people, ah, were in town, the crime rate in the city of Gary actually went down. So, ah, ah, the fears, ah, that, ah, were expressed, ah, initially simply were not realized. The other, ah, truly marvelous thing that occurred was that this problem of no hotel, ah, capacity, ah, ah, re­ quired that, ah, we call upon the citizens of Gary to open their homes, ah, to the delegates who were coming to the convention. And they did it with relish. It was, ah, there were just hundreds of wonderful stories that were told, as, as the delegates lived with Gary families, and, ah, over the period of the time of the convention got to be friends, and friendships were established that con­ tinue even to this day, ah, as a result, ah, of the people of Gary opening their arms, ah, and, and their homes, ah, to the convention delegates. So, um, over­ all it turned out to be a very positive experience, ah, for our city, and, ah, hope­ fully for the people, ah, who visited. SHEILA C. BERNARD: I want you just stop now and think about the beginning, no, just the very opening of the convention, you’ve been planning this for years. Where were you just before you went out on to the podium? Can you just paint that picture for me? RICHARD HATCHER: Well, ah, the interesting thing, the opening session, ah, that morning, I had to be in my office, the Mayor’s office, because there was some city business that had to be, had to be taken care of. And I think I was really concerned about two things. One, I was concerned about whether I was going to get this business taken care of in time to get over to the, ah, school for—because it was on the far west side of the city, ah, in time for the opening, ah, ceremonies. And, secondly, to be very honest with you, even at that point, I still had some, ah, concern that we wouldn’t have very many people, that not very many people would show up. Well, the, the truly wonderful thing was when I got to the hall, and, ah, ah, came from behind the stage and out on to the platform, I saw a, ah, a veritable sea of faces. It was, ah, probably, ah, one of the most glorious moments of my life, ah, when I walked out and saw all of these Black people of every color, every, ah, hue, every shade. Ah, the colorful, ah, dashikis and, and other African garb that some of them wore, ah, mixing



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with, ah, three piece suits and, and so forth. It was just an incredible sight to behold[1] Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965–1985; Episode 205–37. And in that crowd, ah, to see people over the next few days who were really famous, famous entertainers, ah, ah, individuals who in one field or another had achieved, ah, great success and great national and some­ times international fame, but to see them simply mixing with the people. Walking around like any other, ah, delegate, any other person. There was this, this wonderful sense that, ah, we had truly come together, ah, as a people, and a warm feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood that, ah, I’m not sure we’ve been able to duplicate since. Ah, but it was certainly there, and there was a kind of electricity, ah, in the air, and it was clear that people were there about very serious business, and wa—and really saw this as a meeting that would have a long term, long range impact, ah, on the lives of, of Black Americans. SHEILA C. BERNARD: Tell me how you came out on the podium and began your speech and the reception that you got. What went through your head as you—? RICHARD HATCHER: Well, I, I, I don’t recall who introduced me, but whoever did it, ah, was extremely kind, overly so, and they, ah, they really gave me a very warm introduction. Not just as a person who was about to, to make the next speech, but also as the host of, of, of, of this gathering, and, ah, ah, they were extremely kind in their remarks. And so, ah, the response, the reception, ah, ah, from this huge audience, ah, was pretty incredible for me. Ah, I was unused to that kind of, that kind of, ah, warm, and I think very genuine, ah, appreciate response. Ah, and, and, and it also caused me, I, I had this sense, ah, that I feel sometimes when I’m in a Baptist church. Ah, there is just some­ thing about a Baptist audience that makes you feel that, ah, you, you’ve sud­ denly become ten feet tall, and that, ah, you are a combination of, ah, Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, and, and any other great orator, ah, in the Black community. A Baptist audience makes you feel that way, and that’s the way this audience made me feel. Ah, it, it has to be the kind of feeling that people have, ah, that, ah, ah, ah, a basketball player has when he knows he can’t miss. He knows that every shot he takes is going to go in. Well, a speaker has that kind of feeling with certain audiences, that I know that I can reach and I can com­ municate, and I can relate to this audience, and that was my feeling as I, ah, I began that speech ah, ah, at the National Black Political Convention. SHEILA C. BERNARD: What made this special, different from a traditional democratic or republican convention?

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RICHARD HATCHER: Well, I think first of all, it, ah, Gary was different be­ cause the nationalists and so-called mainstream Black politicians came to­ gether at Gary. Ah, there weren’t that many Black elected officials, maybe, ah, 2–300 or so. But, ah, ah, they really had not communicated very well with the nationalists, and the nationalists with them. But Gary represented maybe the first time that these two came together, agreed on something, agreed to work together on something, and in some instances even agreed on goals and, and objectives, although there was much disagreement also. Ah, so that made it different. It, it, it really was our total community that was coming together. Ah, some, ah, just before the convention opened, ah, unfortunately Roy Wilkins, who was then the head of the NAACP, ah, really denounced the entire conven­ tion. He said that, ah, it was not legitimate, that the people who were involved were not, ah, ah, the really influential people there, and there were articles, I believe in The New York Times and other, other publications quoting him as saying this was not a good thing that this meeting was taking place and that he would not participate. In all fairness to him, one of his major objections was that the convention, ah, the planners made it clear that this was a convention for Black people, and that the Whites would not be permitted to attend or to be inside the hall. And, ah, that, ah, Roy Wilkins felt was inconsistent, ah, with the NAACP’s commitment, and, ah, to a, ah, an integrated society. And so he, he criticized it on, on that basis. But that criticism, interestingly enough I think, ah, gave the convention more exposure, more public exposure, and caused more people to come. In other words, local members of the NAACP chapters across the country came in full force, as did members of the Urban League, and so forth. Vernon Jordan, who was then the head of the Urban League, him­ self came to the convention. Ah, he did not play a truly active role in the con­ vention, but he was there. So, he made a statement, ah, by being there. And, ah, other members of the civil rights leadership, ah, of our country, ah, cer­ tainly came. So it was this, this idea of all these people coming together, first of all, this wonderful— SHEILA C. BERNARD: All those people coming together. What was the feeling in Gary? RICHARD HATCHER: Well, the idea of all these people coming together, this, this wonderful kaleidoscope of colors and, ah, ah, political philosophies, ah, coming together in one place and working with each other, and trying to estab­ lish some common goals. That made Gary different. Ah, Gary was different, ah, in another sense, and that was that the nationalists had a better understanding,



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ah, not only of our history, ah, but also of Africa and what Africa was all about. And, ah, they understood that it was necessary to replicate in this country some of the institutions, some of the African institutions in a way that many of us who are elected officials, ah, simply did not, ah, did not understand and, and really appreciate in some instances. Also, ah, we were coming, ah, out of a period, ah, where the pride, ah, the idea of, of, of Black pride was a very powerful force. And it was also the—a time when we were looking at the whole question of power, and how, ah, ah, who had it, how to get it, what to do with it, ah, when you had it. And again, ah, I must say, ah, without, ah, ah, being critical of, ah, many of my colleagues who were in the electoral politics and so forth, that the nationalists seemed to understand the concepts of power better than, ah, many of us did. And so when all of that came together in Gary, ah, that made Gary a very unusual and, ah, particularly interesting place to be. Ah, in addition to that, we had this debate, ah, going on about, ah, one, whether we should go the third party route, or whether we should remain in the democratic party and try to make the democratic party responsive to the needs of Black people. And there were very eloquent and forceful and powerful, ah, argu­ ments on both sides of that issue. Ah, and, ah, that was a part of the Gary, ah, discussion. And then the other part was the whole question, “Should we run a Black for President of the United States?” After all, 1972 was a presidential election year, ah, it was a year that ultimately would see the nomination of George, ah, McGovern as, ah, the democratic nominee for President. But at that time, our focus was, ah, “Shouldn’t an African-American get out and run for President?” Well, ah, as the convention, when we finally arrived at the con­ vention, ah, by that time Shirley Chisholm, ah, the Congresswoman from New York City, had announced that she was a candidate for President of the United States. Frankly, that took a lot of Black males by surprise and shock. And, ah, many of them, ah, were not quite sure how they felt about that. Ah, many of us tried to get Shirley Chisholm to come to Gary, to come to this convention. Ah, we were absolutely convinced that that would be the right thing for her to do. Ah, others who were advising her apparently, ah, persuaded her that she, if she should come to Gary, she would run the risk of, in effect, be—being rejected by that convention, and therefore before the whole country it would appear that her own people had rejected, ah, her being a candidate for President. SHEILA C. BERNARD: What did you think would happen if she came? RICHARD HATCHER: I absolutely believed that if Shirley Chisholm had walked into that hall, just walked into that hall, she wouldn’t have had to say a

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word, and the entire convention would have gone up, ah, in smoke almost because, ah, there was such a great sense of pride that a Black woman had the courage and the fortitude, ah, to a—announce that she was running for the highest office, ah, in this country, and perhaps, ah, the most powerful office on earth. Elective office on earth. And, ah, she without a doubt would have gotten the overwhelming, ah, support of that convention, and I think in many ways, while her candidacy was significant and, and broke new ground, it would have been more significant and would have been enhanced by the kind of momen­ tum that would have come out of Gary in support of her. But, ah, for whatever reason, ah, the decision was made that she would not, ah, not come to Gary. But even that debate was a very interesting, ah, debate. Should we go with, ah, a Shirley Chisholm? Should we go with, ah, ah, a Black candidate for President? Or should we, ah, ah, support, ah, the party that we had supported for such a long time, since 1932, the Democratic Party. SHEILA C. BERNARD: I want to go back to that third party issue. A lot of people came to Gary expecting the third party to be formed right there. What did you think? RICHARD HATCHER: I think that, that many of the people who came to Gary thought that the whole purpose of the convention was to form a third party. That there was going to be a Black third party, and, and that was just that. Gary would formalize that. Ah, however, there were many, ah, individuals, and I include myself in that number, who were not commi—ah, committed or were not convinced that that was the best strategy for us to take. Ah, I felt at the time that, ah, we should give the Democratic Party one more chance. And it seems ironic now, ah, some, some 17 or 18 years later, ah, that in the last campaign for President in 1988, that I, I heard people saying, “Give the democrats one more chance.” Ah, it’s, ah, indicative that over a period of 17 years, ah, ah, the, the, the, the compensation that people generally receive from a political party that they support so overwhelmingly has simply not been forthcoming from the Democratic Party. But in 1972 that was my feeling. In fact I think somewhere in my speech, after pointing out what the Democratic Party had done to us since 1932, and talking about our being in the hip pocket of this party, and, and it almost being a reflex, ah, ah, an automatic reflex to support the Democratic Party on the part of Blacks in this country. And, and yet, ah, when you look at our role in the party and look at, ah, the benefits that we derived, ah, from that party, ah, they were not very substantial. But after, ah, ah, chroni­ cling all of that, then I said, “But I think we ought to give the Democratic Party

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one more chance.” It’s interesting that Reverend Jesse Jackson in his speech, ah, literally, ah, came within a hair’s breadth of calling for the formation of a third party. Ah, he was, ah, very, ah, very articulate and his, ah, language was very colorful in calling, ah, for a third party to be, ah, to be formed. Ah, in the final analysis the compromise was the formation of the National Black Political Assembly. And the idea was that the Assembly would do many of the things that a political party does without declaring itself to be a separate party. And that it would eventually, the thought was that it would eventually evolve into a third party. SHEILA C. BERNARD: What were the agenda items— SHEILA C. BERNARD: Sure. SHEILA C. BERNARD: What was the agenda that was passed at Gary aiming at and ah? RICHARD HATCHER: Well, It was a wonderful agenda. Ah, it addressed the issue of political parity. It was pointed out at that time that based upon our numbers, instead of having I believe, ah, around ten or eleven, ah, Black con­ gressmen, we should have had 43. And so a goal, a target was set to achieve, ah, that level of, ah, members of Congress. Ah, we talked about the need to expand the number of local, ah, Black elected officials. And people were en­ couraged to go back to their home communities and organize politically, and run candidates for offices like city council, mayor and so forth. And, ah, that was a major thrust of that meeting. Talking to people about, ah, and trying to inspire people to go back and to run for public office. And the truly incredible thing is that it happened. Ah, people, ah, at that time we had, as I said, maybe three, four hundred Black elected officials, including dog catchers and every­ thing else. Ah, we have evolved now to where we have over 6,000, and that all has taken place in a short period of about 17 years. So Gary was truly inspira­ tional. A meeting that was held two years later in Little Rock, Arkansas, ah, was significant, ah, for the fact that there were workshops on how to run for office, and a lot of people learned, ah, how to go back home and run for these, ah, these various offices. So political parity was a major thrust of, of this conven­ tion. But we also talked about economic parity, and the need to establish eco­ nomic institutions. Many of the discussions that are ongoing today, ah, were occurring at that meeting. Unemployment, the disproportionate level of unem­ ployment among Blacks. Ah, the disproportionate level of poverty among

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Blacks, and what to do about it. What kinds of new institutions could be, ah, created to address those problems. SHEILA C. BERNARD: In the end, the media had really focused only on two agenda issues in Gary. What were they, and how did that come about? RICHARD HATCHER: Well, I, I think the two agenda issues that the media spent a lot of time on was the issue of busing for the purpose of integration, and the issue, ah, the so-called Israeli, ah, issue, ah, the Middle East question. And, ah, the interesting thing is that, ah, the agenda was not dominated by those two questions. In fact, the first several days of the convention involved the kinds of things I’ve talked about. Political parity, ah, economic parity, ah, the need, ah, to, ah, promote Black pride. Ah, all of those things were very, ah, ah, important in terms of, of that convention. One of the things I must say about the meeting, and the reason, one of the reasons so many people were able to be there was at that time there certainly were a large number of federal programs. And those programs made it possible, ah, for people to come on expense accounts. That is, they, they were able to come to a meeting like this as a part of their work in terms of community organizing and so forth, and so a lot of the people that were there were there based upon that ability to, ah, ah, work on their pro­ gram. It was a part of the program that they were working for. Ah, it also meant, however, that they could only, ah, they had to get back home on Sunday so that they could be at work on, on Monday morning. So, the last day of the conven­ tion was Sunday. We were slated to wrap up at noon. And the purpose of that last day was the adoption of the resolutions, ah, that had been agreed to by the body. Ah, these, many people, I would say, ah, better than half the people who had attended the convention had left by the time these two resolutions on bus­ ing for the purpose of integration, and the issue of the Middle East came up. And both of them, as I said, were very, very controversial issues. And so it was the rather limited number of people who remained, ah, who debated and voted on those, ah, those two issues. Ah, the vote on those issues won against busing for the purpose of integration, which, which was a position directly contradictory to the NAACP’s position, and many other national, ah, Black organizations, and then certainly the, ah, calling, ah, for a homeland for a Palestinian people, which at that time was a very radical position to take. It’s interesting that today almost everyone agrees, ah, on that. But at that time it was very radical. Ah, those were the two resolutions that were adopted, and those were the two resolutions that the news media, which frankly up to that point, with the exception of, of very brief mention on the evening news on the

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day, several days prior, had pretty much ignored the convention because they were very angry about being locked out and not being permitted to come in. And so they pretty much ignored it. But when those two resolutions passed, they picked it up and ran with it, and that was the story, ah, that was told in the national media of the Gary convention. Ah, interestingly, as I said, only a small part of the discussion acted on, ah, by less then half of the delegates to the convention, and yet that became the dominating, ah, story. Ah, one of the rea­ sons, ah, today, if such a meeting were to be held that I don’t think that would happen is that today there are more Blacks involved in the media itself. At that time there were very few Blacks involved in the media, with the exception of the small weekly Black newspapers and a few radio stations around the coun­ try. You did not have Blacks, ah, at NBC and ABC and so forth, ah, in any sig­ nificant numbers. Ah, so it was a very, ah, hostile press, ah, that looked at, ah, what was going on in Gary, and selectively decided what it would emphasize and, ah, did so in an extremely negative way. SHEILA C. BERNARD: One final question about Gary. What do you think the mood and the energy and the enthusiasm of the delegates took home with them was? What did they come away with? RICHARD HATCHER: I, I, I think they were tremendously inspired— SHEILA C. BERNARD: Please say “the delegates”— RICHARD HATCHER: Yes, ah, you have to think, ah, in terms of that fact that, ah, some of our very greatest, ah, orators and speakers, ah, appeared on that platform. Some, some of our, our most revered and respected leaders. Coretta Scott King, ah, they were all there. Ah, Harry Belafonte was particularly active in helping, ah, to organize and raise, ah, money to make the convention work. Ah, Isaac Hayes, ah, I remember he did a tremendous performance. Ah, there were other entertainers who came, ah, Nancy Wilson, who just came as peo­ ple, and just wanted to be a part of something very important that was taking place. And, and so, ah, you couldn’t be at that convention for that week with­ out coming away, I think, feeling great pride in being Black, ah, being very encouraged that there was hope, ah, for Black people in this country, and be­ ing very determined to go back to your home, your city, your town, and, ah, to try to implement many of the things that you had heard at that convention. And that is exactly, I think, what happened. People went back home, rolled up their sleeves, and ran for public office in a way that Blacks had never thought about

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running for public office before. And, ah, the amazing thing, as I said, many of them were elected. Ah, they laid the foundation for, ah, Blacks moving on to the national, ah, platform. Ah, ah, ah, as they have in recent years. In fact, ah, I believe that you can trace the candidacy of Jesse Jackson for President of the United States directly to that Gary convention in 19—1972, because when that foundation was laid, it was a natural step then to run, in a very serious way, a person, ah, for President of the United States. And so much of the political suc­ cess, ah, that we enjoy today, I think, ah, emanated from the meeting in Gary and, ah, the coming together of all parts of the, ah, Black community’s philo­ sophical spectrum. And, ah, a kind of determination to go out and to change the world. And, ah, in many ways, ah, that’s exactly what has happened. SHEILA C. BERNARD: Wonderful. . . . Source: Sheila Bernard, Interview with Richard Hatcher, December 12, 1988, Conducted by Blackside, Inc., for Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. Reprinted with permission.

House of Umoja The House of Umoja (HOU) was founded in 1967 as a revolutionary nationalist secret society by Black Power activists in California. The core members of the group were from the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). They also produced the journal Soulbook. The most notable founders were Mamadou Lumumba (aka Ken Freeman) and Ernie Mkalimoto (aka Ernest Allen). The group primarily united through front organizations, such as Black and Pan-African student unions, the New School of Afro-American Thought, the Afro-American Anti-Bicentennial Committee, the Pan-African Secretariat, and the National Black Human Rights Coalition. The HOU merged into the New Afrikan People’s Organization in 1984.

Origins In 1964, a collective of young activists from the San Francisco Bay Area in California founded a journal called Soulbook, which became one of the preeminent publications of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. Former members of the Afro-American Association Mamadou Lumumba and Ernest Allen were two of the principal leaders of the collective. The same year, the collective



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became the northern California representative of RAM. After the initiation of the Lowndes County Freedom Party in Alabama in 1965, RAM and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee forces promoted forming Black Panther parties nationally as the political party of the emerging Black Power Movement. The Bay Area group founded the Black Panther Party of Northern California (BPPNC) in August 1966. The RAM group disbanded the BPPNC in late 1967 for two reasons. The first reason was internecine conflict with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPPSD), founded in October 1966 by Huey Newton and former RAM member Bobby Seale over the use of the “black panther” name. Second, a directive from national RAM leadership ordered all parties to abandon the name because of concerns about repression after the BPPSD conducted a demonstration at the California State Capitol with unloaded firearms. Repression was increasing, as the Black Power Movement was under siege by late 1967 and the early months of 1968. The leadership of the BPPSD, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chairman H. Rap Brown, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and RAM leaders Herman Ferguson and Max Stanford were all facing charges and prison sentences. The Soulbook/Bay Area RAM collective analyzed the necessity of creating a secret society to survive the wave of repression against the radical wing of the Black Power Movement. Secret socie­ ties had been employed in indigenous African society to build group solidarity. This organizational form was institutionalized in New World African culture in the United States through Masonic lodges, mutual aid societies, and Greek letter fraternities and sororities. Two of their models were the Knights of Tabor organized by Moses Dickson in 1846, which played a significant role in the Underground Railroad during chattel slavery, and the 1920s insurgent nationalist secret society, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB). ABB members Cyril Briggs and Harry Haywood were consulted to learn about elements of the organization. The Soulbook RAM collective believed that it was necessary to utilize the secret society structure and orientation to build internal loyalty to combat infiltration and betrayal in a period of intense counterinsurgency. The name House of Umoja was adopted from a small southern California group headed by Robert Uwezo, who was a former member of the Los Angeles–based Us organization. Uwezo would become a leader in the student movement at San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University Northridge), near Pacoima. His presence at San Fernando Valley State enabled the HOU to establish a base in the campus Black Student Union and the Black Studies Department. The principle of umoja (unity) was emphasized because the collective believed that building a Black Power united front was essential in the face of obvious divide-and-conquer strategies of the U.S. government’s attacks on the movement. Of concern was the internecine conflict between revolutionary nationalists and cultural nationalists. A Soulbook special issue displayed a graphic that illustrated

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a Black male dressed as a classical BPPSD member. The figure wore a black beret and was confronting a typical cultural nationalist with a dashiki and an Afro. The HOU would establish itself in the Black student unions and Black studies departments throughout the state of California, particularly at California State Northridge and San Jose State. In 1968, members of the group relocated to Washington, D.C., where one of its members, Baba Lumumba, had cofounded the New School of Afro-American Thought with writer Gaston Neal in 1966. The New School of Afro-American Thought was a Black Power community-based educational institution that provided classes for youths and adults in the arts and humanities, data processing, and political education. HOU members served as teachers and organized programming for the New School.

Philosophy The core of the HOU political philosophy was revolutionary nationalism. Influenced by Frantz Fanon, the HOU believed that Black America was a colony of U.S. imperialism. Members viewed the Black majority counties of the southeastern United States as the potential homeland of an independent Black nation. They read and were influenced by the writings of Harry Haywood, architect of the Communist International’s position on African American self-determination in the Black Belt South. The collective also believed that a campaign of instilling an African-centered history and cultural practices was necessary to reinforce identity and a sense of peoplehood. The collective promoted the scholarship of Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop. At that time, Diop’s research was not widely read by most Black intellectuals in the United States because it was published in French. Beginning in 1965, Soulbook translated Diop’s scholarship to English, making it accessible to Soulbook’s audience. The editors believed that Diop’s arguments confirmed the Black African presence in ancient Egypt and its pharoanic dynasties and African civilization’s impact on the development of Europe. They believed that Diop, “more than any living Black intellectual . . . developed approaches to, and theories of Black history.” While Soulbook acknowledged his contribution, it was critical of his arguments about climate determining the disguisable cultural patterns between African and Europeans. Diop’s scholarship appeared again in subsequent editions of Soulbook. Besides the introduction of African history, Soulbook began to introduce Kiswahili to its readers. The journal identified itself as the “Kitabu cha Weusi” (Book of Blackness). In the sixth edition of Soulbook the editors wrote “Wananchi” (Citizens) and gave 1967 as the “mwaka ya kuratibisha” (year of organization). Images of African art were always prominently displayed in the journal. The editorial was also labeled “wantengenezaji.” The political intentionality of introducing Kiswahili was to make a connection that Blacks in the United States were an



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African people and to promote an African-centered worldview. HOU members began to study and learn Kiswahili. The collective was impressed by the use of the language in postcolonial Tanzania to “adopt and promote” Kiswahili (a nonethnic language) to build unity among the various ethnic groups of its new nation merged from the European British colonies of Tanganyika and Zanzibar in their experiment to build ujamaa (African socialism). The potential of Kiswahili as a PanAfrican language on the continent and in the African world was also appealing to the editors. HOU members also adopted African names. The HOU also sought to develop a revolutionary African-centered philosophical framework. While they were anti-imperialism and prosocialist and utilized Marxian political economy to critique capitalism, they believed that Marxism was Eurocentric and that the ideology had deficits in challenging white supremacy and forwarding national liberation for Africa and the Third World.

Caribbean, Political Exile, and Pan-Africanism In 1970, HOU members accepted an invitation of Black revolutionaries to seek political asylum in Forbes Burnham’s Cooperative Republic of Guyana. Burnham consented to lobbying from the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA), headed by veteran Pan-Africanist Eusi Kwayana. U.S.-born African educator and Pan-Africanist Ann Cook (later Tchaiko Kwayana) solicited Black Power organizations around the United States to consider seeking political exile in Guyana during the height of the Counterintelligence Program counterinsurgency on the Black liberation movement. ASCRIA along with the Afro-Caribbean Movement of Antigua and the Forum of Saint Vincent made the call for a Pan-African network in the Caribbean and North America at the seminar on Pan-Africanists and revolutionary Black nationalists in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown in February 1970. A Pan-African Secretariat was formed of Pan-Africanists and revolutionary organizations throughout the Caribbean and North America. South African exile Ngdoni Masimimi of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (South Africa) was appointed chairman and Soulbook editor, and HOU member Zolili Ndlela was appointed secretary of the Pan-African Secretariat (PAS). Other member organizations included the New Jewel Movement of Grenada, the National Joint Action Committee of Trinidad, and other organizations from Saint Lucia. One project of the PAS was the organization of worldwide African Solidarity Day to promote support for national liberation movements on the African continent from Portuguese colonialism in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde and settler-colonialism in Zimbabwe and South Africa. PAS organized African Solidarity Day from Guyana in 1970 and 1971. Demonstrations were also organized in Belize, Peru, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. The African Solidarity Day network in the

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United States established a foundation for U.S.-based Pan-Africanists to organize African Liberation Day in 1972 in Washington, D.C., and later the African Liberation Support Committee. PAS and ASCRIA also organized the International African Prisoner of War rally in March 1973 in solidarity with political prisoners in the United States, including the RNA (Republic of New Africa) 11, H. Rap Brown, the Wilmington 10, and Ruchell McGee. The HOU planned to publish Soulbook from Guyana. These plans were disrupted when the Burnham government deported two HOU members with political asylum in Guyana. Mamadou Lumumba and Shango Umoja were arrested by Guyanese military and forcibly put on a plane and returned to the United States. They were accused of engaging in disruptive political activity in Guyana. Political opposition to the Burnham regime was increasing. The regime faced labor insurgency in the bauxite industry and growing criticism of the government’s corruption. The HOU’s relationship with ASCRIA and Eusi Kwayana made it a convenient target of the regime, which accused Lumumba and Umoja of being a disruptive element in Guyanese politics. Ndlela was not deported due to his significant role in PAS, which would have created an international incident among the popular Caribbean organizations and the international Pan-Africanist movement.

Consolidating with Other Revolutionary Nationalists National RAM leadership agreed to disband in 1968 due to the increased repression and reemerged under the name Black Liberation Party (BLP). Muhammad Ahmad (formerly known as Max Stanford) went underground to avoid conspiracy charges in New York. Since RAM was an underground organization, RAM/BLP units in different cities either did not know each other or had a strong working relationship. Stanford was the primary national contact for RAM in the United States. One positive element of Ahmad’s capture in 1972 was that the former RAM national network reemerged first as the Muhammad Ahmad Defense Committee and then as the African People’s Party (APP). The HOU began a process of merger into the APP in 1973. The ideological contradictions within the APP developed primarily over whether the organization would become a Marxist-Leninist vanguard organization or develop an indigenous New Afrikan ideology based on revolutionary nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and socialism. The HOU clearly aligned itself with elements of the New Afrikan Independence Movement. The HOU began to use the terminology “New Afrikan” for the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States. The politics of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA) were consistent with the position of the HOU that Afrikans in North America were an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination in the Black majority counties of the southeastern United States.



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The HOU formally left the APP in 1980 and began to talk to other revolutionary nationalists about the development of a revolutionary nationalist, Pan-Africanist, prosocialist, and anti-imperialism formation. The culmination of these discussions led to the founding of the New Afrikan People’s Organization on May 19, 1984. Akinyele Umoja See also: Communist International and Black Power; Fanon, Frantz; Kiswahili; Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa; Revolutionary Action Movement; Stanford, Max (Muhammad Ahmad) Further Reading Ahmad, Muhammad. 2007. Look for Me in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960–1975. Chicago: Charles Kerr Publishing. Murch, Donna. 2010. Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Smethurst, James. 2005. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

I Institute of the Black World The Institute of the Black World (IBW) (1969–1983) was an organizational expression of Black Power and the Black Studies Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The IBW represented the desire by its leaders and supporters to transform “Negro” universities into Black institutions and to revolt against white intellectual domination. The IBW was founded in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1969 by a collective of Black intellectuals and activists dedicated to serving the interests of the Black community. The organization was initially affiliated with the Martin Luther King Jr. Center that was developed shortly after the assassination of the Civil Rights icon; however, it was a reflection of the dynamic energy surrounding the Black Power Movement. Its director Vincent Harding wrote that the institute was born into a national struggle over the control of defining the Black experience. The institute’s intellectual mission was to analytically critique the social, economic, psychological, and political conditions of African American people as part of a larger liberatory project in the African diaspora. Moreover, they were guided by the belief that it was necessary to reevaluate their relationship with the predominantly white academy and its Eurocentric intellectual focus. Although intellectuals such as Joyce Ladner, St. Clair Drake, Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, and Lerone Bennett Jr. supported the institute, the core cadre of the organization was composed of two historians and a political scientist: Vincent Harding, Robert Hill, and William Strickland. The enduring impact of the IBW was its contribution and expression of the relevance of Black Power in educational settings, its rise as a response to white liberal co-optation, its infiltration and repression, and its enduring legacy toward Black institutional development. At its founding Coretta Scott King, wife of the Civil Rights martyr, believed that the goal of the institute was to help direct the energy of the Black Studies Movement into a coherent strategic response to the problems of inequality within the society. However, the actions of the IBW and its director Vincent Harding were consistent with the goals of the broader Black Power Movement that sought to transform every aspect of African American life socially, culturally, politically, and economically. Lerone Bennett Jr. viewed the IBW as being linked to the larger Black Studies Movement that was growing in the United States and had the possibility of impacting and transforming the broader American society. In support of

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Bennett’s ideas, eventually Black student activists joined other minority student organizations to create the Third World Liberation Front. At its radical peak, Black Cornell students led an armed occupation of a building at Cornell University in the spring of 1969. The IBW was intellectually the culmination of previous decades of work pioneered by scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson. For example, central to the IBW’s intellectual practice was to refute anti-Black bias in scholarship by authors of works such as the Moynihan Report and Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. However, the ideological approaches within the IBW would lead to strained relationships between Harding and the King family. The center had been launched due to the sympathy expressed at the death of Martin Luther King Jr., and the ideological differences would lead to a separation between the King Center and the IBW. Central to the conflict was the belief that the radical thought of Martin Luther King Jr. in the areas of militarism, racial pride, and poverty was being marginalized, and instead King’s ideas were being promoted as mainstream liberalism to secure broader support and financial stability. For example, as opposed to the liberal integration model, the IBW supported the concept of a Black university that served the interests of the African American community, as opposed to a segregated neocolonial education that represented the ideals and attitudes of mainstream white Americans. The institute initially focused its Black university initiative on Spelman College, Morehouse College, Morris Brown College, the Interdenominational Theological Center, and Atlanta University, collectively known as the AUC, or the Atlanta University Center. Later, institutions such as Durham’s Liberation University were founded along with Malcolm X College in Chicago and Nairobi College in East Palo Alto, California. In addition to promoting the Black Power ideal in institutional form, the IBW launched programs of evaluation, collective advanced research, social policy analysis, and the advancement of a Black aesthetic. Additionally, the network of IBW scholars consulted on the formation of Black studies departments and helped with new teaching methods, materials, and practices. Along with other organizations, the IBW had successfully altered the political context of Black life with legal remedies and strategic uses of symbolism in pursuit of Black equality. However, repression, co-optation, and changing political and economic opportunities led to its demise. By the late 1970s legal remedies were stalled after the results of California vs. Bakke (1978), which supported the idea of reverse racism and color-blindness. The seed for these initiatives was sown in the 1960s when it was realized by the white elites that liberal remedies were required to maintain their own power. IBW founder Vincent Harding had foreseen this phenomenon with the Black brain trust of scholars and students from historically Black institutions. For example, from the mid-1960s onward the Ford Foundation actively worked to influence the activities of the Black Power



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Movement and orient organizations toward support of mainstream racial liberalism rather than Black Power Movement goals of self-determination, antiassimilation, self-defense, community control of education, and economic empowerment. As such, while the IBW was organizing for Black autonomy, white institutional power and money co-opted the energy of the Black Power Movement. The effect was the derailment of grassroots Black community initiatives and the development of a neocolonial Black leadership buffer class that accommodated structural inequality in exchange for symbolic politics, social access, and funding. At the same time, Black Power groups such as the IBW and the Black Panther Party were repressed. For example, the IBW experienced vandalism, domestic surveillance, and harassment of staff members between 1974 and 1975. These actions crippled the effectiveness of the IBW to raise money and maintain support. Furthermore, the transitioning American economy with high inflation rates along with the Organization of the Petroleum Countries induced oil shocks and rising unemployment impaired the IBW’s ability to maintain consistent community support. Finally, the twin attacks by the white press, for imaginary support of the Republic of New Africa and the Symbionese Liberation Army, and repression by law enforcement hampered its ability to remain effective. By the early 1980s, the IBW was reduced to developing Black studies curricula. Even still, the legacy of the Institution of the Black World remains a prime example of the fragility of Black organizational development at the end of the Civil Rights era. Reynaldo Anderson See also: Black Studies; Publications; Rodney, Walter; Towards a Black University Conference Further Reading Ferguson, Karen. 2013. Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. “Institute of the Black World: Statement of Purpose and Program.” 1970. Negro Digest 19(5) (March): 20. Lawrence, Charles R., III. 1987. “Education for Black Power in the Eighties: Present Day Implications of the Bakke Decision.” National Black Library Journal 10: 58. Van Deburg, William L. 1992. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. White, Derrick E. 2011. The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Black Power Encyclopedia

Recent Titles in Movements of the American Mosaic Series Encyclopedia of Cesar Chavez: The Farm Workers’ Fight for Rights and Justice Roger Bruns Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement Bruce E. Johansen The Civil Rights Movement: From Black Nationalism to the Women’s Political Council Peter B. Levy, Editor

Black Power Encyclopedia From “Black Is Beautiful” to Urban Uprisings Volume 2: J–Z

Akinyele Umoja, Karin L. Stanford, and Jasmin A. Young, Editors

Movements of the American Mosaic

Copyright © 2018 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The editors and publishers will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Umoja, Akinyele Omowale, editor. | Stanford, Karin L., 1961- editor. |   Young, Jasmin A., editor. Title: Black power encyclopedia : from “Black is beautiful” to urban uprisings /   Akinyele Umoja, Karin L. Stanford, and Jasmin A. Young, editors. Description: Santa Barbara, California : Greenwood, an Imprint of ABC-CLIO,   LLC, 2018. | Series: Movements of the American mosaic | Includes   bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017045242 (print) | LCCN 2017046431 (ebook) |   ISBN 9781440840074 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440840067 (set : alk. paper) |   ISBN 9781440847776 (vol 1 : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781440847783 (vol 2 : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Black power—United States—Encyclopedias. | African   Americans—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. | Civil rights   movements—United States—Encyclopedias. | United States—   Race relations—Encyclopedias. Classification: LCC E185.615 (ebook) | LCC E185.615 .B546647 2018 (print) |   DDC 323.1196/073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045242 ISBN: 978-1-4408-4006-7 (set) 978-1-4408-4777-6 (vol. 1) 978-1-4408-4778-3 (vol. 2) 978-1-4408-4007-4 (ebook) 22  21  20  19  18   1  2  3  4  5 This book is also available as an eBook. Greenwood An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 www.abc-clio.com This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction xi Chronology xxv Overview Essays Armed Resistance in the Black Power Movement  xlv Black Power, Red Power, and the Potential of Red-Black Unity  lxi Black Power Studies  lxxv Gender, Black Women, and Black Power  ci Urban Rebellions  cix Entries Abubakari, Dara (Virginia Collins) (1915–2011)  1 African Liberation Support Committee  5 Afro Set Black Nationalist Party for Self-Defense (1967–1973)  11 Alabama Black Liberation Front  14 Ali, Muhammad (1942–2016)  18 All-African People’s Revolutionary Party  23 Assassinations 26 Attica Prison Rebellion  36 Baker, General Gordon, Jr. (1941–2014)  43 Bambara, Toni Cade (1939–1995)  52 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones) (1934–2014)  55 Black Aesthetic  76

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vi | Contents

Black Arts Movement  78 Black Bookstores  85 Black Churches  93 Black Economic Union  99 Black Internationalism  102 “Black Is Beautiful”  108 Black Liberation Army  112 Black Marxism (Book)  117 Black Music  122 Black Panther Party  134 Black Power Abroad  143 Black Power Conferences  155 Black Prisoner Activism  157 Black Psychology  162 Black Student Activism  168 Black Student Alliance  176 Black Studies  180 Black United Front  185 Black Women’s Alliance/Third World Women’s Alliance (1970–1975)  189 Blaxploitation Films  194 Boggs, James (1919–1993) and Grace Lee (1915–2015)  199 Bond, Julian (1940–2015)  202 Bremond, Walter (1934–1982)  208 Brown, Elaine (1943–)  211 Brown, Hubert “H. Rap” (1943–)  214 Brown, James (1933–2006)  219 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture) (1941–1998)  223 Carter, Alprentice “Bunchy” (1942–1969)  248 Che Lumumba Club  251

Contents | vii

Chisholm, Shirley (1924–2005)  256 Cleaver, Kathleen Neal (1945–)  260 Coltrane, John (1926–1967)  265 Combahee River Collective  270 Committee for Unified Newark (1968–1976)  275 Communist International and Black Power  278 Cone, James Hal (1938–)  282 Congress of African People (1970–1979)  286 Congress of Racial Equality  291 Council of Independent Black Institutions  295 Counterintelligence Program  297 Cuban Revolution (1953–1959)  303 Cultural Nationalism  307 Davis, Angela Yvonne (1944–)  315 Deacons for Defense and Justice  319 Douglas, Emory (1943–)  322 Edwards, Harry (1942–)  325 Electoral Politics and Black Power  328 Fanon, Frantz (1925–1961)  333 Forman, James (1928–2005)  336 Fuller, Hoyt (1923–1981)  340 Garvin, Victoria “Vicki” Ama (1915–2007)  343 Giovanni, Nikki (1943–)  347 Group on Advanced Leadership (1961–1965)  349 Hampton, Fred, Sr. (1948–1969)  353 Hare, Nathan (1933–)  355 Hatcher, Richard (1933–)  358 House of Umoja  376 Institute of the Black World  383

viii | Contents

Jackson, George L. (1941–1971)  387 Jackson, Jesse L., Sr. (1941–)  392 Jackson, Maynard Holbrook (1938–2003)  399 Jackson State Massacre (May 14, 1970)  402 Johnson, Nelson (1943–)  406 Karenga, Maulana (1941–)  411 Kawaida  418 Kennedy, Florynce “Flo” (1916–2000)  424 King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929–1968)  428 Kiswahili  434 Kochiyama, Yuri (1921–2014)  438 Koen, Charles E., Jr. (1945–)  441 Kwanzaa  444 Kwayana, Tchaiko (1937–2017)  449 Last Poets  457 League of Revolutionary Black Workers  459 Lowndes County Freedom Organization  463 Lumumba, Chokwe (1947–2014)  467 Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee) (1942–)  471 Malcolm X (1925–1965)  473 Malcolm X Liberation University  485 Mallory, Mae (1927–2007)  493 Mao Zedong (1893–1976)  496 March Against Fear  501 McKissick, Floyd B., Sr. (1922–1991)  509 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party  519 Moore, Carlos (1942–)  529 Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley (1898–1997)  532 National Black Economic Development Conference and the Black Manifesto  537

Contents | ix

National Black Feminist Organization  541 National Black Political Assembly  545 National Black United Fund, Inc.  548 National Conference of Black Lawyers  553 National Welfare Rights Organization  556 Nation of Islam  560 Neal, Larry (1937–1981)  565 Newton, Huey P. (1942–1989)  568 Obadele, Gaidi (Milton Henry) (1919–2006)  577 Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry) (1930–2010)  584 Ocean Hill–Brownsville Campaign for Community Control of Schools  587 Olympic Project for Human Rights  590 Operation Breadbasket  595 Pan-Africanism  599 Parks, Rosa (1913–2005)  603 Police Brutality  607 Political Prisoners and Exiles  626 Political Prisoners of the Black Power Movement  634 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr. (1908–1972)  636 Pratt, Geronimo ji-Jaga (1947–2011)  640 Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa  643 Publications  647 Religion and Black Power  661 Reparations  664 Revolutionary Action Movement  670 Revolutionary Nationalism  675 Richardson, Gloria (1922–)  679 Ricks, Willie (1943–)  684 Rodney, Walter (1942–1980)  687 Sadaukai, Owusu (Howard Fuller) (1941–)  695

x | Contents

Salaam, Kalamu ya (1947–)  698 Sanchez, Sonia (1934–)  701 Scott-Heron, Gil (1949–2011)  704 Seale, Bobby (1936–)  707 Shakur, Assata (1947–)  714 Shakur, Mutulu (Jarel Williams) (1950–)  718 Shields, Rudy (1931–1987)  721 Sixth Pan-African Congress  725 Smith, Barbara (1946–)  730 Smith-Robinson, Ruby Doris (1942–1967)  733 Stanford, Max (Muhammad Ahmad) (1941–)  738 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee  741 Student Organization for Black Unity  757 Students for a Democratic Society  763 Sunni-Ali, Fulani (1948–2016)  767 Toure, Askia (1938–)  773 Towards a Black University Conference  777 UHURU  785 United Front, The  788 Us Organization  793 Vietnam War  801 Waller, Joseph (Omali Yeshitela) (1941–)  809 Walters, Ronald W. (1938–2010)  813 Wattstax  814 Williams, Mabel (1931–2014)  818 Williams, Robert F. (1925–1996)  821 Wright, Nathan, Jr. (1923–2005)  825 About the Editors and Contributors 829 Index  849

J Jackson, George L. (1941–1971) George Jackson was a Black radical activist and writer incarcerated in the California penal system from 1960 until his death in 1971. Best known for two books related to the Black Power Movement, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson and Blood in My Eye, he was also field marshal for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense based in Oakland, California. Comrade George, as he was known to movement activists, was killed by prison guards in San Quentin State Prison one year after his younger brother was killed by prison guards during an armed takeover at the Marin County Courthouse in California. George Lester Jackson was born to Georgia Jackson and Robert Jackson in Chicago, Illinois, on September 23, 1941. Like many African Americans at the time, the working-class Jackson family moved west to Pasadena, California, after World War II. California was touted as a place where Black migrants from the segregationist South and discriminatory northern states could get ahead. After a series of juvenile detentions for petty crimes as a teenager, Jackson was arrested for robbing a gas station of $70. He pled guilty and was sentenced to one year to life in prison under California’s indeterminate sentencing law that was in force at the time. While imprisoned Jackson, like Malcolm X and many others, engaged in self-education and became a student of history, politics, economics, and military science. Jackson joined with other prisoners who were also willing to learn and act for revolutionary change.

The Power of Jackson’s Writings Jackson extended his influence to those outside of the walls of prison by committing his thoughts to paper and distributing his ideas to the world through two wellreceived books. In Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye, Jackson wrote on a wide range of subjects on his vision of revolutionary change. In a first-person narrative style reminiscent of David Walker’s Appeal, Jackson’s writing appealed to both the intellect and emotions of his readers. Comrade George identified himself as a communist revolutionary and criticized capitalism as antithetical to the interests of the Black people in the United States. He was most influential as an advocate of armed struggle, dismissing the idea that the U.S. government was immune against any attempt to oppose it with the use of

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Photo of author and prison activist George Jackson and codefendant Fleeta Drumgo shackled. Jackson and Drumgo were two of three inmates famously known as the Soledad Brothers. Along with a third inmate, John Clutchette, they were charged with the murder of a white prison guard. (Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge)

revolutionary violence. He tempered his optimism for the prospects of revolutionary change by writing on the inevitabilities of setbacks and defeats. Jackson’s work not only educated his readers about the racism and class politics that might lead to revolutionary change domestically and internationally, but he also provided insight into the injustice and brutality that Black people faced inside the prison system. Prison guards and racist white inmates used violence against radical Black inmates willing to physically resist racism, segregation, and brutality within the walls of the penitentiary. On January 13, 1969, in California’s Soledad State Prison, a prison guard sniper killed three Black prisoners—W. L. Nolen, Cleveland Edwards, and Alvin Miller—during a fistfight with white inmates. In apparent retaliation for the killing of the three Black prisoners and the exoneration of the guard who killed them, white prison guard John Mills was beaten and thrown to his death from the third tier of Y Wing of the prison. Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette were charged with murdering Mills in what became known as the Soledad 3 or Soledad Brothers case. The Soledad Brothers Defense Committee was established in Los



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Angeles and Oakland, California, with a membership that included radicals, community activists such as Angela Davis, George Jacksons’ younger brother Jonathan Jackson, and members of the defendants’ families. George Jackson was facing the automatic death penalty because he was already serving the sentence of one year to life for the $70 gas station robbery. Desperate to see his brother free from prison and because of threats to his life from white racist inmates, corrupt prison guards, and the courts, Comrade George’s 17-year-old brother Jonathan traveled to the Marin County Courthouse in northern California on August 7, 1970. He entered a courtroom and armed radical prisoners William Christmas, John McClain, and Ruchell Magee. The revolutionaries openly demanded that the state free the Soledad Brothers. To demonstrate the seriousness of their demands, Jonathan and his comrades took and held hostage a judge, a district attorney, and several female jurors. After the revolutionaries and hostages left the courthouse and entered a van, prison guards at the courthouse opened fire, causing the deaths of Jonathan Jackson, William Christmas, James McClain, and Superior Court judge Harold Haley. Prisoner Ruchell Magee was wounded in the assault by the prison guards, and Assistant District Attorney Gary Thomas, who grabbed a gun and started shooting the revolutionaries from inside the van, was paralyzed by the guards’ high-powered bullets. The Marin County Courthouse kidnapping and killings led to the national hunt and eventual prosecution of Soledad Defense Committee member Angela Davis for conspiracy and murder because her guns had been used by Jonathan Jackson. Davis was eventually acquitted of all charges. Revolutionary prisoner Ruchell Magee, who was wounded, survived the shootout to stand trial. Magee was eventually acquitted of murder but was convicted of lesser offenses. As of 2018, he has remained imprisoned in the California penal system. On August 21, 1971, there was a prison uprising during which guards Jere Graham, Frank DeLeon, and Paul Krasenes were killed. White inmates Ronald Kane and John Lynn were also killed. As George Jackson left the scene of the fight he ran out into the prison yard, where he was cut down by a prison guard sniper. The first shot put Jackson on his hands and knees, and a second shot went through his back and exited from the top of his head (“Jackson Report Revised” 1971, 15). Prison authorities told a thoroughly discredited account of how Jackson’s lawyer Stephan Bingham smuggled a gun into San Quentin State Prison, which Jackson hid under a wig. Six associates of Comrade George were charged with the deaths of the prison guards and the two white prisoners killed in the uprising—Hugo Pinell, John Larry Spain, Luis Talamantez, Willie Tate, David Johnson, and Fleeta Drumgo. At the time of his death, Jackson carried the title of field marshal for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Thousands of people attended his funeral, and Comrade George was given a hero’s burial in Oakland, California.

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Events after Jackson’s Death On August 22, 1971, prisoners in the Attica Correctional Facility in New York staged a silent fast to memorialize the death of Comrade George. On September 9, 1972, prisoners at Attica took over the prison, with all races and ethnicities participating to address the inhumane and dehumanizing conditions at the facility. The prisoners gave a list of mostly simple demands to make their incarceration more humane. Intense negotiations took place, with radical activists, elected officials, and others working toward a peaceful resolution to the crisis. However, on orders from New York governor Nelson Rockefeller to retake the prison, Attica exploded into the deadliest prison rebellion in U.S. history as dozens of prisoners and guards were killed by National Guard troops and New York state troopers. After the uprising was quashed, the prisoners were systematically tortured, and others were summarily executed. In January 2000, the State of New York settled a decades-old lawsuit filed by Attica prisoners in the amount of $8 million for torture and other human rights abuses inflicted on them by prison and state officials. On August 28, 1971, the Weather Underground bombed the California Depart­ ment of Corrections offices in San Francisco and Sacramento in memory of George Jackson. Also in late August 1971, the Black Liberation Army (BLA) claimed credit for a series of bombings and armed attacks on the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) in response to the assassination of Comrade George. On August 28, 1971, BLA militants Nuh (Albert Washington) and Jalil Montequim (Anthony Bottom) were captured after attempting to assassinate SFPD sergeant George Kowalksi. Unknown BLA militants attacked the Ingleside police station in San Francisco on August 29, 1971, and killed Sergeant John V. Young. In an effort to crack the case, New Orleans police, accompanied by detectives from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, tortured over several days alleged BLA members who implicated themselves and others. Charges in the killing of Sergeant Young against numerous men were dismissed due to the unreliability of the confessions and other evidence gathered by torture. Other noteworthy events that occurred after Jackson’s death include the publication of his second book, Blood in My Eye, which was released in 1972. On March 28, 1972, the surviving Soledad Brothers—Fleeta Dumgo and John Cluchette—were acquitted of the murder of prison guard John Mills. Between 1975 and 1977 the George Jackson Brigade, a clandestine organization named after the slain activist, robbed banks and bombed 20 governmental offices and corporate businesses. On August 1, 1978, Black Guerilla Family member Khatari Gauldin was allowed to die by San Quentin State Prison authorities after prison authorities failed to treat a head injury he suffered in a prisoners’ football game. A year later, the Black August resistance movement was launched by California prisoners who



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were committed to revolutionary change and changing the criminal mentality of prisoners to a revolutionary mentality. In addition to a monthlong emphasis on political study, fasting, and physical training, special attention was paid to the dates of August 7 and 21, the anniversaries of the deaths of Jonathan Jackson and George Jackson. Law enforcement intelligence agencies in California claim that in 1966, George Jackson started the Black Guerilla Family, a nationwide clandestine organization based in the California prison system that holds Comrade George in high regard. Corrections officials have often demonstrated paranoia at the mere mention of Jackson’s name or the date of his death, the possession of his books, or the mention of Black August. Any of these acts have been used by California prison authorities to validate a prisoner as a “gang member” associated with the Black Guerilla Family. Such validation can lead to indefinite isolation in a segregated housing unit for decades with no human contact. In 1976, the San Quentin 6 went to trial for murder and other crimes allegedly occurring during the 1971 uprising that ended in the shooting death of Comrade George. Black Panther Johnny Spain was the only one of the six defendants convicted of murder after the 16-month trial, even though he didn’t touch the guards. His conviction was later overturned due to his being shackled during his trial. David Johnson was convicted of assaulting correctional officers, while Drumgo, Luis Talamantez, and Willie Tate were all found not guilty of all charges. Hugo Pinell was convicted of assaulting correctional officers and spent the rest of his life in prison—43 years of which were in solitary confinement. After a system-wide hunger strike by prisoners, Pinell was released from solitary confinement along with other prisoners statewide. Soon after his release into the general prison population, the racist Aryan Brotherhood gang assassinated Pinell on August 12, 2015. Also in 1986, attorney Steve Bingham, who had fled the country and did not return to the United States for 15 years based on accusations of providing a weapon to George Jackson, was eventually found not guilty of all charges after his trial in 1986. In 2007, alleged BLA members Richard Brown, Richard O’Neal, Francisco “Cisco” Torres, Ray Boudreaux, Henry Watson Jones, and Harold Taylor were arrested and charged for murdering San Francisco Police Department sergeant John V. Young. Herman Bell and Anthony Bottom were also charged for the same murder, even though they were already imprisoned for killing police officers in New York City. The eight defendants became known as the San Francisco 8. Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth was sought for Young’s death but had disappeared. After several years the charges against those arrested were dismissed once again in 2011, as no new evidence had been found, and the alleged evidence obtained by torture was still inadmissible. Bell and Bottom received minimal sentences of probation after a favorable plea bargain agreement.

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Jackson’s Legacy Jackson’s life has been the subject of two fictionalized feature films: Brothers, starring Bernie Casey as Jackson, and Black August, starring Gary Dourdan as Jackson. And several songs about Jackson have been recorded and released, including “George Jackson” by Bob Dylan and “George Jackson” and “Uncle George” by Steel Pulse. James M. Simmons See also: Attica Prison Rebellion; Black Panther Party; Davis, Angela Yvonne; Newton, Huey P.; Political Prisoners and Exiles Further Reading Black August. 2007. Film, directed by Samm Styles. Brothers. 1977. Film, directed by Arthur Barron. Burton-Rose, Daniel. 2010. Creating a Movement with Teeth: A Documentary History of the George Jackson Brigade. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Clark, Richard X. 1973. The Brothers of Attica: The Inmates’ Spokesman Tells What Happened inside the Prison during the Fateful Days of the Attica Rebellion. Edited by Leonard Levitt. New York: Links Books. Davis, Angela. 2013. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York: International Publishers. Jackson, George. 1994. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Jackson, George. 1996. Blood in My Eye. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. “Jackson Report Revised.” 1971. Free Lance-Star, September 22. Liberatore, Paul. 1996. The Road to Hell: The True Story of George Jackson, Stephen Bingham and the San Quentin Massacre. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Mann, Eric. 1974. Comrade George: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought, and Assassination of George Jackson. New York: Perennial Library. Newton, Huey. 2009. To Die for the People. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers. Wicker, Thomas. 1975. A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt. New York: Quadrangle. Yee, Min S. 1973. The Melancholy History of Soledad Prison: In Which a Utopian Scheme Turns Bedlam. New York: Harper and Row.

Jackson, Jesse L., Sr. (1941–) Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr. is one of the most influential African American leaders in 20th-century politics. He is an ordained minister, a leader in civil and human rights, and the first African American to launch two respected bids for the



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Baptist minister Reverend Jesse Jackson and John Williams. As founder of Operation PUSH, an organization that advocated for African American political and economic power, Reverend Jackson’s appearance symbolized the Black Power aesthetic. (Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State Uni­ versity, Northridge)

U.S. presidency. Although his direct-action campaigns in the Civil Rights Movement and electoral politics are well known, it is Jackson’s manifestation of the concept Black Power in appearance and activism that brought him international notoriety and distinguished his work from other mainstream leaders. On October 8, 1941, Jesse Burns was born to Helen Burns and Noah Robinson in Greenville, South Carolina. His mother was a vocalist and later became an entrepreneur in beauty and cosmetology. Helen and Noah were never married. When Jesse was 2 years old his mother married Charles Jackson, who adopted him at 16 years old. The Jacksons lived in the segregated South, where there were few opportunities for African American upward mobility. Charles Jackson worked for the post office after serving in World War II. Despite the social climate, Jesse Jackson became a star pupil. At Sterling High, he was elected student body class president and president of the honor society and led in athletics, especially in baseball, basketball, and football. After graduating from high school in 1959, Jackson was offered a contract with the New York Giants that would pay him a salary significantly lower than that of his white counterparts. Instead of accepting the low offer, Jackson chose to attend the predominately white University of Illinois in Chicago on a football scholarship. Jackson was naturally a quarterback; however, Black quarterbacks were not accepted by whites. So, his positions on the team shifted, as his coaches sought to find another suitable position for him. Jackson was humiliated by such treatment and by the unexpected racism in the North. One year later he transferred to the historically Black college North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College in Greensboro, where he played quarterback. Although Jackson was a successful student at the college, he resented the inequality he witnessed off campus. Jackson decided to challenge segregation by

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becoming involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He soon became a field representative for the Congress of Racial Equality. Using the leadership abilities and skills that he had honed in high school and the mentoring he received by national leaders such as James Farmer and Floyd McKissick, Jackson was selected to lead the North Carolina Intercollegiate Council on Human Rights. As a college student, he led demonstrations of thousands in downtown Greensboro challenging segregated theaters and restaurants. On June 6, 1963, he was arrested and charged with inciting a riot. In order to halt future demonstrations, Jackson and the other students who had been arrested were released from custody, while the city mayor advocated for desegregation. Jackson also became involved in conventional political organizing. He joined the state’s Young Democrats of North Carolina and worked for North Carolina governor Terry Sanford, who sponsored Jackson as one of the first Black delegates to the Young Democrats National Convention in Las Vegas. In 1964, Jackson graduated from college with a bachelor of arts in sociology. After receiving support from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College president Dr. Sam Proctor, Jackson followed his dream of becoming a minister and enrolled into the Chicago Theological Seminary. It was during this period that he received attention from national leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Founded in 1957, the SCLC was dedicated to the principles of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to challenge inequality. When Jackson joined, the organization was led by ministers who coordinated work throughout the country. For instance, the SCLC traveled to Alabama to register African Americans to vote and protest discriminatory voting requirements. As the SCLC encountered the beatings and murders of Black demonstrators, they called for supporters to assist in the campaign. On March 7, 1965, Jackson witnessed what became known as Bloody Sunday on television. Led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the SCLC, activists marched out of Selma with the goal of registering voters at a Montgomery, Alabama, courthouse. However, the demonstrators were met at the Edmund Pettus Bridge by officers and state troopers who demanded that they turn around, which they refused to do. As a result, multiple supporters were left injured and hospitalized. When Jackson saw the brutal beatings on television, he felt compelled to travel to Selma and join in their fight. To encourage others to join, he delivered a convincing speech that persuaded several classmates and teachers to go with him. Jackson and activists from Chicago took the 18-hour drive to support the SCLC and other activists. It was in Selma where SCLC leaders and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. saw Jesse Jackson at the Brown Chapel, organizing supporters. About six months after Selma, at the age of 24 and still a seminary student, Jackson became the youngest member of King’s staff and a part-time worker for the SCLC. During his early



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involvement with the organization, Jackson was a driver for King while he was in town. As Jackson and King became familiar with each other, King gave Jackson more responsibilities, such as introducing him at public events and organizing Black ministers. Eventually in the spring of 1966 King appointed Jackson as the national director for Operation Breadbasket, a program designed to increase economic and political power for African Americans. Operation Breadbasket was modeled after Reverend Leon Sullivan’s work in Philadelphia, applying boycotts and negotiations to force businesses to work with Black people. A significant component of Jackson’s job was to organize ministers and their congregations to work on behalf of economic empowerment and, when needed, to participate in boycotts of businesses. Jackson invigorated Operation Breadbasket. Along with a steering committee and King, he evaluated companies based on whether or not they purchased Black manufactured products, used the services of the Black businesses, and hired Black workers. Jackson negotiated covenants with companies that the SCLC believed had engaged in discriminatory practices. Using the threat of boycotts, Jackson persuaded companies such as the High-Low Grocery chain, the Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, and Red Rooster to sign covenants with Operation Breadbasket. This persuasion resulted in large successes for the Black community. Jackson furthered the initiative by partnering Black-owned companies with white-owned businesses. Operation Breadbasket also helped Black companies such as Mumbo Barbecue Sauce, Diamond Sparkle Wax, and Joe Louis Milk get their products into stores. Banking was another important target area for Operation Breadbasket, as the operation sought to increase Black-owned bank deposits in Chicago’s South Side. Through advertisements with Black media outlets, engaging with larger press circuits in a personal manner, and evangelization at Breadbasket rallies, Jackson successfully promoted Black economic empowerment. In sum, in less than two years with Jackson’s navigation, Operation Breadbasket generated around 3,000 new jobs for Blacks and amplified the annual income for Blacks in Chicago by approximately $22 million. Jackson’s charisma was an important component of Operation Breadbasket’s success. Not only was he able to motivate ministers to participate, but he also led the SCLC’s Saturday Morning Forums and organized the Black Exposition, a showcase for Black businesses to highlight their products and services. Additionally, he introduced the world to a new philosophy and slogan, “I Am Somebody,” designed to raise the self-esteem of African Americans. While Jackson and King worked closely together, their relationship evolved into what closely resembled a father/son bond. King supported Jackson but also admonished him for his youthful exuberance and independent actions. Jackson greatly admired King and saw himself as a disciple of a great leader of humanity. Thus, when King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, as he, Jackson, and others

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were leaving the Lorraine Motel for dinner, Jackson was openly devastated. Today, one of the most iconic photos of Jesse Jackson is of him standing near King on the balcony on that tragic day. On June 30, 1968, a few months after King’s death, Jackson became an ordained minister and an organizer of the Poor Peoples Campaign, the last initiative of King. Jackson was chosen as the city manager of Tent City, which was located near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Jackson also maintained his responsibilities in the SCLC and Operation Breadbasket. Within that context, he developed his own ideology for the program, titled “The Kingdom Theory.” His theory argued that “Black people must understand themselves as having the authority of kings and that their dominions are their communities.” He also stressed that Black people must be informed about ways to improve their economic conditions. In particular, they must increase the circular flow of dollars so that money remained within the Black community. To make this happen, they needed to organize and invest. Thus, Jackson planned successful campaigns with businesses to hire more Black employees, contract with Black firms, and invest in financial institutions. In 1971, Jackson left the SCLC. A simmering power struggle among SCLC leadership reached a high boil following King’s death. On Christmas Day, December 25, 1971, Jackson announced the establishment of Operation PUSH (for People United to Save Humanity, later changed to People United to Serve Humanity). Operation PUSH was founded during the height of the Black Power Movement and became an essential conduit for political, economic, and cultural empowerment locally and nationally. Jackson refused to accept the idea that Black Power and Civil Rights were mutually exclusive concepts, as many others did. He embraced nonviolent direct action, which was exemplified by Civil Rights activism, but used the messages and cultural signals rooted in Black empowerment. Jackson continued to use the selective boycott strategy of Operation Breadbasket and in fact considered Black economic power to be an alternative to violence. Jackson established the Black Expo under Operation PUSH as well. Like Operation Breadbasket, the expo under PUSH appealed to large crowds, reaching hundreds of thousands of attendees and attracting famous entertainers such as Bill Cosby, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, the Jackson Five, and Sammy Davis Jr. Additionally, through the Black Expo Jackson developed close relationships with powerful Black musicians and entrepreneurs such as Quincy Jones and Berry Gordy and Black business owners such as Percy Sutton. In fusing entertainment with his activism, Jackson managed to promote Black cultural power in innovative ways. The theme of the 1972 Black Expo was “Save The Children,” which became a documentary film released by Paramount Studios in 1973 featuring a concert of Black celebrities such as Marvin Gaye and Gladys Knight and the Pips, who shared



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in Operation PUSH’s fund-raising mission. A year later, Jackson appeared in the film Wattstax, which documented a benefit concert commemorating the 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles. At this event, Jackson gave his “I Am Somebody” speech, motivating and captivating his audience. Not only did Jackson promote economic empowerment and engage the communities he served through entertainment, he also promoted Black cultural power in his creative programs and his own personal style. His promotion of Black pride was evident in the celebration of Black Christmas, first showcased under Operation Breadbasket in 1968. During the first annual Black Christmas in Chicago, a parade was held that incorporated the symbol of a horse-drawn wagon and the Black Soul Saint, whom Jackson said came from the South Pole. The Black Soul Saint gave gifts of love, justice, peace, and power. Much like Black Christmas, Black Easter was a brainchild of Jackson’s that coincided with his mission of building Black race pride. Similar to the Black Soul Saint, Black Easter incorporated the symbol of the Black sheep as the star of its own parade. The celebration of Black Easter also incorporated a passion play, which was a biblical experience. Jackson’s outerrepresentation of Black culture did not end with the Black Expo, Black Christmas, or Black Easter. During the Black Power era Jackson was often seen wearing the style and aesthetics of Black Power fashion. For instance, he sported a huge Afro hairstyle with thick sideburns. He wore bell-bottom pants, a big medallion over a turtleneck, or a Black velvet dashiki trimmed with the colors of the red, black, and green flag. Moreover, he used the speaking pattern and rhetoric that was associated with Black Power activism. Interestingly, Jackson managed to exist as a nonthreatening persona despite his promotion of a militant style of Black culture. This was possible due to his reputation, style, and ability to speak the language of the streets while maintaining a distinguished presence in circles outside of his own culture. For Reverend Jesse Jackson, Black Power also meant political power, which was reflected in his efforts to impact public policy on behalf of Black people, other minority groups, and poor people. Within this context, Jackson organized and supported voting registration drives and fund-raised for political campaigns. He held strong views about independent politics as a way to balance power between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. To operationalize his ideas, Jackson ran as an independent candidate for mayor of Chicago in 1971 against the Democratic Party’s incumbent mayor, Richard J. Daley. Jackson’s reasoning was to solidify a third party of independent voters called the “Bread ’n Butter” party and to destroy the tradition of voting the slate in Chicago. Jackson did not receive enough signatures to appear on the ballot. In addition to becoming a candidate, Jackson promoted the idea of crossover voting to Chicago Blacks, encouraging them to select Republican and/or Democratic candidates based on their issue positions, not party loyalty. For instance, he

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organized Black people to support Illinois Republican senatorial candidate Charles Percy in 1972. Jackson also promoted Black Power and Black independent politics at the National Political Assembly in Gary, Indiana, that same year. Before 8,000 attendees, he argued for respect within both majority parties. “We are grown. We ain’t taking it no more. No more yes boss. No more bowing or scraping. We are 25 million strong. Cut us in or cut it out. It is a new ball game.” Jackson crossed paths with Chicago’s Mayor Daley once again at the Democratic National Convention in Miami in 1972, where he served as a McGovern delegate. However, Jackson worked to unseat the Mayor Daley delegate slate and the regular Cook County delegation to show independence from the Daley political machine. In partnering with Alderman William Singer, Jackson successfully removed Daley from his seat. Tensions from this convention increased on a community scale as well as in the political arena. Jackson also supported Black elected officials by dispatching members of his organization to campaign for Black candidates, including Mayor Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Mayor Richard Hatcher in Indiana. During the Black Power era, Jackson maintained a connection to Black Power– oriented organizations. He eulogized Fred Hampton, the Black Panther Party leader who was murdered with Mark Clark by the Chicago Police Department. Jackson later worked to defeat the state attorney whose police launched the assault on the Black Power organization. Jackson was also well known for advocating for gang members, seeing them as young people needing support rather than ostracism. A beneficiary of Jackson’s work was the Black “P” Stone Nation, several of whom were employed by Red Rooster food store chain, based on his recommendation in 1969 through Operation Breadbasket. Jackson also encouraged peaceful political activism of local gangs, including the Black “P” Stone Nation, the Black Disciples, and the Vice Lords. Over the years, Reverend Jesse Jackson has been criticized because of his ideologies and strategies. His calls for protests, boycotts, and unity were not always supported by those who were afraid to lose their jobs. But a holistic review of his work demonstrates his continued commitment to Black Power.

Conclusion Reverend Jesse Jackson has continued the quest for Black Power in various contexts. In 1984 and 1988 he ran for the presidency of the United States under the banner of the Rainbow Coalition and the idea that “the old minorities constitute a new majority.” In 1984 he received more than 3 million primary votes and in 1988 over 7 million, coming in second to the Democratic nominee Al Gore. Jackson’s campaign platforms, considered liberal by most standards, advocated for universal health care, stronger voting rights, ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, a nuclear freeze, an end to apartheid in South Africa, and support for a Palestinian



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state. For Jackson, Black Power must be accomplished with power for subjugated people, emphasizing the end of racism and economic parity. Ashley L. Jackson See also: Black Aesthetic; Electoral Politics and Black Power; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Operation Breadbasket; Wattstax Further Reading “Civil Rights Greensboro.” n.d. UNCG Digital Collections, http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/. Deppe, Martin L. 2017. Operation Breadbasket: An Untold Story of Civil Rights in Chicago, 1966–1971. Athens: University of Georgia. Frady, Marshall. 1996. Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson. New York: Random House. House, Ernest R. 1988. Jesse Jackson & the Politics of Charisma: The Rise and Fall of the PUSH/Excel Program. Boulder, CO: Westview. Reynolds, Barbara A. 1975. Jesse Jackson, the Man, the Movement, the Myth. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Stanford, Karin L. 1993. “Citizen Diplomacy, an Analysis of Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Diplomatic Efforts from 1984–1986.” PhD dissertation, Howard University. Stone, Eddie. 1988. Jesse Jackson. Los Angeles: Holloway House.

Jackson, Maynard Holbrook (1938–2003) Inasmuch as we understand Black political empowerment and electoral politics in the 20th century, few men held fast to the heart and soul of Black people. The Honorable Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr.’s contribution and work within Black America demonstrates the ways in which political empowerment and electoral politics improved the lives of Black people. At the fore of Jackson’s political machine were economic and cultural accessibility for Atlanta’s Black masses and a template for how Black political empowerment could be spread throughout the American South. Jackson’s experiences transcended the sordid racial tensions long associated with the South and challenged how elected and appointed American politicians capitalized on the support of the broader Black electorate to rise to power with the help of a progressive white constituency. A trained lawyer and a sideline minister, Jackson was one of the most influential political leaders of the region. Born on March 23, 1938, in Dallas, Texas, to Reverend Dr. Maynard H. Jackson Sr. and Irene Dobbs Jackson, Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr. was a fifth-generation Georgian. When he was seven years old his family moved to Atlanta, where his

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father pastored Friendship Baptist Church. Jackson’s family stressed education— his mother had a PhD in French from the University of Toulouse, and her five sisters, including internationally acclaimed opera singer Mattiwilda Dobbs, all had master’s degrees. His father’s church was credited as the birthplace of Atlanta University and Spelman College and served as a temporary home to Augusta Baptist College, later Morehouse College, when it moved its campus to Atlanta. Jackson’s great-grandfather, Andrew Jackson, founded Atlanta’s Wheat Street Baptist Church, his maternal grandfather, John Wesley Dobbs, was the grand master of the Prince Hall Masons of Georgia and founder of the Atlanta Negro Voters League. Dobbs was also known as the “unofficial mayor” of the Sweet Auburn District (Pomerantz 1990). Maynard Jackson entered Morehouse College as a Ford Foundation Early Admission Scholar and graduated at the age of 18 with a bachelor’s degree in history and political science. He attended North Carolina College at Durham Law School (now North Carolina Central University), where he earned his juris doctor cum laude. After law school Jackson practiced law with the National Labor Relations Board, which offered legal services to low-income Atlantans. In 1968 he joined the Emory Community Legal Service Center, an organization that provided pro bono legal aid. Jackson developed an interest in representing issues around low-income housing. Later he would help to found the law firm Jackson, Patterson, Parks, and Franklin. In his law career Jackson focused on issues faced by Atlanta’s poor. Soon he was seen as a champion for the people, as he fought for equality in housing, education, public services, and jobs. Jackson’s political career began in 1968, when presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy’s death prompted Jackson to run for the U.S. Senate against segregationist Herman Talmadge. Without the endorsement of the Black political power structure in Atlanta, Jackson ran and lost the race but carried the majority of the vote in Atlanta (Jackson-Ransom 2015). In 1970 Jackson became the first Black vice mayor of the city and changed the role of the vice mayor to serve as a “voice for the people.” He worked for a city ombudsman with subpoena power and established a civic organization–sponsored complaint office. That same year, he sided with the sanitation strikers and ridiculed Atlanta mayor Sam Massell (“City Union on ‘Holiday’” 1970). During the 1973 campaign for mayor, Black Atlanta was galvanized, and Jackson was elected as the American South’s and Atlanta’s first big-city mayor. Jackson served as mayor of Atlanta from 1974 to 1982 and again from 1990 to 1994. His three terms as mayor were marked by the creation of the city’s Neighborhood Planning Unit system, which was a citywide development program to improve mass transit, the arts, housing, jobs, and many other things. The Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport was built under his leadership. His mayoral



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tenures set unprecedented and unparalleled marks for economic development and public-private partnerships, especially for Black contractors. Based largely on his vision and tenacity, Atlanta was marked as the “Best American City” (JacksonRansom 2015). The election of the Honorable Maynard Holbrook Jackson of Atlanta in the 1970s was arguably the most important political achievement for Black America until the election of President Barack Hussein Obama in 2008. Although Black people had embodied Black political empowerment and electoral politics on state and national levels, Jackson’s election was deemed as being most credible because of his ability to change policies that were inclusive for Black Americans at the level of city government. However, Jackson experienced some significant problems during his terms as mayor. These included the Sanitation Strike of 1977, when he fired more than 1,300 sanitation workers, and his mishandling of the Atlanta Child Murders in which Atlanta’s most vulnerable citizens, poor Black children, labeled as hustlers and runaways, were being snatched and murdered. After leaving public office, Jackson founded Jackson Securities, Inc., a national retail investment bank. In 1985 he co-organized and served as the founding chairman of the National Association of Securities Professionals. He was the recipient of eight honorary degrees, was a Chubb Fellow at Yale University, and was a participant of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Jackson passed away on June 23, 2003 (Jackson-Ransom 2015). Maurice Hobson See also: Towards a Black University Conference Further Reading “City Union on ‘Holiday’: 2,000 Asked to Stay Home.” 1970. Atlanta Constitution, March 17, Box 1, Newsweek Inc. Atlanta Collection, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library, Emory University. Hobson, Maurice J. 2017. The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Holmes, Robert A. 2009. Maynard Jackson: A Biography. Miami: Barnhardt and Ashe Publishing. Jackson-Ransom, Bunnie. 2015. Interview with Maurice J. Hobson, July 11, Atlanta, GA. Jackson-Ransom, Bunnie. 2016. “What Manner of Man Was Maynard Holbrook Jackson? A Tribute to His Life and Legacy.” Atlanta Black History Makers, http://atlantas blackhistorymakers.com/index.php/2016/08/31/what-manner-of-man-was-maynard -holbrook-jackson-a-tribute-to-his-life-and-legacy/. Pomerantz, Gary M. 1990. “Maynard Jackson: A Personal Profile.” Box 14, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Books Library, Emory University.

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Jackson State Massacre (May 14, 1970) The Jackson State Massacre (also known as the Gibbs/Green Tragedy) occurred at Jackson State College (JSC) in the spring of 1970 when police raided the institution to quell protests. It resulted in the death of two youths, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green. JSC (now Jackson State University) is a historically Black college in Jackson, Mississippi. Gibbs, age 21, was a junior prelaw major and the father of an 18-month-old son. Green was a senior at Jim Hill High School. He was on his way home from work at a local grocery store when he was shot. Several students were also injured after being struck by gunfire and shattered glass. The shooting at JSC was preceded by the Kent State shooting, which left four white antiwar student protestors murdered. JSC students and white motorists had a long history of racial conflict between one another, oftentimes resulting in white motorists shouting racial slurs at students and throwing objects at them from their cars. Furthermore, Jackson, Mississippi, was a major battleground for the Black freedom movement, and this racial antagonism as well as the subsequent murders of two Black youths by state militia forces added to the long list of racially suppressive attacks. Students and community activists created a resistance movement because of the deaths of Gibbs and Green and joined Black Power organizers to call for accountability. Today, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green are remembered at Jackson State University with the Gibbs/Green Pedestrian Walkway; a monument with the inscription “Martyrs of May 14, 1970”; and a historic marker in front of Alexander Hall, the coed dormitory that was impaled by bullets. In 1967 JSC received a new president, John A. Peoples Jr. Peoples had attended JSC as an undergraduate, had served as president of the Student Government Association president, and had graduated with high honors in 1950. After receiving both a master’s degree and a PhD from the University of Chicago, he served as a teacher and principal in Gary, Indiana, and a lecturer at the University of Michigan. He then moved back to Jackson to serve as vice president of JSC in 1964. Peoples’s relocation to his alma mater was steeped in tragedy. In 1963 a year before he returned to Mississippi, Medgar Evers, Civil Rights worker and field secretary for the Mississippi National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was assassinated outside his home not too far from JSC. Evers’s main office was located near the college on Jackson’s Lynch Street. Three Civil Rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner— were assassinated by white supremacists while organizing for the Freedom Summer project, a program designed in the Council of Federated Organization (COFO). COFO’s headquarters was also on Lynch Street. Finally, in 1967 when Peoples became president, student and Civil Rights activist Benjamin Brown was murdered by police officers on campus near the Stewart Hall dormitory.



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The May 12, 1967, murder of Benjamin Brown foreshadowed the Jackson State Massacre of May 4, 1970. After the murder of Brown, the students at JSC, the largest historically Black college in Mississippi, stopped going to classes and participated in numerous protests with nonstudents, nicknamed “corner boys.” These included rioting, looting, throwing objects at police cars, starting fires, and blocking Lynch Street—a pivotal street that led to the downtown white business district. More than 1,000 students participated in these protests, shutting down campus and causing enough ruckus to call forth an armed police force. In addition, Jackson mayor Allen Thompson came to the protesting students in order to calm them down. He was met with booing and was forced by protestors to remove the police from campus. In 1963, four years earlier, Tougaloo College students and faculty also confronted Mayor Thompson and the white business district in downtown Jackson with nonviolent demonstrations and boycotts to end desegregation, which led to more than 500 protestors being arrested. Mayor Thompson established himself as an adversary to Black advancement in the Jackson movement and continued to try to forcibly uphold the racial order using a militarized police force. Over the course of his tenure as mayor, Thompson ensured that police were provided with equipment to quell Civil Rights activity, even purchasing an armored van that activists nicknamed “Thompson’s Tank.” By 1967, Black nationalist organizing had been popularized and had spread to college campuses all around the nation. Ibram Kendi, in his monogram The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972, describes this Black nationalist movement of Black student organizing at historically white and Black colleges as the Black campus movement. The slogan “Black Power” was shouted in 1966 by Stokely Carmichael during James Meredith’s March Against Fear at Tougaloo College. Including the sustained and often spontaneous protests after the murder of Benjamin Brown, JSC students also began to organize around the Black Power rhetoric. Student organizers operated an underground Black Power newspaper, The Gadfly. President Peoples approved of The Gadfly as an outlet for expression but remained wary that it might become too militant or revolutionary. A group called the Black People’s Unity Movement was formed and circulated leaflets. In addition, Lynch Street, which ran through JSC, was also a hotbed for Civil Rights activity. The state office of the NAACP was located in the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street, and after Medgar Evers’s death, Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of grievers came to Lynch Street to witness Evers’s funeral. Margaret Walker Alexander, a faculty member at JSC, established a Black studies institute at the college in 1968, redirecting the curriculum in multiple departments from classically Eurocentric instruction toward liberation of thought found in a Black humanities program.

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Many JSC students secretly participated in Civil Rights activity—students who openly participated in movement activity, such as Joyce and Dorie Ladner, were reprimanded by administration—and attempted to organize students around Black Power activism. This environment of student activism and youth unrest in the Mississippi Black freedom struggle painted the atmosphere for the Jackson State Massacre. On May 4, 1970, nine days before the massacre, four white student protestors were murdered at Kent State University in Ohio. The four students were Allison Krause, Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, and William K. Schroeder. They were killed by the Ohio National Guard. Kent State University students were protesting the war in Vietnam. A rally was held for the Kent State students on May 9 by JSC and neighboring Millsaps College students. As Tim Spofford describes in Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College, a student from Kent State University, Tom D’Floure, and a student from JSC, Henry Thompson, a 35-year-old Black veteran, addressed the audience with two different messages. D’Floure took a nonviolent stance, citing Allison Krause’s peace activism and another of the slain victims’ ROTC status. D’Floure blamed the incident on frightened soldiers with guns. Thompson, however, argued that the Kent State shooting was “karma” for the atrocities that white people had committed, including the enslavement of Africans and the colonization of native people and their land. The demonstration, organized by the Jackson Peace Coordinating Committee, was in solidarity to the Kent slayings, the antiwar protests, and the antiestablishment protests that were happening throughout the country by college students. However, Black students had a particularly racialized critique of the war as students who were also committed to antiracist activism. On Wednesday evening, May 13, 1970, students and youths at JSC engaged in what was called a mini-­riot after rumors that the Fayette mayor Charles Evers (the brother of Medgar Evers) and his wife had been assassinated in Fayette. Charles Evers took on the position of field secretary in the Mississippi NAACP after his brother’s assassination. When the false rumor of Mayor Evers’s death spread, students and youths began engaging in rock throwing and defamation and destruction of property. White motorists driving down Lynch Street called police, complaining about the protesters pelting their vehicles with rocks as they passed by. In order to contain the protesting and violence, the local Jackson Police Department, the highway patrol, and the National Guard were summoned, including the famed Thompson’s Tank. Police and guardsmen marched from the west toward the JSC campus until they finally reached Alexander Hall. Students were located in Alexander Hall, on the grass outside of the building, and in the B. F. Roberts Dining Hall adjacent to Alexander Hall behind the police officers. The students had a dismissive attitude toward the police. Many students shouted that they wanted the police to leave. The police force, which was largely white and had a



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history of engagement with Black people engaged in civil disturbances in various movement-related activities, also harbored racist attitudes toward the students. There are multiple accounts about what happened that led to the shootings. Student accounts generally agree that police issued a warning and quickly opened fire afterward. The police claim that there was a sniper in one of the windows of the dormitory and that other students were armed throughout Alexander Hall and near the B. F. Roberts Dining Hall. Reporters have denounced the police reports, saying that there was no solid evidence of any shooters attacking police and that they were uncertain why police opened fire except for a student who threw a bottle, which might have been enough to shock police into firing. The JSC campus turned into a mini war zone, and Alexander Hall was riddled with bullets. Police also turned around and fired bullets in the direction of the dining hall, where James Earl Green was located, claiming that they were being attacked from behind. In addition to the deaths of Gibbs and Green, several students were injured; five other students had to be treated for hysteria. The gunfire and glass injured unarmed students located inside and outside the dormitory, many of whom had no idea what was going on while they sat in their dorm rooms studying. After the tragedy, Black freedom activists demanded accountability for the shootings. Civil Rights leaders such as Charles Evers criticized the city government and the police department. Aaron Shirley warned of Black resistance in light of the murder. President John A. Peoples’s President’s Commission on Campus Unrest assembled local Civil Rights leaders, city officials, JSC faculty, and students to address the incident. JSC students such as Degecha X also organized protests. Hundreds of students on the high school and middle school levels marched out of school in protest of the shootings and marched to the governor’s mansion. Many organizers called for boycotts of downtown white businesses. As Akinyele Umoja illustrates in We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, “Some JSC students openly considered arming themselves after what they viewed as a massacre and racist abuse of power and force. There was a surge of gun purchases by Blacks in Jackson in the days after the campus shooting.” However, despite the pressure of organizers, the Hinds County grand jury ruled the shootings justified. No police officer was indicted, arrested, or convicted for any of the violations. Activist Rudy Shields organized the Jackson Black United Front. JSC students participated in Shields’ organization, which led efforts to demand and succeed in getting the first Black person appointed to the all-white Jackson School Board. The Jackson State Massacre is an example of the efforts of student organizing against state-sanctioned violence against Black people and also highlights the interlocking issues of racism and militarism. Alexander Hall is still riddled with bullet holes today to memorialize the tragedy. Theron Wilkerson

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See also: Police Brutality Further Reading Spofford, Tim. 1988. Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Umoja, Akinyele. 2013. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: NYU Press. Wyckoff, Whitney Blair. 2010. “Jackson State: A Tragedy Widely Forgotten.” National Public Ratio, May 3, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126426361.

Johnson, Nelson (1943–) Born in Airlie, Halifax County, North Carolina, on April 25, 1943, Nelson Johnson is an activist, political organizer, author, and minister. He is most noted for his work and leadership with the North Carolina–based Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which produced a second wave of Black Power and Pan-Africanist political programs as the vanguard student group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was disbanding. During the latter Black Power era, Johnson became primarily known for ushering in a Marxist-Leninist analysis and a pragmatic approach to the evolving organizational manifestations that the Black Power Movement was producing. After his time with SOBU and while still in North Carolina, Johnson continued to gain recognition as a chief member and organizer with the Communist Workers Party (CWP). Johnson was raised primarily on a family farm in Littleton, North Carolina. Upon graduation from his all-Black secondary school, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. While in the armed forces, Johnson spent a significant amount of time in Westover Field, Massachusetts, and at a Canadian military base in Baden, Germany. His interests in the social and political endeavors of Black America were sparked while he was stationed in Europe. He became a proponent of the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolent direct action as an approach to remedy the social ills that plagued Black communities. However, Johnson later admitted while in the armed forces and stationed abroad that he found King’s position hard to defend to fellow Black officers. This was principally due to the international outcry that snowballed from nationwide protests of the movement in the mid-1960s. In 1965, Johnson was honorably discharged from the U.S. Air Force. After a brief stint working and living in Harlem, New York, he enrolled as a student in Greensboro at the historically Black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical



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State University (North Carolina A&T). As a college student, Johnson became active in community organizing and Civil Rights activities in and around the city of Greensboro. During this time as an organizer he became a member of Youth Educational Services (YES), an academic program for students that was founded as a recruitment and supplementary initiative to support student success and to recruit students to set up additional tutorial programs under the guise of YES. By 1967 SNCC was leading the charge for student mobilizations in the South, and due to Stokely Carmichael’s momentous call for Black Power, Black youths nationwide shifted their approach to a more radical and nationalist approach to confront the racist power structures in high schools and institutions of higher education. In cities such as Greensboro and Fayetteville, North Carolina, the tactics of YES and student leaders such as Johnson began to express more militant action through their tactics with their explicit intentions of achieving more straightforward community organizing for the poor Black communities in the area. While working with YES, Johnson and many other Black student organizers aggressively recruited and engaged younger students in political education with the purpose of expanding the organization. During the summer of 1968, Johnson assisted in founding the Greensboro Association of Poor People (GAPP) while continuing to work with YES. Under the leadership of Johnson, GAPP identified itself as a multiclass organization of working-class people. Composed of poor Blacks living in the Greensboro area and militant students from James B. Dudley High School, Bennett College, and North Carolina A&T, GAPP challenged the city’s power structure in its efforts to address issues of welfare rights and housing stability for poor Blacks. While working with GAPP, Johnson extended his connections and recruitment base with a GAPP affiliate, Youth for the Unity of Black Society, and other Black college students of Duke University, North Carolina A&T, and North Carolina Central University. Johnson’s organizing and student network of activists in the Greensboro and Durham areas of North Carolina became a base of Black student activism that organizations such as SNCC were losing as they phased out at the end of the 1960s. On February 2, 1969, Bennett College hosted a conference on the university and racism where Black student participants drew up multiple areas of contention against the U.S. National Student Association (NSA). The Black students cited multiple claims against the NSA to include the following: exploitation of Black student members for financial gain, denial of Black student leadership in the NSA in pivotal roles to shape policy, and the NSA’s complicit roles in allowing Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents to infiltrate and dictate policies of the organization. Black students attending the conference constructed a resolution to establish a new organization to meet their needs, which resulted in SOBU. The first SOBU conference took place at North Carolina A&T

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during May 8–10, 1969. At the conference Johnson, who was the newly elected student body vice president, was elected as its national convener. SOBU openly opposed capitalism in all of its forms and decided to establish the organization’s headquarters in the newly formed institution of Malcolm X Liberation University that had been initially launched in Durham the same year. With SOBU, Johnson and other student activists such as Mark Smith and Sandra Neely (later Sandi Smith) and Dawolu Gene Locke had successfully established a Black nationalist/Pan-Africanist student organization that became a bridge that linked Black college students on the East Coast and in southern states and with former SNCC activists such as Cleveland Sellers, Courtland Cox, Willie Ricks, and Jimmy Garrett. As the leader of the upstart organization, Johnson emphasized that students and Black youths were paramount to maintaining the necessary mobilization efforts for systemic change and advocacy for the Black community. He stressed that the truest and most significant work must take place in the Black community and that the Black students must work to stave off any elitist tendencies. As Johnson and other leaders of the organization evolved ideologically and politically, so did the general body of SOBU. Influential ideas came from great theoreticians in the African world, including Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Sékou Touré, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, and Michel Signor. And thus by 1971, SOBU embraced an anti-imperialist analysis with an emphasis of the anticolonial struggles taking place on the African continent. By the latter part of 1971 and into 1972, Johnson and SOBU wholeheartedly subscribed to the philosophical perspectives of Marxism while emphasizing the utility of a scientific approach, and on April 19, 1972, SOBU was fully ensconced as a Pan-Africanist/Marxist Black student organization. SOBU then changed its name to the Youth Organization for Black Unity (YOBU) to emphasize the organization’s commitment to communist principles and also that its body of students was only a fraction of the greater youth forces that existed in the Black community. By 1974 as members of YOBU transitioned into other leftist formations and student organizations, Johnson began to openly identify as a Marxist and eventually became involved in the creation of the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL). In 1976 he departed the RWL and joined the Workers Viewpoint Organization, which later changed its name in 1979 to become the Communist Workers Party. That same year on November 3, 1979, Johnson spearheaded a CWP-sponsored anti–Klu Klux Klan (KKK) march in the city of China Grove, North Carolina. The anti-KKK march in Greensboro resulted in the deaths of five members of the CWP when they were attacked and killed by the KKK. Dismayed by the horrific tragedy and the deaths of his comrades, Johnson withdrew for a time from organizing and from the CWP. In 1986 he completed his undergraduate degree at North Carolina A&T and then later enrolled at the Virginia Union School of Theology in



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Richmond. Johnson went on to earn a master’s degree and returned to Greensboro to serve as an assistant pastor. Johnson became the pastor of the Faith Community Church in 1991. He has remained active in many charitable and civic causes, and he successfully led the efforts to establish the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He investigated the events of the infamous Greensboro Massacre. In 1991, he helped to found the Beloved Community Center and then served as the director. Remaining active in Greensboro, Johnson and other ministers led an effort in 1997 that resulted in a significant contract settlement for workers at the Greensboro K-Mart Distribution Center. Johnson continues to work in Greensboro. He is the pastor of Faith Community Church and the executive director of the Beloved Community Center of Greensboro. Richard D. Benson II See also: African Liberation Support Committee; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Communist International and Black Power; Malcolm X Liberation University; Pan-Africanism; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Student Organization for Black Unity Further Reading Benson, Richard. 2015. Fighting for Our Place in the Sun: Malcolm X and the Radicalization of the Black Student Movement 1960–1973. New York: Peter Lang. Biondi, Martha. 2012. The Black Revolution on Campus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bush, Roderick. 2009. The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Cohen, Robert, David J. Snyder, and Dan T. Carter. 2013. Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s. Baltimore: JHU Press. Rogers, Ibram H. 2012. The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Waller, Signe. 2002. Love and Revolution: A Political Memoir: People’s History of the Greensboro. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

K Karenga, Maulana (1941–) Maulana Karenga (b. July 14, 1941) is an activist-scholar, educator, social and cultural theorist, ethics philosopher, social critic, and author. He is currently a professor in and chair of the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Moreover, he is the executive director of the African American Cultural Center (Us) and the Kawaida Institute of Pan-African Studies, Los Angeles, and founder and national chairman of the Us organization and the National Association of Kawaida Organizations (NAKO). Karenga has also played a key role in national united front efforts, serving on the founding and executive committee of the Black Power Conferences of the 1960s, the National Black United Front, the National African American Leadership Summit, the Black Leadership Retreat, and NAKO and on the executive council of the national organizing committee of the Million Man March/Day of Absence, for which he wrote the mission statement. Karenga is most known nationally and internationally as the creator of the PanAfrican holiday Kwanzaa, a celebration of family, community, and culture that is observed by millions throughout the global African community (Karenga 2008b). He is also the author of the Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles) that are at the heart of the practice of Kwanzaa and are also used globally as an African-centered value system for philosophical and cultural grounding for millions of people and thousands of organizations that represent a wide range of educational, social, cultural, economic, and political formations. These principles are: umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity), and imani (faith). An activist-scholar of national and international recognition, Karenga has had a significant impact on Black intellectual and political culture since the 1960s. Through his organizational and intellectual work and his philosophy, kawaida, he has played a vanguard role in shaping the Black Arts Movement, Black studies, the Black Power Movement, the Black student union movement, Afrocentricity, ancient Egyptian studies and the study of ancient Egyptian culture as an essential part of Black studies, Ifa ethical studies, rites of passage programs, the independent Black school movement, African life-cycle ceremonies, the Simba Wachanga Youth Movement, Black theological and ethical discourse, and the reparations movement. Molefi Asante observed that “No single individual thinker has, without

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Maulana (Ron) Karenga, founder of the Us organization, a cultural nationalist organization based in Los Angeles. He is pictured speaking to civil rights activist Danny Bakewell. (Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge)

media promotion and American mainstream endorsement, molded intellectual discourse and shaped the African American cultural agenda as has Karenga” (Asante 2009). Karenga was born in Parsonsburg, Maryland, and attended elementary and high school in Salisbury, the county seat, but graduated from York High School in York, Pennsylvania, in 1958 at age 16. Moving to California, he attended Los Angeles City College (LACC), where he was active in political movements and student government, participating in the Civil Rights Movement, the anti–capital punishment movement, and the peace movement. He served as student council member and the first Black president of the student body at LACC. There, Karenga began to ground himself in the study of African history and culture and changed his name from Ron Everett to Ron Karenga to indicate a new consciousness and commitment to nationalism and Pan-Africanism. Later Karenga would be given two other names, Maulana and Ndabezitha, by members of his organization Us. Karenga has said that these names represent his



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mission and vocation in life. The name Karenga means “keeper of the tradition,” reflecting a commitment to African culture; the name Maulana means “master teacher” and reflects Us members’ praise of his wealth of knowledge, his commitment to knowledge, and his superior ability in sharing knowledge; and the name Ndabezitha means “constant concern to the enemy” and reflects his commitment to struggle and resistance. His first name is Swahili, his second is Zulu, and his third is Gikuyu, reflecting his embrace of a Pan-African identity and commitment. Transferring to the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA), Karenga earned a BA cum laude and an MA in political science with a specialization in African studies. He also participated in the Black Student Union and became chair of the Afro-American Association, a social action organization engaged in community organization and education. After a year of working on his doctorate, Karenga left the university to become more active in the Black freedom move­ ment in its transition from the Civil Rights phase to the Black Power phase. Karenga would later complete his first doctorate in human behavior and leadership, with a focus in political science and the theory and practice of nationalism, at the United States International University in 1976. He earned his second doctorate in social ethics with a focus on Maat, the classical African ethics of ancient Egypt from the University of Southern California in 1994. In the aftermath of the Watts Rebellion of 1965 and as the Black liberation movement moved toward Black Power, on September 7, 1965, Karenga called a group of colleagues to his apartment to found the organization Us (Us African people), dedicated to Black liberation, cultural revolution, and radical social change. Under his leadership, Us became one of the major Black Power organizations and one of the few still in existence and committed to its original fundamental principles. Karenga argued that a radical activism of community building and liberation struggle, undergirded by an earlier cultural revolution, paralleled and sustained the political revolution. In a word, he contended, cultural revolution helped build a culture of resistance and maintained the revolutionary consciousness and will to begin and sustain the liberation struggle. In this, Karenga borrows from and builds on the ideas of Malcolm X, Sékou Touré, Frantz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral, who stressed the importance of culture and cultural revolution and their indispensable role in the liberation struggle. Therefore, he argued for a radical rupture of the views and values of the established order and for reaching back and recovering the best views, values, and practices of African culture and using them to ground and orient Black lives and advance the interests of the people and the liberation struggle. Beginning at LACC and continuing at UCLA, Karenga studied the writings of major continental and diasporan liberation leaders and freedom fighters, which would aid him in building both his vanguard organization, Us, and his revolutionary cultural nationalist philosophy, kawaida. These leaders and theorists included

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Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, Frantz Fanon, Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba, Jomo Kenyatta, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Malcolm X, Amilcar Cabral, and Aimé Césaire. Later, Karenga would move himself and Us from prior male privileging thought and practice and steep himself in the emancipatory writings of womanist leaders and thinkers such as Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ida B. Wells, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and others. These writers and others would inform his philosophy of kawaida and ground him in nationalism, Pan-Africanism as both a continental and global project, African socialism and womanism, and concepts of culture, cultural nationalism, cultural revolution, and political revolution. The works of these writers would also shape his conception of liberation as a comprehensive project, freeing not only the country but also the consciousness of the people. As Fanon (1968, 246) states, real liberation means “not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man.” While at UCLA, Karenga began self-consciously to develop his philosophy of kawaida (kah-wah-eeʹ-dah), which he defines as “an ongoing synthesis of the best of African thought and practice in constant exchange with the world” (Karenga 2008a, 3). He describes kawaida as a philosophy of life and struggle, for it is a philosophy born in struggle and grows out of concern with understanding and advancing the life of the people. Kawaida is a Swahili word meaning “tradition,” but for Karenga it means tradition and reason—tradition informed and chosen by reason, which yields “the best of African thought and practice in constant exchange with the world.” Karenga’s stress on life and struggle at the heart of kawaida philosophy is expressed in his contention that “This is our duty: to know our past and honor it; to engage our present and improve it; and to imagine a whole new future and forge it in the most ethical and effective and expansive ways” (Karenga 2016, 16). Thus, kawaida uses the past as foundation and framework to improve the present and open the way to a new and expanded future. The radical and revolutionary philosophy and organizing activities of Karenga and Us brought them to the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other police agencies, and they were placed under surveillance. Moreover, Karenga and Us were classified by the FBI as “armed and dangerous,” “plan[ing] for a revolution . . . [and is] currently training in revolutionary tactics and is storing arms,” and as an “organization whose aims include overthrow or destruction of the U.S. by unlawful means.” This led to constant harassment and attacks on Us members by the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program such as those directed against the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, the Republic of New Africa, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and other groups and leaders considered security threats. Also, the FBI and other police agencies produced a deadly rivalry between Us and the Panthers culminating in a fatal shootout at UCLA in 1969.



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As avid Pan-Africanists, Karenga and his fellow advocates worked to support African liberation movements, Pan-African unity and exchange initiatives, and the antiapartheid movement and sponsored African exiles and refugees and other projects. Karenga also served as chair of the African American delegation to the Second World Black African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1977 and participated in many other Pan-African projects such as FESPAC (Senegal, 1996), FESMAN III (Senegal, 2010), and the African Union’s Sixth Region (diaspora) initiatives. In addition, he has lectured on the life, culture, and struggle of African peoples on numerous campuses in the United States and in Senegal, Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Trinidad, Mexico, Britain, and Canada. Recognizing the need for Third World alliances, Karenga led Us into building alliances and working with Mexican and Native American leaders and groups including the United Farm Workers, the Brown Berets, the Crusade for Justice, the Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres, and the Mutual Alliance of Peace, Harmony and Mutual Assistance involving African, Latino, and Native American leaders and groups. He also taught Black and brown activists community organizing at the community-based Social Action Training Center and lectured on organizing the movement at the Center for Social Action at the University of Southern California. Karenga emerged as a national leader during the Black Power Conferences of 1966, 1967, and 1968. In 1966 he and other Black Power leaders were invited by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell to Washington, D.C., to meet and build institutional structures to develop and achieve Black Power. From this initial meeting, conferences were held in Newark (1967) and Philadelphia (1968). Although Karenga served as vice president of the Continuations Committee of the conferences, as Komozi Woodard (1999, 108) notes, “by 1968 Karenga was recognized as its chief organizer and foremost theoretician.” During the conferences, Karenga not only put forth the concept of operational unity as a key organizing principle but also gave Black Power an enduring definition. He defined Black Power as the collective struggle and “means to obtain three basic things: self-determination, self-respect and self-defense” (Karenga 1967, 25). The 1968 conference gave Karenga and Us the mandate to return to Newark and help build the political bases for Black Power that resulted in the election of Black city council members and eventually the first Black mayor. Karenga played a central role in the organization of this campaign for Black political power, proposed its theme “Peace and Power,” trained political workers, raised funds, helped build a Black united front (the Committee for a United Newark), and taught kawaida philosophy. Karenga also played a pivotal role in the Black Arts Movement, providing, as Larry Neal stated, “a cohesive ideology” for the movement through kawaida philosophy and working on projects with artists (Neal 1997, 1964). Speaking to the

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revolutionary times in which the movement developed, Karenga took the position that all art must be revolutionary and that “Black art like everything else in the Black community must respond positively to the reality of revolution” (Karenga 1997, 1973). To achieve this, it must be “functional, collective and committing” (Karenta 1997, 1974). His philosophy of kawaida influenced some of the major writers and artists during and after the movement such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Haki Madhubuti, Val Gray Ward, Gwendolyn Brooks, and August Wilson. Karenga has also had an important influence on Black spiritual and ethical discourse since the 1960s. This began with his engaging with and contributing to the development of Black liberation theology. Here, he “insisted on a God in our own image and interest, the sacredness of our own history, the presence and priority of our own prophets and the anteriority, originality, richness and ongoing relevance of our own sacred texts” (Karenga 2008a, 16). To make such texts available and to encourage engagement with them, Karenga translated, compiled, and did kawaida commentaries on the sacred texts of ancient Egypt, which he called The Husia. His seminal work in Maatian ethical philosophy, Maat, the Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics, opened a new horizon of discourse on Africa as a moral and spiritual ideal. He also translated, compiled, and did kawaida commentaries on a body of ethical texts from the Odu Ifa, the sacred text of ancient Yorubaland. With these sacred texts and the conceptual language he developed around them, Karenga created a new and original international discourse on ancient African ethics, reaffirming their value as a philosophical option for reflection on and engagement of the major issues of our times. Karenga is also a founding and senior scholar in Black studies/Africana studies, participating in the formative and developmental discourse of the discipline; in the building of its preeminent professional organization, the National Association for Black Studies (NCBS); and in producing numerous scholarly articles and books within the discipline and on related issues. Manning Marable (2000, 15) stated that Karenga has been central to the development of Africana studies and lists Karenga and Molefi Asante as the “most pivotal forces in the development of Black Studies.” Karenga has received NCBS’s highest awards including the Paul Robeson–Zora Neale Hurston Award for Scholarly Work Significantly Contributive to the Understanding, Development and Appreciation of African World Culture and the C. L. R. James Award for Outstanding Publication of Scholarly Works That Advance the Discipline of Africana and Black Studies. Finally, Maulana Karenga remains active in intellectual and political projects working within his organization, Us, as well as in various united front efforts to address critical issues facing African people, society, and the world including resistance to police violence and other forms of systemic violence. In 2015, Karenga



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and Us celebrated Us’s 50th anniversary of “work, service, struggle and institution building.” Karenga (2008a, 17) noted in a 40th anniversary article the need to remain in the struggle, recalling the commitment the Simba Wachanga and the Young Lions of Us made, saying that “We are the last revolutionaries in America. If we fail to leave a legacy of revolution for our children, we have failed our mission and should be dismissed as unimportant.” He concluded that “the message retains its original meaning and urgency” in these critical times. Tiamoyo Karenga See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Power Conferences; Cultural Nationalism; Kawaida; Kwanzaa; Us Organization Further Reading Asante, Molefi. 2009. Maulana Karenga: An Intellectual Portrait. Malden, MA: Polity. Fanon, Franz. 1968. Wretched of the Earth. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Karenga, Maulana. 1967. The Quotable Karenga. Los Angeles: Saidi Publications. Karenga, Maulana. 1984. Selections from the Husia: Sacred Wisdom of Ancient Egypt. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 1997. “Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, 1972–1977. New York: Norton. Karenga, Maulana. 1999. Odu Ifa: The Ethical Teachings. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2002. “Maulana Karenga.” Interviewed by Elston Carr (1996– 1998), UCLA Center for African American Studies. Karenga, Maulana. 2006. Maat, The Moral Ideal of Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2008a. Kawaida and Questions of Life and Struggle. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2008b. Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2016. Essays on Struggle: Position and Analysis. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Marable, Manning, ed. 2000. Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience. New York: Columbia University Press. Neal, Larry. 1997. “The Black Arts Movement.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, 1959–1972. New York: Norton. Woodard, Komozi. 1999. A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Kawaida Kawaida (kah-wah-ēēʹ-dah) is a communitarian African philosophy of cultural and social change and a school of thought founded during the Black Power phase of the Black freedom movement by Maulana Karenga, an activist scholar and chair of the organization Us, one of the major Black Power organizations and one that remains active today. A key theorist in the Black Power Movement, Karenga developed and describes kawaida as “a revolutionary philosophy, a philosophy of life and struggle, directed toward radical transformation of both Black people and U.S. society and toward making a self-conscious contribution to the global struggles for liberation” (Karenga 2016, 2). In addition, he defines kawaida as “an ongoing synthesis of the best of African thought and practice in constant exchange with the world” (Karenga 2008b, 3). The term kawaida is a Swahili word that means “tradition,” but in kawaida philosophy it has the expanded meaning of an ongoing synthesis of tradition and reason. This represents Karenga’s aim to build a philosophy of life and struggle rooted in tradition, informed by reason, and tested and made real and constantly relevant through transformative struggle on both a personal and a collective level. Kawaida is self-consciously Afrocentric and makes imperative an ongoing dialogue with African culture, asking it questions and seeking from it answers to the fundamental issues confronting African people and humankind. It thus returns to the African source—continental and diasporic, ancient and modern—to recover and reconstruct the best of African culture and to use it to ground, enrich, and expand African life and to advance the liberation struggle for freedom and flourishing. It is a reflection of kawaida’s embrace of Sékou Touré’s concept of re-Africanization in the interest of the identity, dignity, and liberation of African people. Karenga has served as professor and chair of the Department of Africana Studies, California State University, Long Beach, and chair of the organization Us and the National Association of Kawaida Organizations (NAKO). He developed his philosophical initiative to address urgent issues of the era of struggle in which he lived. These include issues of freedom, liberation, justice, self-determination, cultural and political revolution, Pan-Africanism, self-defense and armed struggle, police violence, reparations, relevant education, African socialism, capitalism, colonialism, decolonization of lands and peoples, etc. Kawaida’s stress on tradition points to its emphasis on culture as indispensable to the life and struggle of a people. Culture for kawaida is posed as the unique and equally valid and valuable way of a person and a people being human in the world and an indispensable source of identity, purpose, and direction. Kawaida has an expansive meaning, for “culture is the basis of all ideas, images and actions. To move is to move culturally, i.e., by a set of values given to you by your culture” (Karenga 1967, 14). Thus, to move in liberating and liberated ways requires a



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culture that undergirds and compels emancipatory practice. In kawaida, then, culture is not simply fine arts—that is, art, music, literature, dance, etc. It is “the totality of thought and practice by which a people creates itself, develops itself, celebrates and sustains itself and introduces itself to history and humanity” (Karenga 2008b, 3). And culture is created and practiced in at least seven fundamental areas: history, religion (spirituality and ethics), social organization, political organization, economic organization, creative production (art music, literature, etc.), and ethos, a collective self-understanding developed from activity in the other six areas. Kawaida seeks to address essential issues in these areas from an African-centered perspective to develop a philosophy of life and emancipatory struggle. Kawaida starts and develops with several fundamental and interrelated propositions and draws ideas and concepts from some of the major African American and continental African revolutionaries, liberation leaders, and theorists in order to work out its essential positions, including Malcolm X, Sékou Touré, Frantz Fanon, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, and others. As kawaida and the liberation struggle develop, a distinct group of womanist theorists and leaders are also engaged in deepening and expanding the kawaida project. These include Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells, and others. First, Karenga argues that the key crisis and challenge in Black life is the cultural crisis and challenge and that until the monopoly that the oppressor has on so many of the minds of the people, “liberation is not only impossible, but unthinkable. For what you can’t conceive, you can’t achieve” (Karenga 2008b, 5). Thus, he contended, “We must free ourselves culturally before we succeed politically”; in a word, “culture provides the bases for revolution and recovery” (Karenga 1967, 4, 7). Following Malcolm X, a major influence in his life and intellectual work, Karenga maintains that what is needed is a cultural revolution that precedes, parallels, and makes possible the larger liberation struggle. Indeed, it is waged to free the people’s minds, teach them the capacity to free themselves, and cultivate in them the will to liberate themselves and build a new society and world. Cultural revolution in kawaida is defined as “the ideological and practical struggle to rescue and reconstruct African culture (continental and diasporan, ancient and modern), break the cultural hegemony of the oppressor, transform persons so that they become self-conscious agents of their own liberation and aid in the preparation and support of the larger struggle for liberation and a higher level of human life” (Karenga 2008b, 5). Therefore, cultural revolution is an integral part of all forms of struggle for liberation—political, economic, etc.—providing the African-centered, dignity-affirming, life-enhancing, and struggle-advancing views and values necessary to initiate, sustain, and win the liberation struggle. Here also, Karenga draws from and builds on Sékou Touré’s concept of “full

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re-Africanization” and his idea, later reaffirmed by Amilcar Cabral, that the liberation struggle itself is “an act of culture” (Touré 1975, 77; Cabral, 1973, 43). In returning to African culture and building a culture of resistance, resistance becomes a compelling act of culture. Another key proposition of kawaida philosophy, borrowing from Malcolm X, is that African Americans are “a nation within a nation,” a cultural nation struggling to come into political being—that is, to gain the capacity to control their destiny and daily lives, to free themselves and be themselves and live full, meaningful, and dignity-affirming lives (Karenga 2016, 44). At this point, kawaida makes a distinction between “oppressor nationalism” and “liberational nationalism.” Oppressor nationalism represents a pathological form of nationalism, but liberational nationalism is a positive form of nationalism, affirming through striving and struggle a people’s “right and responsibility to exist, unite and struggle to define, defend and advance their interests as a people and contribute to the radical transformation of society and the world” (Karenga 1980, 15). It is this stress on self-conscious, culturally grounded, and liberational nationalism that Karenga designates as being central to cultural nationalism. Cultural nationalism, Karenga states, is organized around and grounded in three fundamental propositions that define it: “(1) the defining feature of any people or nation is its culture; (2) for a people to be itself and free itself, it must be self-conscious, selfdetermining and rooted in its own culture; and (3) the quality of life of a people and the success of its liberation struggle depends upon its waging cultural revolution within and political revolution without, resulting in a radical transformation of self, society and ultimately the world” (Karenga 2016, 14). Here Karenga builds on Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral and contends that the struggle to free the people, the nation, is a cultural as well as political struggle and that the struggle to defend, maintain, and develop African culture is in the final analysis a struggle for national existence and liberation. Another key proposition in kawaida philosophy is rejection of what it calls the “theoretical clumsiness” and ideological self-blinding of those who make an unreflective distinction between cultural nationalism and revolutionary nationalism. Kawaida posits four kinds of nationalism based on major areas of social focus: political, religious, economic, and cultural. It argues that terms such as “progressive,” “radical,” “revolutionary conservative,” “reformist,” and “reactionary” are qualities of social thought and practice and may apply to religious, cultural, economic, or political nationalism. For example, Malcolm X was a religious nationalist but clearly a revolutionary nationalist. Imari Obadele was a political nationalist and a revolutionary one. And kawaida is a cultural nationalist and revolutionary philosophy and practice, thus making kawaida advocates “revolutionary cultural nationalists” striving “to build a basis for resistance in culture and in the process of cultural reconversion extend the struggles to other areas” in the interest of



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liberation, as Karenga wrote in 1973 in an essay titled “A Strategy for Struggle” (Karenga 2016, 56). In his earliest writings and lectures, Karenga defined himself, his philosophy kawaida, and his organization Us as revolutionary, committed to the radical transformation of society. In the Quotable Karenga, a collection of quotes from his lectures and writings in the 1960s, Karenga posed Us as a revolutionary vanguard and kawaida as the liberating philosophy that informs and guides the revolutionary struggle. He says that “we are revolutionists (revolutionaries). We believe in change. We believe in being realistic, but as for reality, we’ve come to change it” (Karenga 1967, 5). Also, Federal Bureau of Investigation memos dated January, 24, 1973, and January 23, 1975, furthermore classified Us as “armed and dangerous” and an organization that “plans revolution and trains its members in revolutionary tactics” and “seeks to overthrow the U.S. government.” Thus, not only did Us see and define itself as revolutionary, but also the state defined and treated it as such, making it a target of the infamous and repressive Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Government counterinsurgency led to constant harassment and attacks of Us members by COINTELPRO, similar to the repression directed against the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, the Republic of New Africa, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and other groups and leaders considered security threats. Repression led to political imprisonment of its members, driving them underground and in exile and waging a continuous campaign to misrepresent and discredit the organization. Within the context of kawaida, a school of kawaida womanism has been developed through the initiatives and leadership of Tiamoyo Karenga and Chimbuko Tembo. Their lectures and writings have built on a legacy of struggle of the women of Us to end early male sexism in the organization and build truly equal, mutually respectful, and mutually beneficial relations in the interest of family, community, and the liberation struggle. In a seminal article in 1969, “View from the Women’s Side of the Circle,” the women of Us challenged both themselves and the men of Us to practice the Nguzo Saba, especially ujima, collective work and responsibility, which requires a revolutionary complementarity (i.e., equality of dignity, worth, and rights and mutual respect and shared responsibility in life, love, and struggle). Although there was an ongoing dialogue about male/female relations around these issues, the organizational crisis produced by the COINTELPRO and state suppression of the male leadership increased and expanded the dialogue, and women rose to an expanded leadership in Us. Ensuring that the gains made and the move forward would continue, they argued that “If the liberation struggle was to succeed, this commitment to equality with men must be continued and expressed, not only in women’s carrying on revolution in their (men’s) absence” but also in “carrying on revolution in their presence” (Malaika 1969, 4)—that is to say, when they return from political imprisonment, underground, and exile.

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Reaffirming that kawaida womanism is a fundamental part of kawaida thought and practice, Karenga and Tembo state that kawaida womanism “stresses the rights, dignity and agency of African women” (Karenga and Tembo 2012, 33). And they define it as “culturally grounded thought and practice directed toward the liberation of African women as an integral part of the liberation of African people as a whole.” Moreover, they assert that the kawaida womanism project is defined by several basic commitments and initiatives, including cultural grounding; spiritual and ethical grounding; self-definition; rootedness in family and community; equal male/female relationships in partnership in love, life, and struggle; sisterhood; service; and social action. Karenga builds on this organizational dialogue and discourse in his writings in the early 1970s and reaffirms the development of a new expanded kawaida position on male/female equality in the context of life, love, and struggle. These essays begin with “A Strategy for Struggle: Turning Weakness into Strength” (1973) and culminate with “In Love and Struggle: Towards a Greater Togetherness” (1975), both of which were first published in The Black Scholar and then republished in Essays on Struggle. Kawaida’s economic discourse is rooted in the concept of ujamaa, introduced by Julius Nyerere (1968) and defined by kawaida both as cooperative economics and African socialism—in a word, shared work and shared wealth or benefit. The concept of ujamaa, as principle and practice of shared work and shared wealth, is rooted in kawaida African ethics of shared good in the world. And kawaida from the beginning has been anticapitalist, as evident in the ideas in the Quotable Karenga and Essays on Struggle that criticize capitalism as being dedicated to “the ruthless and endless pursuit of profit,” vulgarly individualistic, and for the benefit of a few and negative for human good (Karenga 2016, 101). In Essays on Struggle, kawaida expands its criticism of capitalism, focusing on its unequal distribution of wealth; the class, race, and gender character of is oppression; its ruthless plunder, pollution, and depletion of the environment for profit; and its violations of the rights and interests of workers. And it calls for a democratic socialism initiative and alternative informed by the best of African and human values and a cooperative struggle with other progressive, oppressed, and struggling peoples to create shared good for humankind and the well-being of the world. Kawaida philosophy has had an enduring impact on Black intellectual and political culture since the 1960s. Its impact is evidenced especially in its role as the philosophy out of which the global Pan-African holiday Kwanzaa and the Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles) were created. These principles, which form a foundational African-centered value system, are umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity), and imani (faith). And these are used by many as value orientation and grounding in personal life as well as in developing various



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cultural, educational, political, economic, and religious projects, organizations, institutions, and initiatives—locally, nationally, and internationally. This impact is also influenced by the effect of Karenga’s writings, lectures, and practical work through the organizations and institutions he leads—Us, the African American Cultural Center, NAKO, and the Kawaida Institute of Pan-African Studies—as well as his teaching at various universities and other national and international venues. Also, kawaida’s intellectual and programmatic influence is evident in the Black Arts Movement; the discourse on the Black aesthetic and the role of culture in the liberation movement; Black studies, in which Karenga is a founding and major scholar; the Black student movement; the rites of passage movement; and the Simba Wachanga, the Young Lions movement. Moreover, kawaida’s influence is clearly reflected in the Black Power Movement in which he was a major theorist and key organizer of the Black Power Conferences. In this context he developed the concept of operational unity, unity in diversity, and offered a much-used and enduring definition of Black Power as the collective struggle of Black people to achieve and sustain three things: self-determination, self-respect, and self-defense. According to Molefi Asante, founding theorist of Afrocentricity, kawaida also influenced the development of his theoretical initiative. Likewise, Karenga’s kawaida development and interpretation of ancient Egyptian Maatian ethics and the sacred text The Husia as well as his translation and kawaida commentary on the ethics of the Odu Ifa have had a significant impact on Black ethical and spiritual discourse, as did his participation in the early development of Black liberation theology. Finally, kawaida’s imprint is also on the discourse on reparations with its Maatian conception of serudj ta—that is, reparations not as simply monetary compensation but instead as a repairing and remaking a people who are in the process and practice of repairing, renewing, and remaking the world. Maulana Karenga See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Cultural Nationalism; Karenga, Maulana; Kawaida; Kwanzaa; Salaam, Kalamu ya; Us Organization Further Reading Asante, Molefi. 2007. The Afrocentric Manifesto. Malden, MA: Polity. Asante, Molefi. 2009. Maulana Karenga: An Intellectual Portrait. Malden, MA: Polity. Cabral, Amilcar. 1973. Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. New York: Monthly Review Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1968. Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove. Karenga, Maulana. 1967. The Quotable Karenga. Los Angeles: Saidi Publications. Karenga, Maulana. 1980. Kawaida Theory: An Introductory Outline. Los Angeles: Kawaida Publications.

424 | Kennedy, Florynce “Flo” (1916–2000) Karenga, Maulana. 1995. The Million Man March/Day of Absence Mission Statement. Chicago/Los Angeles: Third World Press/University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 1997. “Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, 1972–1977. New York: Norton. Karenga, Maulana. 1999. Odu Ifa: The Ethical Teachings. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2006. Maat, the Moral Ideal of Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2008a. Kawaida and Questions of Life and Struggle. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2008b. Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2016. Essays on Struggle: Position and Analysis. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, T., and C. Tembo. 2012. “Kawaida Womanism: African Ways of Being Human in the World.” Western Journal of Black Studies 36(1): 33–47. Malaika, The. 1969. “View from the Women’s Side of the Circle.” Harambee 1(1) (April 25): 4. Malcolm X. 1970. By Any Means Necessary. New York: Grove. Touré, Sékou. 1975. Revolution, Culture, and Pan-Africanism. Conakry, Republic of Guinea: Press Office at State House.

Kennedy, Florynce “Flo” (1916–2000) Florynce “Flo” Kennedy was a lawyer, prolific feminist, and activist who sought to bridge the goals of feminism and Black Power. She wore cowboy boots and a cowboy hat in order to bring attention to her message. Kennedy was a tireless feminist who challenged traditional female roles. Flo Kennedy was raised by her delightfully defiant mother and protective father in rural Kentucky. Living in the South during the Great Depression was not easy for African Americans. It was difficult to find employment and to support families. Constant harassment from the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) made life even harder. Kennedy’s parents had to constantly defend their residence. For instance, the KKK threatened to illegally evict the family from their home in an all-white neighborhood. Kennedy recalled the times when her mother had to defend the house when her father was away. On another occasion, her father was physically violent with a young white boy who had come to the Kennedy home with his friends to harass their family. After that experience, the Kennedy family was no longer bothered at



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Florynce Kennedy, Black feminist attorney for a San Francisco–based organization of sex workers called COYOTE, said in a 1975 interview that prostitution is a result of job discrimination in the United States and therefore should not be prosecuted. (AP Photo)

home. Kennedy’s rebellious, disruptive spirit stems from witnessing her parents’ refusal to accept harassment from racists. Around 1925, Kennedy’s mother moved her children to California after separating from her husband. Kennedy considered her mother’s decision courageous and decided, as did her mother, not to allow the boundaries of her race or gender to prohibit her from making important decisions. Kennedy said of her adolescent years that she was unrestrained when it came to boys. She and her sisters did not have the same value of “purity” as others did. Kennedy’s mother encouraged an open relationship with her children and educated them about sex and drugs. With many young men serving in the military because of World War II, more women were given the opportunity to enroll in universities. In 1945, Kennedy became a prelaw student at Columbia University. She decided to become a lawyer because she was interested in advocating for justice and wanted a stable career. Kennedy recalls being the only Black person in most of her classes, but this allowed her the opportunity to discuss gender issues with white women. In those

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conversations Kennedy critiqued the institution of marriage, which she saw as a life sentence of domestication and household chores. She also thought that motherhood would interfere with her lifestyle choices. For Kennedy, becoming a lawyer could also help her avoid restrictive roles placed on women. After graduating from Columbia Law School, Kennedy took a clerical job at a small law firm in Manhattan, where she was expected to make and get coffee for others. However, her charisma and never-give-in attitude opened opportunities for her to establish good relationships with her male counterparts. She attracted upcoming lawyers in the Manhattan area by organizing soirees. By the time she was 40 she had her own law firm. In the winter of 1959 Kennedy was contacted to work a narcotics case for Billie Holiday, who was prohibited from traveling abroad because of drug charges. Not many lawyers wanted to get involved with drug cases. Kennedy, however, not only accepted the case but also continued to represent Holiday until her death. Kennedy also worked with jazz musician Charlie Parker’s widow. In the entertainment industry, Kennedy became well known for supporting artists who were fighting copyright infringement. Her experiences only confirmed what she already knew in law school: the hypocrisy of American ideals. Kennedy began writing a column for Queens Voice that criticized the government’s role in systemic problems such as poverty and police brutality. Her articles have been compared to the work of investigative journalist Ida B. Wells, who protested racism by writing and publishing. However, Kennedy learned that being a lawyer, an activist, and essentially “somebody” by white standards did not prevent her from being a victim of racism and sexism. Kennedy did not openly identify with any political organizations; however, she did support the Black Power Conferences. In 1966 she attended the planning meeting for the National Black Power Conference along with other notable Black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.. Kennedy saw the Black Power Conferences as Black-led coalitions against unfair practices in government, law enforcement, and big business. They also supported her own antiestablishment politics. Kennedy built her political ideals on her original standpoint of challenging business as usual. The Black Power Movement heavily influenced Kennedy’s involvement with feminism and allowed her the ability to examine how sexism, racism, and imperialism were intertwined. Kennedy believed that she could understand the women’s liberation movement better through the Black Power Movement because she was a part of both. In the early 1960s, many feminists and Civil Rights organizations were working together. Kennedy recalls organizing in southern states where integration was illegal and being required to separate herself from the white women with whom she traveled. Eventually she became the only Black woman in the New York City chapter of National Organization for Women (NOW). She joined NOW because



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she believed that Black people and women had similar enemies, and she made it her goal to connect the women’s movement with the Black Power Movement. Some of Kennedy’s attempts to connect Black Power and feminism resulted in controversy. For instance, she invited two white women to her panel discussion during the Black Power Conference. Not long after the panel began, Queen Mother Moore began to loudly demand that the two women should leave, saying that the meeting was for Blacks only. Like many other Black Power organizers, Moore believed that including white people would diminish the goals of Black Power, which emphasized independent Black politics and organization. The argument became more intense and involved additional voices. At one point during the commotion, Kennedy’s life was threatened. She replied, “Do what you have to do. I’ve lived my life” (Randolph 2015b, 117). Eventually one of the women, Peg Brennan, left. However, the other woman, Ti-Grace Atkinson, was ordered by Kennedy to remain seated, which she did. According to Kennedy, the lesson from the debate was that white women needed to learn about Black rejection and that Black people had the right to control who comes into their environment. By the late 1960s, Kennedy was a part of the Black Power Movement, the New Left Movement, and the women’s movement. Although she continued to push Black Power into more white spaces, NOW leadership dismissed many of her efforts. Despite her feminist affiliations, she was able to convince some of the organizers in the Black Power Movement to accept her advocacy. In 1968, Kennedy defended Black Power activist H. Rap Brown in one of his first legal battles. She held rallies to raise money for his bond and organized meetings with NOW to support his defense. This unification strategy increased the similarities in protest methods between the women’s movement and the Black Power Movement. When Kennedy became legal counsel for Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who shot Andy Warhol, her advocacy helped to create a feminist outcry against the silencing of women. Kennedy’s eloquence in the courtroom and work outside turned the case into a radical feminist opportunity. Even still, the leaders of NOW became furious about their perceived association with Solanas. They wanted to decimate the connection because of the “man hatred” and “sex warfare” rhetoric, and they did not want to be associated with Black Power tactics. Kennedy also fought to legalize abortion in the Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz case, which was won at the state level and ultimately paved the way for Roe v. Wade in 1973. By the early 1970s, Black Power leaders were being severely brutalized and targeted, specifically Black women in the movement. Kennedy defended Angela Davis and the Panther 21 and was one of the lawyers on the defense team for Assata Shakur. Kennedy’s work on legal cases for Black Power leaders led her to believe that Black women should not work for white feminist organizations unless they formed alliances with the Black Power Movement.

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Kennedy helped mold the women’s liberation movement. She was at the forefront of the creation of NOW, organized the Feminist Party that supported Shirley Chisholm’s nomination for president, and understood the link between radical feminism and the Black Power Movement. Kennedy’s efforts to bridge feminism and Black Power revealed the racism and sexism within both movements but also uncovered the importance of putting differences aside to end white supremacy. Flo Kennedy was an unapologetic progressive who dedicated her life to ending oppression on multiple levels. Jocilyn Gilbert See also: Brown, Hubert “H. Rap”; Chisholm, Shirley; National Black Feminist Organization; Shakur, Assata Further Reading Kennedy, F. 1984. “It’s Damn Slick Out There.” Social Text (9/10): 346–358. Randolph, Sherie M. 2011. “The Lasting Legacy of Florynce Kennedy, Black Feminist Fighter.” Solidarity, https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3272. Randolph, S. M. 2015a. Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Randolph, S. M. 2015b. “Not to Rely Completely on the Courts: Florynce ‘Flo’ Kennedy and Black Feminist Leadership in the Reproductive Rights Battle, 1969–1971.” Journal of Women’s History 27(1): 136–160.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929–1968) Martin Luther King Jr. was a strong proponent of Black empowerment on a multitude of levels. Principally, he empowered Black America as its premier nonviolent spokesman and galvanizing strategist during the middle part of the 20th century. He also led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—the organization he served as founding president from 1957 until his assassination in 1968— to tap into the power of the Black church to organize vibrant, independent local movement centers. The SCLC and King also gave strength to Black America by opening the door to the registration of millions of Black voters and thousands of Black elected officials. King also promoted and played critical roles in withholding Black dollars from discriminatory businesses in numerous selective buying campaigns, or boycotts, in cities such as Atlanta, Birmingham, Chicago, and Cleveland, which resulted in the hiring of thousands of Blacks, a commitment to use Black banks and vendors, and frequent advancements in policy and positions. Responding to a call for help from Black striking garbage workers who sought fair wages and conditions, King was assassinated in Memphis.



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Martin Luther King Jr. at a press conference in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 16, 1963. (Library of Congress)

King was, however, at his core a coalition builder who believed in the concept of Black Power, but he was convinced that the terminology, or nomenclature, would both frighten and alienate white partners, who would not understand the rhetoric and would be threatened by it. Such coalition building was the embodiment of his call for the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, which sought to unite poor Chicano migrant workers, Blacks, struggling white coal miners, Native Americans, and other oppressed people to march on the nation’s capitol in a demand for a redistribution of wealth. Unlike the fiery Malcolm X—the Black nationalist leader of King’s time to whom he was often compared—King was no separatist. Instead, the Atlanta-born minister said that because we were all in this country together, Americans had to learn to live together with equality and mutual respect. He also said that the problem of transforming the urban ghetto was an issue of power that pitted the forces of those who sought change against those who fought to keep things the same. However, during the last two years of his life a growing

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frustration with the resistance of white America to move beyond granting civil and voting rights thrust King into increasingly taking a more radical stand, challenging the war in Vietnam and the economic structures that supported it while millions of poor Americans languished in urban ghettos and struggled to scratch out a living in rural America. King’s emergence onto the national and international scene through his leadership role during the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott empowered Black Americans to understand that someone who looked like them could prophetically speak on the world stage with strength, eloquence, and a determination that was respected by both Black and white Americans. Undeniably, King and his associates, spearheaded by JoAnn Robinson, the Women’s Political Action Committee, E. D. Nixon and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Montgomery Improvement Association, exerted an economic version of Black Power during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They achieved this by organizing the majority Black population of the city to withhold its money and bring the segregated transportation business that treated it inhumanely to its knees. This was not the first bus boycott that empowered oppressed Black citizens and crippled an unjust monopoly. Previous successful efforts to integrate had already taken place in Tallahassee, Florida, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. However, for perhaps the first time in U.S. history, the media captured a unified effort that allowed the world to see approximately 40,000 Black Montgomery citizens—comprising at least 75 percent of the bus company’s ridership—utilize its collective power to shut down a transportation company by refusing to patronize a system that discriminated against them. From that moment on through the next decade, King’s message to Black America was a clarion call to organize local movement centers and assert a nonviolent strategy to become full partners in the unfulfilled promises of American democracy. For many Blacks, King’s ability to articulate a message of Black equality and a demand for justice while representing the resolve of a largely oppressed but united community thrust new belief and increased confidence into both their lives and their hopes for a better future. King’s challenge to Black America that a man cannot ride your back unless its bent helped generate confidence, exhibit strength and renewed pride in Blackness, and in some ways helped create the foundation for the Black Power Movement that would take center stage a decade later. But King was more than simply a spokesman who articulated the need for equality and justice. He actively exerted Black Power by pushing for economic justice in dozens of cities and towns where Black dollars were being liberally spent but where opportunities for employment, business development, advertising, and ownership were rare or nonexistent. The self-described “jobs and income branch” of the SCLC, Operation Breadbasket, which was founded in 1962, was in many ways the embodiment of Black Power.



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In February 1963 Operation Breadbasket, a SCLC-initiated program modeled after Philadelphia stalwart Leon Sullivan’s “selective patronage” campaigns, called for more equitable treatment by Atlanta bakeries, which it identified as unfair to its Black patrons. As a result of negotiations following the threat of an economic boycott, five bakeries signed agreements that resulted in 40 promotions and more than two dozen new jobs. In early 1964 following President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s call for a new War on Poverty initiative, King acknowledged that the Black middle class was making progress but that the masses were not. He defined the SCLC thrusts for that year as twofold: continued focus on voter registration and the expansion of national selective buying programs—or boycotts—of large companies that failed to respect Black buying power and consumerism. In Chicago in January 1966, in Operation Breadbasket’s first campaign in the city, pressure applied to Country’s Delight Dairy resulted in an agreement by the food chain to hire 44 Blacks. In November, High Low Foods of Chicago agreed to hire 183 Blacks and promote numerous others. The agreement also called for the company to utilize two Black banks and sell products produced by six Black businesses. Negotiations with three dairies in Atlanta resulted in Borden’s, HawthornMellody, and Wanzer Dairy providing nearly 110 jobs for Blacks in the spring of 1966. In Cleveland, the SCLC and Operation Breadbasket were responsible for shutting down 118 A&P grocery stores and forcing them to remove Sealtest products from its stores, hire Black employees, and advertise in Black newspapers. Each instance served as an example of leveraging Black buying power to empower the Black community. Operation Breadbasket was also the precursor of an economic campaign 30 years later to “make your dollars make sense,” spearheaded and directed by Dr. Joseph Echols Lowery (1921–), an SCLC cofounder. Lowery led the SCLC to sign financial covenants—reciprocity agreements worth hundreds of millions of dollars—with companies including Shoney’s and Publix, where they brokered agreement with these corporations to have them hire Black managers, be serviced by Black vendors, and be located in Black neighborhoods. In 1966 when Willie Ricks first uttered the phrase “Black Power” publicly in a mass meeting in the Mississippi Delta, King was wrestling with financial challenges within his own organization, the SCLC, as well as a growing impatience coming from young Black activist organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee with the pace of the movement. He now shared the spotlight with a new radical movement that would soon formally become the Black Panther Party. Equally important, as he pushed for broader national acceptance and legislative change, King expressed a concern that the fervency of the term, which he cautioned would invoke thoughts of violence and separatism, might

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strike fear and resistance to change within white America. Instead of calling for Black Power, King and SCLC field general Hosea Williams urged Blacks to voice “freedom now.” While Malcolm X (1925–1965) sparked what would become an intense and enduring sense of Black pride and independence among Black youths that blossomed in the 21st century long after his assassination, King’s legacy was in large part the landmark legislative gains that included the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which opened the doors for Blacks to shop, eat, and live wherever they could afford, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which officially opened the doors to the ballot box and representation for millions. King’s leadership in the area of voter education and registration and the resulting Voting Rights Act in many ways served as the precursor of the election of Barack Obama as this nation’s first African American president in 2008. King’s importance to this nation and the world is undeniably personified in the establishment of the King holiday, the only one created to honor an African American, and the erection of his statue on the National Mall, both of which pay tribute to the power of a Blackled, Black-inspired social movement that was respected and modeled across the world. Although the SCLC president intentionally distanced himself from the term “Black Power,” he did proclaim the powerlessness of Blacks in 1966, calling on Black America to build both political and economic power in order to achieve strength and influence. Taking the moral high road of nonviolent civil disobedience, King insisted that America must become a nation wherein its multiracial people share partnership in power. Black Power, he explained to his staff in 1966, was a cry of anguish caused by the refusal of white America to live up to the promises of the American Dream and America’s founding documents. Preferring to use terms such as “black consciousness” and “black equality” along with “freedom now,” King sought to make Black Power a concept that white America could gradually acknowledge as necessary and desirable, not something to be feared, rejected, and systematically crushed. Refusing to denounce the Black Power Movement as several of his fellow “Big Six” (Congress of Racial Equality, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Urban League) leaders had, King called on Black America to achieve power politically. Explaining power and thus Black Power, King called it the ability to achieve purpose, noting that power is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. To that end, he explained, power is not only desirable but also necessary in order to bring about the demands of love and justice. Speaking as a minister of the gospel, King insisted that the concepts of love and power are usually established as opposites but are both necessary, describing power without



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love as reckless and abusive. America’s disgrace, he insisted, was the fact that it distributed power unequally, thereby excluding Blacks and the poor. Toward the end of his life, King consistently spoke more forcefully on issues of economic and political import. His April 3, 1967, speech at Riverside Church in New York against the Vietnam War put him in direct opposition to the nation’s halls of power, as he spoke in defense of powerless Black and other minority citizens disproportionately thrust on the front lines of wars thousands of miles from home. In his final initiative he helped plan and inspire—the Poor People’s Campaign—King called for a broad-based collaboration of poor and marginalized people (Native Americans, poor white coal miners, Black farmers, Chicano migrant farmers, and other oppressed people) to converge on the nation’s capitol in a demand for a redistribution of the American wealth. This ambitious 1968 collaboration, perhaps the height of a quest for power for Blacks and other oppressed people, instead became a tribute to the Civil Rights leader who was gunned down in Memphis on April 4, 1968, while protesting for agency of and the right to increased power and dignity by the city’s Black sanitation workers. King’s legacy includes the emergence of soul power and the successful 1969 Charleston Hospital Workers Strike, which was heavily influenced by his successor, Ralph David Abernathy. The protest was marked by the SCLC organizers’ ability to build coalitions within the churches and communities in support of workers, who fought for the right to organize and against the paltry $1.30 per hour wage the workers were being paid. In the end hospital workers obtained wages, 12 workers who had been fired for protesting discriminatory practices were rehired, modest changes in conditions were granted, and a new cadre of activist political and civic leaders emerged. The economic-based initiatives spearheaded by the organization that King cofounded and led until his death were implemented through increasing the strength of the Black community at the ballot box, using Black vendors, growing Black businesses, and broadening opportunities for Black Americans into new professional and vocational fields that previously had been unavailable to most Blacks. Deric A. Gilliard See also: Black Panther Party; Malcolm X; Operation Breadbasket; Parks, Rosa; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Vietnam War Further Reading Ampim, Manu. 1989. “The Revolutionary Martin Luther King, Jr.” Master’s thesis, Morgan State University, Baltimore. Branch, Taylor. 2006. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968. New York: Simon and Schuster. Cone, James H. 1991. Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

434 | Kiswahili Garrow, David J. 1986. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: Random House. Griffin, Junius. 1964. “Green Power for Negroes.” SCLC new release, November 23, The King Center, www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/green-power-negroes#. Peake, Thomas R. 1987. Keeping the Dream Alive: A History of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from King to the 1980s. New York: Peter Lang. Sales, William W., Jr. 1994. From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of African American Unity. Boston: South End Press. Taylor, Kerry. 2010. The Charleston Hospital Workers Movement, 1968–1969. Charleston, SC: Lowcounty Digital History Initiative. Young, Andrew. 2008. An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.

Kiswahili The Black Power Movement is a multifaceted synthesis of primarily Americans of African descent. A basic force that distinguishes the Black Power Movement from the Civil Rights Movement is the effort to establish a reunification with our ancestoral heritage on the African continent. Language, which is the engine of human communication, became a priority to those who advocated cultural nationalism to be the philosophical foundation in creating an Afrocentric value system. The organization that led the struggle for cultural nationalism was the Us organization, under the leadership of Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga. Maulana (maulana means “master teacher”) Karenga chose Kiswahili to be the language of choice for African Americans. Kiswahili was chosen based on its role in the independence movements in East Africa, specifically in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda during the Black Power era. Its dynamism was a continuation of its historical role as a lingua franca, facilitating communication between people who came from different language communities. In most cases these communities spoke Abantu languages, which have a similar grammatical structure and some common vocabulary items. Abantu people live in every part of the African continent. Speakers of Kiswahili, primarily Tanzanians, continue to project and advocate for its adoption as a continental language, providing a linguistic foundation for African unity, African expression, and African creativity. The literary history of Kiswahili is approximately 400 years. It was originally written in the Arabic script. Beginning in the late 19th century, German colonization followed by British colonization changed the script to Roman. “Swahili has become the most widely known, taught, discussed, and spoken African language

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on the Continent, and the national language of the United Republic of Tanzania” (Whiteley 1969). In the English language, the prefix “Ki-” is usually dropped, leaving “Swahili.” In the language itself, “Ki-” means “the language of, or the culture or type of.” Only five non-Arabic-speaking nations have made an effort to break the linguistic bond of colonialism. Three of the five proclaim Kiswahili to be the national language: Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Only in Tanzania does the government function in Kiswahili. Amheric is the national language of Ethiopia, the fourth country. It is the mother tongue of the dominant ethnic group, the Amharas. The fifth country, Somalia, is the only African nation that has one basic language, Somali, which is the mother tongue of most Somalians as well as the national language. There are approximately 50 million speakers of Kiswahili in East Africa. The majority speak Kiswahili as a second language, consistent with its role as a lingua franca. The people identified as Swahili (English) (Waswahili in the language, “Wa-” meaning “the people”) are inhabitants of the coastal communities and the islands of the Indian Ocean that are within the borders of Kenya and Tanzania. Waswahilis typically speak Kiswahili as their mother tongue. The word comes from Arabic, meaning “coast.” To the west from the Indian Ocean’s coast, Kiswahili is spoken in the eastern Congo. To the north, it is spoken in southern Ethiopia. To the south, it is spoken in northern Mozambique. Kiswahili may be the only lingua franca that crosses national borders, and it may be equally important in meeting the challenge of the modern technical demands of the world economy. For example, Windows software lists Kiswahili as one of the languages an operator can choose for the operating system, and Kiswahili is recognized by the United Nations and the African Union. In the United States beginning in the 1960s, the role that Kiswahili had historically played on college campuses was drastically altered. African Americans began to study the language, inspired by the goals of cultural nationalism. The traditional goals of offering African languages were to train missionaries, Central Intelligence Agency agents, and military personnel. Maulana Karenga was one of the first African Americans to study Kiswahili at the University of California–Los Angeles. When the administration realized that African Americans who had goals of reclaiming their African heritage were studying Kiswahili, they removed all of the literature from the library. Kiswahili became the standard foreign language requirement for Afro-American and Black studies degree programs. Universities—including the University of California–Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Ohio, Ohio State University, Washington University, Delaware State University, Cornell University, the University of Florida, Yale University, the University of Chicago, and Howard University in Washington, D.C.—all offer classes in Kiswahili. As a university subject, Kiswahili has offered employment to East African graduate

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students, some of whom have remained in the United States after completing their graduate programs and have become tenured faculty. The language has been a valuable source of building relationships with the African continent for African Americans. Many of these professors have organized visits for their students to their home countries. These visits allow African Americans to meet and interact with family members of the professors and receive applied lessons in traditions and customs as well as to speak Kiswahili in real-life situations. Kiswahili has inspired African American musicians, poets, graphic artists, and parents who have chosen to name their children with names creatively crafted from the language. An example is the name Maisha, which means “life.” In East African Islamic communities girls are often named Aisha, which comes from the verb ishi, meaning “to live.” The name Maisha is an African American creation. Adapting names from Kiswahili was encouraged by literary leaders such as Haki Madhubuti, who founded Third World Press. Haki means “justice” or lawful “rights,” madhubuti is an adjective meaning “firm” or “resolute.” Another outstanding example is poet, author, critic, Civil Rights activist, and cultural nationalist Imamu Amiri Baraka (1934–2014). Imamu is an Islamic term of Arabic origin signifying the spiritual leader of a mosque; amiri, also of Arabic origin, means “military commander” or “supreme leader”; and baraka, again of Arabic origin, means “blessings.” Poet, author, filmmaker, and teacher Kalamu ya Salaam (meaning “pen of peace”) has been a dynamic asset to the production of African American literary and visual art forms as well as education. The African American master of Kiswahili is New York native Dr. John Mtembezi (meaning “traveler”) Innis, professor of linguistics and Kiswahili at Delaware State University. Some composers of American jazz have named their compositions with words and phrases from Kiswahili. An example is the mwandishi albums of pianist Herbie Hancock. Mwandishi means “writer.” Others such as bassist Nyimbo (meaning “song”) Franklin and percussionist Ndugu Chancellor have chosen Kiswahili names. Ndugu means “relative” or “kin.” When Tanzania adopted a socialist system of politics, economics, and social organization, the meaning of ndugu was extended to mean “comrade” in the political sense. The holiday season Kwanzaa was created by the Us organization. The proper noun is derived from the ordinal kwanza, meaning “first.” Kwanzaa is translated as meaning “first fruits,” and the Kwanzaa celebration is an urban adaptation of a harvest celebration. Kwanzaa is a seven-day celebration, with each day highlighting one of the seven principles of kawaida. This is the philosophy of community unification and progress created by Maulana Karenga. Kawaida means “customary” or “usual behavior.” The seven principles are the Nguzo Saba of the philosophy of kawaida. Even though all of the principles are standard terms in Kiswahili, some of the

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interpretations are Karenga’s creations. To his credit, these interpretations strictly follow the grammatical and syntactical rules of Kiswahili Fasaha, “classic literary Kiswahili,” of which the most profound example is kujichagulia. Chagua is an action verb meaning “choose.” The prefix “ku-” is a gerund when attached to an action verb and thus creates a noun. When attached to an action verb that remains a verb, it means “to.” The infix “iji-” is a reflexive. The suffix “-ia” changes the action verb to a preposition. Therefore, the basic definition of kujichagulia is “to choose for oneself.” As one of the principles of Nguzo Saba, the meaning of kujichagulia could also be “self-determination,” and the extended interpretation is “to define for ourselves, to name ourselves, to create for ourselves, and to speak for ourselves” (Karenga 1980). Kujichagulia offers an example of what was previously referred to as “Abantu grammar.” This is a system of morphological units that contribute to constructed thought. A word can be viewed as a sentence that follows the rules of the English language. Ninakupenda is a word and a sentence. It contains subject, tense, object, and verb, meaning “I love you.” Once a speaker of an Abantu language begins to recognize the meaning of the morphological units of another Abantu language, understanding follows. During the 1970s it was common for high schools in African American neighborhoods to name their graduating classes with a phrase that came from Kiswahili. This was due to the influence of Black student unions and the Us organization. Community centers such as the Mafundi Institute and the Harambee Christian Family Center developed in African American neighborhoods. Mafundi means “craftsmen,” and harambee means “let’s all pull together.” The challenge of reclaiming an African context for understanding life, human relations, and the meaning of civilization ultimately falls on language. Language is the expression of thought, and thought is the rubric of understanding. African languages are the repository of the thoughts of the ancestors of African Americans. Black Power begins with the understanding of self, rejecting the identity of slavery and the compromises that freedom from slavery demand in the effort to survive. Kiswahili is a lingua franca and has the potential to draw from all of the African languages and to enrich African American understanding and appreciation of the philosophies and moral rationalizations of our ancestors. Peter Muriuki Mhunzi See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Studies; Cultural Nationalism; Karenga, Maulana; Kawaida; Kwanzaa; Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee); Salaam, Kalamu ya Further Reading Allen, J. W. T., ed. and trans. 1971. Tendi: Six Examples of Swahili Classical Verse Form with Translation and Notes. London: Heineman.

438 | Kochiyama, Yuri (1921–2014) Karenga, Maulana N. 1980. Kawaida Theory. Los Angeles: Kawaida Publications. Karenga, Maulana N. 1998. Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community & Culture. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Knappert, Jan. 1970. Myths & Legends of the Swahili. African Writers Series. London: Heinemann. Knappert, Jan, ed. and trans. 1972. A Choice of Flowers: An Anthology of Swahili Love Poetry. London: Heinemann. Knappert, Jan, ed. and trans. 1979. Four Centuries of Swahili Verse: A Literary History and Anthology. London: Heinemann. Kusimba, Chapurukha Makokha. 1999. The Rise and Fall of Swahili States. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Mazrui, Shaykh Al-Amin Bin. 1995. The History of the Mazru’i Dynasty of Mombasa. Translated and annotated by J. M. Ritchie. New York: Oxford University Press. Nurse, Derek, and Thomas Spear. 1985. The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800–1500. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Salim, A. I. 1973. Swahili-Speaking Peoples of Kenya’s Coast 1865–1965. Nairobi, Kenya: East African Publishing House. Whiteley, Wilfred Howell. 1969. Swahili: The Rise of a National Language. London: Methuen.

Kochiyama, Yuri (1921–2014) Yuri Kochiyama was an early leader in the fight for human rights in the United States, playing a key role in the collaboration of African American and Asian American community organizations. She espoused an ideology of Asian Amer­ icans, Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinos/as laboring together to defeat their common enemy: institutional racism. Kochiyama was known especially for the quotidian, behind-the-scenes work she did, including making flyers, writing newsletters, and negotiating introductions between key figures in the movement. Born to Japanese immigrants in San Pedro, California, on May 19, 1921, Mary Yuriko Nakahara was reared alongside two brothers in a comfortably middle-class family in a predominantly white neighborhood. Her father, Seiichi Nakahara, worked in the fishing industry, and her mother, Tsuyako Nakahara, was a universitytrained musician. A standout student at San Pedro High School, Kochiyama was a member of the tennis team, reported for the school newspaper, and was the first female elected to student government. At age 18, she documented her personal creed with a written pledge in her journal to respect every person, irrespective of ethnicity, religion, or socioeconomic status. After graduating in 1939 she matriculated at



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Compton Junior College, where she focused on a range of disciplines from journalism to art to English literature. Upon the completion of her studies, she assumed a position teaching at a local Presbyterian church. Yuri’s all-American suburban existence changed forever when her father was apprehended from their home by three Federal Bureau of Investigation officers in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Like others in the fishing community, Seiichi was accused unjustly of being a spy for the Japanese. Already ill at the time of his detention, he was held in a hospital ward for prisoners of war but received no medical attention. Returning American soldiers jeered at him throughout his stay. By the time of his release on January 20, 1942, his health had declined considerably, and he died within a day of returning home. Shortly thereafter, Yuri and the remaining members of her family were removed forcibly from their homes and sent to a series of internment camps, first in Santa Anita, California; then in Jerome, Arkansas; and finally in Camp Shelby, Missis­ sippi. Approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated without due process in government-run prison camps during this period. While incarcerated, she met her future husband, Bill Kochiyama, who had been interned previously at a government-run camp in Topaz, Utah. Not long after he and Yuri met, Bill enlisted and served in the 442nd Regimental Combat team—an infantry unit of the U.S. Army Reserve. The regiment went on to become the most successful unit in the history of the American military, with its 14,000 men having received 9,486 Purple Hearts, 21 Medals of Honor, and 8 Presidential Unit Citations. Yuri and Bill married in 1946, and together they had six children: Billy, Aichi, Audee, Eddie, Jimmy, and Tommy. Early in their marriage they moved to New York City, moving first to the Amsterdam Houses—public housing near Lincoln Center. Yuri had an early brush with activism when she joined the group Asian Americans for Action, also known as the Triple A. In 1960 the family resettled in Harlem’s Manhattanville Housing Projects, where many of their neighbors were African Americans and Puerto Ricans involved in Civil Rights activism. After enrolling themselves and their eldest children in the Harlem Freedom School to learn more about African American history and culture, Yuri and Bill became involved in the Civil Rights and burgeoning Black consciousness movements. Additionally, Yuri Kochiyama became active with Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts school, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Organization for Afro-American Unity, where Malcolm X’s teachings about contemporary imperialism in Asia resonated deeply with her. She became radicalized by his philosophy, convinced of America’s racist nature, with self-determination for people of color as the sole remedy. She worked closely with him in the months after his split from the Nation of Islam in 1964. Kochiyama even brokered the interview when international delegates and journalists from the Hiroshima/Nagasaki World Peace Study Mission expressed that Malcolm X was the American political figure they most wanted to

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meet. Kochiyama was present for the February 21, 1965, address that Malcolm X had been planning to give to the Organization of Afro-American Unity when he was assassinated. As Malcolm X lay dying from 21 gunshot wounds, Kochiyama cradled his head in her lap, and the moment was memorialized in a candid photograph published in Life magazine. After the assassination of Malcolm X, Kochiyama became a staunch advocate for the rights of Asians, Blacks, Latinos/as, and indigenous people in the United States and abroad. She and her husband were active in several community organizations and frequently spoke to the Asian Center and Triple A about redoubling their efforts by collaborating on the social justice activities of other ethnic groups. Kochiyama was a vociferous opponent of the Vietnam War, which allowed her to mentor a new generation of Asian American activists. She also was an ardent supporter of China’s inclusion in the United Nations. During the 1970s, Kochiyama became affiliated with the Provisional Govern­ ment of the Republic of New Africa (RNA) and also supported efforts to free Black Power political prisoners, including Assata Shakur, Max Stanford, and the RNA 11, working with the National Committee to Defend Political Prisoners. Kochiyama attended court hearings and planned events for the defense efforts of political prisoners across the globe, most notably Mumia Abu-Jamal. Kochiyama also worked to increase access to affordable housing, promote ethnic studies, realize nuclear disarmament, and obtain reparations for Japanese American internment victims. Yuri and Bill were among the early voices demanding that the redress for internment be pecuniary; they arranged petition drives, organized rallies, and developed community programming that highlighted the issue. Yuri and Bill’s work was instrumental in President Ronald Reagan’s signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which recompensed each surviving internee with $20,000. Further, she marched alongside the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Attica Brothers, and in 1977 she was arrested with a group of Puerto Rican nationalists for draping the crown of the Statute of Liberty in the Puerto Rican flag. Kochiyama also began collaborating with the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, which is focused on eliminating inequalities against Asian Americans in the criminal justice system, in 1986. Kochiyama appeared as herself, alongside Ossie Davis, Amiri Baraka, and Morgan Freeman as Malcolm X, in the 1981 television document Death of a Profit: The Last Days of Malcolm X. A documentary about her life, Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice, was produced by Rea Tajiri and Pat Saunders in 1993. Kochiyama kept detailed notebooks chronicling her experiences, and a collection of her writings, Discover Your Mission: Selected Speeches and Writings of Yuri Kochiyama, edited by Russell Muranaka, was published by the University of California–Los Angeles Asian American Studies Center in 1998. Tim Toyama’s interpretation of her life, Yuri and Malcolm X, won the Ruby Yoshino Schaar



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Playwright Award from the National Japanese American Citizens League in 2008. Kochiyama also was the subject of the Blue Scholars’ song “Yuri Kochiyama,” which appeared on their 2011 album Cinémetropolis. Kuchiyama’s lifetime of social justice work was recognized in 2005 when she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize via the 1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize project of the Switzerland-based organization PeaceWomen across the Globe. Kochiyama retired to northern California in 1999, where she died on June 1, 2014, at age 93. Leon James Bynum See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Arts Movement; Congress of Racial Equality; Malcolm X; Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa Further Reading Dempster, Brian Komei, ed. 2010. Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books. Fujino, Diane C. 2005. Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wu, Frank. 2003. Yellow: Race in America beyond Black and White. New York: Basic Books.

Koen, Charles E., Jr. (1945–) Charles E. Koen Jr. was a prominent Black Power activist recognized for his leadership of grassroots organizations and struggles across southern Illinois and Missouri during the 1960s and early 1970s. Born on August 7, 1945, in Cairo, Illinois, Koen was the eldest son of Naomi Mallory (née Bondurant), a domestic worker who migrated to Cairo shortly after World War I. Koen was raised in poverty in Cairo’s segregated Pyramid Court housing project, attended all-Black schools, and labored each summer in the cotton fields just outside the city. In 1962 as a junior at Sumner High, he learned about the activities of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and began organizing local schoolchildren to mount their own nonviolent directaction campaign against Jim Crow in public accommodations. That summer Koen formed the Cairo Non-Violent Freedom Committee (CNVFC) and, with the support of SNCC field secretaries John Lewis, Mary Salynn McCollum, and Joy Reagon, staged sit-ins at downtown restaurants and recreational facilities. Within a few short months, Koen and the CNVFC had successfully eliminated segregation in most public accommodations, but efforts to shift the focus onto employment discrimination stalled.

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Koen was strongly influenced by the religious philosophy of the SNCC activists, many of whom had trained in Nashville under Reverend James Lawson and subscribed to a Gandhian philosophy of nonviolence. The following year Koen enrolled at McKendree College in Lebanon, Illinois, where he received instruction in theology and was subsequently ordained by the National Baptist Convention. Koen also remained in SNCC’s orbit, officially joining the organization in 1966 during Stokely Carmichael’s tenure as chairman and the organization’s dramatic turn toward Black Power struggles in urban cities. That same year Koen married Clydia Watson, a fellow Cairoite who had also participated in earlier integration campaigns in the city. After graduating, Koen was eager to return to his political work with a renewed emphasis on job discrimination and youth unemployment. In the summer of 1966 he accepted a position as resident counselor at the Breckenridge Job Corps Center, a War on Poverty initiative based in Morganfield, Kentucky. Koen initially viewed the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) program as a potential vehicle for improving the jobs available to Black youths but was quickly frustrated by the paternalistic attitude of the program’s administrators. After just seven months, Koen returned to Cairo to care for his ailing mother and to accept a new position as area coordinator of the Illinois Migrant Council, another OEO-sponsored initiative established to address the needs of migrant and seasonal workers. On January 2, 1967, the Illinois Migrant School #8 opened in Cairo, offering classes in basic literacy and vocational training to more than 150 African American seasonal farmworkers. With Koen at the helm, the migrant school would emerge as an important center of movement activity. Koen’s return to Cairo also represented a watershed in his ideological evolution from an advocate of liberal integration and nonviolence to Black self-determination, independent Black politics, economic nationalism, and armed self-help. While Koen’s transformation reflected broader changes taking place within SNCC after 1966, local developments also played a role. In July 1967 youths from Cairo’s Pyramid Court housing project took to the streets and set fire to white-owned businesses, following the death of Robert James Hunt Jr., a 19-year-old Black soldier, in police custody. After the National Guard was deployed, the rebels elected Koen as their spokesperson and presented city leaders with a list of demands, including the hiring of African American workers in key industries and the appointment of a Black cochief of police. “My feelings about the whole thing was the youth were tired and nonviolent demonstrations had passed away,” Koen explained. “They sought to change the system peacefully back then; it didn’t work” (Koen n.d., 53). After the revolt, Koen increasingly embraced Carmichael’s call for the development of Black-owned and -operated cooperatives, founding the Southern Illinois Cooperative Association (SICA) and opening a buying club and grocery store. Through SICA, Black Cairoites were offered an alternative to exploitative



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white merchants in addition to new jobs and the opportunity to channel profits back into the Black community. The following year Koen exported this cooperative economic model to the metro St. Louis area, where he served as a spokesperson for the Black Economic Union (BEU), a newly formed alliance of antipoverty, youth, and cultural organizations. Koen’s work with SICA and the BEU impressed SNCC leaders, who elected him Midwest deputy chairman at a staff meeting in June 1968. Koen’s ascent to formal leadership coincided with SNCC’s short-lived alliance with the Oakland Black Panther Party (BPP) and growing interest in building independent Black political organizations. Inspired by these developments, Koen relocated to St. Louis and established the Black Liberators, a revolutionary nationalist organization that drew its membership from the swelling ranks of the city’s poor and unemployed youths. Patterning themselves after the BPP, the Liberators donned uniforms, adopted a paramilitary organizational structure, and staged weekly drills in the streets, practices that drew criticism from some Civil Rights and Black Power leaders. Though they trafficked in the rhetoric of armed revolution, the Liberators’ program incorporated a broad array of strategies and tactics, combining Koen’s previous work on economic cooperatives with the Panthers’ advocacy of survival programs, multiracial coalition building, and electoral politics. Less than six months after the Liberators’ formation, however, the group was forced to disband under intense harassment from law enforcement agencies. The organization’s offices were kept under 24-hour surveillance, and members were repeatedly arrested for minor ordinance violations. Events reached a climax in September when Koen suffered fractures to his skull and hands while being held in police custody after a routine traffic stop. Officers charged the Liberators’ prime minister with assault, but Koen insisted that he and fellow Liberator Leon Dent had been brutally beaten by officers armed with clubs and brass knuckles. Despite the formation of a citywide alliance to demand justice, Koen resigned from the Liberators in the spring of 1969 and returned to Cairo. Over the next five years, Koen put to use the knowledge accrued from these earlier campaigns to build a formidable Black Power struggle in his hometown. Rather than organizing a radical vanguardist group as he had in St. Louis, he cast a wide net, joining with local ministers, youth leaders, Civil Rights liberals, and moderate Black Power advocates to establish the Cairo United Front in the summer of 1969. By working in unison with these diverse actors, Koen aimed to overcome potent intraracial divisions as well as afford young working-class radicals some protection in a moment of narrowing political opportunities and state repression. The heterogeneity of the United Front’s support base gave rise to an eclectic political program that combined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s legal strategy with a selective patronage boycott, economic cooperatives, electoral politics, and armed self-defense. Koen also drew on his

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ministerial training and emergent trends in Black theology to foster a shared movement culture capable of bridging the chasms of ideology, class, and generation between the United Front’s constitutive groups. Weekly mass meetings were held at local churches and followed a liturgical structure that featured gospel music, corporate prayer, testimonies, and call-and-response oratory. By the end of the 1970s, Koen and the United Front had won a number of important victories that served to transform race relations in the city. Landmark legal decisions challenged discrimination in public housing, education, employment, and governmental appointments, while the United Front’s economic development initiatives created skilled positions and affordable housing for Black working-class residents. However, the most significant victory came in March 1980 when the district court ruled on Kendrick v. Walder, a suit alleging that the voting rights of Black citizens had been violated by the city’s adoption of an at-large city commission form of government. In a monumental decision, the court ruled in favor of the plaintiff and imposed a consent decree replacing at-large elections with a wardbased aldermanic system. The following year, Koen joined Bobbie Whitaker and Earl Wade in becoming the first African American city council members in nearly 70 years. Koen went on to pursue an electoral strategy at the state level, cofounding the United Black Voters of Illinois in 1976 and mobilizing downstate communities around the campaigns of numerous Black candidates. Koen also launched a failed gubernatorial bid in 1986, running as an independent against Adlai Stevenson. Kerry Pimblott See also: Black Economic Union; Black Panther Party; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Jolly, Kenneth. 2006. Black Liberation in the Midwest: The Struggle in St. Louis, Missouri, 1964–1970. New York: Taylor and Francis Group. Koen, Charles E. n.d. The Cairo Story: And the Round-Up of Black Leadership. Cairo, IL: Koen. Lang, Clarence. 2009. Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–1975. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pimblott, Kerry. 2012. “Soul Power: The Black Church and the Black Power Movement in Cairo, Illinois, 1969–1974.” PhD dissertation, University of Illinois.

Kwanzaa Kwanzaa (kwahnʹ-zah) is an African American and Pan-African holiday that celebrates family, community, and culture. A seven-day holiday, it begins on

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December 26 and continues through January 1. The holiday’s name is derived from the Swahili words matunda ya kwanza (first fruits) and reflects the ancient origins of the holiday in African first harvest celebrations, each with their own names in the language of the peoples who celebrate them. Some of these are Pert-en-Min of ancient Egypt, Umkhosi in Zululand, Odwira in Ashantiland, and Odun Ijesu in Yorubaland. Created in 1966 by activist scholar Maulana Karenga, Kwanzaa has become an internationally celebrated holiday, observed by millions throughout the global African community on every continent in the world. In terms of the legacies from the struggles and movements of the 1960s, Kwanzaa and the Nguzo Saba, its core seven principles, clearly occupy a special space and have an enduring significance within the global African community. Kwanzaa, as explained in Karenga’s text Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture, has two sources of its origins—both ancient and modern. From its ancient African sources in continental African first harvest celebrations, Kwanzaa’s central message revolves around cooperative planning, producing, harvesting, and sharing good in the world. Therefore, Kwanzaa’s message stresses an ethics of sharing good in the world and practicing the Nguzo Saba and other communitarian values to achieve this—that is to say, “values that stress, build and strengthen family, community and culture. . . . There is no way to understand and appreciate the message and meaning of Kwanzaa without understanding and appreciating its profound and pervasive concern with values” (Karenga 2008b, 35). This stress on communitarian or community-focused and community-building values and the sharing of good are expressed in the five fundamental activities around which the ancient first harvest festivals were organized and on which modern Kwanzaa thought and practice build: the ingathering of the people, special reverence for the Creator and creation, commemoration of the past, recommitment to the people’s highest values, and celebration of the good. The first activity was the ingathering of the people, reaffirming bonds of family, friendship, community, and African people as a whole. Second, there were activities to show special reverence for the Creator and creation, giving expressions of commitment to protect, preserve, and care for the earth that produces the abundance. Also, there was a commemoration of the past, learning the lessons of history, honoring the legacy of the ancestors, and committing to continue and expand their legacy of excellence and achievement. Moreover, there was a recommitment to the people’s highest cultural values—moral, spiritual, and social values (i.e., of mutual respect and caring, truth, justice, cooperation, peace, and concern for humanity and the well-being of the world). And finally, there was a celebration of the good in the world—of life itself; of family, community, and culture; of brotherhood and sisterhood; and of the earth and the beauty and abundant good it offers. Or as the ancient Egyptians said, it was a celebration of “all that heaven

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grants, the earth produces and the waters brings forth from its depths” (Karenga 2016, 69). Building on this ancient tradition, Maulana Karenga created Kwanzaa as an act of cultural recovery and reconstruction to celebrate African people, offer them a shared value system from the best of African culture, and use it in the interest of the people in the midst of a liberation struggle. Like no other time of the year, during Kwanzaa African people around the world celebrate themselves and their culture. Therefore, they engage in these fundamental activities in ways that reflect their consciousness and the conditions in which they live. They gather as families, brothers, and sisters in birth and in struggle; as friends, coworkers, and associates at work sites; as activists in the struggle, young and old, and as long-term and new Kwanzaa celebrants. They give special reverence to the Creator and creation as they perform the ancient African harvest dances, songs, and other rituals of thanks and in celebration, and they make commitments concerning care for the earth and the well-being of the world and all in it. Commemorating the past, they pour libation to the ancestors while calling the names of all the great “bridges who carried us over,” those well-known models of excellence and achievement. Also, the people praise those bridges known in the community and in personal families, honoring women and men who made countless daily sacrifices and opened the way forward and upward for them. And they also pour libation and tell narratives of these ancestors’ lives and struggles as lessons and models to emulate. They also engage in the daily practice of lighting the Kwanzaa candles, reciting the Nguzo Saba, and discussing how to put each of the principles and other life-enhancing values into a year-round practice. Finally, the people celebrate with a karamu, an African feast, by wearing fine African clothes, speaking in African languages, sharing African narratives, and enjoying foods of all kinds from the continent and throughout the diaspora. And they sing, beat drums, shake the shekere and other African instruments, and dance in joyful celebration of themselves and in recommitment to family, community, and culture. Kwanzaa’s modern origins are in the Black freedom movement of the 1960s, especially its Black Power phase. Karenga created Kwanzaa in the midst of the liberation struggle of African Americans and in the context of the organization Us, which remains active and committed to cultural revolution and racial change. Kwanzaa therefore reflects the context and language of its time, mirroring the movement’s emphasis on self-determination, cultural grounding, cultural and political revolution, “Back to Black,” “return to the African source,” liberation, freedom, community, justice, and related concepts (Karenga 2008b, 28). Moreover, Kwanzaa and the Nguzo Saba were created out of and framed in the kawaida philosophy, a philosophy of cultural and social change. Karenga defines it as a philosophy of life and struggle. He emphasizes that this best thought and practice

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are both continental and diasporan, ancient and modern. Furthermore, kawaida stresses the ethical and intellectual obligation to “constantly dialog with African culture,” asking it questions and seeking from it answers to the fundamental issues and concerns of Africans and humankind (Karenga 2008a, 7). Karenga states that he created Kwanzaa to reaffirm African Americans’ rootedness in African culture, provide a time and space for Africans throughout the world African community to come together in unity and celebration, and introduce and reaffirm the importance of communitarian values, especially the Nguzo Saba. But he notes that Kwanzaa was also created to support the liberation struggle and advance the interests of African people. In this regard, Karenga has written that Kwanzaa “is both an act of freedom and a celebration of freedom” (Karenga 2016, 86). It was an act of freedom in that it was a self-conscious resisting and breaking from the cultural imposition of the dominant society, returning to one’s own history and culture and using them to strengthen the people, reaffirm their dignity, and affirm African culture as an “equally valid and valuable way of being human in the world.” And it was also an act of freedom to use culture, as Malcolm X, Sékou Touré, Frantz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral urged during this revolutionary period, as a weapon in the liberation struggle and as a fundamental resource to develop a new way forward toward a new world. Kwanzaa is considered an act of freedom because it is an act of self-determination. When Karenga created Kwanzaa, he created it wholly out of African culture, not using European or Eurocentric models or sources. Also, he did not seek dominant society’s approval or acceptance or even media coverage. Nor did he and the Us organization seek acknowledgment by local, state, or federal authorities for Kwanzaa. On the contrary, Karenga and Us appealed directly to Black people, and they embraced it and used it to culturally ground themselves, orient themselves in African-centered ways, and direct their lives toward good and beautiful ends. The central communitarian values, “the hub and hinge on which the holiday (Kwanzaa) turns,” are the Nguzo Saba (Karenga 2016, 73), which are considered a Black value system essential to Black life and struggle. These Seven Principles are first in Swahili and then in English: 1) Umoja (Unity) To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race; 2) Kujichagulia (Self-Determination) To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves; 3) Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems and to solve them together; 4) Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together; 5) Nia (Purpose) To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their

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traditional greatness; 6) Kuumba (Creativity) To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it; and 7) Imani (Faith) To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle. (Karenga 2016, 73) Kwanzaa has seven core symbols and two supplemental symbols. These symbols are instructive, and each symbol represents communitarian African values contributive to building and strengthening family and community. The seven basic symbols, first in Swahili and then in English, are: (1) mazao (the crops), which symbolize African first-fruit celebrations; (2) mkeka (the mat), which symbolizes African tradition and history; (3) kinara (the candle holder), which symbolizes our parent people, continental Africans, and our ancestors in general; (4) muhindi (the corn), which symbolizes children and therefore the people’s future; (5) mishumaa saba (the seven candles), which symbolizes the Nguzo Saba; (6) kikombe cha umoja (the unity cup), which symbolizes the principle of umoja (unity) and is used during the pouring of libation; and (7) zawadi (the gifts), which symbolize the love of parents and commitments made and kept by children. Kwanzaa has two supplemental symbols: first, the bendera, the black, red, and green flag whose colors represent Black for African people, red for struggle, and green for the future, hope, and promise that come through struggle; and second, the Nguzo Saba Poster, which lists the Seven Principles and the definition of each. The last day of Kwanzaa is called Siku ya Taamuli (Day of Meditation). On this day, celebrants are to pause thoughtfully and “measure ourselves in the mirror of the best of (Black) history and culture” and ask themselves where they stand (Karenga 2008a, 99). This self-questioning is accomplished by asking and answering three essential questions: “who am I; am I really who I am; and am I all I ought to be?” Having answered these questions, they are to recommit themselves to the highest values of African culture, those that promote the good of Africans, humanity, and the world. Kwanzaa reached a 50-year milestone in December 2016, demonstrating its durability, value, and meaning to African people throughout the global African community. The future of Kwanzaa, like its past, rests in the hearts, minds, and practices of African people who embrace it and its core principles, the Nguzo Saba. It is African people throughout the global African community who use the Nguzo Saba to culturally ground their lives—to name themselves, their children, and their organizations and to create and develop cultural, economic, and political programs and therefore, as kawaida says, to build the good world we all want, deserve, and struggle to bring into being. Chimbuko Tembo See also: Cultural Nationalism; Karenga, Maulana; Kawaida; Us Organization



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Further Reading Karenga, Maulana. 2008a. Kawaida and Questions of Life and Struggle. Los Angeles: Sankore. Karenga, Maulana. 2008b. Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture. Los Angeles: Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2016. The Message and Meaning of Kwanzaa: Bringing Good into the World. Los Angeles: Sankore.

Kwayana, Tchaiko (1937–2017) Sister Tchaiko R. Kwayana was an educator and a popular historian. As an English teacher, she taught on three continents: Africa (Nigeria), South America (Guyana), and North America (in the United States on both the East Coast and the West Coast). She traveled around the world (Suriname, Brazil, Ghana, South Africa, China, Australia, and New Zealand). As a historian, anthropologist, and social linguist, she traveled in search of her African heritage (of which she was confident) but also with the goal of establishing and defending it in world history. She was a forerunner of many of the major currents of the Black Power and Black studies movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s and was among those who challenged post–Civil Rights, postcolonial independence, Black-led regimes where they emerged as authoritarian and oppressive, betraying the goals of national liberation and Black autonomy. Kwayana was born Annie Florence Elizabeth Cook in 1937. She was raised in the small town of Buena Vista, Georgia. As a one-year-old baby in her father’s arms, she was introduced to Jim Crow white supremacy at the point of a gun and was disturbed by degrading threats as her father wished to get her water from a local restaurant. Kwayana grew up experiencing segregation at restaurants and movie theaters, denied access to public swimming pools, and the ever-present danger of being swindled out of one’s land and did not learn to ride a bicycle or swim because her parents feared for her safety. Their concern was not unwarranted in a southern culture where mutilated Black bodies could be found lynched, at the bottom of the well, or in the gutter. But she was also raised in an African American community that prided itself on self-reliance. Kwayana’s father, Reverend James John Cook, was a Christian Methodist Episcopal minister, and her mother, Dorthula Theresa Coan Cook, cut wood in her South Carolina sharecropping home and worked as a live-in maid in New York to send her brothers and sisters and herself to college. Kwayana’s father taught her that the proper measure of respect from white people was not simply whether they called you by your first or last name or treated you professionally in a customer service setting, while in reality keeping you in

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your subordinate place. For Reverend Cook, the key was whether white people respected you enough to listen to you, discuss philosophy and worldviews, and lend each other books. Those whites who wished to keep Black people in their place did not acknowledge that people of color had something to teach them about culture or their own self-government in an exchange of equals. Kwayana’s mother taught her the importance of having a work ethic. Initially, her mother believed that the children should join work gangs, most often led by white men, so they knew how to pick peaches and cotton. While her father agreed that these farming skills should be learned and preserved in their children, he believed that this educational experience of engaging the land should be found among Black families in their own community. Kwayana’s mother’s and father’s approaches to education complemented each other. Her mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse and watched over young girls, even those who became pregnant and were cast out of church communities. She made sure they were educated. She also taught Kwayana to read at age four. Kwayana changed her name in search of her own identity, (“Tchaiko” is Shona for “one who seeks truth,” and “Ruramai,” her maiden name, means “take a clear path to a given goal”) but did not anticipate how this would make her mother feel. Her mother always wanted to live near a historically Black college and felt that “founder’s day” and graduation ceremonies, marking the overcoming of obstacles to an education, were of communal significance. Kwayana studied at Paine College, a historically Black college in Augusta, Georgia, and later at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. Around the age of 20, she became a grade school teacher in Augusta, Georgia, having graduated high school early at the age of 16. Soon she would migrate by railroad to teach Mexican American farmworkers in Texas and work in a child care center for African American migrant farmers in Sherbourne, New York, and more affluent students in an education workshop at Fresno State College. When she taught at a boys’ high school in Lagos, Nigeria, the only female on the staff, she beat all the students and faculty in the 100-yard dash. From 1960 to 1968, Kwayana helped form the Afro-American Association (AAA) led by Donald Warden in the San Francisco Bay Area, which eventually gave birth in 1966 to Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party, Maulana Karenga’s Us organization, and the Bay Area’s Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) that defined itself as a revolutionary nationalist group that promoted African cultural groundings. As James Smethurst, a scholar of the Black Arts Movement, has put it, at the same time as Maulana Karenga, Kwayana pioneered the study of precolonial and ancient African civilizations and projected new philosophies of culture but without the subordination of women. The AAA recognized that the vote, formal education, and Civil Rights didn’t necessarily translate into empowerment and that it was wrong to blindly worship



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constitutional forms of change. What was needed was education rooted in African history and culture for the development of autonomous community institutions— the desire to be only Americans and not Afro-Americans made this more difficult because it papered over the history of empire and slavery that made Blacks fall outside classical notions of ethnic and immigrant social mobility. Civil Rights paved the way for middle and professional classes to thrive but not the marginal working class, the unemployed, or the unemployable. The AAA mentored many young college students through critical dialogues that led to deeper conclusions about what real change would entail, as the work of Warden and Kwayana and others who were a few years older were invaluable in these efforts. This was before or concurrent with historical moments such as Malcolm X breaking with the Nation of Islam (1963–1964), Malcolm’s death in February 1965, and the Black Power and Black studies rebellions of 1966–1971. Kwayana was innovating and organizing before these became mass movements. During the period when Kwayana taught in Nigeria (1962–1964), she became inspired by those who participated in Wole Soyinka’s 1960 Black Masks group. They heightened her awareness of pidgin or Creole English as a phenomenon that, like Gullah/Geechee heritage in South Carolina and Georgia, contained African cultural retentions and knowledge systems but also were a gateway to better understanding the thought of Black toilers. She spent her holidays in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, where a large African American community had settled led by Maya Angelou before Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966. Soon Kwayana would develop lifelong friendships with the artists Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence and, until his death, a close friendship with Langston Hughes when she had her apartment in Harlem. Kwayana also became close with Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Amiri Baraka. In 1968 Kwayana (still as Ann Cook) published her first major article, “Black Pride: Some Contradictions?,” in popular journals of the period such as Hoyt Fuller’s Negro Digest (later renamed Black World) and Jitu Weusi’s Black News. Kwayana’s article was also in conversation with debates about the need for independent Black media and communications in Soulbook, a unique theoretical journal originally produced by northern California members of RAM. Soulbook was a forum for revolutionaries from Guyana, South Africa, and Ghana to discuss the emerging conflicting tendencies in the Black liberation and Pan-Africanist struggle. Kwayana’s essay also had a subtle chiding of Kenya’s Tom Mboya for referring to African Americans as “cousins.” Mboya in his Challenges of Nationhood, a collection of essays and speeches, approached African American cultural nationalism with some reasonable critiques but also a tone of smug contempt. Kwayana reminded Mboya that African Americans were “brothers,” not “cousins,” and

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anticipated contemporary concerns that some Africans don’t like the descendants of the enslaved or find them inauthentic. She contested that nobody could disinherit Black people from the African heritage if they searched for it and worked hard to claim and affirm it. It was not a given, as Kwayana showed, that Africans on the continent had overcome their own internalized racism and colonialism. “Black Pride” was published in Toni Cade Bambara’s edited volume The Black Woman (1970), which included contributions from Patricia Robinson, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, and Grace Lee Boggs. What did Kwayana have to say that made this a classic of Black political thought? “Black Pride” explored how in the period 1968–1970, when “Black revolution” was widely discussed, the search for African identities became a fashion, co-opted by corporate media and consumer culture. “African” fashion shows were adapted to Western conceptions of gender and sexuality. It wasn’t simply that “Black” culture was being appropriated by white chauvinists. Rather, African Americans were carelessly engaging African symbolism and substance as well. Deeper color complexes within the community, as represented by blow-out Afros and skin bleaching, Kwayana explained, was covering up an inability to deal with the presence within the Black community of anti-­Blackness. Kwayana critiqued what we now know as Afrocentric interpretations of history for its monumentalism and high modernism, its search for Egyptian pyramids to approximate Western skyscrapers in technology and architecture, and Mali’s Timbuctoo to prove that Africans could write. Affirming that Blacks were “the first” or “equal to” Western civilization’s standards and achievements sometimes fell short of unveiling the autonomous thought of the African heritage. African American Islam, while encouraging a culture of modesty and discipline that Kwayana could support, was obscuring deeper questions about Islam’s role in facilitating racism and slavery on the African continent. While African Americans’ antiracist initiative to switch from unquestioned loyalty to Christianity (as a result of its silences on slavery) to openness to Islam was a sign of critical thinking, not enough questions about “monotheism” as Westerners had assimilated it were being asked. Kwayana argued that besides the study of an African language, Blacks would better relate to Africa if they did not visit as tourists in air-conditioned hotels and related not to the African urban life but rather the rural agrarian life found also in the American South. Farming, herding chickens and cattle, shucking peanuts, being aware of Yoruba cosmologies, and keeping in mind that most Africans were peasants who lived by oral history (though precolonial writing systems were present and she would disseminate information about these) would bring Blacks closer to the African heritage. Kwayana also explained that traveling in Latin America with the proper mindset could illuminate African cultural retentions just as well as visiting West Africa. Her discussions of her visit with the Djukas of Suriname, a Maroon community



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hostile to the ways of assimilated middle classes, revealed to Kwayana their collective memory of African cosmologies and how this informed their sense of independence, defending their own family forms but also their own sense they were part of an African world. In her 1968 sojourn to South America Kwayana also met Abdas Do Nascimento in Brazil. His T.E.N., the Black experimental theater group, was teaching against anti-Blackness racism within Brazil’s national culture, revealing how colonial legacies, in this case Portuguese, could promote genocidal thoughts as internalized racism. Kwayana brought her independent initiative, in search of African survivals and rejecting white supremacist epistemic burdens, to Guyana in 1968, where she met her future husband of 46 years, the Pan-African and independent socialist Eusi Kwayana, now 92 years old. Tchaiko Kwayana with her essay on Black pride in many ways wrote her husband into African diaspora history and African world history. Eusi, then Sidney King, had been a minister in the government and coleader of the Cheddi Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was a political prisoner when Anglo-American imperialism overthrew their democratically elected government in 1953–1954. Had this not occurred, the Cuban Revolution would not have been the first socialist government in the region. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Eusi transitioned from a critical supporter of Jagan to a critical supporter of Forbes Burnham’s People’s National Congress (PNC). Eusi advised Burnham’s PNC in various ways through official independence for Guyana in 1966 and gave him the idea of a cooperative republic or cooperative socialism as the philosophical foundation for the postindependence government. From 1968 to 1971, when Kwayana first met Eusi, he had built an organization called the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA). ASCRIA was first a cultural front around the PNC government, teaching a cultural revolution very similar to Kwayana’s thoughts on Black pride. The contradictions of Black nationalism and pseudosocialism of Burnham’s regime unfolded from 1971 to 1975. Wildcat strikes of landless sugar workers, bauxite workers, and independent cooperatives were coordinated by or supported by ASCRIA in a manner that presented African (and Indian) labor’s self-emancipation as the embodiment of national liberation against Burnham’s increasing populist authoritarian regime. ASCRIA struggled successfully to discard the idea that Black Power involved people of color holding the same elite posts and coveted positions as whites. In between her travels, Kwayana was the director of SEEK at City College in Harlem, a higher educational opportunity program for disadvantaged or underprivileged students. Out of these students came the rebellions for Black studies and open admissions. At this time City College was still overwhelmingly white,

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although it was located in Harlem, a predominately Black section of New York City. In Guyana, Kwayana was instrumental in connecting Guyana with the Black Power Movement that was increasingly turning toward Pan-Africanism in the early 1970s and critiques of post–Civil Rights, postcolonial independence regimes. The result was a split between Eusi Kwayana and Forbes Burnham in 1973–1974, which caused great international controversy. Most of the Pan-Africanist movement of the early 1970s saw Burnham as a sponsor of the Pan-African Secretariat, led by two political exiles, Ngdoni Masimimi of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (South Africa) and Zolili Ndlela from northern California and a former member of RAM. Burnham’s regime was considered a friend to African American political prisoners. RAM’s Herman Ferguson (underground as Paul Adams) and the African American children’s book author Tom Feelings were now employed by the Guyanese government. But other exiles such as Mamadou Lumumba and Shango Umoja became dissidents against Burnham, siding with ASCRIA, and were cast out of the country in 1973. Amiri Baraka and Jitu Weusi for a time did not know whose side to take. Nevertheless, this revealed the conflicting tendencies within the Black Power and Pan-African movements. C. L. R. James soon led a boycott of the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania for which he had traveled the world organizing. During this time, Burnham singled out Kwayana specifically for her dynamic community organizing with ASCRIA and smeared her as a meddling outsider. This was recorded in the publications ASCRIA Bulletin and ASCRIA Drums. Burnham’s Pan-African facade of his increasingly dictatorial regime was starting to evaporate. Kwayana learned about popular educational methods from observing Eusi, who was a teacher and principal at County High School in Buxton, Guyana. He taught his young students to be confident reading William Shakespeare, to participate in theatrical productions, and to write down oral histories from community elders so as to retain African heritage and survivals in their community. At the same time he linked a return to the land, the hinterland of Guyana, with respect for Amerindians as they affirmed African culture. The Kwayanas were part of the social revival of African drumming and showed that those who practiced Comfa and the Jordanites of Guyana on their own authority had been initiating the search for African survivals before ASCRIA. He embraced all people in Guyana, including Indians and Amerindians, who sincerely searched for their heritage but did not use their self-determination to undermine others. In 1973 Tchaiko and Eusi Kwayana published Scars of Bondage: A First Study of the Slave Colonial experience of Africans in Guyana. It stood out for its descriptions of the self-emancipating African personality under adversity and for its documentation of African cultural survivals, underscoring that the enslaved brought



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with them their own history and identity despite the barbarism of the Middle Passage and the destructive environment that Africans found imposed on them by those who strived to master them. In 1974–1975, Tchaiko Kwayana was part of the merger of ASCRIA with the Indian Political Revolutionary Associations, the Ratoon group, and the Working People’s Vanguard Party that became the Walter Rodney–led Working People’s Alliance. The Kwayanas worked with Rupert Roopnarine, CY Thomas, Josh Ramsammy, Bonita Harris, Tacuma Ogunseye, Karen de Souza, Jai Parsam, Omawale, Ohene Koama, and Andaiye (whose Red Thread collective later projected the need to count women’s caring work). In 1979–1980 in the confrontation with Forbes Burnham’s PNC government’s violent repression, the historian Walter Rodney was assassinated. Tchaiko Kwayana with the Women Against Terror group received a beating in the Bourda Green area of Georgetown in a 1983 protest. She had struck police with her umbrella who were injuring young protestors. Kwayana was present in the struggle for “people’s power and no dictator.” Kwayana went to live in Atlanta in the mid-1980s to raise the Kwayana children but also to organize Helping Uplift Guyanese (HUG), coordinating global aid and solidarity with the Guyanese working people. With John Henrik Clarke, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Ivan Van Sertima, Jan Carew, Joyce Gleason Carew, and Runoko Rashidi, Tchaiko Kwayana was part of the circle around the Journal of African Civilizations that established contributions of Africans to science and technology and African women’s contributions from antiquity to precolonial times. This was a bold endeavor that not only discussed Egypt, Nubia, and the Nile Valley but also Latin America, Amerindians, and China from an African world perspective. Kwayana was also among the early scholars who wished to recognize the women’s initiatives of the Marcus Garvey movement before this became a trend in university life. Whether instructing in creative writing, crafting autobiographies, teaching how to write open letters to government officials, or interpreting comparative literature, Kwayana received awards and recognition from government certification authorities but also met controversy among administrators above her. With her “identity papers” and “writing our hope” projects, she tried to get grade school children and their parents to practice their writing as they recorded their own history. She taught also at the community college level and in Upward Bound and SEEK programs. One of Kwayana’s Atlanta grade school students wrote an open letter to the Atlanta Daily World. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, it was argued, were mistaken as individuals to discuss nuclear weapons and the potential destruction of the world. They did not best represent the nations for which they spoke, and a selection of ordinary people could resolve matters best. Many years later a San Diego student, an Asian American, wrote a historical treatment of white

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supremacy that found its way onto the Internet as a polished pamphlet. Tchaiko Kwayana’s teaching methods equally captivated those of African, Asian, Latin American, Native America, and European descent. Tchaiko Kwayana, like Wole Soyinka, could frame the Western canon as reconcilable with an African cosmology where the dead, the living, and the unborn of the natural world were in conversation and where ideas and images inscribed in stone (whether in ancient Egypt or Olmec Mexico) could revive a consciousness of history. Kwayana found herself in trouble when she discovered that the treatment of the historical background of novels in public schools often emphasized Europeans and left out the intellectual and political experience of the African world and the colonized. She became heralded for teaching American literature by underscoring antiquity and precolonial origins, not European settler colonialism. Kwayana became a master teacher of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where both the historical background of precolonial and ancient African civilizations and the colonial experience of Native Americans could not be ignored. Matthew Quest See also: Black Internationalism; Black Power Abroad; Black Studies; PanAfricanism; Publications Further Reading Allen, Ernie, Randolph Boehm, and Daniel Lewis. 2004. The Black Power Movement: Part 4, The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 1965–1976. Bethesda, MD: Lexis­­­ Nexis. Kwayana, Eusi, and Tchaiko Kwayana. 2002. Scars of Bondage: A First Study of the Slave Colonial Experience of Africans in Guyana. Georgetown, Cooperative Republic of Guyana: Free Press. Rissman, Rebecca. 2015. The Black Power Movement. Minneapolis: ABDO Publishing. Smethurst, James. 2005. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

L Last Poets The Last Poets are a staple in African American history, serving as the first musical group to revolutionize Blacks through poetry. They are often credited as godfathers of modern-day hip-hop. The music of the Last Poets served as a monument for Black consciousness during the peak of the Black Power Movement. Due to the parallels in the systemic oppression of African Americans from Jim Crow to the present, the Last Poets are a relevant force decades after the Black Power Movement, as they collaborate with contemporary artists and revive their own music to push the agenda for equality and humanity. The success of the group’s impact is owed to all seven members: Abiodun Oyewole, Umar Bin Hassan, Jalal Mansur Nurridin, Felipe Luciano, Gylan Kain, Suliaman El-Hadi, and David Nelson. The Last Poets were established by Nurridin, who was imprisoned for his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. While imprisoned, he converted to Islam and learned how to spiel, which was considered an earlier form of rap. Nurridin later connected with prison mates Hassan and Oyewole, and the group was named the Last Poets on May 19, 1969, the birth date of the late activist, Malcolm X. The group’s name was inspired by revolutionary South African poet “Little Willie” Keorapetse Kgositsile, who stated that the era would be “the last era of poets before the takeover of guns.” The Harlem-based group spent its humble beginnings playing music on street corners while drawing on its inspirations: John Coltrane, the Temptations, and Black consciousness. With the help of white record producer Alan Douglas of Douglas Music, the Last Poets’ first album, titled The Last Poets, debuted in 1970. Their music was so controversial that their 1971 album, This Is Madness, put them on President Richard Nixon’s counterintelligence programming list. They were also surrounded and sponsored by the members of organizations, including the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Nation of Islam. The music of the Last Poets was symbolic and revolutionary and consisted of militant lyrics that condemned the oppression of Black people in the United States. Important characteristics of their music include urban slang with a mix of ancient African traditions. For members of the Last Poets, the music served as a war against Black people who did not embrace Blackness during the Black Power era. Blackness was a way of speaking, thinking, and acting. The Last Poet’s mission is

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to humanize Black people in the eyes of the world by “De-Niggerfying” them. Their most famous song is titled “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution.” Nurridin describes the term “nigger” as a metaphor for negative aspects of a Black person, which include but are not limited to lazy, subservient, ignorant, and savage. “Deniggerfying” Blacks is illustrated through many of the lyrics, one of which comes from the song “Die Nigga!”: “Die Nigga, so human beings can live.” The Last Poets used their poetry not only as a way to humanize Black people but also as a staple of change to call for a revolution. They urged all Black people to join the revolution for social change. Despite the group’s success, the Last Poets had numerous fallouts, some of which were based on drug use and personality differences. Although some members were removed, replaced, and restored, their music still thrived. The fame of the Last Poets experienced a downward spiral in the late 1970s, which paralleled the decline of the Black Power Movement and the rise of the crack epidemic. However, their poetry remains staple in contemporary hip-hop, sampled by the likes of many hip-hop artists including a Tribe Called Quest on their feature “Excursions,” Nas’s songs “Project Roach” and “You Can’t Stop Us Now,” and Quasimodo’s “Discipline 99 Pt.0.” The Last Poets were also motivation for artist and producer Kanye West’s production of Common’s “The Corner” in 2005. The Last Poets are recognized as the music group that paved the way for contemporary hip-hop artists, including the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Erykah Badu, and many others. Members of the Last Poets began working together again in the late 1990s, releasing Retro Fit (1992), Holy Terror (1993), Scatter Trap/Home (1994), and The Prime Time Rhyme of the Last Poets: Best of Volume 1 (1995). Race remains a detrimental issue in our contemporary moment. Black consciousness movements have regained popularity, and many people are rallying for their rights as African American people. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Black Lives Matter, Project South, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and many other organizations are still fighting police brutality and the systematic oppression of Black people especially after the murders of Oscar Grant, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Kisha Michael, Michael Brown, and Philando Castile. The Last Poets continue to contribute to the fight against racism and police violence today, advocating for human resistance and resilience. They perform at various venues and teach poetry classes. Overall, the Last Poets’ most notable contributions span more than 18 albums. Their most recent discography is as follows: Beats, Rhyme + Revolution: The Best of the Last Poets 1970–1985 (1997), The Best of the Last Poets (2003), The Very Best of the Last Poets (2005), and Best of The Last Poets (The Early Years) (2015). Aubrey Williams



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See also: Black Arts Movement; Black Panther Party; Nation of Islam Further Reading Gross, Jason, and John Grady. 1977. “The Last Poets: Abiodun Oyewole Interview.” Perfect Sound Forever, http://www.furious.com/perfect/lastpoets.html. The Last Poets: Made in Amerikkka. 2012. Video file. Films on Demand, http://fod.info base.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?wID=96311&xtid=53225. Otten, Christine. 2016. “The Last Poets: America in Poetry from Black Power to Black Lives Matter.” The Guardian, November 21, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016 /nov/21/the-last-poets-america-in-poetry-from-black-power-to-black-lives-matter.

League of Revolutionary Black Workers The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) represented the most radical expression of Black labor organizing during the Black Power era. Headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, the LRBW, which consisted of militant rank-and-file Black workers and radical intellectuals, captured the imagination of revolutionary nationalists and Black Marxist-Leninists with its activism from 1969 to 1971. During this short period, the racial politics that had dominated the working conditions of Black workers ended, and one of the largest labor fronts of the Black liberation struggle would evolve. From 1958 to 1961 a massive reconstruction of the auto industry in Detroit led to a major depression. This allowed the erosion of working-class power in the auto industry to become quite visible. By the mid-1960s, employment figures in the auto industry were constantly changing due to pressure applied by the Black working class. When the Detroit Rebellion happened in 1967, most of the auto workers in the Detroit metropolitan area were Black. These workers were old and young, and many had achieved seniority and some measure of power and stability in the plants. The younger workers’ dissatisfaction was with not only management but also the representation of their interests in the United Auto Workers (UAW), which led to the forerunner of the LBRW—the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). The primary organizer for the development of DRUM was General Gordon Baker Jr., a husband, father, son, activist, revolutionary, union organizer, and human rights advocate. He was born in Detroit on September 6, 1941. Growing up in the area, General Baker attended Wayne State University (WSU) in the early 1960s. As a student he joined UHURU, a radical Black student organization that focused on community issues such as police brutality, substandard housing, unemployment, segregation practices in Michigan, and discrimination, while studying

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labor history and social and economic injustice issues across North America and internationally. Baker went from student organizing at WSU to community activism in Detroit and Highland Park and then to labor organizing, as a worker, in the Dodge Main plant in Detroit. Dodge Main was in the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck. The Hamtramck plant was 70 percent Black with a management and a union leadership that was predominately white. Initially, DRUM set out to attack issues involving racism and economic justice in the Dodge Main plant, discrimination in the union, and the power of the auto companies to dictate working conditions. Formed in May 1968, according to activist scholar and former LRBW member Ernie Allen, “Within a few months [of its creation] DRUM had dramatized its seriousness to both the company and the union by publicly calling another illegal strike which was honored by 3000 Black workers and some whites; demonstrating at union and company headquarters; and putting forward a DRUM candidate, Ron March, who pulled out the largest number of voters in the first round of the union election” (Allen 1979). DRUM’s July 8, 1968, wildcat strike lasted three days and prevented the production of 3,000 vehicles. Their demands focused on better working conditions at the Hamtramck assembly plant. Black workers overwhelming represented most the workforce at the Hamtramck plant. As such they believed that the union did not represent them, as they repeatedly attempted to present their grievances to management, who did not respond to their concerns. Consequently, Black workers organized, mobilized, and protested the UAW’s bureaucratic procedures, claiming that the UAW was just as guilty as the white managers of the Chrysler Corporation. Through the efforts of DRUM, Black workers realized that they had no option but to organize and present a platform that would abolish racism in the plant and in the union. DRUM argued that the racist factory owners relegated many Black workers to heavy and dirty lowpaying jobs. Easy jobs in the plants were held by whites, and whenever white workers were assigned to difficult jobs they would be reassigned, and the former tasks they performed would be assigned to Black workers. Seniority was another factor that signified systematic institutionalized racism as well as Black workers who were denied employment. As it mobilized protesters, DRUM skillfully organized carpools for nearly 250 workers to get to Chrysler’s headquarters in Highland Park. Upon arrival, Black workers and supporting community-based organization members joined the march to demand change. The success of DRUM’s first protest inspired a score of other Revolutionary Union Movement groups at other plants. These groups included UPRUM (among United Parcel Service workers), NEWRUM (among Detroit News workers), HRUM (among health workers), FRUM at Ford’s River Rouge complex, ELRUM (Eldon Avenue Revolutionary Union Movement), JARUM at Chrysler’s Jefferson Avenue Assembly plant, MARUM at the Mack Avenue plant, CADRUM at



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Cadillac’s Fleetwood factory, DRUM II at Dodge Truck, and MERUM at the Mound Road engine plant. All of these groups participated in the movement. There were also units at Chevrolet’s Livonia factory, Ford’s Wixom plant, Chrysler’s Forge plant, Winfield foundry, the Huber foundry, and the Plymouth assembly plant. In the end the various Revolutionary Union Movement groups united into a collective revolutionary organization and became the LRBW in 1969. The LRBW published numerous documents including position papers and leaflets, staged protests, and survived counterattacks from the company and their unions. In addition to the development of DRUM, the other RUMs formed a central staff, which grew to 80 members, and a tightly controlled 7-man executive committee that consisted of Baker, radical attorney Kenneth Cockrel, and revolutionary activists Mike Hamlin, John Watson, Luke Tripp, John Williams, and Chuck Wooten, who advocated a Black-led Marxist-Leninist Vanguard Party. The most publicized LRBW protests and in-plant organizing were led by Baker and Wooten. While the Baker group emphasized building new RUMs to become tough and dependable units, Hamlin was concerned about the potential of the RUMs being isolated, and Tripp and Williams held middle-ground positions between those stressing organizing in the plants and those who saw the broader LRBW activism of equivalent significance. The activism of the LRBW also addressed strategic and tactical problems in the United States through its participation in the Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit, April 26–29, 1969, when James Forman, read the Black Manifesto on May 1, 1969. Forman was a former six-year Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader who also had a brief membership in the Black Panther Party. The Black Economic Development Conference was instrumental in developing a programmatic response of the Black Power Movement on reparations and winning material support for the LRBW efforts in Detroit. Ernie Allen, who labored as a 1960s activist in the Black Power Movement on the West Coast, joined the LRBW in 1970 and eventually served as its director of political education. Allen wrote a critical analysis of the LRBW titled “Dying from the Inside” that examined some of the dilemmas and failings in the organization. He argued that internal contradictions led to the demise of the LRBW. These contradictions included differences within the LRBW leadership on expanding the organization or strengthening the RUM groups, ideological differences between nationalists and Marxist-Leninists within the organization, and the lack of political education throughout its membership. Allen also points out that Chrysler met some of the demands of DRUM such as increasing the number of Black foreman on the assembly line, thus decreasing activism on the part of rank-and-file Black workers. Political repression on RUM members was another factor.

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The late 1960s and early 1970s proved to be a period of one of the more significant manifestations of African American political maturity since World War II. Though short-lived, the LRBW made a significant impact on the Black Power Movement and provided a significant model of resistance. The LRBW’s approach differed in several ways from Black organizations seeking civil and human rights. Rather than place primary emphasis on combating oppression, the LRBW directed its efforts toward organizing a specific sector of the African American community. It argued that organized Black workers, particularly at the point of production in manufacturing, represented a viable force for insurgent Black Power. The LRBW, while taking concrete steps to combat police oppression, continued to view that phenomenon as only one important aspect of class rule. The LRBW quickly embarked on a program of expansion into community organizing, film production, and legal defense as well as a small printing plant and a bookstore. Externally, the LRBW’s operation was extremely impressive. Ronald J. Stephens See also: Baker, General Gordon, Jr.; Black Marxism (Book); Forman, James; Revolutionary Nationalism; UHURU Further Reading Ahmad, Muhammad. 2005. “1968–1971: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers.” libcom.org, http://libcom.org/library/league-revolutionary-black-workers. Ahmad, Muhammad. 2007. We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960–1975. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Allen, Ernie. 1979. “Dying from the Inside.” They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee: Seven Radicals Remember the 60s. Edited by Dick Cluster, 71–109. Boston: South End Press. Davenport, Christian. 2015. How Social Movements Die: Repression and Demobilization of the Republic of New Africa. London: Cambridge University Press. “From Repression to Revolution: Speech by Kenneth V. Cockrel.” 2008. libcom.org, March 13, http://libcom.org/library/repression-revolution-speech-kenneth-v-cockrel. Georgakas, Dan, and Marvin Surkin. 1972. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying; A Study in Urban Revolution. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Geschwender, James A. 1997. Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers. London: Cambridge University Press. Glaberman, Martin. 2011a. “Black Cats, White Cats, Wildcats: Auto Workers in Detroit.” In The League of Revolutionary Black Workers Selected Readings IWW: Black History Month, 3–4, Teaching American History, https://libcom.org/files/LRBW%20Study %20Guide.pdf. Glaberman, Martin. 2011b. “Workers Have to Deal with Their Own Reality and That Transforms Them.” In The League of Revolutionary Black Workers Selected Readings IWW: Black History Month, 23–27, Teaching American History, https://libcom.org/files /LRBW%20Study%20Guide.pdf.



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Rowe, Reverend Edwin A. 2014. “A Celebration for the Life of General Gordon Baker Jr., September 6, 1941–May 18, 2014.” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =CrhEtm2tqB0. Tripp, Luke. 1969. “DRUM: Vanguard of the Black Revolution.” South End (January 23): 3–4.

Lowndes County Freedom Organization The Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) was an independent all-Black countywide political party that was officially established in Lowndes County, Alabama, in November 1966. The LCFO was also known as the Black Panther Party because of its ballot symbol, which was a snarling black panther. The LCFO helped African Americans make sure they had a voice in decisions that affected their lives. The organization grew out of a grassroots movement launched in March 1965. Local activists collaborated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”) to spearhead the campaign. Lowndes County was then transformed from a place of violent white supremacy into the center of southern Black militancy. The impact of the LCFO reached far beyond Lowndes County. The LCFO directly influenced SNCC’s embrace of Black Power and inspired African Americans nationwide, including California Bay Area activists Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. They had adopted the black panther symbol as their own and named their new organization the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Lowndes County was and is a typical Black Belt county. The Black Belt is a mostly rural region of the South with rich black soil and majority African American populations that stretches from coastal Virginia to eastern Texas. After emancipation, the Lowndes County’s ruling white minority used political, economic, and legal power, reinforced by violent terrorism, to maintain white supremacy and stay in control. One hundred years later, although African Americans remained more than 80 percent of the population, no African Americans were registered to vote. The exclusion of Black voters meant that African Americans in Lowndes had no say in the political process. Whites owned most of the land and held all elective offices. There had been no Black elected officials in Lowndes since Reconstruction. And because juries were selected from a list of registered voters, no African Americans sat on juries. The exclusion of Blacks from the Lowndes County political process meant that racial discrimination would prevail in every part of local life. Public schools were rigidly segregated, public accommodations were separate and unequal, and Black laborers, especially agricultural workers, were overworked and underpaid. The white sheriff deputized almost every white man over age 21.

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Since emancipation, Blacks had fought hard for their freedom and the rights associated with that freedom. These rights included access to quality education, voting, decent housing, fair wages, and personal safety. Rights also included land ownership. However, white supremacy seemed endless and unabated. Its most vicious manifestation was racial terrorism, which made public challenges impractical, if not impossible. For example, in the 1880s, whites used guns at voting booths to defeat Reconstruction. In the early 1900s, whites feared neither arrest nor prosecution and lynched African Americans, concocting preposterous rape narratives to justify the murders. Prior to World War II, whites used extreme force to suppress wages of Black agricultural workers. In 1935 many Black sharecroppers were killed and dozens more were beaten, forcing hundreds to flee Lowndes County for good. In early 1965, some things began to change. One week before Bloody Sunday in neighboring Selma in March 1965, a group of 39 Black residents gathered at the county courthouse to boldly attempt to register to vote. No one was able to register that day, but a movement was born. To coordinate future voter registration attempts, a small group met and formed the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights (LCCMHR). John Hulett (1927–2006), who had spearheaded early voter registration attempts, agreed to serve as chairperson. The LCCMHR quickly began organizing additional voter registration efforts. As it did, four SNCC field secretaries joined the LCCMHR. These included Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), a veteran of the movement in Mississippi, and Bob Mants, a native of Atlanta. They came to Lowndes County just after the Selma to Montgomery March passed through, and they were able to find many people who were willing to fight white supremacy. The SNCC organizers who came into Lowndes brought with them years of valuable experience fighting on the front lines of the struggle for racial justice. Influenced by longtime activist Ella Baker (1903–1986), they sought to encourage and develop local leadership. Respecting and embracing local values of selfreliance and mutuality, they also sought to tap into the strength of other local social and economic institutions. Many of the SNCC organizers who were drawn to Lowndes, including Stokely Carmichael, came with an interest in independent politics and Black nationalism. Having seen the national Democratic Party refuse to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (a group that sought to unseat the segregationist “regular” party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City), they no longer believed that using moral suasion or seeking alliances with northern white liberals would address the problems facing African Americans. At the same time, they were inspired by Malcolm X, African liberation movements, and the strength of southern Black communities where there was a long history of self-determination and parallel institutions.



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The relationship between locals and SNCC in Lowndes was not only about voting. It was also about creating a new kind of politics that would focus on the community’s best interests. For example, the LCFO developed a platform before choosing candidates, and the candidates came prepared to execute the community’s goals. SNCC’s pursuit of an independent party in Lowndes was widely criticized by the national media as well as by some northern white liberals and former SNCC allies. Many of these people believed that southern African Americans should be grateful for voting rights and should simply join one of the existing parties controlled by whites. On the national level, the Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress. There was also a Democratic president. President Lyndon Johnson signed into law both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Meanwhile, many Republicans were violently opposed to Civil Rights; the party was also almost nonexistent in the South. In Lowndes County, the Democratic Party was the only functional political party. Therefore, the newly registered Black voters aligned with the Democratic Party. However, SNCC workers felt that it made little sense for Blacks to join the Democratic Party. After all, the Alabama party’s slogan was “white supremacy for the right,” and it was led by segregationists who vehemently opposed the Civil Rights Movement. Likewise, if Lowndes County Blacks registered as Republicans, they would be supporting a party whose most recent presidential nominee had campaigned against Civil Rights. They would also have no voice in state or local politics because all the worthwhile candidates were Democrats. As soon as the SNCC found an obscure Alabama law that laid out the process for creating a county-level independent party, activists began thinking about nontraditional ways of empowering Black voters, and the LCCMHR created its own independent political party. In December 1965, John Hulett announced the formation of the LCFO and its intention to hold a candidate nomination convention on the day of the Democratic primary, as required by law, in order to enter Black candidates into the general election in November 1966. Its main goal was to take control of the county government away from white Democrats. Building the LCFO, which officially became the Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP) after the November general election, was not very complicated. SNCC field secretaries and local allies canvassed and taught people about the voter registration process. They developed a political education program, which was unique for Lowndes County residents. It used mass meetings and workshops to increase general knowledge of local government. According to Gloria House, one of SNCC’s field secretaries, “We were helping to equip the people with the information and skills essential to running the county themselves not just as new voters but also as political leaders. We found that a review of African American

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and African history, giving a strong sense of historical identity, was of immeasurable significance in this process” (Holsaert et al. 2010, 510). In Alabama, all political parties were required to have a symbol that would make it easier for illiterate voters to identify parties and candidates. The state Democratic Party used a white rooster as its symbol. Movement activists in Lowndes County considered many symbols, including a white dove, but finally settled on a black panther. “The Black Panther is an animal that when pressured it moves back until it is cornered, then it comes out fighting for life or death,” said local movement leader John Hulett. “We felt we had been pushed back long enough and that it was time for Negroes to come out and take over” (Jeffries 2009, 152). With the LCFP and its new voting rights, African Americans began to improve the conditions of their lives. Courtland Cox, political analyst and SNCC field secretary, thought the Black community would be better served if the focus was on electing a new school superintendent, school board, and sheriff rather than if the community spent its energy complaining about police brutality and the poor schools. SNCC’s intensive grassroots organizing effort in Lowndes County—which helped form an emerging Black electorate—and the successful establishment of the LCFP was also at the heart of SNCC’s move toward Black Power in 1966. At a SNCC staff meeting less than a week after the May 1966 primary, the organization demonstrated its excitement over the LCFP by electing its principal organizer and architect, Stokely Carmichael, as the new chair. SNCC also decided to use the LCFP as a model for organizing independent political parties in other southern counties, to promote Black consciousness, and to limit fieldwork to Black organizers. When SNCC staff joined James Meredith’s March Against Fear in early June, they did so with these goals in mind. Along the march route, they helped register new Black voters and advocated for independent political parties. And in Greenwood, Mississippi, where Carmichael and SNCC had learned many of the lessons they applied in Lowndes, Carmichael publicized SNCC’s new program by shortening the phrase “Black Power for Black People” to “Black Power.” Emilye Crosby and Hasan Kwame Jeffries See also: Black Panther Party; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Newton, Huey P.; Seale, Bobby; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Baker, Ella. 1998. “The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle [1969].” Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, edited by Joanne Grant, 227–231. New York: Wiley. Carmichael, Stokely [Kwame Ture], with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. 2003. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael. New York: Scribner. Carson, Clayborne. 1991. “The Time Has Come.” In Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle,



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edited by Clayborne Carson, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, and Darlene Clark Hine, 244–287. New York: Penguin. Cox, Courtland. 1966. “What Would It Profit a Man?” Freedom Archives, http://freedo marchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Lowndes_Co/513.LowndesCO.what .would.it.profit.a.man.pdf. Cox, Courtland, and Jennifer Lawson. 1966. “One Man, One Vote.” Freedom Archives, http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Lowndes_Co/513.Lown desCO.one.man.one.vote.1966.pdf. Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, ed. 1998. “Ordinary People: Alabama and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.” In A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC, 87–109. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer, eds. 1990. “The Lowndes County Freedom Organization, 1965–1966: ‘Vote for the Panther, Then Go Home.’” In Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s, 267–280. New York: Bantam. Holsaert, Faith S., Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Wheeler Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner, eds. 2010. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. 2006. “SNCC, Black Power, and Independent Political Party Organizing in Alabama, 1964–1966.” Journal of African American History 91(2): 171–193. Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. 2009. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. New York: New York University Press. Joseph, Peniel. 2014. Stokely: A Life. New York: Basic Civitas. Minnis, Jack. 1967. “Lowndes County Freedom Organization: The Story of the Development of an Independent Political Movement on the County Level.” Freedom Archives, http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Lowndes_Co/513.Lowndes CO.vote.nov.8.1967.pdf.

Lumumba, Chokwe (1947–2014) Chokwe Lumumba was an activist attorney and revolutionary organizer. He served as a spokesperson and leader in the New Afrikan Independence Movement. After establishing himself as an attorney and grassroots organizer, Lumumba ran for political office in Jackson, Mississippi. He was successfully elected to the city council (2009) and as mayor (2013). Chokwe Lumumba was born Edwin Taliaferro in Detroit, Michigan, on August 2, 1947. His working-class parents, Lucien and Priscilla Taliaferro, instilled in him a sense of spirituality, morality, and service. During Lumumba’s formative years, Mrs. Taliaferro engaged her children in grassroots organizing with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Inspired by urban rebellions and the growing Black Power Movement, Lumumba joined the Black student movement

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Revolutionary nationalist organizer and attorney Chokwe Lumumba, who would later be elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, shown in 2013. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

while attending Michigan’s Kalamazoo College as a student-athlete. He also fought for the establishment of Black studies on his campus. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Lumumba joined the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA) in 1969. Established in 1968, the PGRNA declared its independence from the United States and demanded five states, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, for reparations to the Black nation, New Afrika, for slavery and oppression. Lumumba first traveled to Mississippi with the PGRNA in March 1979 when the group celebrated the emanate purchase of land in the state, which they referred to as Land Celebration Day. He served as one of the leaders of the PGRNA security team that confronted a contingent of white supremacist local and state police forces that were threatened by the Black nationalist event. Months after Land Celebration Day, local police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided a PGRNA residence in Jackson, Mississippi, resulting in the death of police officer William Skinner and the wounding of another officer and an FBI agent. Seven PGRNA workers at the scene were arrested, and four others, including PGRNA president Imari Obadele, were taken into custody later. Lumumba returned to Mississippi to support the legal case of the Republic of New Africa (RNA) 11 political prisoners. The ultimate conviction of the RNA 11 on state and local charges motivated



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Lumumba to finish law school at Wayne State University. After becoming an attorney in the state of Michigan, Lumumba successfully sued Wayne State University for racial discrimination against its African American law students. While practicing as an attorney in the city of Detroit, Lumumba maintained his activism in the PGRNA. Eventually he would serve as minister of justice and Midwest regional vice president of the PGRNA. Along other New Afrikan revolutionary nationalists from the PGRNA, the House of Umoja, and the Afrikan People’s Party, Lumumba founded the New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO) in 1984. He became NAPO’s chairman and the primary spokesperson of NAPO for 29 years. Subsequently, Lumumba and NAPO founded the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) as its mass association in 1990. International law was another important area of work for Lumumba. He applied his knowledge of global affairs and law in defense of political prisoners and prisoners of war and to advance reparations. Lumumba partnered with his mentor, Imari Obadele, and comrades in the PGRNA, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, and NAPO to support Queen Mother Moore’s call for reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States. This effort led to the formation of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America and the book Reparations Yes (1989), which he coauthored with Obadele and attorney Nkechi Taifa. Reparations Yes presented the legal and political case for reparations for African slave descendants in the United States. Lumumba was renowned as a defense and human rights attorney for several political prisoners such as Assata Shakur, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Sekou Odinga, the Pontiac Brothers, Hayward Brown, and rap artist Tupac Shakur—the son of Black Panther Afeni Shakur. In addition to political prisoners, Lumumba involved himself in fighting for grassroots and poor Black people fighting injustice in the legal system. Lumumba relocated with his wife Nubia and their two children, Rukia and Chokwe Antar, from Detroit to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1988. In Jackson, Lumumba worked with the Jackson Human Rights Coalition to pressure the district attorney to reopen the prosecution of Byron De La Beckwith, the assassin of Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers. Lumumba’s efforts on this case in concert with others ultimately led to the conviction of De La Beckwith in 1994. Another one of Lumumba’s most noted causes was fighting for the release of the Scott Sisters, two young Black women convicted and sentenced to double life sentences in Mississippi for an armed robbery of $11. The Scott Sisters served 16 years in prison before they were released. In Mississippi, Lumumba also fought in the courts for labor rights for Black workers and against racial discrimination within workplaces and challenged police misconduct in several jurisdictions. The MXGM encouraged Lumumba to run for Ward 2 of the Jackson City Council in 2009 as part of the MXGM’s campaign to win self-determination, participatory

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democracy, and economic justice in Black majority counties in Mississippi, called the Jackson-Kush Plan. According the Jackson-Kush Plan, a People’s Assembly was formed and promoted a People’s Platform that guided Lumumba’s campaign. Lumumba was elected to the city council after winning a runoff election with 61 percent of the vote. Again, backed by a citywide People’s Assembly and People’s Platform, Lumumba was elected mayor of Mississippi’s capital city in 2013, receiving 58 percent of the vote. Due to his radical activism and grassroots organizing, Lumumba’s electoral victories were considered extensions of the Black Power Movement. Lumumba was hailed by different media outlets as the most revolutionary mayor in the United States. In another aspect of the Jackson-Kush Plan, Lumumba promoted the development of worker-owned cooperatives as a vehicle to improve the lives of working and poor Black people in Jackson and throughout the state of Mississippi. Lumumba died of heart failure on February 25, 2014. Akinyele Umoja See also: Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry); Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa; Reparations; Shakur, Assata; Shakur, Mutulu (Jarel Williams) Further Reading Lumumba, Chokwe, Imari Obadele, and Nkechi Taifa. 1989. Reparations, Yes! The Legal and Political Reasons Why New Afrikans, Black People in North America, Should Be Paid Now for the Enslavement of Our Ancestors. Baton Rogue: House of Songhay.

M Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee) (1942–) Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) was as an important figure in the Black Power Movement. He was one of the leading architects of the Black Arts Movement and continued as a consistent example of the basic principles of Black Arts and Black Power. A contemporary of other Black Arts Movement figures such as Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka, Madhubuti is regarded as an influential activist, poet, institution builder, educator, and publisher that helped develop a strong Black literary tradition. Born in Detroit but based in Chicago for most of his adult life, Madhubuti emerged in the Black Power Movement as the poet Don L. Lee. Influenced by the thought and work of Malcolm X, Madhubuti has lived a life of committed advocacy for Black self-determination. He has often credited his success as both a literary artist and an independent institution builder to the influence of several mentors, especially poet Gwendolyn Brooks and artists-educators Margaret and Charles Burroughs, founders of Chicago’s DuSable Museum. Since the 1960s Madhubuti has been at the center of building and promoting positive African American culture and independent institutions to develop the capacity of the Black community for independence and empowerment while making a major contribution to African American literature as a writer and publisher. Think Black, his first book of poetry, appeared in 1967 and was published by African American literary scholar and poet Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press. That same year Madhubuti also founded Third World Press (TWP) and began publishing other Black poets, writers, and thinkers. Under Madhubuti’s leadership as publisher, TWP became the oldest continuously publishing Black independent press in the United States, ensuring that important voices and works of poets, essayists, novelists, historians, educators, and thinkers are not dependent on mainstream white publishers. In five decades of continuous independent publishing the Third World Press catalog includes Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ishmael Reed, John Henrik Clarke, Chancellor Williams, Margaret Walker, Sonia Sanchez, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Herb Boyd, Asa G. Hilliard, Pearl Cleage, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Gil Scott-Heron, Michael Simanga, Bakari Kitwana, Marc Lamont Hill, and scores of other writers and advocates of Black liberation. Madhubuti was also the founder and editor of Black Books Bulletin and a founding member of the Organization of Black American Culture Writer’s Workshop.

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A prolific writer, Madhubuti has published more than 31 books including several under his former name, Don L. Lee. His essays and poetry have also been published in more than 85 anthologies. His collection of essays, titled Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? The African American Family in Transition (1990), has sold more than 1 million copies and remains in publication. Spanning several decades, his works include Don’t Cry, Scream! (1969); Tough Notes: A Healing Call for Creating Exceptional Black Men (2002); Run toward Fear (2004); YellowBlack: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet’s Life; A Memoir (2006); Liberation Narratives: New and Collected Poems, 1966–2009 (2009); Honoring Genius: Gwendolyn Brooks; The Narrative of Craft, Art, Kindness and Justice (2011); By Any Means Necessary: Malcolm X; Real, Not Reinvented (coeditor, 2012); and Taking Bullets: Black Boys and Men in Twenty-First Century America; Fighting Terrorism, Stopping Violence, and Seeking Healing (2016). Madhubuti earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Iowa and has several honorary PhDs, including one from Spelman College in 2006. His distinguished teaching career includes academic appointments such as the Ida B. Wells-Barnett University Professor at DePaul University and positions at other universities including Howard University, the Columbia College of Chicago, the University of Iowa, Morgan State University, Cornell University, and Chicago State University, where he was university distinguished professor. At Chicago State University he founded and was director emeritus of the annual Black Writers’ Conference and the Gwendolyn Brooks Center. As a scholar, Madhubuti is regarded as an important mentor and teacher of new generations of Black educators, writers, and cultural workers, encouraging them to develop and work in the tradition of Black educational and artistic excellence and to become advocates for the liberation of African people. Known for his deep commitment to strengthening and healing Black communities through building strong Black families, Madhubuti is also a husband, father, and grandfather. He is married to his partner in life and struggle Dr. Safisha Madhubuti (Carol Lee), a global leader in pedagogy and practice with a particular focus on educating Black children. In addition to nurturing their own children, they are recognized for their impact and influence on the education of Black children. Madhubuti’s work as an educator did not begin on the university campus but instead has been deeply rooted in the community-based struggle for Black independent education and institutions. He is the cofounder of the Betty Shabazz International Charter School and the Institute of Positive Education/New Concept School. He also cofounded the DuSable Leadership Academy and the Barbara A. Sizemore Middle School. Madhubuti has spoken and written extensively on educating African American children and on the necessity of an African-centered education model.



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Madhubuti has also been a leader engaged in the continuous attempts within the Black liberation movement to create unity beyond ideology and organization through several attempts at building united fronts. He was an organizer and held leadership positions nationally in the Black Power Conferences (1966–1969), African Liberation Day (1972), the African Liberation Support Committee (1972– 1974), the Congress of African People (1970–1974), the National Black United Front (1980), the Million Man March (1985), and other national and local initiatives. Additionally, he has worked tirelessly behind the scenes to resolve and heal conflicts between various personalities and organizations within the Black liberation movement. In recognition of his lifelong work and service as a poet, writer, educator, organizer, publisher, and institution builder, Madhubuti has been recognized with numerous local, national, and international awards. He is the recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the American Book Award, the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award, and the Literary Legacy Award from the National Black Writers’ Conference. He also received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Art Sanctuary of Philadelphia and was named one of the “Ebony Power 150: Most Influential Blacks in America” for education. Michael Simanga See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Arts Movement; Last Poets; Pub­ lications Further Reading Hooper, Lita. 2007. The Art of Work: The Art and Life of Haki R. Madhubuti. Chicago: Third World Press. Jennings, Regina. 2006. Malcolm X and the Poetics of Haki Madhubuti. Chicago: Third World Press. Neal, Larry. 1968. “The Black Arts Movement.” Drama Review 12: 29–39.

Malcolm X (1925–1965) Malcolm X (el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) was born Malcolm Little, one of seven children, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Earl and Louise Little on May 19, 1925. Both of his parents were disciples of Marcus Garvey and wrote for the Universal Negro Improvement Association newspaper, Negro World. Malcolm was raised in Lansing, Michigan, where his father was killed in 1931 under suspicious circumstances (many believe that the hate group the Black Legion was responsible).

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Malcolm X during a press conference for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964. (Library of Congress)

Malcolm moved to Boston to live with his half sister Ella after living briefly with a foster family following his mother’s institutionalization in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1939. During Malcolm’s teenage years he spent time in the Roxbury district of Boston and Harlem, New York, where a variety of jobs introduced him to a burgeoning jazz culture. As a shoe shiner at the Roseland Ballroon, he met musicians and entertainers. He traveled to Harlem as a cook on the New Haven Railroad, where he visited jazz clubs such as Small’s Paradise and Jimmy’s Chicken Shack. Malcolm even performed part-time at Abe Goldstein’s Lobster Pond in mid-Manhattan under the stage name Jack Carlton. During this period he also became involved in a life of petty crime and was eventually arrested and sentenced to 8 to 10 years for a string of home robberies during the Christmas season of 1945. Influenced by his siblings, other Muslim prisoners, and personal writings from Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm converted to the Nation of Islam (NOI) while in prison in 1948. During his incarceration, he joined the prison debate team and argued for the end of capital punishment. He refused typhoid inoculations on religious grounds and wrote letters on behalf of fellow Muslims at Norfolk Prison being held in solitary confinement. Malcolm and other incarcerated Muslims even got the attention of local press when they demanded a halal menu and prison cells facing east. After six years in prison, Malcolm was granted parole in 1952 and secured a job through his brother Wilfred as a porter at a Detroit department store.



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As is customary in the NOI, Malcolm had assumed the last name “X” to represent his lost original name. Malcolm quickly became a leading figure within the NOI, helping to establish and revive more than 60 mosques across the country, most notably Mosque 7 in Harlem. Malcolm’s ascendancy in the Harlem political scene was solidified in 1957 following the police beating of Johnson X Hinton, who was submitted to medical care only after Malcolm silently organized a phalanx of men from the mosque to surround the 28th Precinct Station House, demanding Hinton’s release before thousands of Harlem onlookers. During the mid-1950s, Malcolm also built relationships with several major Black newspapers and international journals, including Moslem World and the U.S.A., the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Los Angeles Herald-Dispatch. In 1958 he was even given office space and use of a secretary at the Herald-Dispatch, where his weekly column, “God’s Angry Men,” introduced the NOI to many Los Angeles residents and prisoners across the country. By 1960 he had helped begin the NOI’s official organ, Muhammad Speaks, which eventually became the most prolific Black newspaper in the country. After the NOI offered support for the first Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference, held in Cairo, Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser extended an invitation to Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm traveled to Africa and the Middle East in the summer of 1959 in order to make inroads before Muhammad’s trip the following year. Although he intended to make hajj—one of the five pillars of Islam—Malcolm was not able to do so until after he had left the NOI in 1964. However, his trip had a tremendous impact on the NOI’s relationship to global Islam and emerging independent African states. President Nasser reportedly viewed the NOI as an important “minority pressure group.” Elijah Muhammad also increased Arabic instruction in NOI schools, ordered that temples be renamed “mosques,” and sent his son Akbar to study at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. In 1961, Malcolm X was named the official spokesman of the NOI. As the public face of the organization, he confronted racism well beyond the confines of southern segregationists, condemning white liberalism for its hypocrisy and calling President John F. Kennedy the “foxiest of the foxy.” Malcolm denounced American imperialism, neocolonialism, and capitalism. Just as a chicken cannot produce a duck egg, he charged, capitalism could not produce freedom for African Americans. His college lectures and debates also introduced him and the NOI’s message to an ever-widening audience. Due to the growing incompatibility between the political approach of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X as well as internal strife and jealousy within the organization, Malcolm was “silenced” by Muhammad in December 1963 for describing the assassination of President Kennedy as a case of the “chickens coming home to roost.” Malcolm spent the coming months alongside boxer Cassius Clay

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(soon to be Muhammad Ali) in Miami as he trained for his heavyweight title bout against Sonny Liston. However, Malcolm publicly revealed that Elijah Muhammad had out-of-wedlock children with NOI secretaries. Combined with competing political visions, this public feud caused deep divisions within the community. Malcolm quickly formed two independent groups: the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) and a religious haven for those who sided with him in his rift with the NOI, the Muslim Mosque, Inc. Ali meanwhile proclaimed his fealty to Elijah Muhammad. Throughout 1964, Malcolm traveled abroad while tensions at home reached a fever pitch. The NOI, which technically owned Malcolm’s home in Queens, sought to evict his wife and four daughters. Meanwhile, Malcolm traveled to Los Angeles and offered to testify in a paternity suit by several of Elijah Muhammad’s former secretaries. A judge ruled in favor of the NOI in the eviction case but tabled the execution of the warrant until January 1965. On the morning of February 14, Malcolm’s home was firebombed while he, his wife Betty Shabazz, and their four daughters all slept inside. The newspaper that he had helped start, Muhammad Speaks, devoted pages to slandering its former spokesman, even using Malcolm’s older brothers Wilfred and Philbert to denounce their brother’s waywardness. The newspaper even included an iconic cartoon of Malcolm’s decapitated head, horned and catapulting down toward the skulls of other notorious traitors such as Benedict Arnold, Judas, and Brutus. On the afternoon of Sunday, February 21, Malcolm was set to announce a new action program for the OAAU at the Audubon Ballroom when he was shot and killed. Although six members of the NOI likely carried out the plot, only one man—Talmadge Hayer—was apprehended at the scene of the crime. In the following days, the New York Police Department made two more arrests of members from Mosque 7 in Harlem: Norman 3X Butler (Muhammad Abd Al-Aziz) and Thomas 15X Johnson (Khalil Islam). Both men as well as key witnesses who knew Butler and Johnson well denied that they were at the ballroom that day. However, Hayer was reluctant to exonerate his codefendants at the 1966 trial by naming other accomplices, and all three were sentenced to life in prison. Nearly a decade into his incarceration, Hayer came forward with more details about his four coconspirators. Although Islam and Al-Aziz were paroled in the mid-1980s, none of the other four men have ever been prosecuted. Malcolm X’s internationalization of the Civil Rights Movement and his move to reframe it as an issue of human rights fundamentally changed the Black freedom struggle. He challenged U.S. foreign policy in the Belgian Congo and questioned the government’s role in the assassination of Congolese president Patrice Lumumba. Years before Martin Luther King Jr. joined the chorus of antiwar protesters in 1967, Malcolm denounced the war in Vietnam. He corresponded with Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, inviting him to an OAAU meeting. And as



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Malcolm called on recently independent African nations to denounce the United States before the United Nations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation scrambled to charge him with violating the Logan Act, a federal law forbidding unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. Meanwhile, Malcolm was also making overtures to the southern wing of the Civil Rights Movement. He spoke to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and visited with Coretta Scott King in Selma. He arranged for Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to speak in New York. In Chester, Pennsylvania, he worked with northern activists such as Gloria Richardson and Reverend Milton Galamison to form an organization called ACT. Malcolm is considered by many to be the fountainhead of the Black Power Movement. Stokely Carmichael watched Malcolm debate Bayard Rustin at Howard University as a college student in 1961. Bobby Seale wrote the OAAU to subscribe to its newsletter, Blacklash, in 1964 before beginning the Oakland chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense two years later. Malcolm X also had a tremendous impact on Black Arts Movement poets such as Sonia Sanchez and LeRoi Jones; the latter changed his name to Amiri Baraka and moved to Harlem and eventually Newark following Malcolm’s death. Finally, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, coauthored with Alex Haley and published posthumously in November 1965, became a foundational text for the movement and for autobiography as a genre. It became an international best seller and remains a classic in American literature. Garrett Felber See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Arts Movement; Black Panther Party; Kochiyama, Yuri; Nation of Islam; Sanchez, Sonia; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Breitman, George, ed. 1989. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. Atlanta: Pathfinder. Collins, Rodnell P. 2002. Seventh Child: A Family Memoir of Malcolm X. New York: Dafina Books. DeCaro, Louis A., Jr. 1997. On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X. New York: New York University Press. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. 2001. “‘Ironies of the Saint’: Malcolm X, Black Women, and the Price of Protection.” In Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights– Black Power Movement, 214–220. New York: New York University Press, 214–229. Malcolm X. 1978. Malcolm X FBI Surveillance File. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources. Malcolm X and Alex Haley. 1965. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove.

478 | Malcolm X (1925–1965) Marable, Manning. 2011. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Reprint ed. New York: Penguin. McDuffie, Erik S., and Komozi Woodard. 2013. “‘If You’re in a Country That’s Progressive, the Woman Is Progressive’: Black Women Radicals and the Making of the Politics and Legacy of Malcolm X.” Biography 36(3): 507–539.

Primary Document FBI Investigation of Malcolm X, 1964 The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) secret investigation of Malcolm X fell under the scope of the bureau’s Counterintelligence Program. Some of the primary targets of this program were Black Civil Rights leaders and “the leadership of so-called Nationalist-Hate Groups,” according to FBI documents. The FBI’s investigation of Malcolm X began in February 1953 when Malcolm still used the name Malcolm K. Little. His FBI file totaled 4,065 pages at the time of his death in 1965. During the 11-year investigation Malcolm X rose to second-in-command in the ranks of the Nation of Islam (NOI), a Black nationalist organization. By March 1964, however, following a dispute with the NOI leadership in Chicago, he had left the NOI and formed the Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. He had also become known as the minister of the NOI. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 while delivering a speech in New York City. The following is an excerpt from the Malcolm X file compiled by the FBI. MALCOLM K. LITTLE currently resides at 23-11 97th Street, East Elmhurst, Queens, New York, a one family dwelling. . . . LITTLE is a key figure of the NYO [New York Nation of Islam Organization] and until December, 1963, he was the Minister of NOI Mosque #7, NYC, and the official national representative of ELIJAH MUHAMMAD the head of the NOI. He was considered to be the number two man in the NOI. In December, 1963, he was suspended from the NOI for 90 days. Because of an alleged power struggle within the NOI in which members of ELIJAH’s family fear that Malcolm will succeed to the leadership of the NOI, the suspension of subject was made indefinite in March, 1964. On March 8, 1964, LITTLE announced that he was breaking with the NOI, although still a believer, and would speak out on his own forming his own “black nationalist” group. Although LITTLE indicated he would not form a rival

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organization to the NOI, it cannot yet be definitely determined whether he will or will not form his own defacto organization. Mar. 19, 1964 NY 105-8999, CONFIDENTIAL It is felt that a tesur on his telephone would provide invaluable information relative to his proposed activities in his new role, his supporters if any, and whether or not he will in fact establish his own organization. Because of his split with the NOI, Bureau sources therein are of no value relative to LITTLE. Further, by this split he has deprived himself of working space and it is felt that most of his business will be conducted at his home and over his telephone. The NYO requests authority to conduct a survey to determine the feasibility of placing a tesur on the telephone of LITTLE. ROUTE IN ENVELOPE To: SAC, New York (105-8999) From: Director, FBI (100-399321)-86 MALCOLM K. LITTLE INTERNAL SECURITY—NOI, CONFIDENTIAL REWRAIRTEL 3/11/64 Provided full security is assured, you are authorized to conduct a survey looking toward the instillation of a technical surveillance on telephone [number] OL1-6320 at the home of Malcolm K. Little, 23-11 97th Street, East Elmhurst, Queens, New York. Promptly advise results of same together with our recommendation regarding the installation of the technical surveillance. Note: Subject is former minister of Muslin Mosque Number 7, New York City, of the National of Islam (NOI) who was indefinitely suspended by Muhammad, national NOI leader, for his remarks concerning the assassination of President Kennedy. Little has now announced he will form a politically oriented organization more militant than the NOI which will participate in civil rights activities. The New York Office believes technical surveillance on Little’s residence would provide valuable information concerning his activities in this connection which would not otherwise be available

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CONFIDENTIAL Mar 23, 1964 UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT Memorandum To: Director, FBI, DATE 3/30/64 FROM: SAC, NEW YORK (105-8999) Subject: RECOMMENDATION FOR INSTALLATION OF TECHNICAL OR MICROPHONE SURVEILLANCE RE; Title, Malcolm K. Little aka 1. Name and address of subject: MALCOLM K. LITTLE 23-11 97th Street, East Elmhurst, Queens, NY 2. Location of technical operation: C 3. Other technical surveillance on same subject. NONE 4. Cost and manpower involved: Cost not known until installed. 5. Adequacy or security: Believed to be secured. 6. Type of case involved: Internal security case on Muslim Mosque, Inc., the newly formed black nationalist organization. 7. Connection or status of subject in the case: Leader and founder of the Muslim Mosque, Inc. 8. Specific information being sought: Information concerning contacts and activity of LITTLE and activity and growth of the Muslim Mosque, Inc. 9. Reasons for believing the specific information will be obtained by technical surveillance: LITTLE conducts business from his residence. 10. Importance of case and subject: Organization has philosophy of black nationalism, and has entered racial field where it suggests formation of rifle clubs by negroes to defend themselves.

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11. Possibilities of obtaining desired information by other means (Explain in detail): Only other plausible means. . . . Since the organization is new (announced 3/12/64). 12. Risks of detection involved: Negligible to none. 13. Probable length of technical surveillance: Unknown. 14. Request made for technical surveillance by any outside agency (name specific officials, title and agency): Not known. 15. Remarks: Recommend approval of installation. 16. Recommendation of Assistant Director. 4/22/64 Airtel To: SAC, New York (105-8999) From: Director, FBI (100-399321) MALCOLM K. LITTLE INTERNAL SECURITY NOI, CONFIDENTIAL Provided full security is assured, authority is granted to install tesur on the residence of Little, 23-11 97th Street, East Elmhurst, Queens, New York telephone number OL 1-6320. Advise time and date of installation and symbol number, Sulet justification 30 days after installation and each three months thereafter. April 22, 1964 6/4/64 AIRTEL To: Director, FBI (100-399321) FROM: SAC, NEW YORK (105-8999), CONFIDENTIAL SUBJECT: MALCOLM K. LITTLE aka 00: New York ReBuairtel dated 4/22/64. Tesur on MALCOLM K. LITTLE, 23-11 97TH Street, East Elmhurst, Queens, NY, telephone number OL 1-6320, installed at 4:00 p.m., 6/3/64.

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UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT Memorandum TO: DIRECTOR, FBI, DATE 7/2/64 FROM: SAC, NEW YORK (105-8999) SUBJECT: JUSTIFICATION FOR CONTINUATION OF TECHNICAL OR MICROPHONE SURVEILLANCE RE: Title MALCOLM K. LITTLE, aka 1. Name of person or organization on whom surveillance placed: MALCOLM K. LITTLE. 2. Address where installation made. Also give exact room number or area covered: 23-11 97th Street, East Elmhurst, Queens, New York (single family dwelling) 3. Location of monitoring plant: 4. Dates of initial authorization and installation: Authorized 4/22/64 Installed 4:00 p.m., 6/3/64 5. Previous and other installations on the same subject (with dates and places): None. 6. If installation is a technical surveillance, answer following questions: 7. If a microphone surveillance involved, state number of microphones actually used and location of each: No. 8. Is the installation part of________? If so, give symbol of other side of the combination: No. 9. Specific examples of valuable information obtained since previous report which indicates specific value of each item and the ate information received. State what use was made of each item involved: See attached. 10. Could above information have been obtained from other sources and by other means? No.

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11. ________________________________________________________? 12. Has security factor changed since installation? 13. Any request for the surveillance by outside agency (give name, title and agency): No. 14. ______________________________________________________? 15. ______________________________________________________? 16. Personnel Costs ________________________________________? 17. Remarks (By SAC): It is recommended that this source be continued in view of the prominence of LITTLE as a militant figure in the civil rights field, particularly as the leader of the Muslin Mosque, Inc and the organization of Afro-American Unity. Recommendation by Assistant Director: This technical surveillance is in the single family dwelling occupied by Malcolm K. Little, 23-11 97th Street, East Elmhurst, Queens, New York. It was first installed on 6/3/64. Little is a former national official of the Nation of Islam (NOI) who broke with that organization on 3/8/64 and formed Muslim Mosque, Incorporated (MMI) which he announced would be a broadly based black nationalist movement for Negroes only. Little has urged Negroes to abandon the doctrine of nonviolence and advocated that Negroes should form rifle clubs to protect their lives and property. At MMI rallies, Little has surrounded himself by guards armed with rifles and there have been numerous incidents recently involving gun-wielding MMI members where violence has been averted only by timely police action. At an MMI rally on 6/28/64, Little announced the formation of a new nonwhite civil rights action group called the “Organization of Afro-American Unity” with headquarters at MMI headquarters in New York City the aim of which would be to bring the United States racial problems before the United Nations and which would engage in civil rights demonstrations using the theme “by any means necessary.” In the past 30 days this technical surveillance has furnished valuable information on Little’s travel plans, on the new Organization of Afro-American Unity, facts concerning the arrest of MMI members in Boston on a weapons charge following an altercation with Boston NOI members and information on a threat to Little’s life by a person unknown. It also furnished information that

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Little was sending an assistant to Phoenix and Los Angeles to contact two women who had illegitimate children by Elijah Muhammad, NOI leader. Public announcement of these children by Little has caused the virtual state of war now existant (cq) between the NOI and MMI. On 6/30/64 information war between the NOI and MMI. On 6/30/64 information was received that Little sent telegrams to civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King and James Foreman offering to send his followers to teach self-defense to Negroes if the Government did not provide Federal troops for protection. All of the above information was furnished immediately to the Bureau and was disseminated to the Department and interested agencies. The Domestic Intelligence Division concurs with the recommendation of SAC, New York, that this installation be continued for additional three months. UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT Memorandum DATE: July 28, 1964 TO: Mr. W. C. Sullivan From: Mr. F. J. Baumgardner SUBJECT: MUSLIM MOSQUE, INCORPORATED INTERNAL SECURITY—MMI Reference is made to memorandum C. D. DeLoach to Mr. Mohr, dated 7/25/64, captioned “Racial Riots,” and specifically to the last recommendation concerning establishment of additional technical and photographic surveillance coverage Malcolm X Little and the Muslim Mosque, Incorporated (MMI) In connection with this matter it is noted Malcolm X Little is out of the U.S. on a tour of African nations and is not expected to return until 8/15/64. We presently have technical coverage on the residence of Malcolm X Little which is producing considerable valuable information. The New York Office has conducted surveys to determine whether additional installations are feasible. . . . A survey was also conducted by New York regarding the feasibility of installing microphone surveillances both at Little’s residence and at the hotel. New York points out that the headquarters of MMI will be moved as soon as Little returns to the U.S. and such installations at this time would be impractical. New York also points out that microphone surveillances could not be monitored at the hotel or nearby. . . . New York points out that the wife and child of Little are constantly at his residence and there are a number of Negroes constantly around the residence. Little has also maintained guards at his residence since receiving

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threats of bodily harm. Monitoring of microphone surveillances on the residence of Little could not be handled in the immediate neighborhood. Micro­ phone coverage is not feasible at his residence. CONFIDENTIAL UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT Memorandum To: Director, FBI, 10/2/64 FROM: SAC, NEW YORK It is recommended that this source be continued in view of the prominence of LITTLE as a militant figure in the civil rights field, particularly as the leader of the Muslim Mosque Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Plus the fact that source recently advised that MALCOLM, who has been in Egypt since July, 1964, at the expense of the Egyptian Government, and expected to return to New York on 11/15/64, has been appointed to the board of the Supreme Council governing Islamic affairs and is qualified to spread Islam in America among the Afro-Americans. . . . Source has furnished the following valuable information on dates indicated: 7/3/64 Information that MALCOLM notified New York City Police Department that an attempt was made on his life. 7/4/64 Information that MALCOLM and his followers were attempting to make a big issue out of the reported attempt on MALCOLM’s life in order to get the Negro people to support Him. (Police believe complaint on an attempt on MALCOLM’s life was a publicity stung by MALCOLM) (Teletype to Bureau 7/4/64). . . . Source: Freedom of Information request, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/malcolmx.htm.

Malcolm X Liberation University Founded in Durham, North Carolina, in 1969, the Malcolm X Liberation University (MXLU) was a Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist independent African-centered institution that emerged in response to the campus protests at Duke University.

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MXLU responded to cultural, racial, curricular, and pedagogical deficiencies that Black students identified to be most apparent at predominantly white institutions. By the early 1970s, MXLU also became the epicenter for Black activist activity as the strongholds of the Black Power Movement shifted to the South and experienced ideological changes and reconsiderations. Toward the end of the 1960s, Black students across the nation began to shift ideological perspectives and adopt protest strategies in both community and higher education/campus contexts. Riding the momentum established by the vanguard of the national student protest movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Black students began to elevate the aims of their campus protest activities with a national outcry for culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally relevant curricula, and more substantive Black faculty representation in significant disciplines that addressed both the Black American and continental African experiences. Since the founding of SNCC at Shaw University on February 1, 1960, the state of North Carolina was long considered a citadel of Black student activism and campus mobilization efforts at both historically Black colleges and universities and predominantly white institutions. The activist efforts by Black students similarly found a significant presence at the elite private institution of Duke University, located in Durham, North Carolina. At Duke, the Afro-American Society (AAS)—a campus formation of Black students—led the charge to pressure campus administrators and faculty to acknowledge the racist marginalization traditions of the university. Additionally responsible for ensuring that Black students were exposed to and received extracurricular programming, the AAS established speaker’s series and on- and off-campus events and secured relationships with community stakeholders in the Black communities of Durham. Thus, having established its presence in and around Duke University, the AAS was primed to spearhead a charge for the founding of a Black studies program at Duke. Since the latter part of 1968, the AAS initiated communication with the Duke University administration for the institution to acknowledge the Black student requests for adjustments to be made on campus. And as the spring 1969 semester began, the AAS released 10 demands to the university’s administration calling for radical changes to address the general inadequacies that affected Black students’ well-being on the campus. Duke president Dr. Douglas Knight met with the Black student leadership, and though hesitant to acquiesce to the AAS students, he agreed to the implementation of a Black studies program at the university. However, as the 1969 spring semester progressed, President Knight and Duke’s administration balked on their promises, and the negotiations with the AAS were neutralized. Consequently, the Black students of the AAS met and chose to revisit their strategies toward achieving their desired outcomes related to the demands issued to the administration earlier that year.



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On February 13, 1969, approximately 75 students of the AAS seized and barricaded themselves in the Allen Building of the university. The students threatened to set fire to student records if the police attempted to enter the building. Upon the takeover of the building, the students of the AAS renamed the building “Malcolm X Liberation School” after the slain leader of the Black liberation struggle who met an untimely death just four years earlier in Harlem, New York. In addition to renaming the building, the students of the AAS issued 13 demands to President Knight and the Duke administration calling for a Black studies program, a Black dormitory, more Black professors, the reinstatement of Black students who had been flunked out of the institution the previous semester, and amnesty for all students who had participated in the Allen Building takeover. AAS student leader Charles “Chuck” Hopkins, who remained at the forefront of the student negotiations for the AAS and other related Black activities on campus, expressed the discontent of Black students at Duke University and reminded the press that actions such as the Allen Building takeover were forewarned. However, due to the administration’s unwillingness to act more expediently, the Black students felt that they were left with no other choice to have their voices heard. The Allen Building takeover lasted nearly 10 hours, and after the Black students involved in the occupation exited the building, the students, still sweltering with the emotional highs of having successfully accomplished the objectives of their protest strategies, formed an impromptu parade line and marched down the Duke University campus drive repeatedly chanting “It’s Not Over!” while holding a banner that read “Malcolm X Liberation School.” Days after the building takeover, AAS students met with President Knight to discuss the fate of the students involved in the Allen Building takeover. Meeting with the students to advocate for their concerns was the seasoned and well-revered local community activist Howard Fuller. Fuller, originally from Milwaukee, had been an organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality and the National Urban League and had received his master’s degree in social work with a specialization in community organizing from Case Western University in Ohio. Fuller later went on to work in Chicago prior to taking a position with the newly formed Ford Foundation–funded antipoverty program, the North Carolina Fund (NCF) under the helm of executive director George Esser. Fuller ascended in the NCF organization and later assumed a leadership position with a subsidiary of the NCF, the Foundation for Community Development (FCD). While working for the FCD under Executive Director Nathan Garrett, Fuller continued to gain statewide recognition and a vast amount of community support from a large segment of the poor Black demographic around North Carolina. Fuller had also worked extensively with college students throughout North Carolina, and in the case of Duke University he worked with Black service workers on Duke’s campus in their fight for equal pay. He was well equipped to assist the AAS students in their meetings

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with the Duke University administration, which eventually ended unfavorably for the students involved in the Allen Building takeover. Undaunted by the outcome of meetings with the Duke University administrators, the Black students from Duke, including student leader Charles Hopkins along with Howard Fuller, Nathan Garrett, Black student supporters, and Black faculty members from Duke, North Carolina University at Chapel Hill, Bennett College, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and North Carolina College in Durham decided that it would be best to establish an independent institution. Fuller, Hopkins, Garrett, and many student activists and supporters foresaw creating the type of institution that would address the curricular, community-based intentions, and pedagogical needs of Black students in the higher education hotbed of areas around Durham and Greensboro, North Carolina. Initially, MXLU was housed in the offices of the FCD through the assistance of Nathan Garrett. And with Garrett continuing to support the efforts of Fuller and Black students from Duke and other surrounding institutions, MXLU began its planning stages during the summer of 1969 at the Franklinton Center in Bricks, North Carolina. With Fuller having officially left the FCD and now leading the organizing efforts, the institution was chartered and established as a tax-exempt nonprofit entity. A 15-member board, a council of elders, a community council, and a council for student input were all agreed upon and established as the administrative structure of the school. A judicial body called the Indaba Council was recognized to enforce regulations of the institution, and student tuition was set at $300. In order to commence operations, the leaders of the institution were aware that the donations received at the outset would not be enough to actuate MXLU. Thus, the MXLU leaders sought to take advantage of the General Convention Special Program (GCSP) of the Episcopal Church that had been founded in 1967 for the efforts of urban renewal. The Episcopal Church earmarked $9 million to be disseminated to foundations and minority organizations in urban cities across the nation. Procurement for GCSP funding required a grant application process to which MXLU applied in the spring of 1969 and was approved for two amounts of $15,000 and $45,000 by July of that same year. However, funding of the school by the GCSP caused a firestorm of media coverage and caused much of the 40,000-member Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina to be split on the direction of the diocese throughout North Carolina because of the grant award. Much of the controversy regarding the GCSP award to MXLU was connected to the glaring national attention generated by James Forman and the Black Manifesto. Forman’s treatise called for $500 million in reparations to be paid by white churches and synagogues across the nation to Blacks in America. Most members of the Episcopal Diocese in North Carolina attached the actions of



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Forman with the establishment of MXLU and other Black organizations across the country. However, Fuller and the Black student leadership were determined to not be deterred by attempts to thwart the drive toward MXLU’s creation. Thus, a fundraising campaign was launched in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Houston, New York City, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. With a financial coffer and supplementary donations in tow, MXLU began recruiting students and identified the address of 428 E. Pettigrew in Durham, North Carolina, as the first site of the institution. To further the political potency of the upstart institution, MXLU forged a fraternal relationship with the fellow Black student organization, Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU). In conjunction with SOBU, the Black student activists of the two organizations worked to ensure that the opening-day ceremonies for MXLU were a success. On Saturday, October 25, 1969, MXLU opened its doors, with approximately 3,500 community residents, students, Black faculty, and supporters in attendance to celebrate the inaugural day. The ceremonies included a parade, with many of the attendees adorned in African garments and with participation from honored guests such as Betty Shabazz (widow of Malcolm X), Nathan Garrett, and former members of the SNCC, Cleveland Sellers and Courtland Cox. Stokely Carmichael, who was not in attendance due to his relocation to Guinea for work with Kwame Nkrumah, provided a statement to be read to the attendees in his absence. Largely considered a success, the opening-day ceremonies marked the beginnings of an independent Black institution that was built to meet the needs of Black student activists and the Black community for whom it was intended to serve. During MXLU’s first years, the institution touted itself as a school that would espouse a curriculum-based communal nation building that reflected Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism. The press of North Carolina questioned the aims, structure, and direction of the school, citing reports that the school was a stronghold of communist activity. MXLU leadership remained steadfast in maintaining the school’s conceptual framework of nation-building concepts that housed the following: an early education center (named after Betty Shabazz), a Children of Africa Program and Willie Grimes Educational Center that operated in a local housing project, a Teacher Corps training program, and a Young African Warriors club for young Black males that was modeled after the Boy Scouts for Black males youths between the ages of 10 and 14. As the programming of the institution developed and evolved, the first year for MXLU experienced rigid beginnings, with the initial student enrollment of 51 students decreasing to 17 students due to attendees leaving for personal reasons and for disciplinary actions. However, MXLU continued its mission to work with local activists and organizations such as SOBU and in doing so decided by the second year of operations to relocate the main institution from Durham to Greensboro, North Carolina. MXLU leadership decided that the support in Greensboro would be greater due to more operational

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space and the growing political coalition with SOBU, also located in Greensboro. The biorganizational strength of both MXLU and SOBU gained national attention, and the growing expressions of Black nationalism in North Carolina increased the reputation of the Black Power Movement, having its stronghold in the South. Activists, volunteers, Black students, and former members of SNCC migrated to Greensboro and thus strengthened the upstart institution and the political fervor of Black pride for the overall movement. Now located at 708 Asheboro Street in Greensboro, MXLU continued its operations, now with an expanded curriculum of nation building that was deeply influenced by the work of Julius K. Nyerere. Nyerere had constructed a sociopolitical outline for Tanzania based on ujamaa, which translates to “familyhood.” Based largely on this concept, MXLU’s first-year courses for students included history; development of Black political thought and language; cultural expression; speech; physical development; and special-topic seminars that were made available. Students were immersed in course work for three essential languages for an academic year, combining for a total of three months per language for a total of nine months. The languages included French, Spanish, and Swahili. Second- and third-year students received technical training in one of four areas: biomedics, communication, agriculture, and engineering. The engineering component also consisted of three subareas of study: electrical, mechanical, and construction. MXLU was also instrumental in the establishment of a collective of PanAfricanist institutions from around the country that came to be known as the Federation of Pan-African Educational Institutions. The federation included MXLU; the Center for Black Education in Washington, D.C.; the Chad School in Newark, New Jersey; Our School of New York City; the Clifford McKissick Community School of Milwaukee; and the Pan-African Work Center in Atlanta, Georgia. MXLU provided significant contributions to schools in the federation, and Fuller, who by 1971 changed his name to Owusu Sadaukai (meaning “one who clears the way for others”), provided assistance by giving lectures at the various schools. By the end of the 1970–1971 school year for MXLU, Owusu Sadaukai was invited to attend a meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, sponsored by the National Committee of Black Churchmen. While on the African continent, he planned to visit additional countries for personal enrichment and gather support for MXLU and SOBU. While in East Africa, Sadaukai met former SNCC member and photographer Bob Fletcher, who was planning to complete a film documentary on the anti-Portuguese guerrilla fighting force, the Portuguese Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front, FRELIMO). Sadaukai, who was interested in seeing more of the group’s activities, joined Fletcher to meet up with FRELIMO in Mozambique and ended up traveling with the liberation army for nearly a month. While in Mozambique, Sadaukai met with Samora Michel, the



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Marxist leader to FRELIMO and eventual president of Mozambique. When asked by Sadaukai how Blacks in American could help their cause, Michel relayed that both material support and a voice of anti-imperialist dissent were needed to inform the world of the African continent’s anti-imperialist struggles. Upon Sadaukai’s return to the United States, operations for the school continued, and Sadaukai was now motivated to enact the request of Michel by bringing national and international attention to the plight of Africans throughout the diaspora with a mass demonstration that came to be known as African Liberation Day. In January 1972, planning meetings began to address the needs of the African Liberation Day demonstration. The established steering committee, the African Liberation Day Coordinating Committee (ALDCC), consisted of a local North Carolina and national network of activists that would be responsible for the success of the event. The event found its historical roots in the work of former Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah and his establishment of African Freedom Day following the formation of the Organization of African Unity, and to ensure the success of the African Liberation Day event the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organizations (IFCO) provided a grant and full support. MXLU became the central location for the event’s planning, and with Sadaukai as both the head of the institution and national chair of the African Liberation Day event, Greensboro, North Carolina, increased its now national and international reputation as a hotbed for Black nationalist/Pan-Africanist activism. On Saturday, May 27, 1972, the African Liberation Day activities commenced with demonstrations in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Toronto, Canada; Grenada; Dominica; and Antigua. The theme of the demonstration, “We Are an African Peo­ ple,” carried the sentiments of the Pan-African supporters, and the event drew approximately 4,000 attendees in Washington, D.C., alone. And the success of the event marked the significance of MXLU as an epicenter for national and international activity among Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist proponents from across the nation and from many continental African students who sought support and activist engagement during their tenure in the United States. By the beginning of the 1972–1973 MXLU school year, the institution experienced radical ideological shifts toward Marxist-Leninism. Much of the school’s reexamination occurred because of Sadaukai and other MXLU leaders’ involvement with continental African activism and perspectives of an anti-imperialist/ class-based interrogation of social ills that plagued the African continent. So affected by the evolution of national Pan-African perspectives and contentions, MXLU and SOBU embraced Marxism-Leninism as the foundational principles of the institution and the student group. However, not all of the Black student attendees and faculty of MXLU made willing conversions, and ideological clashes ensued as the institution progressed through its fourth and final year of operations.

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By January 1972 MXLU began phasing down its operations, with new intentions to focus on projects in the surrounding Black communities of North Carolina. MXLU also readjusted the institution’s daily operating schedules and continued to operate the African Children’s Educational Center, the Floating Swahili Program, community outreach programs, and the school’s 32-acre farm. However, the institution faced the financial strain of monthly operations, and the MXLU leadership not in agreement about applying for or accepting addition monetary sources from white granting agencies. By the end of 1972, MXLU’s fraternal relationship with Youth Organization for Black Unity (YOBU) as a Marxist collective of a school and Black student organization (formerly SOBU by 1972) increased the difficulties in garnering any additional funding. MXLU recharged for a second and what would be the final time to lead the May 26, 1973, African Liberation Day activities and fundraising for liberation movements on the African continent. Held with a new focus for local participation, the ALDCC now morphed into the African Liberation Support Committee, and local sites around the nation were being charged with fund-raising in their locales to ensure the success of African Liberation Day 1973. The event succeeded in its quest to raise $50,000 for African liberation movements and raise cultural and political awareness about the African continent and anti-imperialist struggles taking place throughout the diaspora. A month after the African Liberation Day demonstration on June 27, 1973, MXLU officially announced its closing at a press conference held at the Greensboro location. Joined by members of MXLU, YOBU, and the IFCO, Sadaukai provided the press and those in attendance with a three-part explanation and analysis of why MXLU’s four-year journey as a Black nationalist/Pan-Africanist institution came to an end. Sadaukai cited that an overemphasis on Africa, alienation of the local Black community, and the institution’s financial woes that had plagued operations since 1969 were the critical factors in the decision to close MXLU. Sadaukai and MXLU leadership included the ideological shifts of the movement as auxiliary factors in the institution’s decline as well; however, the perspective for much of the MXLU collective was that MXLU’s objectives of providing alternative Black American/Pan-Africanist curricula and community engagement were achieved in the short four-year period of the school’s existence. From the fall of 1969 until the early summer of 1973, approximately 125 students coming from 32 states participated in the life of MXLU as students of the institution, thus cementing the school’s place in the complex and multifaceted history of the Black Power Movement. Richard D. Benson II See also: African Liberation Support Committee; Black Student Activism; Black Studies; Johnson, Nelson; Student Organization for Black Unity



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Further Reading Benson, Richard. 2015. Fighting for Our Place in the Sun: Malcolm X and the Radicalization of the Black Student Movement, 1960–1973. New York: Peter Lang. Biondi, Martha. 2012. The Black Revolution on Campus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bush, Roderick. 2009. The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Cohen, Robert, David J. Snyder, and Dan T. Carter. 2013. Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Johnson, Cedric. 2007. Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rogers, Ibram H. 2012. The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rojas, Fabio. 2007. From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press. Waller, Signe. 2002. Love and Revolution: A Political Memoir; People’s History of the Greensboro. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Mallory, Mae (1927–2007) Mae Mallory was a leading figure in the movement for Black liberation in the 1950s and 1960s and was especially known as a proponent of the right of Black people to armed self-defense. She gained national attention after being accused, along with Robert F. Williams, of kidnapping a white couple during a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) invasion of the Black community of Monroe, North Carolina, in 1961. Mallory was born in Macon, Georgia, on June 9, 1927, and was raised by her mother and maternal grandparents. At a very early age, Mallory embraced a selfdefense ideology. At just three years old she defended herself after a white woman offered spoiled cheese to Black children. Mallory knocked the cheese out of the store owner’s hand. In retaliation, the woman hit Mallory, but compelled by her older cousin, Mallory fought back. This was Mallory’s first lesson in self-defense. Soon after her family realized that she would not do well in the South, and they moved to New York. In 1944 at the age of 17, Mallory’s family arranged a marriage between Mallory and a man from the South. The two could not have been more different, as he was a farmer and she was an intellectual. They produced two children, Butch and Patricia. Shortly after they were born, Mallory left the marriage because she felt that there was more to life. She worked in nearly every low-skilled industry and in 1955 joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) to advocate for Black equality.

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Mallory’s activist career started in the 1950s. As a mother to two school-age children, she fought for a just and equal New York City public education for them, a new school building, and better curriculum. In 1957, her lawyer Peter Zuber sued the school district on behalf of parents. In 1958 they lost the desegregation lawsuit, and Mallory and other parents hired a teacher to educate their children. As a result of her activism, she and her family faced harassment by the state. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) classified her as a “Security Matter– Communist,” placed pressure on welfare authorities to incarcerate her for welfare fraud, and removed her son from her care. By 1958 Mallory had decided to leave the CPUSA, which she felt did not support Black women. She joined the Black nationalists even though she opposed their male chauvinistic practices. She found affinity with the efforts of Robert and Mabel Williams and the Monroe Negroes with Guns Movement. Following the suspension of Robert Williams from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Mallory founded Harlem’s Crusader Family to raise funds for the Monroe movement, including purchasing guns for them through fundraisers. In 1961 Monroe activists invited the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordi­nating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Riders to North Carolina. Williams, as a nationally known activist, called for support to provide housing and food to the 20 young students in their efforts to desegregate interstate transit. Monroe activists also knew the danger the students faced in their nonviolent direct actions, so they also asked for physical help to keep them safe. Mallory, along with activist Julian Mayfield, traveled to North Carolina heavily armed to help keep the activists safe against KKK violence. The Freedom Riders, including James Forman of SNCC, peacefully demonstrated on August 27, 1961, at the courthouse in Monroe. Their presence exacerbated the racial tensions already simmering in Monroe, and white onlookers hurled insults and glass bottles at the young people. The local authorities watched as a crowd estimated at over 2,000 people (including members of the KKK) brutally attacked the Freedom Riders. Because Mallory did not adhere to nonviolent doctrine, she was not present at the courthouse; instead, she remained at the home of Mabel and Robert Williams helping to fortify the Black community against further attacks. Night riders were known to drive through the Black section of town shooting indiscriminately. On that Sunday evening, the Black community braced for another invasion and was ready to fight back. Mallory reportedly encouraged both an offensive and a defensive position, which countered Williams’s efforts to quell the Black community. Meanwhile, a white couple—Charles and Mabel Stegall— drove into the Black neighborhood, presumed to have ill intentions. Divergent accounts of the incident exist. According to Williams and Mallory, some individuals in the Black community threatened the couple’s life, and Charles and Mabel



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Stegall looked to Williams for help, seeking refuge in their home. The Stegalls, however, claimed that they were kidnapped and tied up and that Mallory guarded them with a rifle. A few hours later the Stegalls, unharmed, left the home. Mallory, Williams, and other activists were charged with kidnapping. The local chief of police threatened to hang everyone in the Williams home. Fearing for their lives, the Williams family left the state and ultimately resettled in Cuba. Mallory escaped to New York. Accused of kidnapping, she fled to Cleveland, Ohio, hoping to hide out with the help of family and local activists. After Mallory spent several months in hiding, the FBI apprehended her at her cousin’s home, and she spent 13 months in jail and faced extradition. Audrey Proctor, Ruthie Stone, Clarence Henry Seniors, and Ethel Azalea Johnson founded the Monroe Defense Committee to free Mallory and prevent her extradition to North Carolina. The committee fought for three years to free Mallory. On February 27, 1964, she was found guilty of kidnapping and faced a 17-year prison sentence. In 1965 the committee successfully challenged the sentencing based on racial discrimination in the jury selection. Upon release Mae Mallory continued her fight for social justice in the United States and abroad. She moved with her daughter, Patricia, to Tanzania. Mallory’s desire was to help with its revolutionary government. Tanzania gained independence in 1961, with Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu as its political leader. Mallory wanted to help build a socialist country in Tanzania; she lived there for 10 years. While in Tanzania, she helped to organize the Sixth Pan-African Congress held in June 1974 in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. The congress centered on African independence and African unity. Mallory worked toward nation building. Unfortunately, because of the anticommunist climate she was forced to leave Tanzania and return to the United States. Still, she stayed committed to social justice, Pan-Africanism, and socialism. After returning to the United States, Mallory decided to return to school. In 1984, she graduated from the State University of New York, Empire State College. She remained committed to Black liberation throughout her life and engaged the community with the pressing issues of the day through her radio show based at Medgar Evers College. In July 2007 Mallory passed away at the age of 80. Paula Marie Seniors See also: Black Internationalism; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Sixth Pan-African Congress; Williams, Mabel; Williams, Robert F. Further Reading Black, Adina. 2004. “Still Unequal: A Fiftieth Anniversary Reaction on Brown v. Board of Education.” Radical History Review 90 (Fall): 67–68. Gore, Dayo. 2011. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York: New York University Press.

496 | Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Higashida, Cheryl. 2011. Black Internationalist Feminism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. James, Joy. 1996. Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender & Race in U.S. Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Johnson, Paula C. 2002. Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison. New York: New York University Press. Lathan, Rhea Estelle. 2007. “Crusader: Ethel Azalea Johnson’s Use of the Written Word as a Weapon of Liberation.” In Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century, 59–71. New York: Lawrence Erlbraum. Mae Mallory Interview. 1970. Interviewed by Malaika Lumumba, Ralph J. Bunch Oral History Collection 523, February 27, 1970, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC. Mae Mallory Papers. n.d. Reuther Labor Library, Wayne State University, Detroit. Robert F. Williams Papers. n.d. Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Williams, Robert F. 1963. Negroes with Guns. New York: Marzani and Munsell.

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) was a Chinese communist revolutionary statesman and soldier and the preeminent Chinese Marxist theorist who ruled a quarter of the world’s population for 25 years, making China one of the most powerful countries in the world. Employing guerrilla warfare to defeat his nationalist rival Chiang Kai-shek, Mao rose to establish the People’s Republic of China and went on to implement programs such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which began the industrialization that would lay a foundation for China’s extraordinary economic development since the late 20th century. Mao’s legacy remains a contested ideological arena, with some scholarship leaning more heavily toward anticommunism. However, Mao Zedong has been perceived as an international hero in the eyes of many Black people in the United States, particularly within Black revolutionary circles. Born on December 26, 1893, in Shaoshan, Hunan Province, China, Mao was the son of a former peasant who had become an affluent farmer and grain dealer. Mao acquired a basic knowledge of the Wuking (Confucian classics) at his native village’s primary school. He was forced to begin working full-time at the age of 13 on his family’s farm, but a young Mao rebelled against tradition (including an arranged marriage that he left unacknowledged and unconsummated) and left his family to study at a higher primary school in a neighboring county and then at a secondary school in the provincial capital, Changsha. It was in Changsha where he encountered many of



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the ideologies that would shape his work. Cultural and political reformers—Liang Qichao and the nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen—greatly influenced him. On October 10, 1911, amid his own studies of revolutionary thought, fighting broke out in Wuchang against the Qing dynasty, and within two weeks the revolt had spread to Changsha. Mao enlisted in a unit of the revolutionary army in Hunan, but the spring of 1912 marked the birth of the new Chinese republic and the end of Mao’s military service. The official civil service examination system had been abolished in 1905, and Western ideas about learning had begun to infiltrate the Chinese education system. Mao, like many other Chinese students at that time, was faced with the challenges of redefining his career goals as well as what it meant to be of service to China. He eventually graduated from the First Provincial Normal School in Changsha in 1918, where he studied Chinese history, literature, and philosophy as well as Western ideologies. It was there that Mao developed an interest and began participating in political activity. In 1917, he helped establish several student organizations such as the New People’s Study Society. Many of its members would later join the Communist Party. After leaving the normal school in Changsha, Mao spent six months in China’s leading intellectual center, Peking University. Working as a librarian’s assistant, it was here that he came under the influence of Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, both of whom would go on to become principal figures in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mao’s brief stay at Peking coincided with the events that led up to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which according to many historians was considered the fountainhead of China’s changes for the next 50 years. The May Fourth Movement was the term given to the Paris Peace Conference student demonstrations and protests against the decision to hand over former German concessions in Shandong Province to Japan instead of returning them to China. These demonstrations, part of a large-scale cultural and political shift in China, resulted in the abandonment of Western liberalism for Marxism and Leninism by Chinese radicals as the answer to their country’s problems. Mao Zedong was a founding member of the CCP in 1921. After the nationalist Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek, dissolved the alliance with the communists in 1927, the rivalry between the two parties became a civil war. Mao conducted protracted revolutionary warfare from peasant-backed countryside encampments, eventually defeating Chiang Kai-shek and gaining control of the country. A temporary anti-Japanese (as they attempted to invade China) united front between the two parties swelled Mao’s communist forces, establishing effective grassroots political control over a population that may have totaled as many as 90 million. With the political and ideological aid of Moscow, Mao established the People’s Republic of China. Though Mao’s leadership was fraught with contradictions, he had hoped to “let a hundred flowers bloom” and maintain an administration that would draw inspiration from many diverse ideas, thus preventing China from existing within a

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repressive political atmosphere. Mao’s innovations, the Great Leap Forward program and his Cultural Revolution, had the goals of combating bureaucracy, encouraging popular participation, and stressing China’s self-reliance, but his methods have been both widely criticized and in many cases perhaps misinterpreted. Mao Zedong served as chairman of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1959 and led the CCP from 1935 until his death. Maoist thought held strong to the notion that Marxism must be taken and utilized in the context of time and place and that revolutionary leadership, struggle, and ideology must be born of actual people in motion rather than abstract theory. Maoism was not at all a rejection of theory but rather an active use of it, and when combined with ethical behavior and the revolutionary will it represented, according to Chinese communist leader Lin Biao, an “exhaustible source of strength and a spiritual atom bomb of infinite power.” It is often stated as fact that Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign (1958) resulted in the mass starvation and death of millions of Chinese people. The campaign saw the emergence of large-scale agricultural communes consisting of tens of thousands of people. Large-scale irrigation projects were implemented to improve both agricultural and industrial productivity across China. The associated death toll varies widely, from 16.5 million (based on figures released during an ideological campaign by the post–Mao Deng Xiapong government) to more than 38 million (as seen in “‘Jung Chang, and Jon Halliday’ MAO: The Unknown Story”). Political activist and socialist researcher Joseph Ball maintains that “There seems to be no way of independently authenticating these figures due to the great mystery about how they were gathered and preserved before being released to the public” (Halliday 2006). Mao Zedong himself has critiqued his policies and admitted his mistakes, which include implementation and policy issues. Still, after a period of early challenges and disruptions, China’s population and life expectancy increased under his leadership. Ball explains that despite the Western writers who have taken a disproportionate view of the period due to “mesmerizing death toll figures from dubious sources,” there is still an emergent understanding of how some of the policies developed during Mao’s Great Leap Forward actually benefited the Chinese people and led to their ascendancy in the global arena (Halliday 2006).

Impact The Chinese endowed nationalist struggles with revolutionary value and reached out specifically to Africa and to Black people throughout the diaspora. China formed the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization in December 1957 and invited W. E. B. Du Bois to spend his 90th birthday in China after he had been declared a public enemy by the United States. The People’s Republic of China and Maoist thought have had a lasting impact on Black radical movements from the 1950s through at least the mid-1970s; in fact, though he had traveled there as early



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as 1936 (before the revolution), Du Bois returned to China in 1959 and became convinced that China would be the leader among underdeveloped nations on the path away from Western capitalism and toward an international socialism. In 1963 three weeks prior to the historic March on Washington, Mao Zedong issued a statement condemning the United States for its racism and holding up the Black freedom movement as an integral aspect of the global struggle against imperialism. Mao stated that “The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the black people.” Mao Zedong’s global influence resulted in cross-cultural interests and engagements, as Black radicals were inspired by his writings and revolutionary action, and Chinese students became increasingly interested in Black movements and the culture that emerged from them. Several organizations emerged out of the debates within the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), one of which was the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in 1965, an outgrowth of the earlier labor movement. Initially the PLP was led by ex-communists who were in solidarity with the Chinese and insisted that Black workers were the “key revolutionary force” in the proletarian revolution. Black activists such as John Harris from Los Angeles and Bill Epton from Harlem, who had been arrested for “criminal anarchy” during the 1964 riots, were noted members of the PLP. “Predominantly white Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties were not the primary vehicle for the Maoist-inspired Black left. Most Black radicals of the late 1950s and early 1960s discovered China by way of anti-colonial struggles in Africa and the Cuban Revolution” (Kelley and Esch 1999). Ghana’s independence in 1957 and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo also emboldened Black radicals in the United States while expanding the international scope of revolutionary struggle. Black radical Vicki Garvin traveled in Black leftist circles in Harlem during the postwar period and supported Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s efforts in developing better-paying jobs for Harlem Blacks as well as Black history clubs that were dedicated to building library resources for the study of Black life. She held degrees in political science and economics and was instrumental in helping Malcolm X arrange part of his tour of Africa. Garvin joined the Black intellectual exodus to Nkrumah’s Ghana along with Maya Angelou and eventually moved next door to Du Bois. Garvin taught conversational English to Cuban, Algerian, and Chinese diplomats in Ghana and taught at the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute. “Gavin remained in China from 1964 to 1970, building bridges between the Black freedom struggle, African independence and the Chinese Revolution” (Kelley and Esch 1999). Robert F. Williams, arguably the embodiment of Black traditions of selfdefense, was a Black internationalist hero. Williams, a former marine with extensive military training, was famous for forming armed self-defense groups to fight the Ku Klux Klan. He espoused a Black internationalist ideology that called for

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solidarity between Black nationalism and Third World independence movements. At the invitation of Mao Zedong, Williams and his wife Mabel moved to China and lived there for three years, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Ethel Johnson, an activist who had worked with Robert F. Williams in Monroe, North Carolina, was an adviser to the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). RAM was formed primarily by Donald Freeman, a Black student at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, and Wanda Marshall along with Max Stanford. RAM planned a national movement that was focused on revolutionary nationalism, youth organizing, and armed self-defense. In the postwar period, the organization was the first serious and sustained attempt to blend Marxism, Black nationalism, and Robert Williams’s Third World internationalism into a coherent revolutionary program. According to Kelley and Esch (1999), it was Stanford’s assertion that what RAM desired was to “apply Marxism-Leninism Mao-Tse Tung thought” to the conditions of Black people and advance the theory “that the Black liberation movement in the U.S. was part of the vanguard of the world socialist revolution.” RAM leaders identified with the revolutionary Chinese peasants. They paid close attention to the way the rural revolutionaries led the CCP to victory. Many RAM members read Mao in a very literal sense, combining his writings with Robert F. Williams’s theories of urban guerrilla warfare and deducing that a campaign of mass chaos and revolutionary discipline would be the key to Black revolutionary victory in the United States. The fall 1964 issue of Black America predicted a modern apocalypse where Black men and women in the Armed Forces would defect to Black liberation forces and whites who “claim they want to help the revolution will be sent into the white communities to divide them, fight the fascists, and frustrate the efforts of counter-revolutionary forces.” They saw a breakdown of mass communication, a Wall Street crash, and a general urban collapse that would make the oppressor class powerless, paving the way for Black liberation and the emergence of a new social order. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, affectionately referred to as the Little Red Book, enjoyed wide popularity among Black Harlemites. The Black Panther Party (BPP) would at times sell the book on street corners as a fund-raiser for the organization. In fact, the pocket-size collection of aphorisms greatly influenced Black radical literature, as similar books such as The Black Book, edited by Earl Ofari Hutchinson (with assistance from Judy Davis) were published specifically for Black militants. Many Black radicals of the era regarded China, along with Cuba and Ghana, as a bastion of people’s power and Third World revolution. Among them was BPP cofounder Huey P. Newton. Newton was heavily influenced by Maoist thought. Long before he helped to found the Black Panthers, as a student at Merritt College in the early 1960s he studied existentialism and attended meetings sponsored by the PLP.



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Poet, writer, educator, and political activist Amiri Baraka blended Maoist thought with Black nationalism to produce his brand of cultural nationalism. Baraka led the Congress of African People (CAP) in the mid-1960s. Ideological schisms within CAP brought with them the strengthening of Marxist-Leninist thought, which arguably began to overshadow some of the Black nationalist elements. Later those elements of Marxist-Leninist-Mao thought would coalesce around Baraka’s shift to the Revolutionary Communist League. The willingness of Chinese revolutionaries to meet force with force inspired many Black radicals in an age when nonviolent passive resistance was coming under increasing scrutiny. Kelley and Esch (1999) maintain that Mao’s China “offered black radicals a colored or Third World, Marxist model that (once tailored to fit their specific cultural and political realities) enabled them to challenge white, western concepts of class struggle.” Though the example of Mao’s China remains in various ways contradictory, it still stands as an example of nonwhite peasants making a socialist revolution, a revolution that influenced world politics in ways distinct from Russia and the West as well as an archetype of cultural struggle that helped develop the discourse surrounding Black Arts and politics. Tarell C. Kyles See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Panther Party; Congress of African People; Garvin, Victoria “Vicki” Ama; Newton, Huey P.; Revolutionary Action Move­­ ment; Stanford, Max (Muhammad Ahmad); Williams, Mabel; Williams, Robert F. Further Reading Ball, Joseph. 2006. “Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward?” Monthly Review: Independent Socialist Magazine, September 21, http://www.monthlyre view.org. Haldane, J. 2007. “‘Jung Chang, and Jon Halliday’ MAO: The Unknown Story.” NUCB Journal of Language Culture and Communication 8(2): 68–70. Ho, Ping-ti. 1959. Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953. Harvard East Asian Studies 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kelley, R. D., and B. Esch. 1999. “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution.” Souls: Critical Journal of Black Politics & Culture 1(4): 6–41. Riskin, C. 1998. “Seven Questions about the Chinese Famine of 1959–1961.” China Economic Review 9(2): 111–124.

March Against Fear In 1966 Civil Rights activist James Meredith (1933–) organized the solo March Against Fear. The purpose of the march was to bring attention to southern racism

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Watched by a number of journalists, American Civil Rights leaders Floyd B. McKissick (center, in long-sleeved white shirt), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) (center, with a hand on his sunglasses), and Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998) (third from the right, in short-sleeved white shirt) speak with a uniformed police officer during a voter registration march, Mississippi, June 9, 1966. Originally called the March Against Fear, it began as a solo march by James H. Meredith, who was shot and injured by a sniper while walking from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. King and others took up the march, subsequently renamed the Meredith March. Carmichael and SNCC popularized the slogan of “Black Power” at the march. (Lynn Pelham/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

and discrimination that had continued even after the passage of federal Civil Rights laws and to encourage people to register to vote in Mississippi. Meredith intended to march the 220-mile route from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. The March Against Fear is a significant event in the Civil Rights Movement because it introduced the ideology of Black Power to the nation and the world on June 16, 1966, in Greenwood, Mississippi, the heart of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). James Howard Meredith was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, on June 25, 1933. The seventh son born to Moses and Roxie Meredith, James Meredith was raised on an 80-acre farm with nine brothers and sisters. His father was very independent and raised his family away from white society. Meredith’s first encounter with racism occurred on a train ride from Chicago to Mississippi. While in Memphis he was required to move to the segregated Black section of the train, where he was forced to stand for the remainder of his trip. He vowed then that he would dedicate



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his life to ensuring equal treatment for Blacks. After high school, Meredith spent nine years in the U.S. Air Force. After leaving the military he enrolled in Jackson State College—an all-Black school—in Mississippi. In 1962 James Meredith became a household name after he transferred to the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), a segregated public university. Local whites rioted for two days in an attempt to prohibit his entry into the college. Their efforts were unsuccessful, and on October 1, 1962, Meredith became the first African American student to enroll in the University of Mississippi. After graduating from Ole Miss in 1963 he attended law school at Columbia University in New York. But still angered by the continuing racism and terrorism in Mississippi, Meredith decided to embark on the solo March Against Fear. On June 5, 1966, Meredith began the March Against Fear in Memphis, Tennessee. The first day proved uneventful. However, on the second day the march made headlines. Near Hernando, Mississippi, 30 miles from his starting point, Meredith and a small group of photographers, reporters, and followers heard James Aubrey Norvell (1926–) shout out “I only want Meredith!” before striking Meredith three times with buckshot from a 16-gauge shotgun (Branch 2006, 474–475). The Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph taken by Jack Thornell of Meredith screaming in pain in the middle of U.S. Route 51 forever changed the tone of his one-man march and became another transformational moment in the Civil Rights Movement. Floyd McKissick (1922–1991), leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, vowed to continue the March Against Fear. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) received permission from Meredith while he lay in his hospital room to continue the march in his name. On June 7, 21 marchers resumed the walk from the spot where Meredith was shot. At the head of the group, King locked arms with McKissick and Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998), the newly elected leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Other participants of the march included SNCC member Cleveland Sellers and Reverend James Lawson (1928–), the follower of Ghandi who trained the students in Nashville in the method of nonviolent direct action. A line of Mississippi state troopers met the marchers with orders to get off the pavement. When King responded with a request for protection, the troopers began to forcefully shove him and other marchers. At one point King had to restrain a visibly angry Carmichael. The acts of brutality by the troopers and the shooting of Meredith resulted in strengthening the resolve of some Civil Rights leaders, who advocated for stronger militancy in the movement. Meredith may have also contributed to the growing call for militancy within the movement. On June 7, 1966, he told the New York Times that he would never walk through Mississippi unarmed again and that he was sorry he didn’t have something to take care of that man. At first, the violence against Meredith created a coalition among Civil Rights organizations, but following the scuffle between King, Carmichael, and the

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troopers, the activists realized that they needed to establish a joint purpose if they were to continue the march. Agreeing on the conditions and terms for jointly continuing the march proved difficult. According to historian Taylor Branch in his book At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68, at a rally of a thousand people in Lawson’s Centenary Methodist Church back in Memphis Roy Wilkins (1901–1981) of the NAACP and Whitney Young (1921–1971) of the Urban League proposed to unite behind Johnson’s Civil Rights bill of 1966, but McKissick swept away the crowd by scoffing at new laws. . . . Carmichael said he refused to beg for undelivered rights and protections, to great applause, and Charles Evers brought down the house with a pledge to avenge Meredith with an armed black host. (Branch 2006, 477) Wilkins and Young displayed an air of superiority and condescension by questioning the presence of SNCC members Cleveland Sellers and Stanley Wise at a meeting in the Lorraine Motel, following the rally at Lawson’s church. Wilkins insisted that he and Young only spoke with generals (Carmichael) and not rank-and-file members. Sellers and Wise remained after some debate. Wilkins laid out the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) plan along with the resources for its implementation if everyone agreed to avoid criticizing the Lyndon Johnson administration. Carmichael and SNCC countered with a plan that preferred local involvement and home activists to northerners and visitors. They also argued for a permanent community-based movement rather than a media driven spectacle that, they believed, had some of the characteristics of Meredith’s original plan for the march. Floyd McKissick expressed support for SNCC’s ideas, but Wilkins and Young did not. Wilkins objected to limiting the march to local Blacks, the level of militancy, and criticisms of the Johnson administration. Wilkins and Young also objected to labeling the proposed agreement a “manifesto.” They were also concerned that King’s signature on the manifesto undermined their argument, and therefore both refused to sign it. Wilkins also rejected to the presence of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an organization that practiced armed self-defense and used violence when necessary. In November 1964, Earnest “Chilly Willy” Thomas and Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick formed the Deacons in Jonesboro, Louisiana, to protect Civil Rights workers, their families, and their communities against the KKK. Most of the Deacons were war veterans with combat experience from the Korean War and World War II. The March Against Fear signified a shift in character and power in the southern Civil Rights Movement and was an event in which the Deacons participated. Many Civil Rights leaders did not want the Deacons involved in the march because of their image and use of firearms. Stokely Carmichael supported the idea



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of the Deacons’ involvement, and according to Cleveland Sellers, King agreed. There is some debate by historians as to whether King agreed or merely kept silent as Carmichael impolitely argued his point against Wilkins and Young. In spite of the controversy over King’s participation in the conversation, the Deacons played a major role in the March Against Fear. It was Charles Sims and his Deacons who drove King to the funeral of Armstead Phipps, an elderly marcher who died of a heart attack during the march. The Deacons also questioned whites who were suspected of potentially causing problems during the march. The armed men provided protection, patrolled campsites at night, and escorted march participants to the airport. Following the decision by Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young to withdraw their participation from the march, King along with veterans of the movement such as Fannie Lou Hammer (1917–1977), Hosea Williams (1926–2000), Charles Morgan (1930–2009), and the Deacons’ founder, Ernest Thomas, continued to work on a compromise agenda to present to Meredith. King visited Meredith at Bowld Hospital in Memphis on the morning after the shooting. Meredith was weak but strong enough to let King know that he wished to remain at the top of the chain of command. During their meeting, Meredith was asked to leave the hospital immediately because of threats from the KKK. King objected to such treatment, but Meredith obliged. As Meredith incoherently greeted television screws set up outside the hospital, he fainted. Doctors revived him on the scene, and friends took him back to New York. That same afternoon, Civil Rights activists resumed the March Against Fear. For almost three weeks, between several hundred and several thousand people marched what was left of the 220 miles to the state capitol in Jackson. However, problems occurred throughout the march for several reasons. For instance, unlike some of previous marches organized by Civil Rights organizations, the March Against Fear did not have proper preparations, government protection, or even a strong enough reason for people to walk the long distance. Now called the Meredith March by some, it became far more than could have been imagined. The behavior of some whites in Mississippi caused additional problems. Some white people ignored or did not understand the reasons for Meredith’s march, as their actions during the march revealed. Local whites harassed the marchers constantly. They drove cars dangerously close to the marchers, yelled racial slurs at them, exposed weapons, and chased voter registration workers down the highway and attacked them. Some whites in Natchez, Mississippi, would even go as far as committing murder in order to possibly bring an end to the march, further proving why Meredith began the march in the first place. The perpetrators planned to assassinate King by murdering a local innocent Black man who did not have a connection to Meredith, King, or the march whatsoever other than the color of his skin.

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On June 10 members of a KKK offshoot the Cottonmouth Moccasin Gang— Claude Fuller, Ernest Avants, and James Lloyd Jones—hatched a murderous plot to take the lives of two Black men. One of the Black men, Ben Chester White, worked at the Cooper Hill Plantation. It is the same plantation that his grandparents worked as slaves and where he was born and worked his entire life. While on his way to work, the three KKK members coaxed White into their car by offering to pay him $2 and a soda for helping them find a lost dog. They brutally killed White and hoped that his murder would generate enough publicity to draw King to Natchez, where he could be assassinated. But King never visited Natchez and never discussed White’s murder publicly. The murders of White and King would have accomplished the goal of the KKK members to murder two Black men. White’s body was found in the Pretty Creek full of bullet holes. Eventually the police connected James Lloyd Jones to the murder through his shot-up and burned car, which was their attempt to destroy the evidence. The three murderers were tried separately. Jones’s trial was held first. The jury deadlocked even though he confessed to his role in the murder and expressed remorse. He also claimed health problems and was therefore never retried. Avants was found not guilty based on his defense that Fuller had already killed White, so Avants’s additional shots had no effect. Fuller avoided trial altogether, based on his claim of health problems. Decades later in 2003, Avants was charged with the murder of White because the murder was committed on federal land. At age 72, Avants was finally convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in jail in June 2004. On June 14 Meredith marchers entered the town of Grenada, where locals who joined the march greeted them. Demonstrators used public restrooms, and Floyd McKissick met with city officials about appointing a Black voter registration official. Although June 14 is national Flag Day, the Confederate flag was also flown in Mississippi. The sight of seeing so many Confederate flags and the statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis prompted SCLC’s Robert Green to make public statements against the Confederacy and the marchers’ anger about its symbolism. A group of demonstrators surrounded the statue and placed an American flag on top of it without any response from local whites, who looked on. This momentary suspension of segregation did not last long. Reports in Time magazine indicated that integration of public bathrooms ceased, and some African Americans who attended the demonstrations lost their jobs. The quiet little march that started with one man’s protest against continuing racism was now becoming a pivotal event in the Civil Rights Movement. Over the next two days the original March Against Fear, now labeled the Meredith March, would be transformed by two words that the media transmitted around the nation. In Grenada, John Doar, assistant attorney general for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Justice, filed a lawsuit against officials for illegally ejecting Black voters at the polls in Greenwood on June 7. The marchers were headed to



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Greenwood next. Members of SNCC were quite familiar with Greenwood. SNCC had a history in Greenwood going back to 1961, when the director of the Mississippi Project, Robert Moses, worked with the Black community to register Black voters. Stokely Carmichael was also a familiar figure in Greenwood. SNCC first assigned Carmichael to Greenwood in 1962. In 1964 Carmichael served as the regional director for the Freedom Summer project, a volunteer campaign to register as many African American voters as possible in Mississippi. The project also set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers in small towns throughout Mississippi to aid the local Black population. According to June Johnson, “Stokely had a charm about himself with older people. . . . He had to make young people know that in order to be free you had to pay a price . . . and there was nothing wrong with going to jail and he went to jail many times in Greenwood. Many times” (Carmichael 2003, 284). When Stokely Carmichael arrived in Greenwood it was a homecoming for those who knew and worked with him. But his arrival in Greenwood was also surrounded by tension. First, it was the hometown of Byron De La Beckwith, the white supremacist who murdered Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers a year earlier. Second, one of the state troopers who had directed the beatings of June Johnson, Annell Ponder, and Fannie Lou Hammer in Winona, Mississippi, in 1963 had been recognized by Johnson, a close friend of Stokely Carmichael. Finally, the marchers had received advanced approval from the board of the Negro School to set up their tents at the Stone Street Negro Elementary School for the night. But that afternoon the police chief told Carmichael the marchers needed permission from the all-white school board, which was closed. Carmichael protested and was immediately arrested. Local officials reversed the decision to prevent the marchers from setting up camp at the elementary school, and Carmichael was released on bail. He walked out of Greenwood’s jail and into history. As Carmichael walked to the microphone to address the crowd, SNCC member Willie Ricks told him that they were ready and to drop it now. Carmichael recalled his many times of going to jail in front of the crowd of 600 and that “he wasn’t going no more,” and then he raised the call for Black Power that was heard around the world. The media documented Carmichael and Ricks leading the crowd in a call and response of “What do you want?” and “Black Power!” After Carmichael’s speech that night, the march and the movement were forever changed. King had been the face of the Civil Rights Movement for over 10 years and was approaching 40. Carmichael, at age 25, was part of a new generation of Civil Rights leaders. For many people, the concept Black Power was an ambiguous theme and was hard to define, so it garnered a number of interpretations. Some interpretations included the possibility of Black hostility against whites, Black nationalism, and a drastic change in the movement. The most often suggested

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change in the movement was the ideological differences that developed between the SCLC and SNCC, or King and Carmichael, during the Meredith March. Regarding the struggles between he and King, Carmichael stated that they were “utter nonsense. In fact, it was exactly the reverse. The fondest memories I have of Dr. King come from that march” (Carmichael 2003, 508). Black Power as a theme has proven to be popular among the press and the public. After its conversion to the Black Power march in Greenwood, the marchers continued to experience white violence as they headed toward Jackson. On the night of June 21 a white mob attacked King, Reverend Ralph Abernathy (1926–1990), and 20 volunteers with rocks, clubs, and bottles as they tried to commemorate three young civil workers murdered by the KKK there two years earlier. Police merely observed the brutal attack until some Black men began to fight back. The ideological differences were highlighted during a mass meeting. The Deacons for Defense advocated for vigilante committees to deal with the lawlessness of whites, King refused to resort to any kind of violence, and Carmichael preferred Black Power to the idea of settling for Black equality. In order to maintain stability during the march, the leaders agreed to avoid presenting divisions. Even still, the marchers were attacked at night when they were setting up camp in Canton. The troopers gassed and beat the crowd of 150 marchers, which included King, Carmichael, women, and children. But the Deacons were left unharmed. Meredith arrived in Canton on June 24, where he was supposed to be at a rally but for some unexplained reason chose not to attend. On June 25 he returned to the march in the city of Tougaloo, where he would walk the final eight miles to Jackson with King and the rest of the marchers. On June 25, the last night of the march, King and Carmichael attended a concert at the Tougaloo College football field featuring music by James Brown and Sammy Davis Jr. and words from Marlon Brando. The March Against Fear ended at the state capitol, with 15,000 people in attendance. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and James Meredith spoke at the event. Perhaps Carmichael was the most remembered for introducing the world to a phrase or ideology that had already been familiar to the Black community for at least a decade or more. Black leaders such as Paul Robeson (1898– 1976) and Richard Wright (1908–1960) had used the term, while singers Nina Simone (1933–2003) and Abbey Lincoln (1930–2010) lived it. After June 16, “Black Power” became a term used by SNCC. The idea became a movement of its own, separate from the Civil Rights Movement, with Stokely Carmichael as its leader. Sherwin “Keith” Rice See also: Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); King, Martin Luther, Jr.; McKissick, Floyd B., Sr.; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee



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Further Reading Branch, Taylor. 2006. At Caanan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68. New York: Simon and Schuster. Carmichael, Stokely. 2003. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael. New York: Scribner. Joseph, Peniel E. 2006. Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative of Black Power in America. New York: Henry Holt. Reed, Roy. 1966. “Meredith Regrets He Was Not Armed.” New York Times, June 8. Roberts, Gene. 1966. “Troopers Shove Group Resuming Meredith March.” New York Times, June 8. Sellers, Cleveland. 1973. The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC. New York: William Morrow.

McKissick, Floyd B., Sr. (1922–1991) Today, Floyd Bixler McKissick Sr. is a forgotten figure. However, during Black Power’s tumultuous formative moment, in the mid to late 1960s, only Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) exceeded the then executive director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in importance and in developing the nascent political strategy. McKissick was an outstanding lawyer and organizer and a courageous and creative political strategist. In hindsight, McKissick may have had as significant an impact in shaping the direction of Black Power as Carmichael, Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), James Forman, Maulana Karenga, Amiri Baraka, and Huey P. Newton. McKissick was born in Asheville, North Carolina, on March 9, 1922. After his successful suit McKissick v. Carmichael in 1950, he became the first African American to attend the University of North Carolina Law School (UNCLS). McKissick only attended UNCLS for a summer, since he had graduated from the North Carolina Central’s law school while awaiting a decision on his legal case. Throughout the 1950s, he was active in Durham and local North Carolina Civil Rights activities. By 1960, he led the state’s sit-in movement. As attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), McKis­ sick’s firm litigated “more than 5,000 demonstration cases.” In 1963 he was elected chairperson of CORE and became its executive director in March of 1966, three months before he joined Carmichael in advocating Black Power during the March Against Fear. Additionally, in 1966 McKissick came out against the Vietnam War, making him one of the first Civil Rights leaders to publicly do so. In 1969 he revived the practice of consciously building Black-controlled towns. And in 1972, he broke ranks and endorsed President Richard Milhous Nixon for reelection,

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Floyd B. McKissick Sr. served as the National Director of CORE from 1966 to 1968. Under his leadership, the Civil Rights organization navigated the Black Power Movement and embraced many of its tenets. (AP Photo)

becoming the first major Black nationalist and Black Power advocate to join the Republican Party. As a Republican operative, McKissick worked closely with the National Black Committee for the Re-Election of the President, played a leading role in the Fund for Representative Government, and formed the Committee for a Two-Party System. McKissick contended that he initiated the latter group to “free black people from the captivity of the Democrats” and to position them “to pressure the Republicans for concessions” (Johnson 1972). Nevertheless, even as Black Power undergoes a scholarly renaissance, McKissick remains an apparition, only partially seen and thus denied his place among his contemporary Civil Rights and Black Power activists. This biographical portrait examines McKissick’s political ideology and contri­ butions to the development of Black Power and African American political discourse from 1955 to 1978. We use his attempt to build Soul City, North Carolina, and its associated political ramifications and transformations as a prism through which to excavate neglected themes in Civil Rights and Black Power studies. Three interrelated goals animate this biographical sketch. First, we situate conservative Black nationalism, the particular current of Black Power practiced by McKissick and CORE within the larger river of Black Power. Second, we locate Soul City within the historic tradition of Black town building. Third, we interrogate the Soul City Project as the site for the “strange alliance” between conservative anti-Black Republican politicians and conservative Black nationalists. Investigation of McKissick, the attempt to build



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Soul City, and his transformation into a Republican operative are important because they serve to remind us that the incorporation of Nixon’s strategy of judicious repression and corporate liberalism was an important aspect of the Black liberation movement. Finally, an investigation of McKissick, the struggle to build Soul City, and the construction of a conservative Black nationalist–Republican Party alliance provides a vantage point from which to investigate the development of contemporary Black conservatives.

Biography and Ideology McKissick was truly a Black child of the apartheid South, a product of a world of sharp racial disparities and violent racial repression, but just as important, he was also the product of a world in which Blacks turned “segregation into congregation,” in Earl Lewis’s potent phrase (Lewis 1991). The Asheville of McKissick’s youth was a small tourist town in which African Americans composed approximately 25 percent of the town’s population. There, McKissick experienced racism at an early age. He was greatly affected by two incidents, the latter of which spurred him to become a lawyer. At the age of four, he attempted to join a group of white boys his age who were being shown how to operate the vehicle controls of a streetcar. Upon seeing young McKissick, the conductor loudly demanded that he return to his seat. Confused and probably more than a little frightened, McKissick took a seat in the front of the car. When the conductor realized where McKissick had sat, he began to berate him and instructed McKissick’s aunt “to teach that boy some manners,” admonishing her that “this little boy was headed for trouble” (Woodward 1981). Perhaps the conductor had some special insight that gave him the power to detect the stirrings of resistance, even in a small child, for his admonition proved quite prescient. The second and more determinative critical incident in McKissick’s life occurred in the midst of the Great Depression, in 1936, when he was 14 years old. Assigned to patrol the boundaries of an outdoor skating tournament sponsored by his Boy Scout troop, McKissick and another guard were helping two skaters get back within their rope boundaries when two white police officers accosted him. After attempting to explain why he was on the other side of the area demarcated for them, the cop ordered him to remove his skates and then struck him twice with a “thick glove” that “had two reflector lights attached . . . [,] drawing blood” from his lip. Enraged, the teenaged McKissick hit the enforcer of the racial order on the shoulder with one of his skates (Woodward 1981, 14). Rushed to jail, McKissick was released without being incarcerated due to the timely intervention of his father and community leaders. McKissick was ordered to appear in court two weeks later. Unable to find an attorney to represent him, he and his father were accompanied to court by leaders of the local Black community.

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A sympathetic judge dismissed the case and instructed his father to “give him a good thrashing out” (Woodward 1981, 15). Undoubtedly, McKissick’s favorable decision was a consequence of the strong support his family received from local leadership. A day after McKissick’s appearance before the judge, Mrs. Flora Fortune, a librarian, gave him a copy of the Crisis, the NAACP’s monthly organ. That week McKissick joined the NAACP. Although under the circumstances he got off light, he was deeply troubled by his family’s inability to find legal counsel. Upon reflection, McKissick decided to become an attorney. While the precise proximity between his court appearance, membership in the NAACP, and selection of his career path is unclear, it is interesting to note that these formative incidents occurred a year after Charles Hamilton Houston inaugurated the NAACP’s legal strategy. As the latter incident demonstrates, McKissick grew up in a supportive and highly organized, if besieged, community. He was raised in a nurturing Black civil society (a social network of family, friends, and institutions) fostered by his parents, the local African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, a Black YMCA, a Boy Scout troop, and an American Legion chapter formed by Black World War I veterans that sponsored monthlong citizenship training classes at Shaw University for local youths. Young McKissick’s father, like many Black men of that era, occupied a contradictory class location. In addition to his job as a bellhop at the Langren Hotel, he also worked as an agent for North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (NCMLIC), the largest Black-owned insurance company in the United States. His father’s teachings about business ownership and exposure to the NCMLIC agents frequenting his home left an indelible impression on the young McKissick. He was determined to become an entrepreneur rather than a laborer, a dream he would realize in 1968 with the incorporation of Floyd McKissick Enterprises. His dreams of entrepreneurship were intimately connected to his vision of social activism and African American liberation.

Black Power and McKissick’s Transition from Progressive Politics to Black Conservatism, 1966–1972 McKissick exploded into public consciousness during the March Against Fear in June 1966. After an assassination attempt against James Meredith, the march’s conceiver, failed, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Martin Luther King Jr., and McKissick continued the march through Mississippi. Black Power was not born during this march, but it was in the sweltering Mississippi heat, in that climate of omnipresent brutality, that Black Power first penetrated the social consciousness of the nation and the world. In Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16, 1966, after being released on bail, a 25-year-old Carmichael declared that “This is the 27th time I



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have been arrested—I ain’t going to jail no more. I ain’t no more. Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down, to get rid of the dirt. We want Black Power!” (“Mississippi” 1966). From its controversial beginnings, Carmichael and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee would dominate all discussions of Black Power. Yet from its first critical vocalization another voice was also audible, articulating what would gradually become a very different vision of Black Power. McKissick’s and CORE’s voices were less perceptible, yet some claim that they were as important as the voices of Carmichael and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). One such observer, Benjamin V. Clarke, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference staffer, claimed that CORE was “Yelling ‘black power’ louder than Snick. You take Floyd McKissick out of CORE right now and Snick would be all that’s left” (“Explanation by Dr. King” 1966). At first, McKissick’s and CORE’s rhetoric mirrored that of Carmichael and SNCC. That is, at its most general level both SNCC’s and CORE’s initial articulations of the Black Power concept adhered to liberal pluralism. Carmichael and political scientist Charles Hamilton, his coauthor of Black Power, assert that “The concept of Black Power rests on the fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks.” Continuing their vision of ethnic pluralist politics, Carmichael and Hamilton argued that “where black people have a majority, they will attempt to use power to exercise control. This is what they seek: control. When Black people lack a majority, Black power means proper representation and sharing of control” (Carmichael and Hamilton 1992). Accordingly, at the march’s concluding rally in Jackson, McKissick declared that “1966 shall be remembered as the year we left our imposed status of Negroes and became Black men . . . 1966 is the year of the concept of Black Power. The year when Black men realized their full worth in society—their dignity and their beauty—and their power—the greatest power on earth—the power of right.” However, McKissick quickly lowered the intensity of his militant assertions by also locating Black Power firmly in the orbit of liberal pluralism. Continuing, he argued that “Black Power . . . is a Movement dedicated to the exercise of American democracy in its highest tradition” (Meier and Rudwick 1975, 412). Moreover, at CORE’s 23rd annual convention McKissick supported a resolution that explicitly stated the ethnic pluralist vision undergirding the liberal version of Black Power. The resolution declared that “Black Power is effective control and self-determination by men of color in their own areas. Power is total control of the economic, political, educational, and social life of our community from the top to the bottom. The exercise of power at the local level is simply what all other ethnic groups in American society have done to acquire their share of total American life” (qtd. in Allen 1992, 65; Meier and Rudwick 1975, 401–408, 414–416). As the passage reveals, McKissick’s and CORE’s militant rhetoric cloaked their liberal, reformist, ethnic-pluralist discourse (and masculinized viewpoint), at least for a time.

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By the summer of 1967, Carmichael and McKissick escalated their rhetoric. However, despite their increasing militancy the differences between them and their organizations were rapidly becoming apparent. In August at the Organization of Latin American Solidarity meeting in Cuba, Carmichael moved beyond liberalism to articulate a revolutionary nationalist critique of capitalism and racial oppression. Declaring that “Our people are a colony inside the United States, and you are colonies outside the United States,” Carmichael stated that “We are moving to control our African-American communities as you are moving to wrest control of your countries, of the Latin continent, from the hands of foreign imperialist powers. There is only one course open to us: we must change North America so that the economy and the politics of the country will be in the hands of the people, and our particular concern is our people, African Americans. But it is clear that a community based on the community ownership of all resources could not exist within the present capitalist framework.” Moving from a critique of racism and exploitation, which he termed the “horns of the bull,” to his vision of what King called the “beloved community,” Carmichael proclaimed that “The society we seek to build among Black people is not an oppressive capitalist society—for capitalism by its very nature cannot create structures free from exploitation. We are fighting for the redistribution of wealth and for the end of private property inside the United States” (Carmichael and Thewell 2003, 589–90; Allen 1992, 248). A month earlier McKissick, speaking at the July 1967 Black Power Conference in Newark, New Jersey, articulated an apparently parallel but actually divergent analysis. In a talk titled “Genocide U.S.A.,” he too addressed the commonalities between African Americans and the world’s darker peoples. He claimed that “White supremacy reigns in such distant and exotic places as Europe and South Africa. But the true bastion of white supremacy, that country which makes it all possible, is the United States” (McKissick 1967a, 3). In addition, McKissick addressed questions of economic exploitation, arguing that “Although slavery as a recognized legal institution has been abolished, economic slavery, economic exploitation, has not. Black People in this country have never been allowed to share in the economic riches of America.” Elaborating, McKissick argued that “The Black and colored masses are regarded as chattel— with a difference. We are mere consumers. And by our consumption of the goods and services of this nation—this economic, political system, we furnish the margin of profit on which the system survives” (McKissick 1967a, 3). Carmichael had a more sophisticated understanding of racial oppression than McKissick. In Cuba, Carmichael emphasized imperialism, albeit “white western imperialism,” as well as colonialism and racism as the forces oppressing African Americans and the Third World, while McKissick focused only on white supremacy. McKissick’s and Carmichael’s understanding of economic exploitation were fundamentally different. Carmichael’s Marxist-influenced interpretation



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was rooted in production relations, in the exploitation of labor; McKissick’s was rooted in distribution—in consumerism. Whereas Carmichael called for a redistribution of wealth along more equalitarian lines, McKissick, despite charges of genocide and bold calls for revolution, longed to be a part of the capitalist system. In 1967 a year after they jointly called for Black Power, Carmichael was embracing a radical perspective, while McKissick’s conservative sediment was beginning to harden. McKissick’s preference for a solution to racial oppression within the framework of capitalism reflected the dominant sentiment in CORE among both the interracialists and the nationalists. In point of fact, McKissick did not condemn capitalism. Indeed, he argued that if interpreted fairly the U.S. Constitution could become an emancipatory document. Further developing his perception of a symbiotic connection between the U.S. Constitution and Black nationalism, in Three-Fifths of a Man McKissick promoted the Mormons’ development of Utah and the Morrill Act as models for Black nationalists. According to McKissick, the Demonstration Cities Act (Title VII of the United States Urban Growth and New Communities Act of 1968), which sought to “encourage new town development,” could be used to stimulate the building of Black towns in specific southern states. Such a process, he argued, could in “one generation” produce “two or three states that are Black led, Black controlled, and predominately Black populated” (McKissick 1969a, 155–157, 164). This proposal demonstrates that McKissick had not become a fullblown territorial nationalist but instead remained wedded to the U.S. concept of federalism as an appropriate political architecture. McKissick was seeking to expand the concept of community control to municipalities and eventually states but within the spatial boundaries of the U.S. empire and the intellectual boundaries of American political discourse and practice. At the same time that he was articulating these controversial if nonthreatening proposals, he was also negotiating with the Ford Foundation to fund CORE’s signature projects. CORE was seriously in debt, and McKissick was devoting most of his energies to resolving that crisis. However, the alliance with the Ford Foundation was not simply a pragmatic move; it also expressed a more permanent philosophic position. And equally important according August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, “the Ford Foundation sought to develop the potentialities inherent in CORE’s moderate, reformist version of Black Power” (Meier and Rudwick 1975, 420). The foundation provided funding for the Baltimore Target City and Cleveland voter registration, job training, and leadership development projects. Ultimately, the foundation contributed several hundred thousand dollars to CORE projects. After two and a half years, McKissick resigned from CORE’s directorship in September 1968 to initiate a business development firm. Upon launching Floyd B. McKissick Enterprises, Inc., he clarified the ambiguities in his position. Writing in his corporation’s brochure, McKissick stated that “I feel that my best service to the

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movement and to my people can be rendered by my full-time commitment to Black Economic Independence. . . . It is my belief that the development of Black Economic Power offers White America its last chance to save the Republic. . . . McKissick Enterprises believes that the development of Black capitalism is so long overdue and of such importance that it takes precedence over job training programs and general education” (McKissick 1969b, 28).

Soul City and the Historical Tradition of Black Town Building Four months later in January 1969, McKissick announced his intention to build Soul City in Warren County, North Carolina. Soul City was founded by the Soul City Company, which was a limited partnership composed of three entities, McKissick Enterprises; the Muslim Mosque, Inc., a division of Madison-Madison International, Planners, and Architects; and the National Housing Partnership, an early example of neoliberalism, as it was “a unique private organization created by Congress under the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 to stimulate the production by private enterprise of low and moderate-income housing.” Soul City, located on 3,000 acres of land with plans to expand to 5,000 acres, was planned by McKissick Enterprises projected as a “freestanding” town. It was purposely located in a rural area about an hour’s drive from Durham and Raleigh, the nearest metropolitan communities, to prevent it from being transformed into a “pseudo town.” Soul City shared several traits with historic Black towns but differed in other ways. For instance, despite McKissick’s meticulous plans, like other historic Black towns, Soul City never developed a viable economic base. However, in other critical aspects Soul City differs profoundly from previous Black towns. First, although conceived by McKissick, Soul City was a product of the U.S. government and corporate America. Several federal agencies combined to contribute over $26 million directly or indirectly to the Soul City Company, the Warren Regional Planning Corporation, the Soul City Foundation, the Soul City Utilities Company, or the Soul City Sanitary District. Second, the application, which the Soul City Company submitted to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), reimages the community’s goals away from an all-Black town. According to organizational records, its benefit to the region and the nation was the opportunity to develop an economically sound community free of racism. Nevertheless, it is best to view this as a necessary statement in order to receive federal funding. How did a Black nationalist convince the U.S. government to provide him with $26 million of guaranteed loan credits? The answer is found in a complex set of relationships that McKissick developed between major corporations, foundations, CORE, and Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The nexus for the confluence of these groups was the strategy of Black capitalism. Three-Fifths of a Man



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is extremely critical of capitalism. There, McKissick argued that an individual socialized in the United States “invariably has a capitalistic—and racist— orientation” (McKissick 1969b, 89). Nevertheless, the goal of McKissick Enter­ prises was “to provide a means for Black people to become part of the American capitalistic system and thereby achieve social and economic parity with the white community” (McKissick 1970, 494–495). Elsewhere, McKissick argued that he was neither for nor against capitalism as a system but recognized it as “a power fact of life” (Van Deburg 1993, 135). This of course was evasive, which rationalized his functioning as a capitalist.

The End of Soul City and the Death of Floyd McKissick Sr. Despite McKissick’s acceptance of Black capitalism and his work to reelect Nixon, his rapprochement with the Republican Party was incomplete. The election of Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate from North Carolina sealed Soul City’s fate. The archconservative replied to McKissick’s congratulatory election night message in 1972 with a declaration to initiate a “careful independent examination” of Soul City’s “expenditures.” The combination of a negative series of articles in the Raleigh News and Observer and Helms’s aggressive actions led HUD to freeze Soul City’s funding in 1975 while the Government Accounting Office conducted an audit. Ultimately, McKissick and Soul City were exonerated of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, when Ford succeeded Nixon after his Watergate Scandal–forced resignation, McKissick faced a party that was rapidly moving further to the right of the political spectrum and away from its Rockefeller moderate Civil Rights wing. In that climate, McKissick and Soul City were out of favor. Soul City survived Helm’s crusade into the Jimmy Carter administration. Ironically, it was under a Democratic administration and an African American secretary of HUD, Patricia Roberts Harris, that the Soul City project was terminated. HUD cited “economic conditions” and “site location” as the reasons for suspending support for the project (“Troubled Soul City Loses Support of U.S.” 1979; Fergus 2009, 209). McKissick never left Soul City. He became pastor of the First Baptist Church of Soul City, and a year before he died, North Carolina’s Republican governor James G. Martin appointed him as state district court judge in the Ninth Judicial District. McKissick left an ambivalent legacy. He maintained some liberal if not progressive or radical tendencies. He continued to have faith in state-based remedies as he advocated for the Office of Minority Business Enterprise. But in the end, this ardent 1960s Black nationalist and arguably the preeminent proponent of Black capitalism during the Black Power era made too many compromises. He abandoned the principles of the Gary Black Political Convention and shunned the progressive politics of its progeny, the National Black Political Assembly, in favor

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of collaborationist vehicles, the National Black Committee for the Re-Election of the President, the Fund for Representative Government, and the Committee for a Two-Party System. The case for his conservative transformation is perhaps most evident in the labor policies he adopted within his proposed model city. Desperate to attract investors, in the last year of Soul City’s existence McKissick, a former labor lawyer, promoted North Carolina’s antilabor right-to-work laws in Soul City’s promotional materials. He even took A. Phillip Randolph’s name off the industrial park in order to appeal to capitalist investors. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Augustus Wood See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Brown, Hubert “H. Rap”; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Congress of Racial Equality; National Black Political Assembly; Newton, Huey P. Further Reading Allen, Robert L. 1992. Black Awakening in Capitalist America. 1969; reprint, Trenton, NJ: Africa World. Carmichael, Stokely, and Ekwueme Michael Thewell. 2003. Ready for the Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture]. New York: Scribner. “Explanation by Dr. King.” 1966. New York Times, July 2. Fergus, Devin. 2009. Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965–1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Johnson, Rudy. 1972. “McKissick Forms New Group To Help the Republican Party.” New York Times, October 15. Lewis, Earl. 1991. In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in TwentiethCentury Norfolk, Virginia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. McKissick, Floyd. 1967a. “Genocide U.S.A.: A Blueprint for Black Survival.” New York: CORE. McKissick, Floyd. 1967b. “The Need for Revolution.” Monthly Review 19 (4) (September 1967): 12–13. McKissick, Floyd. 1968. “Programs for Black Power.” In The Black Power Revolt, edited by Floyd B. Barbour, 33–36. Boston: Porter Sargent Publisher II. McKissick, Floyd. 1969a. “A Black Manifesto—CORE.” New York: Congress of Racial Equality. McKissick, Floyd. 1969b. Three-Fifths of a Man. London: Macmillan. McKissick, Floyd. 1970. “Black Business Development with Social Commitment to Black Communities.” In Black Nationalism in America, edited by John H. Bracey Jr., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, 492–503. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. 1975. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. “Mississippi.” 1966. Time, June 24. “A Negro Leader Warns of Violence, and Gives Reasons: An Interview with Floyd B. McKissick.” 1966. U.S. News & World Report, May 23, 40–42.



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Strain, Christopher. 2004. “Soul City, North Carolina: Black Power, Utopia, and the African American Dream.” Journal of African American History 89(1) (Winter): 57–74. “Troubled Soul City Loses Support of U.S., Which Backed $10 Million of Financing.” 1979. Wall Street Journal, June 29. Ture, Kwame [Stokely Carmichael], and Charles Hamilton. 1992. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. 1968; reprint, New York: Vintage Books. “U.N.C. Admits Three Negroes to Law School; Will Attend Summer Session.” 1951. Unnamed newspaper article dated June 7, 1951, found in Floyd McKissick Papers, Southern History Collection, University of North Carolina. “UNC Must Admit 4 Non-White Law School Applicants.” 1951. Norfolk Journal and Guide, June 9, 6. Van Deburg, William. 1993. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weems, Robert E., Jr., and Lewis A. Randolph. 2001. “The Ideological Origins of Richard M. Nixon’s ‘Black Capitalism’ Initiative.” Review of Black Political Economy 29(1) (Summer): 49–61. Woodward, Harold. 1981. “Floyd McKissick: Portrait of a Leader.” MA thesis, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. Wright, Erik Olin. 1993. “Class Analysis, History and Emancipation.” New Left Review, Vol. a: 15–35. Yette, Samuel F. 1982. The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival In America. New York: Putnam.

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was an effort to bring true democracy to the antidemocratic, segregationist state of Mississippi. The MFDP was founded in the election year of 1964 to challenge the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party, which had rejected any Black participation in Mississippi. The MFDP’s fight against white supremacy in Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention in 1964 changed the face of politics in the United States, and its impact has been felt all the way through the 2016 presidential campaign. The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi was faced with terrorism from the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), street violence from ordinary white citizens, and governmental repression from local police departments that brutally enforced racist laws and sometimes joined in the terrorism of the KKK. In its efforts to increase the Black voting population, the movement also faced resistant county voter registrars, mass spying, and intimidation of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. The Mississippi Democratic Party (MDP) continued to exclude Black Mississippians and support efforts to intimidate Black people seeking to

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participate in the politics in what most considered the most violent of the oppressive white supremacist states of the segregationist South. In spite of the atmosphere, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and other Civil Rights organizations continued to register Black voters and organize the Black people of the state in a push for Black political power. The youthful radical activists of SNCC assisted in the founding, organizing, and development of the MFDP, which was a part of Freedom Summer.

MFDP State Convention, 1964 On August 6, 1964, the MFDP held a statewide convention in Mississippi, with about 2,500 people in attendance. Ella Baker was the keynote speaker. She was an MFDP representative from Washington, D.C., as well as a radical Civil Rights organizer. She spoke about how the party needed to strategize and plan for the upcoming Democratic National Convention. A broad cross section of Black Mississippian farmers, sharecroppers, business owners, educators, clergy, service workers, and others made up the 68-member delegation to the national convention. Working people made up the vast majority of delegates, reflecting the demographics of Black Mississippians. While some of the delegates were poor and uneducated, others had completed college. Also in the delegation were 4 white Mississippians, 10 members of SNCC, and many MFDP members who were also members of the NAACP. The convention platform committed the delegates to supporting the presidential candidate chosen at the national convention, something the MDP had refused to do in the prior presidential election. One of the main goals of the convention was to have the integrated MFDP seated as the legitimate representative of the people of Mississippi at the national convention in place of the segregationist whites-only MDP. They elected E. W. Steptoe, Reverend Ed King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Winson Hudson, Victoria Gray, Hazel Palmer, Annie Devine, and Aaron Henry as electors from the state to the national convention.

MFDP Democratic National Convention, 1964 The National Democratic Convention was held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in August 1964. MFDP delegates attending the convention challenged the Mississippi Democratic Party’s participation at the convention and asked that the MFDP delegates be seated rather than the segregationist regulars. The MFDP challenged the legitimacy of the MDP to represent all of the citizens of Mississippi. The appearance of the MFDP at the convention resulted in controversy surrounding the convention’s credentials committee. A brief submitted to the National Convention presented legal arguments supported by facts detailing why the MDP



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should not be given credentials to represent Mississippi at the national convention and the MFDP should be seated at the convention. The Democratic National Committee’s decision on credentials would reveal the future and standing of the national Democratic Party: Whether the National Democratic party takes its place with the oppressed Negroes of Mississippi or their white oppressors, with those loyal to the National Democratic party or those who have spewed hatred upon President Kennedy and President Johnson and the principles to which they dedicated their lives. In the final analysis, the issue is one of principle; whether the National Democratic Party, the greatest political instrument for human progress in the history of our nation, shall walk backward with the bigoted power structure of Mississippi or stride ahead with those who would build the State and the Nation in the image of the Democratic Party’s greatest leaders. (Rauh, Holmes, and Jaffe 1964) The MFDP’s attack on the credentials of the MDP was based on the monopoly of power that the MDP had in the state of Mississippi and the history of suppression of Black attempts to participate in the democratic processes. It was also rooted in the history and presence of terrorism and harassment waged against the MFDP, SNCC, CORE, the NAACP, and others as they attempted to organize and register Blacks to vote. Leading the terrorist efforts were the white supremacists of the White Citizens Councils and the KKK, which were backed by the MDP and its allies. The MDP required any potential or actual member to repudiate membership in any party, including the national Democratic Party, and uphold segregation of the races. The second reason was the MDP’s disloyalty to the national party by its declaration that it was an independent party not affiliated with any national party and the MDP’s rejections and active opposition to the 1960 Democratic Party candidate John F. Kennedy. Finally, the MFDP argued that the opening of Mississippi’s intransigently segregationist closed society would only happen with the help of outside influence, as it was incapable of reforming itself. The proceedings were televised by the credentials committee. This gave the nation the opportunity to see and hear the MFDP delegates’ testimony, including that of Fannie Lou Hamer. A sharecropper on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta, Hamer described the brutality she experienced for trying to register to vote and her activism with the Mississippi freedom fighters. Despite their testimony, which moved many to consider seating the MFDP, the MDP threatened to leave the party and the convention. President Johnson feared losing southern support in the upcoming presidential election and intervened in the proceedings. Johnson along with other party leaders offered the MFDP a compromise. Instead of unseating the whites-only MDP, they offered the MFDP two at-large seats,

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allowing them to watch but not participate or vote. The compromise did nothing to address the valid concerns offered in the brief, and the MFDP refused the compromise.

National Black Political Conference, 1972 The MFDP sent a delegation to the first National Black Political Conference in 1972. It was the first national conference specifically designed to advance the political interests of Black people from every corner of the United States. The conference attendees included grassroots organizations, radical political parties, labor organizations, and elected officials from the major political parties. James M. Simmons See also: Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Congress of Racial Equality; Lowndes County Freedom Organization; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Draper, Alan. 2016. “Class and Politics in the Mississippi Movement: An Analysis of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Delegation.” Journal of Southern History 82(2): 269–304. Lee, Chana Kai. 2000. For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, Vol. 112. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. 2002. Westside Gazette, January 11. Online Archive of California. 2017. “The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964: Challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.” Online Archive of California, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt1m3n989f&brand=oac4&doc.view=entire_text. Rauh, Joseph L., Eleanor K. Holmes, and H. Miles Jaffe. 1964. “Brief Submitted by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party for the Consideration of Credentials Subcommittee of the Democratic National Committee, etc.” Civil Rights Movement Veterans, http:// www.crmvet.org/docs/6408_mfdp_brief.pdf.

Primary Document M. Jay Lockard, Account of School Boycott and Shootings at the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Center, August 16, 1965 The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was one of the organizations that inspired the transition from civil rights to Black Power in the African American freedom struggle. The MFDP was formed in 1964 to challenge the legitimacy and the qualification for the segregationist regular Democratic Party

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of Mississippi to represent Democrats in the state at the party’s national convention in Atlantic City that year. Several workers in the state lost faith in the willingness and/or ability of the federal government and northern liberals to intervene on behalf of the southern Civil Rights Movement versus white supremacists in the South after the failure of President Lyndon Johnson and Democratic leaders to seat the MFDP at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. The MFDP persisted throughout the state for years after the 1964 convention. Clay County had a vibrant Freedom Democratic Party, led by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activist John Buffington. Clay County became one of the most significant areas of organizing for SNCC and the MFDP. Like much of the state, white resistance challenged Black voting and human rights, and African Americans were about half the population of the county. This Federal Bureau of Investigation report of an agency interview with MFDP organizer Jay Lockard discusses the challenges of organizing in Clay County, Mississippi, in 1965. Pheba, Mississippi August 16, 1965 In early July a three-room shack in Pheba, Mississippi was repaired and painted and opened as a Freedom Democratic Party Freedom Center. It was staffed by five FDP volunteer workers. The Center was to service the rural, western half of Clay Country which had never been worked before. From the time it was opened the Freedom Center was an irritation to the white residents of Pheba and the surrounding area. There was continual harassment, people prowling at night, a cross burned, tacks put in the driveway. Meeting and talking to people in Pheba and the surrounding communities, the workers soon learned that a major discontent among Negro citizens was the condition of their children’s school. Beasley School is the Negro school in rural, western Clay County. It draws children from eight, widespread communities who are brought to the school by ten school buses. Beasley is only about five years old and has a nice looking building, but facilities within the building are totally inadequate. No class has enough books for all the children, often there are but five or six books for a class which might have as many as 50 or 60 students. The few books there are hand-me-downs from the white school, and in very poor condition. At the end of the school year children lucky enough to have one of these books are made to pay for its damages. Beasley has no

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science laboratories, no home economics, no industrial courses, no foreign language, not enough desks, poor heating so children have to wear coats in cold weather, and no fans or air conditioning in mid-summer when the split session is being held. There has been proven corruption in the administration of the county schools. In Spring of 1964 the County Superintendent of Schools, a man named Littlejohn, was convicted of stealing a sum of money from the schools. He was suspended from his job. The principal of Beasley, E. E. Heard, had been given authority over the hiring and firing of teachers, and the running of Beasley, by Littlejohn and was kept on as principal by Littlejohn’s successor, J. W. McCuiston, even though parents had requested that he be removed. Heard used his authority to fire several good teachers who opposed him on one thing or another. He also refused to let parents form a PTA. Another grievance parents have is the constant fund raising going on in the school. Parents were paying for damages on books every year. Each class, at least once a year and sometimes more often, was asked to raise $30 or $40 in Queen Drives. The class raising most money would be privileged to provide the queen. No accounting was ever given of the money raised. On July 15, after the condition and needs of Beasley had been discussed at FDP precinct meeting in several communities, a list of 20 demands was drawn up and presented to the Superintendent of Schools, J. W. McCuiston, by four Negro citizens of the area. Nothing was done to meet any of these demands. Anger over the conditions of the school and the inaction of the Superintendent led students and parents to begin discussing and planning for a boycott of the school. It began on July 26, 1965. This was the beginning of the second week of the summer session, the ‘split’ session which runs for eight weeks in July and August to allow students to be free in spring and fall to work in the fields. On July 26, at 7am, before the school bell rang, about 200 Beasley St. students walked out of Beasley School, singing, and down the street to Beasley Methodist Church to attend Freedom School. Two FDP workers and several students were leafleting at the school that morning to spread word of the boycott. Many students had heard already and stayed home. About 100 remained in school that day. The Average Daily Attendence of Beasley had been about 550. The total enrollment was 700. About 8am that morning Sheriff Joe Ed Strickland came into the church. It was packed with students; they were singing Freedom Songs. The Sheriff arrested three FDP workers who were sitting in the back of the church. He came back and walked to the front of the church, and the students stopped singing. He began talking, telling the students that they had a good school, that they



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shouldn’t let themselves be led out of school, and that he, their sheriff, was 100%. The students began laughing. Mr. Strickland then attempted to arrest two more workers who were in the front section of the church. Neither cooperated, and he left saying he would be back to arrest them later. He didn’t return until students had left Freedom School to return to the school buses. In Freedom School that Monday there was a non-violent workshop and a discussion of non-violence. Students agreed to be non-violent for the boycott. There was discussion and role playing about what to do should students not be allowed on the buses at noon. Students believed it was their right to ride those buses home, and decided to sit down in front of them if they were not allowed on. At about 11:30am students left the church and marched back to Beasley School. They boarded the buses with no trouble. However, at the road in front of the school, and in front of Beasley Church, seven more FDP workers were arrested. There were a total of ten arrests that day, all staff workers. Charges against five of them, who had only driven in from town to observe, were dropped. The other five were charged with disturbing peace, and were all out on bond by Tuesday evening. With all the workers in jail, the students took over, spreading word of the boycott, and conducting Freedom School. In the local newspaper, the Daily Times Leader, articles about the failure of the boycott began appearing. The Superintendent of Schools called for a meeting of parents for Wendesday at Beasley. Parents and students called a special meeting Tuesday night and decided to boycott the Wednesday meeting, feeling its only purpose was to defeat the boycott and feeling it would be controlled by the Superintendent and Principal. About four people attended the Wednesday meeting, and it was called off. But the next day in the Daily Times Leader it was announced that forty parents voted to continue the split session at Beasley. Students then added a 21st demand to their list of 20—an end to Beasley’s split session. Though there are a number of families who are in favor of the split session because they need their children in the fields, it is clear that a majority of students and parents want it ended. The next move of the Superintendent was to put pressure on the bus drivers. They were told not to pick up children known to be going to Freedom School. Children in school were told they would not be able to ride home if they went to the church to Freedom School. Because of this, attendance at Freedom School declined slightly the first week, and a great deal the second week as pressure increased. But children continued to stay at home. There were between 100 and 200 at Beasley School each day of the first week of the boycott,

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and about 200 to 250 the second week. More and more pressure was put on the bus drivers. They were given lists of students not to be allowed on the buses. Students, however, were always successful in getting on the buses to ride home from Freedom School, though some were not able to get to school in the morning. But on Thursday, August 5, seven city policemen and the sheriff were on hand from 7am on to guard the buses from the boycotters at Freedom School. When they walked, singing, from Freedom School toward Beasley about 11:45am, 55 of them were arrested. The youngest child arrested was 10, the oldest 19. They were taken to city and county jails in West Point, fingerprinted and photographed, and released without charges in the late afternoon. Three FDP workers were also arrested at the county jail for “obstructing justice”: they were attempting to take photographs. On Thursday afternoon at 3pm parents met with the Superintendent of Schools, J. W. McCuiston, substituting for students who had made an appointment to see him but who were in jail. The Superintendent refused to discuss the 21 demands of the boycott with the parents. On Friday afternoon, several different parents met with the Superintendent. He Bargained with them, saying he would fire Principal Heard if they ended the boycott and presented a petition signed by parents to have Heard removed. These parents began telling people to send their children back to school. This was the second attempt by the Superintendent to define in his terms the students’ boycott. Their protest from the start was based on the 20 demands drawn up in community meetings, and later increased to 21 demands. But the newspapers and school authorities first claimed that the boycott was only protesting the split session, and then, later, thought that its only aim was to have the principal removed. They continually refused to discuss seriously the 21 demands. On Friday morning, before the second group of parents met with the Superintendent, there was a demonstration at the courthouse in West Point. It was in protest of the conditions at Beasley School and the arrests of the 55 children on Thursday, 58 demonstrators were arrested, charged with blocking the sidewalk. While searching the demonstrators and ripping off their FDP and SNCC pins, a Mississippi Cattle Investigator, Mr. B. Coward, dies of a heart attack. One of the demonstrators, [NAME OMITTED], son of [NAME OMITTED], was charged with manslaughter. However, he was nowhere near Mr. Cowart when he died, though it was claimed that Cowart was searching him and that [NAME OMITTED] drew his hand back to hit him just before he died. [NAME OMITTED] was beaten, but not seriously, in jail. Charges against him were dropped the next day. Charges were also dropped against all the female dem-



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onstrators and all those under 18 years old. The others paid fines for obstructing the sidewalk. There was much anger over the death of Mr. Cowart in the white community. It must have been the last straw for some of them, to whom the presence of the Pheba Freedom Center was a constant irritation, and the boycott and demonstrations an added goad. At 2am on Sunday morning, August 8, night riders fired two series of shots into the Freedom Center. There were six people in the house at the time, four FDP workers and two lawyers. The two lawyers, Bill Kopit and James Shellow, and two of the workers had just arrived at the Center, having driven in from the Marshall Motel in West Point where they had been meeting with Congressman Reuss. They had just finished bringing some groceries into the Freedom Center, Bill Kopit was outside looking for a toothbrush in the car, the others were talking together, when the shooting began. After it stopped, the six people left the house by the back and went across a field to a neighbor’s home. The neighbor’s house was also shot into that night. Sunday morning, after it became light, 51 bullet holes were counted in the front wall of the Freedom Center. There were about 10 holes in the nieghbor’s house. Sheriff Strickland and FBI men from Jackson and Columbus came to investigate. They examined the bullet holes and took impressions of tire tracks in the gravel road in front of the house. The Sheriff explained how “these things happen,” and commented on his inability to patrol the whole county. The FBI men took statements. Congressman Reuss came out and questioned a group of students and parents about Beasley School. The boycott continued on into its third week. However, Freedom School was suspended; students decided they did not want to continue to go to jail for trying to ride the school buses home after they had spent the morning at Freedom School instead of Beasley School. Attendance at the school rose. The violence of Sunday and necessity of guarding the Freedom Center at night, as well as the beginning of a kind of defeatism among the staff and student leaders, disrupted communication between the leaders of the boycott and the communities. With the lack of information and the advice of that small group of parents who had met with the Superintendent on Friday, to return to school, students drifted back to Beasley. In spite of this, E. E. Heard resigned as principal in the latter part of the week. Those children in school began receiving a few new books, still not enough to go around even for them, and coat racks began appearing in the rooms. On Friday, August 13, there was a second demonstration at the courthouse in town to demand the right to protest and significant changes in the school. About 200 people marched single file from the FDP office in West Point to the

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courthouse, and into a courtroom where the Sheriff and the School Board Attorney, Harvey Buck, and the Superintendent of Schools allowed people to ask questions for about half an hour to an hour. People at this meeting were not treated with respect. They were told they would be arrested if they were not orderly and quiet. Their demands and questions were not met with honesty or seriousness. Friday night three people, one worker and two local students, stayed in the Pheba Freedom Center. About midnight, a carload of local whites drove up, and began prowling about the house. One of them, whom one of the local students had worked for and who said he wanted to talk, was allowed inside. After being in the house about 20 minutes, he pulled a gun, grabbed one of the local students, and put the gun to his neck, threatening to kill the 2 students and the staff worker. The worker grabbed a shotgun, and as he did this the student who was being held at gun point, grabbed the wrist of his assailant. Holding his wrist, the student managed to get the assailant out the door. The carload of whites left, after one of them kicked in the windshield of the project car. After a short time the two students and the FDP worker left the house to go to town to report the incident. On the way their car was seen by the same people who had just been at the Center, and they were chased and overtaken. The car of whites pulled across the road in front of the project car with the FDP worker and the two students who managed to escape by quickly turning and driving down a dirt road. They were then able to get to the home of a local Negro. Later it was discovered that the Freedom Center had been shot into after they left. On Saturday night the regular FDP precinct meeting was held at Mt. Zion Church next door to the Freedom Center. The decision was made at that meeting to end the boycott on Tuesday, August 17. There seemed no hope that continuing the boycott at the present time would force the school authorities to take seriously the demands of students and parents. After the meeting on the next night, Saturday, August 14, some people remained with guns to protect the Freedom Center. Sometime before midnight three shots were fired at the house. Two shots were fired back at the night riders. The next morning, Sunday, August 15, FBI men and Sheriff Strickland examined the new bullet holes in the Freedom Center, digging out two slugs. Later in the morning, the Sheriff returned with two of the three men who had driven by and shot the previous night. He and they explained that they had shot not at the house but at a rabbit that had crossed the road in front of their car as they were passing the Freedom Center. They said they had warrants out for whoever had shot at them. We learned that one of the men who was in the

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car Saturday night was injured, either by buckshot or by gravel that had been kicked up by buckshot, when their car was fired at. Sunday afternoon several of the workers attempted to swear out warrants against people they were able to identify when they were attacked on Friday night. The local Justice of the Peace refused to allow them to swear out warrants. At the present things are very tense. We receive virtually no protection from the sheriff or the FBI. There have been no arrests of those who are known to have threatened our lives. The local Negro people are organized to protect themselves. The Freedom Center remains in operation. It is very possible that people will be hurt or killed if the Sheriff and FBI remain as irresponsible as they have been so far. The school boycott, officially over tomorrow, accomplished the resignation of the Principal, the acquisition of a few new books and coat racks, and vague promises for more equipment. More significantly, it made clear to the community who it was who had power over the schools. There was a definite progression of thought. The first target was the Principal, but people came to realize that he was only controlled, and that it was the white people who controlled the purse strings who must be overcome. The boycott gave a number of students the experience of being leaders and of dealing with the white community in a new way. We judge the boycott to be neither a success nor a failure, but a learning experience. The Movement in the western part of Clay County will continue; the emphasis has already changed from the schools to voter registration and preparing for the ASC elections in December. It will continue whether or not there is local law enforcement. MJL Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Record Group 65, Classification 157 (Civil Unrest) Case Files, 1957–1978, National Archives and Records Administration.

Moore, Carlos (1942–) Carlos Moore, born Charles Moore Wedderburn, is the most prominent AfroCuban critic of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and its aftermath. Moore became active in the Black freedom struggle in the United States during the late 1950s and continued his activism in Cuba, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. He is known internationally for his articles and books criticizing white racism in Cuba and around the world.

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Moore, a child of West Indian immigrants, was born and raised in Central Lugareño, Cuba. His family faced racial discrimination, poverty, and anti-immigrant sentiment in mid-20th-century Cuba. Moore and his siblings grew up speaking Spanish outside the home but English with their parents. The various challenges of his life in Cuba prompted him to consider how life would be living outside of Cuba. Eventually Moore’s parents divorced, and his father moved to the United States and then remarried in the late 1950s. In 1957, Moore joined his father in New York City. The move to the United States was a turning point in his life. The transition from a small rural town in a small country to one of the largest cities in a large country created many new possibilities. The opportunities for study, work, travel, and interactions with people of diverse nationalities were far greater in New York than in Central Lugareño. In the United States, Moore lived in Brooklyn and went to Boys High School. An outstanding student, he took advantage of the big city. He visited bookstores and libraries and explored metropolitan cultural life. Moore developed a strong connection with African Americans. He recognized the injustice of Jim Crow segregation in the South and the discrimination that African Americans faced throughout the country. He was exposed to the Civil Rights Movement and the accompanying rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr., the Black nationalist discourse of Malcolm X, and the other ideological and political debates that occurred in the Black community. During this period, Moore was also exposed to the international activism of African people, such as Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. The speeches of Malcolm X and the vision of African liberation inspired Moore to think critically about the place of Black people in the world. Led by Fidel and Raul Castro, the Cuban Revolution triumphed in January 1959. The purpose of the revolution was to oust the U.S.-supported capitalist regime of President Fulgencio Batista and install a government rooted in socialist principles. The changes in Cuba transformed the political and economic system of the country and its international relationships. The Cuban Revolution also led to another significant turning point in Moore’s life because of the vast attention it received in Black and progressive political circles. Friends and associates began to ask Moore his thoughts about the revolution. Given the discrimination that his family experienced in Cuba, Moore was hesitant to identify with the revolution. However, he overcame his initial reluctance and investigated Cuban history and the contemporary situation. Moore became a strong supporter and defender of the revolution while in New York. Before long, Moore distinguished himself as an outstanding and authentic speaker on the Cuban Revolution. He worked with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the July 26 Movement that overthrew Batista. Moore came to believe that the revolution had improved the lives of the Cuban masses and worked diligently to



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eliminate the racism that Black Cubans had faced when he lived in Cuba. As a result of his solidarity work, Moore met Fidel Castro and the Cuban delegation to the United Nations in New York in September 1960. Moved by the experience, Moore decided to return to his homeland and arrived in Cuba in June 1961. For two and a half years, Moore stayed in Cuba and worked for the revolution. His particular interest was in making sure that the revolution effectively removed all forms of racial discrimination and pursued egalitarian social policies. However, Moore’s approach to eliminating racism conflicted with the strategy implemented by the Castro government and its revolutionary leadership. Fidel Castro and other top officials decided to ban all forms of explicit racial segregation and discrimination, which Moore saw as a near-consensus positive step. However, the government also outlawed all forms of autonomous racial, cultural, and political expression. As a result, any complaints about implicit or institutional racism were treated as counterrevolutionary and divisive. Afro-Cuban social clubs and political groups were banned in the spirit of nonracial social equality. Moore and key Afro-Cuban leaders disagreed with this decision. Moore vehemently argued that Cuban racism was deeply ingrained in the culture and consciousness of the people. To eradicate it would require antiracist education, widespread debate, and ongoing political struggle led by Black Civil Rights groups. Following the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the revolutionary government placed national security and its own survival above all other concerns. Eventually, all independent political groups were banned. After several major conflicts with authorities, Moore fled Cuba in December 1963 and did not return until the 1990s. During his three-decade absence from Cuba he lived in Egypt, France, Nigeria, the United States, Senegal, and the Caribbean. In Paris, France, Moore met Malcolm X in November 1964 and pledged to help build the Organization of Afro-American Unity in Europe. Moore was scheduled to meet again with Malcolm X in February 1965 in Paris, but French authorities prevented Malcolm X from leaving the airport and forced him to return to London. Malcolm X was assassinated in New York two weeks later. Moore spent the rest of the 1960s and most of the 1970s in France, working to support his family, writing about conditions in Cuba, and pursuing his academic studies. His experience in Paris and other places was complicated. Although he believed firmly in the struggle for global Black liberation, many comrades rejected him because of his criticism of the Cuban Revolution. Over the years, Moore developed close relations with respected Black leaders and intellectuals from various countries. Malcolm X, Robert Williams, Maya Angelou, Alex Haley, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Aimé Césaire, Cheik Anta Diop, and Abdias Nascimento are some of the activists who worked with and inspired Moore. While based in Lagos, Nigeria, Moore and Fela Kuti established

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a close relationship that led to Moore’s authorship of Kuti’s biography, Fela: This Bitch of a Life. During that period Moore also served as secretariat of the Second World Black Festival of Arts and Culture. In 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union and the communist governments of Eastern Europe contributed to an economic crisis in Cuba and forced the Castro government to open the economy to international investors and develop new relations with Cuban exiles and immigrants. The once closed country was now open enough to allow Moore to visit his family in Cuba for the first time in more than 30 years. Moore continued to visit Cuba for several short trips. Nevertheless, Moore maintains his critique of the revolution’s approach to race. Afro-Cubans are still unable to organize autonomously, and the Cuban government continues to underestimate the degree of racism in Cuban society and politics. Since 2000, Moore has lived in Brazil with his family. He has written his first memoir, Pichón. Moore writes and lectures on African history and culture, the Black experience in the Americas, and race and racism. Ollie A. Johnson III See also: Cuban Revolution; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X Further Reading Johnson, Ollie. 2015. “Malcolm X and the Cuban Revolution.” In Malcolm X’s Michigan Worldview: An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies, edited by Rita Kiki Edozie and Curtis Stokes, 263–277. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Moore, Carlos. 1989. Castro, the Blacks, and Africa. Los Angeles: CAAS/UCLA. Moore, Carlos. 2008. Pichón: A Memoir; Race and Revolution in Castro’s Cuba. New York: Lawrence Hill Books.

Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley (1898–1997) Audley Moore, bestowed with the Ghanaian title of honor of “Queen Mother” in 1972, is recognized as a reparation advocate, a leader for people of African descent, and a tireless nationalist and Pan-Africanist. Her presence and influence spanned the globe from organizing the first rent strike in Sugar Hill (New York) to attending the 1974 Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania.

Early Years Born in July 1898 in New Iberia, Louisiana, deep in the heart of Jim Crow south, Audley Moore had a fourth-grade education. Having lost her mother in childbirth and her father to racial violence a decade later, Moore took on the role of family



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leader. Leaving school to work as a domestic, she supported herself and her two younger sisters until she relocated to Muscle Shoals, Alabama during World War I and became a hairdresser. She later moved her family to New Orleans, Louisiana, where she met and married Frank Warner, a grocer, in the early 1920s and continued her employment through domestic services. It was in New Orleans that Moore was first introduced to Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Asso­ciation (UNIA). Moore credits Garvey as the one who “brought the consciousness to [her]” and woke her to the “nature of [her] oppression.” From that time forward, her life was irrevocably changed. Audley Moore emerged as a lifelong activist, organizer, and leader.

Activist for Life Leaving New Orleans, she crisscrossed the country to California, Chicago, and finally settled in Harlem. From her UNIA membership, Moore went on to join the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) through the International Labor Defense (ILD). Early on she rose to the forefront, displaying strong leadership skills. Galvanized by tenant evictions during the Depression, she united renters and led the Sugar Hill rent strikes, landing her in jail three times. Her work in Harlem expanded to include voter registration in Harlem. From her earliest foray into activism, she was instrumental in bringing women’s issues to the forefront within the context of long-standing systemic racism and classism. It was in the CPUSA, according to scholar Ashley Farmer, that Moore experienced “grassroots mobilization and community organizing skills and showed her the importance of grounding her politics in a strong analysis of the interrelationship between race and class.” In 1954, Audley Moore returned to New Orleans with her two sisters where she subsequently joined Sons and Daughters of Ethiopia (SDE), an offshoot of UNIA. However, it was 1957 when Moore founded her signature organization which established a Pan-African, nationalist group and her individual identity, the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women (UAEW). Located in New Orleans, the womencentered organization initially focused on protesting and advocating on behalf of African American men systemically targeted, both within and outside of the judicial system, through interracial rape charges. However, later the group, under Moore’s leadership, opened the dialogue and led the charge on the historic and ongoing sexual abuse of African American women perpetrated by white men. These crimes against African American women had long gone unacknowledged and unconfronted. Once again Moore led the charge when she sent, via the UAEW, an appeal to the United Nations (UN) in 1959 charging “genocide” of African Americans within the United States via lynching and systemic injustice, bringing the rampant

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racism within the United States to international light. The UAEW appeal requested UN intervention in the South and an end to capital punishment. Moore and the UAEW also very vocally opposed the Suitable Home Law passed by the Louisiana legislature in July of 1960. The legislation left approximately 23,000, primarily African American, women and children in Louisiana without any social welfare benefits through a series of pseudo-moralistic standards. Attacked by white supremacist gunmen in Tennessee as she drove from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Moore survived a hail of bullets and being forced off the road and into a ditch. She went on to publicly challenge Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis’ racist, sexist stance. Moore is long recognized as one of the leading advocates of reparations in the United States, forming the “Reparations Committee for the Descendants of American Slaves” (RCDAS). Through RCDAS, she worked toward economic parity, financial restitution, and an independent, self-governing Black republic within the United States. Moore’s multifaced influence on the Black Power Movement is seen in her impact on the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). She not only mentored and advised the members, she was instrumental in shaping the movement’s direction and philosophy. RAM founder Muhammad Ahmad maintained Moore “trained the RAM cadre in the philosophy of Black nationalism and MarxismLeninism.” She continued her training of young radicals at Harlem’s 135th Street YMCA, formulating many ideas and philosophies subsequently put forth by Black Power activists. In 1964, along with Nana Oserjiman Adefumi and Nasser Shabazz, Moore founded the African Descendants National Independence Partition Party (ADNIP). ADNIP demanded the United States cede “all the territory south of the Mason-Dixon line” to African Americans as reparations. The Black nationalist party also established a provisional government with political exile Robert Williams as its president. This would precede the concept of the Republic of New Africa (RNA) four years later. The direction of the Black Power Movement, an emphasis on “race” or “class,” was one of the issues debated at the Sixth PanAfrican Congress in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which Moore attended. In 1972, while attending the funeral of the former president of Ghana, she was honored with the designation “Queen Mother.” It was a designation she held for the rest of her life. Queen Mother Moore was key in the establishment, organization, and naming of a provisional Black government, the RNA. Per Queen Mother Moore, “I initiated [the RNA]. I helped to organize it. . . . I gave the brother (Milton Henry) the idea that we’re a nation.” Having named the group, she was also the first to sign the RNA’s “Declaration of Independence” and subsequently served as the minister of foreign relations and culture. She was also one of five women to address the Million-Man March (1995).



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Self-taught and a tireless proponent of Black nationalism, reparations, and the power of the community of women, Queen Mother Moore led by example as does her enduring legacy today. Jennifer LaBrecque See also: Obadele, Gaidi (Milton Henry); Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa; Reparations; Revolutionary Action Movement; Stanford, Max (Muhammad Ahmad) Further Reading Farmer, A. 2016a. “Reframing African American Women’s Grassroots Organizing: Audley Moore and the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, 1957–1963.” Journal of African American History 101(1–2): 69–96. Farmer, A. D. 2016b. “Mothers of Pan-Africanism: Audley Moore and Dara Abubakari.” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 4(2): 274–295. Moore, Q. 1973. “The Black Scholar Interviews: Queen Mother Moore.” Black Scholar 4(6–7): 47–55. “Queen Mother Moore: First Lady of African Reparations.” 2016. Journal of Pan African Studies 5: 6. Umoja, A. O. 2013. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: NYU Press.

N National Black Economic Development Conference and the Black Manifesto One weekend in late April 1969, more than 500 Black activists, organizers, clergy, and businesspeople gathered in Detroit, Michigan, for the National Black Economic Development Conference (NBEDC). Their aim was to discuss the Black people’s economic situation in America and strategies for community development. The conference—held from Friday, April 25, through Sunday, April 27—was sponsored by the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO). The IFCO was an interdenominational body designed to foster dialogue between mainstream churches and marginalized people in the United States and was founded in late 1966. The organization aimed to find solutions to the poverty that overwhelmingly affected minority groups in the United States. The IFCO supported various projects to aid Black communities in its pursuit of justice, self-determination, and economic independence during the Black Power era. The NBEDC was perhaps the most controversial initiative sponsored by the organization. The late 1960s was a tumultuous period in the United States. Black soldiers were dying disproportionately in the war in Vietnam; many Black Americans held low-paying jobs or were unemployed; discrimination was rampant in the American education system, resulting in inferior education for Black students; and Blacks were confined predominanantly to the inner cities, where they suffered from systemic poverty. Simply put, the United States was losing its War on Poverty. Various Black political veins had critiques of the systemic racism that plagued American society, and American religious institutions were not unaffected. At this time, Black clergy were fighting for recognition and power within majority white churches and for churches to take a more liberal stance and action on social and racial issues. The push for the NBEDC came from Black caucuses in predominantly white Christian denominations. The conference leader was Reverend Lucius Walker, a Black American Baptist clergyman. Reverend Walker said in 1969 that “It’s a travesty how much churches have said about social justice and how little they have done” (Martin 1970). The NBEDC and the manifesto that was introduced there would mandate more decisive action. On Saturday, April 26, James Forman, a prominent member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, presented the Black Manifesto. It is likely that many authors collaborated to produce the programs and tactics in the Black

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Manifesto; however, Forman wrote the preamble and was the spokesman. Without permission, Forman took the stage and proclaimed that “We the Black people assembled in Detroit, Michigan, for the National Black Economic Development Conference are fully aware that we have been forced to come together because racist white America has exploited our resources, our minds, our bodies, our labor. For centuries we have been forced to live as colonized people inside the United States, victimized by the most vicious, racist system in the world.” The manifesto continued, calling for reparations to African Americans for slavery. Forman demanded that white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues pay a total of $500 million to support Black-operated programs and institutions. This amounted to approximately $15 per Black American—a modest sum. These funds were to be recompense for white religious institutions’ complicity in American racism and white supremacy. The $500 million would be divided among several projects, including a southern land bank to establish cooperative farms, a publishing company, four audiovisual networks to provide an alternative to the racist propaganda of white TV networks, a Black research center, financial assistance to the National Welfare Rights Organization and welfare recipients, a national Black labor strike and defense fund for the protection of Black workers, the establishment of cooperative businesses in the United States and Africa, and the founding of a Black university in the South. These projects would be used to alleviate Black poverty and build up the Black community to be independent from white oppressors. Issuing the Black Manifesto had not been on the conference’s agenda. However, the manifesto brought to light some issues that many delegates felt should be addressed by white America. Although all conference delegates did not officially sanction the manifesto, the NBEDC committee approved the statement (Schuchter 1970, 4). For the writers of the manifesto, Black liberation would need to come through revolution, and part of the revolution was to be economic in nature. Overthrowing an oppressive system necessitated the redistribution of wealth and resources. They were not asking for a handout or charity. They were demanding reparations, “the making of amends for wrong or injury done.” Black Power activists often placed emphasis on learning Black history. Surely, reflections of the Black past in America contributed to the writing of the Black Manifesto. Whites in America had profited off of forced Black labor for centuries, and it was only right for whites to make restitution for the legacy they continued to benefit from. Even though slavery had ended, Blacks in America continued to be mistreated and suffered from white supremacy and economic subjugation. Only reparations in the form of funds directly to Black Americans could help to counter the social and economic inequalities that existed across the nation. Forman made clear that the Black Manifesto’s demand for reparations was not “an idle resolution or empty words.” The manifesto writers made clear that they were not threatening churches—that was not the road they



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wanted to take—but that they were prepared to use force to get their demands; they were not necessarily opposed to violence to overthrow an oppressive system. The manifesto had called on Blacks across the nation to unite and “help force racist white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues to implement these demands.” However, not all Black Americans were on board with the Black Manifesto’s message or programs. Forman and the demands of the manifesto were often viewed as being too militant by mainstream and moderate activists. The Black Power era saw an increase in radical Black activism and calls for Black selfdetermination, independent Black politics, and advocacy of armed resistance and self-defense. Unlike the tone of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, Black activists did not shy away from a more militant approach to promoting Black collective interests. The radical and dramatic tactics of Forman caused some Black organizations to distance themselves from the Black Manifesto, even if they were sympathetic to the manifesto’s program. Prominent Black organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Baptist Convention urged that instead of reparations, funds be donated to their causes. For James Forman and other proponents of the Black Manifesto, the push for reparations did not end after the conclusion of the Black Economic Development Conference. On May 1, 1969, a few weeks after the NBEDC, Forman and Reverend Lucius Walker went with a 25-person delegation of NBEDC members to meet with bishops at the Episcopal Church headquarters to present the Black Manifesto to several bishops. They would also present the manifesto to the general board of the National Council of Churches, the United Presbyterians, the United Methodist Board of Missions, the New York Roman Catholic Archdiocese, the American Baptist Convention, the Lutheran Church in American, the (Southern) Presbyterian Church in the United States, the United Church of Christ, and several Jewish agencies (Schuchter 1970, 4–5). In a dramatic sequel to his NBEDC display, Forman and several others made a colorful point at Riverside Church in New York City. On May 4 the group disrupted the services at the wealthy church, presenting their demands for reparations. They also informed the assembly that it would be required to pay extra reparations because of connections with the Rockefeller family (Haines 1995, 69–70). Not long after the Riverside Church incident, Forman made another bold action. In a move reminiscent of Martin Luther King Jr., Forman attached a copy of specific demands—$50 million in cash and 60 percent revenue from assets—to the door of the Lutheran Church in America’s national headquarters in New York (Haines 1995, 4–5). These presentations made news across the country and put Forman and the Black Manifesto on the nation’s radar. Many white Christian organizations either ignored or rejected the Black Manifesto’s program. In a formal response to the manifesto, the executive council

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of the Episcopal Church did not accept the manifesto as it was presented. While it recognized the existence of poverty, injustice, and racism in America and claimed to be listening to discontented groups, it maintained that it would continue its commitments to alleviate poverty on its own terms. The Episcopal Church committed to establishing more programs dedicated to self-determination and selfhelp by the poor. Yet, it would not contribute money directly to a reparations fund that would allow Black Americans to self-direct their own liberation. According to the church’s statement, “The central contribution of the Christian Church to the crisis in our society cannot be measured simply in terms of money. In our judgment the crisis is not primarily one of money but of the human spirit and of how men deal with one another” (“Executive Council’s Response to the Black Manifesto” 1969). However, some white churches and ministers sympathized with the objectives of the manifesto. For example, Dr. Ernest Campbell, the minister of Riverside Church, agreed with the principle of reparation for Black Americans. He wrote that “From the beginning, the Christian church has taught us that restitution is an essential part of penitence. You don’t simply say ‘I’m sorry’ to a man you’ve robbed. You return what you stole or your apology takes on a hollow ring” (Schuchter 1970, 6). Reverend Campbell’s words were not hollow; Riverside Church contributed $200,000 to the reparations fund. However, most churches that contributed chose to do so by increasing aid to existing or new programs of their own instead of providing money directly to programs laid out in the manifesto. The Black Manifesto made the term “reparations” a household word. The manifesto was revolutionary because it was not a request for financial assistance from whites; it demanded what was owed to Black Americans and insisted that white America fully account for its past actions. It also drew more attention to the lasting effects of slavery and the continued economic exploitation of Black Americans. The Black Manifesto reflected the attitude of many Black Power activists who wanted white money without the condition of whites directing and controlling how the money was used for Black uplift. The desire for self-determination and community control was a major aspect of the manifesto and a significant aspect of the Black Power era. Though Black Americans did not receive the reparations called for in the Black Manifesto, discussions of the place of reparations in addressing Black oppression continue still. Kendra Boyd See also: National Welfare Rights Organization; Reparations; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Vietnam War Further Reading Dye, Keith. 2009. “The Black Manifesto for Reparations in Detroit: Challenge and Response, 1969.” Michigan Historical Review 35(2): 53–83.



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“Executive Council’s Response to the Black Manifesto.” 1969. Archives of the Episcopal Church, Executive Council, http://www.episcopalarchives.org/Afro-Anglican_history /exhibit/pdf/Manifesto_Response.pdf. Forman, James. 1997. The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Illustrated ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Frye, Jerry K. 1974. “The ‘Black Manifesto’ and the Tactic of Objectification.” Journal of Black Studies 5(1): 65–76. Haines, Herbert H. 1995. Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream, 1954–1970. 1988; reprint, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Lecky, Robert S. 1969. Black Manifesto: Religion, Racism, and Reparations. New York: Sheed and Ward. Martin, Douglas. 1970. “Lucius Walker, Baptist Pastor for Peace, Dies at 80.” New York Times, September 12, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/us/12walker.html?_r=0. Schuchter, Arnold. 1970. Reparations: The Black Manifesto and Its Challenge to White America. Hampden, UK: Lippincott.

National Black Feminist Organization The National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) began as an idea cultivated by Florynce “Flo” Kennedy and Margaret Sloan. Kennedy was an activist and a lawyer, and Sloan was the founding editor of Ms. magazine. NBFO was the first organization of its kind and proved historic. The first meeting of this collective took place in May 1973; 30 Black women, most of whom were educated professionals, gathered to discuss issues affecting Black women. A common discussion thread of the time among Black feminists was that Black women lacked the luxury of separating race from gender as well as sexual orientation. It was at this initial meeting that the founding members concluded that their concerns as Black women were being willfully ignored by Black male counterparts, mainstream Black liberation groups, and even some Black women. In addition, their needs were ignored by white mainstream feminist organizations. Soon after the initial meeting, the NBFO planned a conference in order to address its concerns. A steering committee of 7 women, from the original 30, was formed. The mission of the NBFO was to counteract both negative press toward women’s’ liberation movements and the lack of Black interest in feminist organizations. The NBFO’s priority was interstitial politics, or the personal politics of those left in the margins of society. This included establishing a collective identity. The NBFO was one of several organizations that arose in the late 1960s to early 1970s to raise the consciousness of Black women across the United States. On August 15, 1973, Sloan made a public statement officially naming the collective as well as the upcoming conference, which was scheduled to take place

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from November 30 to December 3. This conference solidified the NBFO as being tasked with filling the void created by the aforementioned institutions responsible for ignoring the intersectional plight of Black women. At least 200 participants showed up at St. John the Divine Church in New York City to address a great deal of issues at this conference, perhaps too many at once with such a limited infrastructure. Workshops were held on several topics, including child care, welfare, women’s liberation, politics, the church, media, the labor force, homosexuality, cultural arts, female sexuality, prisons, and education. The attendees were among the most notable Black women of the time, including congressional representative and presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm. She was said to have been a charismatic, visible, and articulate force. The event was largely collaborative and focused on eliminating all liberation struggles as well as on self-determination (Davis 1988). Unfortunately, the momentum from the New York gathering was not enough to sustain the NBFO. Moreover, with the continued success of other national movements, both related to Black liberation and women’s rights, Black women were made to feel like race traitors or unwanted in mainstream female organizations. Black women were urged to remain in supportive roles by their male counterparts, leaders of the Black liberation movement; proponents of this position included Elijah Muhammad, Amiri Baraka, Stokely Carmichael, and others. Black women could not obtain leadership roles they so duly deserved, nor were they being recognized for the work they had already accomplished. Thus, some of what Black feminists were tasked with included debunking myths surrounding their political pursuits (Davis 1988). First, it was assumed that their concerns mirrored those of Black men. However, after slavery, Black women were not elevated in the way Black men were, nor were they seeking employment. Second, Black women consistently earned less than Black men in the workplace. Finally, in regard to the mainstream women’s liberation movement, Black women still remained suspicious of white women, with fears that their progress would be co-opted (Davis 1988). The NBFO rose almost as fast as it died. The NBFO peaked in 1975, operating on a national level, and was defunct by 1980. In truth, when Sloan and Kennedy decided to announce the existence of the organization, they had exaggerated its size. During the press conference they made mention of the group’s name, their mission, and chapters including San Francisco, Cleveland, and Chicago. Immediately following the press conference, Sloan received over 400 inquiries and nearly as many calls, and there was no headquarters. This reinforced the need for such an organization, as Black women were in search of a place that would allow them to define their political agenda for themselves. Within one year, the NFBO had garnered a following of at least 2,000 from across the nation, bringing life to 10 chapters in various cities. Leaders immediately began educating masses



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by addressing myths, publishing their statements, providing a list of frequently asked questions, curating a bibliography, and creating a speakers’ bureau. These leaders were considered frontrunners by the mainstream media. While regional leaders looked to the founding members for support, they also sought to address the needs of their constituents in their immediate areas (Davis 1988). The NBFO attempted to establish an egalitarian structure—unsuccessfully. Eventually, factions emerged across the organization. Newer factions garnered an increased amount of power and had little desire to maintain the previous agenda set by predecessors. Two notable offshoots grew: the Combahee River Collective (CRC) in Boston and the National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) in Chicago. The CRC no longer agreed with the ideals of the national branches and felt a need for structural change. The CRC believed that a collective approach was both lacking and necessary to the continued success of the organization. In contrast, the NABF was not in disagreement with the NBFO. Rather, the NABF seemed to have grown impatient waiting for correspondence from the New York branch. Chicago members were also interested in an agenda tailored to meet the needs of Black women in the Midwest. The NABF broke away from the organization but continued to work with the NBFO whenever possible. Eventually the dissension within the NBFO led to a massive breakdown in communications among other chapters (Springer 2001). It is possible that this was a direct result of the efficacy of those in power being intentionally undermined as a means of disruption to the organization’s original mission. Most notable was the divide between the New York and Detroit chapters; some members were more aligned to Black liberation, while others were more aligned with women’s liberation (Davis 1988). Some literature implies that there were infiltrators within the organization who sought to lessen the impact of the NBFO by pushing the Black male agenda and the white female agenda (Springer 2001). Despite the turmoil, the NBFO made a significant number of contributions to the cause of Black women for generations to come. It set a precedent for at least four other Black feminist organizations, including a structural model. One success to come of this particular organization is the realization for Black women that they were not alone and did not have to work in isolation of other activists. Each chapter played a role on the national level in dealing with imperative issues that seemed to be regional but could effect change on a large scale. For example, the Los Angeles chapter was able to focus on the media’s portrayal of Black women as stereotypical caricatures, while the New York chapter fought for a minimum wage among domestic workers and against sexual harassment (Davis 1988). With the fall of the NBFO came some valuable lessons. First, leaders should not be afraid to set an organization-wide agenda at the group’s conception, as opposed to waiting for every member’s input. Second, leaders must ensure that there is a consistent revenue stream to ensure sustainability. Third, the organization should

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have an explicit decision-making process as well as a transition plan for the inevitable change in leadership. Fourth, there should be a plan for outreach to organizations with aligned missions. Fifth, the organization must be able to utilize the media to its advantage (Davis 1988). History has failed the NBFO in many ways. For starters, its stories have not been regularly shared for what they were: instrumental to both the future of Black liberation and women’s liberation. This can be attributed to racism and sexism: Black men lessening the impact of Black female leaders, and white women doing the same among their respective organizations (Springer 2005). Barbara Ransby in her 2000 article “Black Feminism at Twenty-One: Reflections on the Evolution of a National Community” credits many successful Black feminists’ campaigns and organizations to the NBFO. Black feminism has the potential to transcend many movements due to its multifaceted nature. However, this may also be the downfall of many organizations. Ransby advances the idea that such organizations fail because they lack recognizable, charismatic leaders, as in many other social movements. Another reason that organizations seem to fade is because they are founded on the principle of intersectionality. This implies a multifaceted battle, which could distract from organizational momentum, eventually leading to an organization’s decay. Though the organization fell, its legacy persists. Feminism in the United States has undergone several phases of evolution. The term “Black feminism” is a contemporary one that began to develop with the second wave of white feminism and Black liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The NBFO constructed a collective Black feminist identity and consciousness, absent from mainstream and political discussions prior to 1973. While some Black women may not identify with the sentiments of the NBFO, Black women across the nation continue to carve space for themselves as leaders among both Black liberation and women’s rights groups. One recent example of this is Black Lives Matter, founded by Black women and led predominantly by such and whose agenda moves forward through the work of strong chapters in Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, and Chicago. A term that was popularized after the founding of the NBFO is “womanism.” Considered interchangeable with “feminism,” the term “womanism” honors the intersectionality of Black women avoiding negative connotations often associated with feminism, race, class, sexuality, and gender (Taylor 1998). Because Black feminism is intersectional and multifaceted by nature, it transcends so many struggles. Thus, hope for progress remains. Further investigation into the political agenda and the process of millennial Black feminist is needed (Ransby 2000). Estella Owoimaha-Church See also: Black Women’s Alliance/Third World Women’s Alliance; Combahee River Collective; Kennedy, Florynce “Flo”; National Welfare Rights Organization; Smith, Barbara



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Further Reading Combahee River Collective. 1978. “The Black Feminist Statement.” In Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 232–240. New York: Norton. Davis, Beverly. 1988. “To Seize the Moment: A Retrospective on the National Black Feminist Organization.” Sage 5(2) (Fall): 43. Echols, Alice. 1989. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975, Vol. 3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Laporte, Rita. 1974. “Notes Prompted by the National Black Feminist Organization.” Off Our Backs 4(3) (February): 2–3. Ransby, Barbara. 2000. “Black Feminism at Twenty-One: Reflections on the Evolution of a National Community.” Feminisms at a Millenium, special issue of Signs 25(4) (Summer): 1215–1221. Springer, Kimberly, ed. 1999. Still Lifting, Still Climbing: Contemporary African American Women’s Activism. New York: NYU Press. Springer, Kimberly. 2001. “The Interstitial Politics of Black Feminist Organizations.” Meridians 1(2) (Spring): 155–191. Springer, Kimberly. 2005. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, Ula Y. 1998. “Making Waves: The Theory and Practice of Black Feminism.” Black Social Issues, special issue of Black Scholar 28(2) (Summer): 18–28.

National Black Political Assembly The National Black Political Assembly of 1972, popularly called the Gary Convention, took place on March 10–12 in Gary, Indiana. More than 8,000 Black leaders, community organizers, and politicians covering a wide range of ideologies attended. The aim for the Gary Convention was double-barreled. First, the delegates adopted and created a Black political agenda that reflected the interests of the African American community. It was used as a tool to endorse Black political candidates. Second, those at the Gary Convention believed that it was important to encourage African Americans to see themselves as the proprietors of an independent and progressive movement. The convention led to its administrative arm—the National Black Political Council—and the official National Black Political Agenda. The Gary Convention also led to the large increase of Black elected officials by 1980 and is considered to be the largest gathering of Black leaders to date. The National Black Political Assembly of 1972 was essentially a culmination of various occurrences within the Black freedom struggle of preceding years. Major accomplishments for Americans of African descent took place in the early 1960s. In the summer of 1963 Civil Rights leaders, activists, organizers, and key

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allies organized the historic March on Washington, which was one of the largest Civil Rights protests in U.S. history. On the heels of its success, Congress acquiesced to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in which discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin became illegal, and the Voter Rights Act of 1965, which was aimed at overcoming the legal barriers that prevented Black people from exercising their right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment. Toward the end of the decade, Americans saw the election of the first Black mayors of major northern cities in Cleveland and Gary and the rise of the Black Power Movement. The ascendance of the latter, in addition to long-lasting oppositional sentiments toward the Black liberation movement as a whole, led to a backlash and a shift in the national political climate. Along with the election of President Richard Nixon in 1968 came a political rhetoric that targeted the Civil Rights Movement and Black liberation efforts. Nixon advocated for law enforcement agencies to adopt a law-and-order approach, and his administration established a war on the War on Poverty. Both of these rhetorical weapons disproportionately affected African American communities in tangible ways. Nixon’s conservative law-and-order theme consistently pointed to the Civil Rights Movement as the source of the general increase of racial unrest and criminal activity. Whereas the previous president, Lyndon B. Johnson, had opted to come down softer on violators who were involved in liberation movements, Nixon sought to punish all violators more harshly and permanently. Nixon met Johnson’s War on Poverty with a War on Drugs, which heavily criminalized the African American community in disproportionate ways. And though Nixon’s administration held the record for most Black appointees in a presidential cabinet, these social policies, along with his Southern Strategy, proved to be adverse to any Black interests. This assault on the Black community caused during the Nixon presidency meant that the stakes were high for the 1972 presidential election. Nixon’s administration sparked a sense of urgency within the Black political community, and thus Black leadership and its intelligentsia began to debate which strategies might bolster Black influence in the upcoming election. Happening simultaneously, massive unrest in America’s urban centers such as Los Angeles and Detroit led to grassroots movements with a strong nationalist fervor. In correlation with the Black Power Movement, Black nationalists rejected integrationism and supported building Black institutions and communities in which Blacks control Black spaces. The growing support of nationalism among Black people began to put mainstream Black political organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on the defensive, as insurgent leaders condemned them as Uncle Toms and the like. By 1970, the Black American community stood at a critical crossroads when it came to the tensions between nationalism, integrationism, and what each ideology meant for the Black influence in the presidential election of 1972. Throughout the late 1960s calls for Black unity were emphasized,



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especially those that Malcom X had made in his proposal of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. However, with the national election forthcoming, the calls for Black unity became more prevalent. Amiri Baraka successfully organized the 1970 Congress of African People (CAP 1970), which acted as the first leg in bridging ideological divides and tensions between Black leaders. Along with Baraka, the Committee for a United Newark and other leading nationalist/Pan-Africanist activists served as coleaders for CAP 1970, a conference that took place in Atlanta, Georgia. In order to attract a wide variety of organizations, the cohosts of CAP 1970 promoted the idea of operational unity rather than uniformity. Because of these efforts, CAP 1970 was able to attract organizations on all points of the ideological spectrum including the Nation of Islam’s emerging leader, Louis Farrakhan, as well as Nelson Johnson of the Student Organization for Black Unity, the nationalist/Pan-Africanist Owusu Sadaukai of Malcom X Liberation University, and Whitney Young of the fairly moderate and mainstream National Urban League. Although CAP 1970 seemed to be the most successful gathering of Black leaders since the March on Washington in 1963, the most important aspect of CAP 1970 was that it set the scene for the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary. Several meetings and strategy sessions took place in the two years that followed CAP 1970. These meetings were mostly centered on the 1972 presidential election and a Black political strategy. When March 10 arrived, Gary, Indiana, welcomed 2,776 delegates and 4,000 alternates for the first National Black Political Assembly in 1972. The delegation process was designed to include representation from both elected and nonelected Black leaders. Each of the 50 states was allocated 5 slots regardless of the size of the state’s population, and 2,000 extra delegate slots were divided among states and the District of Columbia according to Black population. Much like CAP 1970, the convention reflected a variety of political views and ideological tendencies. The idea of operational unity once again brought in an array of Black activists, leaders, and elected officials. The list of notable attendees is vast, but a few are as follows: Reverend Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz, Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale, Queen Mother Audley Moore, Richard Roundtree, and Nikki Giovanni. The convention marked a new era in Black politics. The 1972 Gary Convention produced the National Black Political Agenda and brought together a broad sampling of Black political activists. However, the convention quickly revealed the limits to racial unity, as debates arose surrounding the exact content of the Black Political Agenda and the possible formation of a Black political party. Proposed resolutions calling for “community control of education” in lieu of busing students to integrate schools and demanding that Israel revert to Palestinian homelands shocked mainstream moderate organizations. As a result, some elected officials and integrationist leaders concerned about the impact of their relationship with constituents even turned to the media to distance themselves from the radical

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positions in the document. In regard to the Black party, Amiri Baraka, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Richard Hatcher, Gary’s first Black mayor, supported the formation of a singular political party, as did most of the nationalist/Pan-Africanist activists. On the other hand, most elected officials fiercely opposed the idea. Debates notwithstanding, the National Black Political Agenda was successfully drafted by the end of the convention. When published, a note was included in the agenda that admitted its slight idealism: At every critical moment of our struggle in America we have to press relentlessly against the limits of the “realistic” to create new realities for the life of our people. This is our challenge at Gary and beyond, for a new Black politics demands new vision, new hope, and new definitions of the possible. Our time has come. These things are necessary. All things are possible. (Daniels 1980) Thousands of Black intellectuals, politicians, leaders, and activists left Gary, Indiana, with an energized determination to make Black politics more influential. Some activists implemented the idea of Black independent politics and unity expressed during the Gary Convention into their own organizations, including the National Caucus of Black State Legislators, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and the National Conference of Black Local Elected Officials. Although the later conventions waned in support and attendance, the 1972 National Black Political Assembly served as an inspiration to many Black activists. Thus, the quadrupling of Black elected officials by 1980 can be seen as the principal accomplishment of the 1972 Gary Convention. Eva Cooke See also: Congress of African People; Giovanni, Nikki; Hatcher, Richard; Jackson, Jesse L., Sr.; Johnson, Nelson; Malcolm X Liberation University; Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley; Pan-Africanism Further Reading Daniels, R. 1980. “The National Black Political Assembly: Building Independent Black Politics in the 1980s.” Black Scholar 11(4): 32–42. Johnson, C. 2007. Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marable, M. 2015. How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

National Black United Fund, Inc. There are a variety of ways in which one can examine the social and historical significance of the Black Power era, one of the single, most tumultuous social



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uprisings in American history since the American Civil War. As Maulana Karenga (2010) notes, the Black Power era was uniquely different from the period in history defined as the Civil Rights era. While calls for voting rights, social equality, and freedom from social oppression marked the Civil Rights era, the Black Power era embraced a more assertive posture, proclaiming the right to positive selfexpression, self-defense, and self-determination. Buttressed by an energized and more youthful urban base, a new generation of leaders emerged, creating social, civic, cultural, spiritual, and professional organizations that would support the calls for Black freedom, liberation, and emancipation from all forms of social oppression. The Black Power thrust demanded the social, psychological, cultural, and economic liberation of the mind, body, and spirit as it encouraged the members of the Black community to rid themselves of the many social restraints and dictates fostered by an ideology of white supremacy. Dozens of organizations and institutions responded to the call, resulting in the proliferation of nationalist-inspired racially conscious organizations and institutions throughout the country. A few of the organizations/institutions that mark their founding to this period include Freedom Theater (Philadelphia); Us (Los Angeles); Afro-One Dance, Drama and Drum Theatre, Inc. (Willingboro); Church of the Black Madonna (Detroit); the National Association of Black Psychologists; the National Association of Black Social Workers; and the National Black United Fund (NBUF).

The NBUF The NBUF (which is not to be confused with the National Black United Front, another veritable Black Power–era organization) was officially launched in 1972 but acknowledges its long-standing historical connection to the Black community’s efforts for self-determination and sustainability through Black philanthropic initiatives. In 1787 during the critical period of the shaping of the U.S. Constitution, eight free men of African descent organized the Free Africa Society, a mutual selfhelp group, which marked the beginnings of the independent Black church and the first steps toward organized Black philanthropy in America. In the following century, African American men and women assisted those in need, providing financial support to many seeking freedom through the Underground Railroad and organized activities of the abolition movement (Franklin and Moss 2000). Following the period of Reconstruction and up to the early part of the 20th century, Black churches, fraternal, sororal, and mutual aid associations spent a considerable amount of time engaging in fund-raising activities to support Black philanthropic projects. According to Lerone Bennett Jr., author of Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (1972), organizations such as the ones listed above collected an estimated $168 million between 1870 and 1920. Efforts focused on

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economic self-sufficiency and empowerment continued throughout the first half of the 20th century, with initiatives by organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. It was during a period of racial unrest and social protest in cities across the nation that the Black philanthropy movement entered the modern era. While selfhelp had been the basis of Black philanthropic efforts, in the late 1960s and early 1970s the exclusivity of the concept of Black self-help faded for many and was replaced by a quest to seek outside support. These individuals began to argue that following more than two centuries of racial oppression and economic discrimination, the white community owed a debt to the Black community—and the bill was past due! In 1967 the United Negro Fund, founded by Reverend Lucius Walker in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in 1968 the Brotherhood Crusade, founded by activist Walter Bremond in Los Angeles, California, provided practical support to the implementation of this concept. These organizations, precursors to the establishment of the National Black United Fund, received initial funding support from corporations and/or white philanthropic organizations. The principal mission of these two organizations was to raise funds and resources from within the community and distribute those funds back into the community from which they came; however, the mechanism by which this transfer could take place was tied to the existing funding structures that, for the most part, were under the control of the white community. Moreover, white philanthropic organizations controlled the resources contributed to charitable organizations from millions of Americans, some of which had been collected from members of the Black community. Finally, Black organizations needed to find ways to access white wealth in order to support their social action agendas. The dependence on others from outside the Black community for support became a crucial aspect of the NBUF narrative, one that was likely viewed at that time as a justifiable form of reparations. Thus, the NBUF sought independence and self-determination while acknowledging the need for white support and cooperation to accomplish its goals and mission.

The Social Activists The NBUF owes its beginnings to a group of social activists who questioned the domination and control of America’s philanthropic organizations by Europeandescendent Americans. These nationally recognized social leaders—Lucius Walker, the Negro Fund; Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women; Reverend Leon Sullivan, founder of the Opportunity Industrial Centers International; Walter Bremond, president of the Brotherhood Crusade; Reverend Negail Riley, president of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization; James Joseph, president of the Cummins Engine Foundation; and



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Amiri Baraka, author, poet, Civil Rights activist, and cofounder of the Black Arts Movement—joined together, serving as founding members for the Board of Trustees of the National Black United Fund. During this heightened period of the Black Power Movement, NBUF founders were fully cognizant of the need to advocate publicly for the right to selfdetermination. The principles of Black pride, independence, and self-determination offered a cohesive philosophy that served as the base for the Black Power Movement. The NBUF’s mission was to encourage members of the Black community to be active participants in the community’s struggle for liberation through charitable giving. This would require a commitment to utilize financial resources to support Black charitable organizations and to insist that contributions collected by outside institutions be controlled by members of the Black community for the sole purpose of redistribution of funds back into the local communities. This was the primary focus and role of the NBUF: finding ways to insert itself into existing charitable giving mechanisms and insist that Black organizations control the processes.

The Ongoing Struggle Walter Bremond was named as the first executive director of the NBUF. To support its national initiative, Bremond launched an effort to organize affiliates in local communities and encouraged existing Black self-help organizations to join the movement. Local NBUF affiliates were established in California, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Texas. While the desire to educate the Black community about the need to finance its own struggle remained a priority, during its initial stage of development the NBUF relied heavily on major foundation support from white philanthropic organizations. However, Bremond, who had received initial support for his activist work from the Cummins Engine Foundation, insisted that any funded program designed to aid the Black community—including all government and privately funded initiatives—must be controlled by Blacks (Reid-Merritt 2015). The move to join the government-organized Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) further sealed the NBUF’s commitment to work closely with the dominant political power structure. The CFC permitted federal employees to make direct contributions to nonprofit organizations, and contributions from Black federal employees were identified as a possible steady stream of financial support to the organization. The NBUF, initially denied access to the CFC, challenged the ruling in federal court, arguing that the government engaged in unfair discriminatory practices by allowing the United Way of America, Inc., to dominate the charitable giving campaign. The court ruled in their favor, and the NBUF was granted full access to the CFC in 1980.

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Leadership and Organizational Development Bremond guided the development of the NBUF until his death in 1982. After several interim executives, Dana Alston was selected as the new executive director (1985–1987). Under Alton’s leadership, the NBUF expanded its role as a funding source for social programming that supported social activism, social development, and educational, economic, arts, and cultural programming, thus reinforcing the concept of self-help and communal responsibility in the Black community. William T. Merritt assumed the role of president/CEO in 1987. Under his leadership, the NBUF incorporated the National Black United Federation of Charities (NBUFC) in 1991. The NBUFC created a family of Black nonprofit organizations whose primary objectives focused on the growth, development, and cultural preservation of the African American community. Several member organizations include the Alpha Kappa Alpha Educational Advancement Foundation, Inc.; Black Deaf Advocates, Inc.; the Brown Foundation, Inc.; the Jackie Robinson Foundation, Inc.; the National Association of Black Social Workers, Inc.; the National Black United Front, Inc.; the National Black Veterans Association, Inc.; the National Hook-Up of Black Women, Inc.; and the National Council for Black Studies, Inc. Merritt has remained at the helm of the organization for the past three decades,

The Future In its 45-year history, the NBUF has raised millions of dollars in support of the Black community. The organization’s motto, “The helping hand that is your own,” continues to guide and motivate others to be active participants in a movement for Black self-help that was launched during the Black Power era. However, the downward trend in the American economy, which has negatively impacted the socioeconomic status of Black Americans, coupled with a deteriorating sense of identity in the African American community presents daunting challenges for the NBUF. In order for the NBUF to survive and thrive throughout the 21st century, calls for Black pride, Black independence, Black self-determination, and Black Power must again resonate within the Black community. Patricia Reid-Merritt and William T. Merritt See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Bremond, Walter Further Reading Bennett, Lerone, 1993. Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America. 6th ed. New York: Penguin. Bothwell, Robert, and Timothy Saasta. 1982. “Walter Bremond: A Social Activist with a Vision.” Grantsmanship Center News, July/August.



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Carson, Emmett D. 1993. The National Black United Fund: From Movement for Social Change to Social Change Organization; New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising. New York: Jossey-Bass. Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss Jr. 2000. From Slavery to Freedom. 8th ed. New York: Knopf. Joseph, James A. 1976. Philanthropy and the Black Economic Condition. San Fernando: Black Scholar. Karenga, Maulana. 2010. Introduction to Black Studies. 4th ed. Los Angeles: Sankore. National Black United Fund. www.nbuf.org. Reid-Merritt, Patricia. 2005. The National Black United Fund, Inc., Encyclopedia of Black Studies. Edited by Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Reid-Merritt, Patricia. 2015. The National Black United Fund, Inc., Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America. Edited by Mwalimu J. Shujaa and Kenya J. Shujaa. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

National Conference of Black Lawyers The National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL) was formed on December 6, 1968, to be the legal arm of the Black revolution. The NCBL was composed of lawyers, judges, scholars, legal workers, legal and community activists, and law students. The Civil Rights era of the 1960s witnessed several Black professionals who felt the need to form their own organizations that represented their interests and not the interests of racism and white supremacy. For members of the legal profession, the largest volunteer association is the American Bar Association (ABA), founded on August 21, 1878, as a national bar association of lawyers and law students. The ABA did not allow Blacks to join until 1943. The National Bar Association (NBA), founded in 1925, is the oldest and largest national organization of predominantly Black lawyers and judges. Although the founders of the NCBL were members of the NBA, they found that its activism was limited, involving itself in the Civil Rights cases of the period but not in the defense of political prisoners, prisoners of wars—that is, members of radical and revolutionary organizations. The NCBL’s mission is “To protect human rights, to achieve self-determination of Africa and African Communities and to work in coalition to assist in ending oppression of all peoples.” This statement grew out of its 1968 meeting in Capahosic, Virginia. Of the 113 founding members of the NCBL, the most well-known are Derrick Bell Jr., Haywood Burns, A. J. Cooper, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., C. B. King, Conrad J. Lynn, Floyd B. McKissick, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Honorable Charles B. Rangel, and the Honorable Bruce Wright.

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Chief delegates to the National Conference for New Politics during session, including Dr. Benjamin Spock, prominent pediatrician; Rev. James Abernathy, an aide to Dr. King; Dick Gregory, entertainer; and Dr. Martin Luther King. (Bettmann/Getty)

The objectives of the NCBL and the purposes that serve to define its mission are the following: 1. Analyze and study problems of Black attorneys in the United States in their legal practices; 2. Encourage Black youths to study law; 3. Work for the elimination of racism in the law; and 4. Give attention to the root problems of the Black community. The NCBL’s national Board of Directors meets four times a year. The board has two cochairpersons who are elected for two-year terms in alternate years. Its bylaws provide that one of the board chairs must be a woman. Chapters are entitled to elect one member to the board. The NCBL has five at-large board members; one must be a law student, and another must be a legal worker. The president of the Black Law Students Association also holds a seat on the Board of Directors. The NCBL’s client list has included the Attica Brothers, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Reverend Benjamin Chavis and the Wilmington 10, Geronimo ji-Jaga,



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Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Ahmed Rahman and other committed freedom fighters. On December 11, 1978, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the National Alliance Against Racism, and the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ petitioned the United Nations Commission on Human Rights alleging a “consistent pattern of gross . . . violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms of certain classes of political prisoners in the United States because of their race, economic status, and political beliefs.” The Commission of Human Rights in response to the petition sent seven international jurists to visit a number of prisons on August 3–20, 1979. In their findings, political prisoners were one of the four categories they listed. Political prisoners are defined as “a class of victims of FBI misconduct through the COINTELPRO strategy and other forms of illegal government conduct who as political activists have been selectively targeted for provocation, false arrests, entrapment, fabrication of evidence, and spurious criminal prosecutions. This class is exemplified by at least: The Wilmington Ten, the Charlotte Three, Assata Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, Imari Obadele and other Republic of New Africa defendants, David Rice, Ed Poindexter, Elmer Geronimo Pratt, Richard Marshall, Russell Means, Ted Means, and other American Indian Movement defendants.” The NCBL also defended affirmative action programs, most notably the California case of Allan Bakke who argued that the medical school at Davis, which held seats for “minorities,” discriminated against him because he was “white.” The NCBL expanded its liberator role and became a part of the first organizations to demand an end to apartheid in Southern Africa. Its international solidarity included working with progressive forces in Northern Ireland, Palestine, Cuba, Nicaragua, Guyana, and Grenada. On September 26, 1987, the NCBL became a founding member of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) with the New Afrikan People’s Organization and the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa. N’COBRA is a mass-based coalition organized to obtain reparations for African descendants in the United States. It also has chapters in Ghana and London. N’COBRA is a part of the international movement for reparations. N’COBRA states that “Reparations is a process of repairing, healing and restoring a people injured because of their group identity and in violation of their fundamental human rights by governments or corporations. Those groups that have been injured have the right to obtain from the government or corporation responsible for the injuries that which they need to repair and heal themselves. In addition to being a demand for justice, it is a principle of international human rights law. As a remedy, it is similar to the remedy for damages in domestic law that holds a person responsible for injuries suffered by another when the infliction of the injury violates domestic law. Examples of groups that have obtained reparations include Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust, Japanese Americans interned

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in concentration camps in the United States during WWII, Alaska Natives for land, labor, and resources taken, victims of the massacre in Rosewood, Florida and their descendants, Native Americans as a remedy for violations of treaty rights, and political dissenters in Argentina and their descendants.” Under the leadership of Adjoa Aiyetoro, NCBL member and N’COBRA commissioner, the coalition in the courts of the United States and in the international arena made a clear declaration that the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery were crimes against humanity. “Millions of Africans were brutalized, murdered, raped and tortured. They were torn from their families in Africa, kidnapped and lost family and community associations.” N’COBRA’s work was instrumental in the outcome of the United Nations World Conference Against Racism conference held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. Slavery was declared legally as a “crime against humanity.” In 2002, this work was furthered by the creation of the International Front of Africans for Reparations and the Global Afrikan Congress at the African and African Descen­ dants Conference in Bridgetown, Barbados. The NCBL is currently fighting for the land rights of indigenous peoples in America. It continues work resisting unjust criminal prosecutions, fighting the oppression and exploitation of underserved communities, and demanding the full human rights and self-determination of Black and other peoples of color. The NCBL remains committed to the fulfillment of its mission. It has stood strong in the face of bomb threats and death threats in the past and shall continue revolutionary work. Kwame Osagyefo Kalimara See also: Lumumba, Chokwe; Political Prisoners and Exiles; Reparations Further Reading Hinds, Lennox. 1978. Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Violations in the United States. Iowa City: School of Social Work, University of Iowa.

National Welfare Rights Organization The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was established in 1964 to unify welfare recipients with the intent and purpose of demanding better treatment, which specifically translated into expanding the scope of benefits being made available to beneficiaries. However, the primary function of the organization was to pressure the government into aiding poor and marginalized citizens with increased financial assistance. Despite the fact that more than 50 percent of welfare recipients and/or Aid to Families with Dependent Children beneficiaries



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enrolled during the time of the NWRO’s early development consisted of white families, the NWRO was mostly composed of African American members. More important, the NWRO was recognized as an integral part of the poor people’s movement because it had great reach and consisted of dozens of chapters located throughout the country. By 1969 it was said to have more than 22,000 members. It was one of the first organizations of its kind to fight for economic opportunities, gender equality, and justice for families that received government assistance. Its agenda against poverty, economic inequality, and wealth redistribution resonated with many of the Black Power Movement’s demands. The organization’s success was largely due to the NWRO’s ability to destigmatize some of the more common stereotypes of people on welfare and motivate low-income women to be more receptive to rights and power claims. The NWRO was founded by George Wiley, a former chemist and one of the first Black professors to teach at Syracuse University. After a brief stint in academia, Wiley shifted gears and set his sights on activism by becoming a highly dynamic figure in social movements during the 1960s. The NWRO was created from Wiley’s involvement with the Poverty Rights Action Center after finding that it would be necessary for him to connect his interests in social justice with the poor people’s movement. Not only is Wiley known for his activism, but he is also recognized for his radical tactics and nonconventional approaches to challenging the government. Wiley and the NWRO organized a string of highly publicized events in some of the country’s largest cities. In 1966, Wiley put together the group’s first march. From June 20 to June 30 an estimated 40 participants took to the streets, walking from Cleveland to Columbus, Ohio. By June 30 the NWRO picked up momentum, and an additional 2,000 supporters joined its efforts, ending the march at the state’s capital. Wiley’s leadership abilities would prove to be most beneficial in the planning and operation of the NWRO. An integral component of the march’s success was that it was organized to coincide with rallies stationed in 15 other cities throughout the United States, including New York City, Trenton, Chicago, Louisville, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. This was indeed a significant moment in the organization’s existence and was noted by Wiley as the birth of the welfare rights movement. Two years later the NWRO met in Washington, D.C., on August 25, 1967, for its founding convention. Perhaps the most noteworthy attempt carried out by the NWRO occurred in its attempt to bankrupt the government. Drawing on recommendations from Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Pivens to accomplish this goal, the NWRO sought to increase the welfare rolls, thereby creating a fiscal crisis. Ultimately this would lead to replacing public assistance programs with a guaranteed annual income for all people. Cloward and Piven, both sociologists from the University of Colombia, were instrumental in assisting the NWRO in developing its ideology and systematic approach to ending capitalism. The Cloward and Pivens

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model was a forceful scheme that included using bullying-style methods. This strategy was identified in instances when the NWRO would storm into government offices, demanding that recipients be given every penny rightfully owned to them. Recipients staged sit-ins in legislative chambers and at Senate committee hearing and organized school boycotts and picket lines. At times, demonstrators faced mounted police, tear gas, and arrests. On occasion, recipients would throw rocks, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers, and ripped-out phones. Due to these tactics, social workers were essentially forced to enroll every recipient they encountered. Their approach evoked Black Power protest campaigns and the uprisings of the mid-1960s sentiment. More significant, welfare enrollment increased exponentially and more than doubled from 4.3 million to 10.8 million for households of single parents between 1965 and 1974. The major push from the NWRO was to grant welfare recipients additional monies. Initially Wiley suggested that households with four or more children be given $5,500 annually in government support. By the end of the campaign, Wiley was demanding that the government grant families $6,500 in financial assistance. Neither increase would come to fruition. Instead, the NWRO’s victory came in the form of pushing more families to apply for welfare. The large number of enrollments proved to be too much for the government to sustain, ultimately reaching in the tens of billions of dollars. Overall, the financial demands were so overwhelming that the U.S. government almost declared bankruptcy. Although the NWRO did not successfully carry out its mission to empty government funding at the federal level, the campaign did prove successful at the state level. In 1965, John Lindsay of New York City was elected mayor. Lindsay, often seen as a liberal Republican, would unknowingly assist the NWRO with its efforts. Because of Lindsay’s willingness and determination to promote Civil Rights, he readily gave in to the demands of the NWRO. After he was elected into office, welfare enrollment increased from 12 percent from the previous year to 55 percent prior to his election. By the 1970s there were almost as many people working in New York City as there were citizens receiving welfare. By 1975 New York City was forced to file for bankruptcy due to overspending, which was prompted by funneling funds to families receiving government assistance. Shortly thereafter the NWRO proved incapable of handling its own financial affairs. Mismanagement of funds and insufficient financial contributions caused many problems for the organization. In addition to financial problems, the NWRO found that the public was becoming irritated with its violent tactics. Furthermore, Wiley was scrutinized for his position on poverty, because he too had been raised in a middle-class family. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter the NWRO underwent major changes and was unable to sustain itself, even after its successes with increasing enrollment and participation. Wiley resigned from his position at the NWRO on January 31, 1972, in order to begin work on a new project, the



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Movement for Economic Justice, which was similar to the NWRO in regard to its objective to fight for income redistribution. However, losing Wiley did not immediately damage the NWRO. The new leader of the organization was a highly dynamic female activist and writer named Johnnie Tillman. Tillman, who has been compared to the likes of Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks, was chosen after publishing her most notable work, “Welfare Is a Woman’s Issue,” a widely read essay published in 1972 by Ms magazine. Under Tillman’s leadership NWRO feminist sensibilities and gender critique of Black Power–era politics was exposed. In her essay, Tillman compared welfare to “a super-sexist marriage” where the welfare recipient ended up trading “in a man for the man. But you can’t divorce him if he treats you bad.” In March 1975 the NWRO closed its doors and permanently shut down. Although the NWRO’s feat was relatively short-lived, there is evidence of its impact in other organizations that developed during its time as well as those that sprang up shortly thereafter. The franchised-styled model developed by the NWRO, which allows for individuals from multiple communities all across the nation to function cooperatively, is one that similar organizations and public interest research groups have adopted and still use today. One of the most recognizable companies to use this particular structure is undoubtedly the Associations of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). ACORN was established in 1970 by NWRO organizer Wade Rathke, who served directly under Wiley for 37 years and was able to translate what he learned as an activist for welfare recipients into leading ACORN. In fact, ACORN had more than 500,000 due-paying families registered in more than 100 cities throughout the United States. Nonetheless, the NWRO would prove to be resilient and reemerged under a different name. On June 30, 1987, the NWRO was revamped and became the National Welfare Rights Union (NWRU). Since its beginning, it has served to assist and fight for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised. The NWRU has offices located throughout the country and is partnered with many similar entities. The headquarters for the NWRU is located in Detroit, Michigan. Its objective is to address what the NWRU refers to as nationalization. A statement released by the NWRU defines nationalization as follows: “The opposite of privatization is nationalization. But we are not referring to the nationalization that the government is now using to bail out the financial corporations, (i.e. where we pay for their problems and where the rich people get the benefits.) We are calling for nationalization where the government takes control over the big corporations, runs them in our interests, and where we get the benefits. All of the rewards from the programs are turned back into society. The rich have no solution to the crisis. We need to take action for us. We need programs in place that eliminate poverty in this county.” The NWRU has a list of eight specific tenets that outline the organization’s goals: (1) a guaranteed annual income and the nationalization of the food industry;

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(2) universal health care with a single payee; (3) nationalization of child care; (4) nationalization of education, including the Head Start program; (5) nationalization of utilities; (6) nationalization of housing; (7) nationalization of public mass transit; and (8) troop withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan with no new deployments. Idrissa N. Snider See also: Black Economic Union; National Black Economic Development Confer­ ence and the Black Manifesto; Reparations Further Reading Balis, Lawrence Neil. 1974. Bread or Justice: Grass Roots in the Welfare Movement. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Kornbluh, Felicia. 2007. The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nakesen, Premilla. 2004. Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movements in the United States. New York: Routledge. Nick, Kots. 1977. A Passion for Equality: George Wiley and the Movement. New York: Norton. Orleck, Annelise. 2005. Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty. Boston: Beacon, 2005. Tillman, Johnnie. 1976. “Welfare Is a Woman’s Issue.” America’s Working Woman: A Documentary History 1600: 355–358. Valk, Anne M. 2000. “‘Mother Power’: The Movement for Welfare Rights in Washington, DC, 1966–1972.” Journal of Women’s History 11(4): 34–58.

Nation of Islam The Nation of Islam (NOI) is one of the most enduring Black Power organizations of the 20th century. Founded in 1930 by W. D. Fard Muhammad in Detroit, Michigan, the NOI advocated for freedom, justice, and equality for Black people. For the NOI freedom, justice, and equal opportunity meant a separate nation within a nation for Blacks. Its goals included promoting Black love and unity (love thyself), economic independence (do for self), self-knowledge, and personal development (know thyself). Though widely known for what many described as antiwhite, anti-Christian, and anti-American rhetoric, the NOI overwhelmingly challenged long-held notions of white superiority and Black inferiority and promoted Black pride and self-determination. The organization rose to national eminence in the late 1950s and 1960s under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad. The NOI’s founding leader, W. D. Fard Muhammad, disappeared sometime in 1934, leaving the NOI in the hands of his student and one of his top ministers,



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The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan speaking in front of the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) banner. He revived the NOI after its previous leader changed the organ­ ization’s religious nationalist orientation. (Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge)

Elijah Muhammad (formerly Elijah Poole). Although there was some dispute over the leadership by local Detroit members, Elijah Muhammad and his wife Clara successfully took charge of the burgeoning organization from the mid-1930s to the 1970s. With Elijah Muhammad’s guidance, the NOI appealed to inmates in prison and led efforts to reduce Black recidivism. One inmate, Malcolm Little, converted to the NOI in 1948. He changed his name to Malcolm X. According to the NOI’s ideology, Black people’s given names represented their slave past; thus, members of the NOI often relinquished their surnames and adopted an “X” to symbolize the shedding of former slave masters’ names. According to Prophet Elijah Muhammad, Black Americans were a distinct people who had lost their true identity during slavery. In his book Message to the Blackman in America (1965), Muhammad suggested that Blacks needed to reclaim their identity and their original names, which the NOI would provide to each individual in due time. With Malcolm X as its spokesperson, the organization received national attention after he appeared on a local New York television show, The Hate That Hate Produced, which alerted white Americans to Black nationalist thought and ideology. As national spokesman, Malcolm X helped to recruit members and establish or revive more than 60 temples (later called mosques) in major cities throughout the United States, including Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Newark, and San Francisco. During and before the Black Power Movement and in large part due to Malcolm X’s prominence, the organization’s membership grew into hundreds of thousands.

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The NOI was known as a religious militant organization, but with Malcolm’s political acumen, the organization tackled major issues impacting Black urban residents, including police brutality. While Civil Rights organizations pushed for integration, the NOI viewed that goal as an illusory solution to the problems impacting Black Americans that failed to alleviate issues such as poverty, joblessness, police brutality, and de facto segregation. Black Muslims’ critique of the goals and tactics of the Civil Rights Movement resonated with many northern Blacks. Still, Elijah Muhammad increasingly sought to move the organization away from the political medley of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. In 1960, Malcolm X founded the newspaper Muhammad Speaks. It was the most widely read Black-owned newspaper in America and had a circulation of 600,000. Black nationalist ideology filled its pages and influenced the political thought of thousands of its readers who appreciated its international perspective. Moreover, Muhammad Speaks offered a powerful critique of colonialism and advocated anti-imperialism and other philosophies that would characterize the Black Power Movement. For many readers, Muhammad Speaks provided coverage of world affairs and introduced radical African leaders and the African struggle for liberation to young Black people across the country. Finally, the Muslim Program was featured in every single issue of the newspaper, presenting the social and economic demands for all Black people to its readers. The demands “What the Muslims Want” consisted of 10 points, included equality of employment and education, the freeing of Black prisoners, elimination of all attempts to integrate with whites, Black control of Black institutions, and a separate land or territory. These demands became the basis of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense’s 10-point program. As the largest African American Muslim movement in the United States, the NOI advocated self-determination, economic independence, and community control. During its founding, the NOI established its own school system—the Mu­ hammad University of Islam—that was later renamed Sister Clara Muhammad Schools. These schools in their earliest formations were the ideological predecessors to the Afrocentric and Black nationalist independent education movements of the 1960s. Clara Muhammad, wife of Elijah Muhammad, was its first teacher and helped to run the school. Despite its name, the university was actually an elementary and secondary school serving the Black community of Detroit. Clara Muhammad also helped to establish the Muslim Girls Training Schools, which provided education for NOI children. Though not every city could boast of a full-time school, most offered youth training and development through their junior Fruit of Islam and Muslim Girls and Training & General Civilization classes. The instruction received in these classes sought to prepare young men and women for the responsibilities of community and family life as well as play a key role in the development of the NOI such as doctors, scientists, architects, and



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entrepreneurs. While young boys at an early age sold papers and fish to inculcate them with an entrepreneurial spirit, women were schooled in the science of domestic affairs and other important skills to help them to become contributing members. The NOI found success in several Black Power initiatives. Its most effective venture was the economic program, which encompassed Muslim restaurants and control of farms, grocery stores, bakeries, and an import business with Peru called H&G Whiting. Health was crucial to the group. Muslims were instructed on “how to eat to live,” receiving detailed teachings in food selection and preparation. Nation members were cautioned about overeating and were encouraged to eat only once per day. Their health regimen sought to address issues that plagued the wider Black community such as high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. Additionally, the NOI was successful in not only recruiting and reforming former criminals but also in reducing drug and alcohol abuse among its members. The NOI helped develop some of the most influential Black leaders of the 20th century, including Malcolm X (national spokesman for the NOI from 1959 to 1964), Clara Muhammad (the first woman to lead the NOI, from 1942 to 1945), Louis Farrakhan (national spokesman from 1964 to 1975), and Muhammad Ali, formerly Cassius Clay (NOI minister and heavyweight champion of the world). Ali was drawn to the NOI as an amateur boxer in 1958 and joined three years later. After his well-publicized fight with Sonny Liston and winning the heavyweight championship, Ali announced his membership with the NOI. Ali’s political stance undoubtedly was shaped by his membership in the NOI. The NOI changed leadership several times throughout its history. While W. D. Fard established the organization in 1930, Elijah and Clara Muhammad actually expanded and further developed the movement from 1934 to its apex in 1975. Though Malcolm X helped to recruit members and establish mosques, his role as national spokesman with the group ended in 1964. After being suspended from the NOI, he worried that he would not be allowed back into the organization, prompting him to publicly distance himself from the movement. In April 1964 he would establish two independent groups: the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity and a religious haven for those who sided with him in his rift with the NOI called the Muslim Mosque, Inc. Although some scholars suggest that Malcolm X was positioned to replace Elijah Muhammad, he never led the organization. Clara Muhammad died in 1972, and Elijah Muhammad died in 1975. When Elijah Muhammad passed away in February 1975, the NOI leadership and mission would again shift under its new leader, W. D. Muhammad, the seventh child of Clara and Elijah Muhammad. Although Elijah Muhammad did not personally appoint his son, who had been suspended several times from the organization from the 1960s to 1970s, W. D. Muhammad would be seen as the most likely

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candidate to lead the group into its next stage of development. On February 26, 1975, at the annual Saviour’s Day convention, Muhammad was dubbed the new supreme leader. Given his study in Egypt, his fluency in Arabic, his time as a minister in Philadelphia, and his propensity for a more orthodox Islam that was more inclusive, Muhammad would move the NOI in a new direction, placing less emphasis on racial pride and economic uplift and more weight on Quranic mastery and assimilating the group into the wider Islamic society. Though the NOI morphed into the World Community of Al Islam in the West in the 1970s and then the American Muslim Mission in the 1980s, the sociopolitical platform of the NOI would continue in the reconstituted NOI under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan in 1979. Former minister Louis Farrakhan, who left the NOI a few years after W. D. Muhammad’s ascension, felt that the movement had lost its way and sought to reclaim Elijah Muhammad’s legacy. Though most members of the NOI remained with Muhammad, several members left to establish their own organizations. John Muhammad, younger brother of Elijah Muhammad, started another NOI in Detroit, Michigan, and Silis Muhammad launched the Lost Found Nation of Islam. Jeremiah Shabazz and John Ali created the NOI Council of Elders. Although Farrakhan’s NOI started off like these other splinter groups, his former “position as the National Spokesman for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and his obvious gifts as a minister enabled him to soon outflank, outrank, and out-recruit all of his competitors” (Jeffries 2014, 26). Thus, Farrakhan was able to assume the historical moniker (discarded by W. D. Muhammad) of the original NOI, claiming it for his community. Because of Farrakhan’s leadership, the NOI remains one of the largest and most outspoken Black nationalists groups today with a following throughout the United States and abroad. Farrakhan’s leadership brought together an estimated 1 million Black men in 1995 for the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. This event and his Black college tour from 2012 to 2014 demonstrates the importance of his Black nationalist message and by proxy the NOI’s programs even in the 21st century. Religion was very important to NOI followers. Although scholars disagree on the extent to which NOI members practiced Islam, NOI members were Muslims. They embraced Islamic principles that encouraged regular prayer, charity, and fasting, and some completed hajj prior to the 1970s. Their dress, though uniquely African American in design, was emblematic of the modesty required by Islamic doctrine. Women’s attire included long dresses and smocks with pantaloons as well as head coverings that included scarves and fezzes specifically designed for women. Men could generally be recognized by their dark suits, white shirts, bow ties, and later the unique uniform designs of blue, white, and red. Moreover, according to historian Richard Brent Turner, the NOI managed the largest Arabic school in the United States prior to the 1970s. Elijah Muhammad sent both of his sons, Akbar Muhammad and W. D. Muhammad, in addition to other Muslim



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youths to Egypt to study Arabic in the 1950s and 1960s. Sister Roslyn, one of the young people who studied in Egypt, would return and teach Arabic to students at the Muhammad University of Islam in Chicago in the 1960s. For more than six decades the NOI helped to define a Black Power agenda in the United States. Although the NOI has evolved since the 1930s, its mission remains committed to those characteristics that came to symbolize Black Power in the late 1960s and 1970s: self-pride, self-knowledge, and economic development. Bayyinah S. Jeffries See also: Ali, Muhammad; Black Panther Party; Malcolm X Further Reading Alexander, E. Curtis. 1981. Elijah Muhammad on African American Education: A Guide for African and Black Studies Programs. New York: ECA Associates. Clegg, Andrew Claude. 1997. An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad. New York: St. Martin’s. Curtis, Edward E. 2006. Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Jackson, Sherman. 2005. Islam and the Blackamerican. New York: Oxford University Press. Jeffries, Bayyinah S. 2014. A Nation Can Rise No Higher Than Its Women: African American Muslim Women in the Movement for Black Self-Determination, 1950–1975. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Karim, Jamilah, and Dawn-Marie Gibson. 2014. Women of the Nation: Between Black Protest and Sunni Islam. New York: NYU Press. Pitre, Abul. 2007. The Educational Philosophy of Elijah Muhammad: Education for a New World. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Ross, Rosetta E. 2003. Witnessing & Testifying: Black Women, Religion and Civil Rights. Minneapolis: Fortress. Turner, Richard Brent. 1997. Islam in the African-American Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Neal, Larry (1937–1981) Larry Neal was a revolutionary, playwright, poet, and cultural critic. Along with Askia Toure, Amiri Baraka, and others, Neal was a prominent leader of the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Lawrence Paul Neal was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and his family eventually moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Following his graduation from high school, Neal attended and graduated from Lincoln University with a degree in English and history and pursued graduate

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studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He would go on to receive awards from the Guggenheim Fellowship, teach at several educational institutions, and serve as an administrator for the arts to promote creative expression for African Americans in Washington, D.C. Neal’s intellectual formation was heavily influenced by the vision of Malcolm X, Black radical politics, and the arts. Neal believed that Malcolm X shaped the ideas of many other artists and radicals of his generation by his thoughtful and creative advocacy of Black Power, Black pride, and self-determination. Neal also motivated artists to emphasize the Black working class as well as poor and young people in their work. Malcolm X argued for the necessity for African Americans to revise their worldview, especially regarding whites, in order to understand their contemporary social, political, spiritual, and economic position (Breitman 1965). Neal agreed with Malcolm X: “The cultural values inherent in western history must be either radicalized or destroyed and we may even find that radicalization is impossible” (Neal 1968). Neal also embraced Malcolm X’s concept of Black nationalism, which redefined the objectives of the Black community by encouraging mass political mobilization following his departure from the Nation of Islam (NOI) and founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), recognizing that African Americans needed to link their human rights struggle with the international sphere (Breitman 1965). Prior to Malcolm’s assassination by members of the NOI, he was developing a coherent approach for African people to begin to conceptually organize around the ideas of culture, politics, and economics. Malcolm’s ideas were later adopted by organizations such as the Us organization and its leader, Maulana Karenga, focusing on the cultural aspects outlined by Malcolm and the OAAU. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (BPP) and adopted the radical aspect of Malcolm’s ideas concerning the need for self-defense and armed struggle. These aspects of the vision and life of Malcolm X also influenced Neal and the Black Arts Movement. The famed poet Amiri Baraka referred to Neal as the “Spiritual Leader” of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) (Collins and Crawford 2006, 7; Neal 1968, 29). Neal believed that BAM was the “cultural wing” or “aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power” of the Black liberation movement in America and existed to provide a “vision” that was a “necessary component of a successful social revolution” (Collins and Crawford 2006, 7). Neal’s beliefs were demonstrated by his interaction with radical elements of the Black liberation movement such as the BPP and the Revolutionary Action Movement. In 1965, Neal and Baraka were the cofounders of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem New York. The theater became well known for its stage plays, poetry, music, and concerts. The institution also provided tutelage in various forms of art and culture. Neal was the proponent of a Black aesthetic and urged Black artists and creative intellectuals to reconceive their African American audiences and free themselves from Eurocentric standards



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of expression that reflected “black realities” and intersected with “liberation struggles throughout the world” (Collins and Crawford 2006, 8). Neal also spoke to the merging of Black Power and Black Arts in his statement “the political values inherent in the Black Power concept are now finding concrete expression in the aesthetics of Afro-American dramatists, poets, choreographers, musicians and novelists” (Neal 1968). Neal developed several collections of poetry that reflected Black folklore and speech patterns in works such as Black Boogaloo: Notes on Black Literature (1969) and Hoodo Hollerin’ Bebop Ghosts (1971). Literary institutions such as the New York Times and The Partisan review featured his work. However, in the literary sphere Neal was best known for his coedited anthology with Amiri Baraka titled Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968), which included the works of cultural icons and theoreticians such as John Henrik Clarke, Sonia Sanchez, Stokely Carmichael, and James Stewart. Equally noted is Neal’s important manifesto “The Black Arts Movement,” which was the ideological blueprint for BAM. Furthermore, Neal’s work sought to ground the African American creative experience in a social context that ranged from precolonial Africa to contemporary blues and jazz. Neal was also a featured writer for Liberator magazine and coedited, along with A. B. Spellman and Baraka, the magazine Cricket (Neal 1989). Prior to his death in 1981, Neal had written for an anthology on Zora Neal Hurston and was preparing to develop an autobiography on the jazz musician Max Roach. The cultural critic Stanley Crouch noted that Neal was still evolving his literary talent at the time of his death, navigating his vision into an original uniquely African American aesthetic perspective that avoided the mechanical view of Marxism and the angry, crude essentialism of racialized nationalism that debilitated the gifts of many writers (Neal 1989). Yet, Neal’s ultimate contribution to the African American arts tradition in the United States was the recognition that the culture of a people should be reflected in their institutions and passed on to future generations. Reynaldo Anderson See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Arts Movement; Karenga, Maulana; Malcolm X; Revolutionary Action Movement; Sanchez, Sonia; Toure, Askia Further Reading Baraka, I. A., ed. 1969. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, Vol. 220. New York: William Morrow. Breitman, G. 1965. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. New York: Grove. Collins, L. G., and M. N. Crawford. 2006. New Thoughts on the Black Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Neal, L. 1968. “The Black Arts Movement.” Drama Review: 29–39.

568 | Newton, Huey P. (1942–1989) Neal, L. 1969. “Black Boogaloo: Notes on Black Liberation.” Journal of Black Poetry Press 1(1). Neal, L. 1974. Hoodoo Hollerin’ Bebop Ghosts. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Neal, L. 1989. Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings. Edited by M. Schwartz. New York: Thunder’s Mouth.

Newton, Huey P. (1942–1989) Huey P. Newton was the author and/or coauthor of five books as well as scores of articles. His most important works are his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide (1973) and his treatise To Die for the People (1972). Newton’s writings serve the following purposes: they provide a chronological account of his childhood and the journey to his political awakening; they offer insights into the history, origins, and inner workings of the Black Panther Party (BPP); they give the reader an idea of his perspective on the pressing issues of the day; they debunk myths and disabuse people of misunderstandings about the BPP, perhaps the most misunderstood organization of that era; and they help raise people’s consciousness. Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, on February 17, 1942, the son of a Baptist minister and the youngest of seven children. He was named after Louisiana governor Huey P. Long Jr., one of the state’s most popular figures and one of the country’s most colorful politicians. Governor Long had impressed Newton’s father with his propensity for bringing about programs that benefited Blacks: free books for schools in Black areas and road and bridge construction projects that provided Blacks with jobs. Biographer T. Harry Williams wrote that Long was the first southern mass leader to leave aside race-baiting and appeals to the goldmisted past and address himself to the social and economic concerns of his people. Two years after Newton was born, his father left the family and traveled to California in search of wartime employment. He eventually landed a job at the Oakland Naval Supply Depot. Not long after, the entire Newton family moved from Louisiana and settled in Oakland. By all accounts, Newton’s parents provided a loving home for him and his siblings. As the baby of the family, Newton received more than his share of attention. Newton’s mother, a homemaker, was particularly attentive. A good kid, Newton was no different than the typical Black child growing up in Oakland. He of course enjoyed playing the typical kid games. Newton also idolized his older brothers and his father and adored his doting mother. As Newton got older, he found it difficult to resist the allure of Oakland’s seductive streets. He started pitching pennies, shooting craps, and committing minor



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In this 1971 photo, Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton arrives at the Alameda County Courthouse for the start of his third trial. He was charged with the fatal shooting of an Oakland policeman in 1967. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

crimes. While in junior high school, Newton and another youth formed a gang called the Brotherhood to, according to Newton, protect themselves from racist students, faculty, and administrators at school. According to Newton, both white staff members and students called Black people “niggers” regularly, thus fomenting both a tense and hostile atmosphere. Although Newton may not have fully grasped the insidious nature of the word, he knew enough to know that it was derogatory and that its usage often led to fights between Blacks and whites. He was often kicked out of class because he refused to allow himself to be disrespected by either students or school officials. Newton’s refuge became the streets. He spent almost as much time on the streets as he did in school. By his accounts, he was suspended from high school anywhere from 30 to 40 times. An incident during Newton’s high school days had a profound impact on the way he would come to view the world. Hurrying to get students into the shower one day, the white gym teacher ignorantly shouted “Last one into the shower is a nigger baby!” Black and white students alike ran for the shower except Newton. Shocked, he stopped in his tracks, fighting to compose himself, and then walked slowly to the shower. He held his temper but never forgot the incident, which, he says, opened his eyes to a widespread pattern of racism in society. In his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, Newton wrote poignantly about his experience as a student in the Oakland public school system. According to Newton, none of his

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teachers taught him anything relevant to his own life or experience, and none of them ever awoke in him a desire to question or explore the worlds of science, literature, and history. In fact, they nearly robbed him of his sense of self-worth and almost killed any desire to aspire to be anything in life (Newton 1973). Newton maintained that by the time he entered his senior year in high school he was a functional illiterate. His brother Melvin was shocked and disgusted when he learned that his brother could not pronounce easy words, which hurt Newton. He had been hurt many times in fights, but nothing matched the pain he felt because he was unable to read. So, Newton decided to challenge himself. He wanted to learn to read for two reasons. First, he associated reading with being an adult. Second, he wanted to read so that he could go to college and prove his high school counselor wrong. The counselor who was convinced that Newton was not college material based his conclusion on the 74 that Newton scored on an IQ test— considerably lower than the average score of 100 and a score indicating a borderline mental deficiency. After much painstaking work Newton became a voracious reader, and a completely new world opened up to him. When he reached this point, he collected books and read one after another. In his autobiography, Newton recalls how his undetected illiteracy may have actually helped him rather than hindered him. He reasoned that his mind was not cluttered and locked by the programming of the system; therefore, he could view matters in an entirely different light. What he had read in books led him to question, to think, to explore, and finally to redirect his life. In 1966, Huey Newton enrolled in Merritt Junior College in Oakland. While there he joined the Afro-American Association and helped create the school’s first Black history course. In college Newton developed his analytical and critical thinking skills; he also became politically and socially conscious. Attuned to the harsh realities of Black life, he began to realize that most campus organizations were irrelevant outside the university walls and that there were few organizations in the Bay Area willing to address racism head-on, especially that which the Oakland Police Department was guilty of. Hence, in 1966 Newton along with Bobby G. Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, with Newton as the group’s minister of defense and Seale as its chairman. Upon establishing the organization, Newton and Seale set out to learn what local residents believed they needed and wanted. Consequently, Newton and Seale drew up a questionnaire and surveyed as many people as they could. To their surprise, they found that people’s number-one concern was police brutality, concerns there not unwarranted. However, Newton and Seale had anticipated that people would be most concerned with unemployment, inadequate housing, and/ or lack of health care. Still, Newton and Seale knew all too well the havoc that the Oakland Police Department wreaked in the Black neighborhoods of Oakland. Arguing that the police had to be stopped from harassing Oakland’s



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Black community, Newton and Seale instituted as one of the first items on the BPP’s agenda patrolling the police. Familiar with the California penal code and the state’s laws regarding weapons, Newton armed his fellow Panthers with not only guns but also cameras, tape recorders, and a copy of the state constitution to ensure the safety of motorists and pedestrians when stopped by police officers. Not long after putting the police patrols in place, California legislators, spearheaded by state senator Don Mulford, passed a bill that prohibited the carrying of firearms within residential and incorporated areas, thus rendering the Panthers’ police patrols ineffective. Not one to accept this type of repression, Newton sent Seale and a delegation of Panthers to the state capitol to protest the passing of the bill. The event garnered national attention and made the BPP a household name almost overnight. In addition to patrolling the police, the Panthers later created an array of community survival programs designed to improve poor people’s lives such as the Free Breakfast Program, the Free Busing to Prisons Program, and free health clinics, to name a few. When some within the BPP believed that the BPP would be better served by escalating the revolution by violent means, Newton believed that it was best to meet the needs of the people. In Newton’s mind, a revolution could only be launched by the people. And in order for the people to launch a revolution, their consciousness had to be raised. Newton viewed the community survival programs as a means of sustenance for poor residents and a vehicle through which to raise people’s consciousness. Only when people’s consciousness is raised will they start to move politically. Newton was one of the most controversial activists of the 20th century. His public visibility and controversial positions led to multiple confrontations with law enforcement, including an altercation that left a police officer dead and Newton wounded. On the other side, Newton’s work captured the attention of national and international leaders such as Premier Zhou Enlai of China. Despite Newton’s notoriety, little of substance is known about this much-maligned Black Power leader. According to James Baldwin, Newton was one of the most important people produced by the American chaos. Yet so few in America know anything about him. Many who followed Newton or who were frightened of him had seen the famous poster of him wearing a leather jacket and a beret with a spear in one hand and a rifle in the other. In 1980 Newton earned a PhD in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California in Santa Cruz. In 1989 he was shot to death by Tyrone Robinson—a member of the Black Guerilla Family—over drugs in the same streets that saw the rise of the BPP more than 20 years earlier. Judson L. Jeffries See also: Black Panther Party; Police Brutality; Seale, Bobby

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Further Reading Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo Martin. 2013. Black against Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hilliard, David, and Donald Wiese, ed. 2002. The Huey P. Newton Reader. New York: Seven Stories. Jeffries, Judson L. 2002. Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist Jackson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Murch, Donna. 2010. Living for the City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Newton, Huey P. 1972. To Die for the People. New York: Random House. Newton, Huey P. 1973. Revolutionary Suicide. New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich. Seale, Bobby. 1970. Seize the Time. New York: Random House.

Primary Document Huey Newton, “In Defense of Self-Defense,” 1967 In the summer of 1967 Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, published a series of essays in the Black Panther newspaper. In these essays, Newton put forward the kind of politics and plan that would galvanize millions of Black people into action. In “In Defense of SelfDefense” (a two-part essay), he argues that Black people united, armed, and organized can defeat the American empire. Like many of his contemporaries, he linked the struggle for liberation in the Black American community with anticolonial struggles around the world. Drawing on the writing of Mao Zedong, Newton argued that the “gun” was a basic tool of liberation, one that Blacks should fully and strategically embrace. Newton concludes that to obtain freedom and peace for Black people and to achieve true justice for all oppressed people, armed self-defense against the U.S. empire was absolutely necessary. Men were not created in order to obey laws. Laws are created to obey men. They are established by men and should serve men. The laws and rules which officials inflict upon poor people prevent them from functioning harmoniously in society. There is no disagreement about this function of law in any circle the disagreement arises from the question of which men laws are to serve. Such lawmakers ignore the fact that it is the duty of the poor and unrepresented to



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construct rules and laws that serve their interests better. Rewriting unjust laws is a basic human right and fundamental obligation. Before 1776 America was a British colony. The British Government had certain laws and rules that the colonized Americans rejected as not being in their best interests. In spite of the British conviction that Americans had no right to establish their own laws to promote the general welfare of the people living here in America, the colonized immigrant felt he had no choice but to raise the gun to defend his welfare. Simultaneously he made certain laws to ensure his protection from external and internal aggressions, from other governments, and his own agencies. One such form of protection was the Declaration of Independence, which states: “. . . whenever any government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” Now these same colonized White people, these bondsmen, paupers, and thieves deny the colonized Black man not only the right to abolish this oppressive system, but to even speak of abolishing it. Having carried this madness and cruelty to the four corners of the earth, there is now universal rebellion against their continued rule and power. But as long as the wheels of the imperialistic war machine are turning, there is no country that can defeat this monster of the West. It is our belief that the Black people in America are the only people who can free the world, loosen the yoke of colonialism, and destroy the war machine. Black people who are within the machine can cause it to malfunction. They can, because of their intimacy with the mechanism, destroy the engine that is enslaving the world. America will not be able to fight every Black country in the world and fight a civil war at the same time. It is militarily impossible to do both of these things at once. The slavery of Blacks in this country provides the oil for the machinery of war that America uses to enslave the peoples of the world. Without this oil the machinery cannot function. We are the driving shaft; we are in such a strategic position in this machinery that, once we become dislocated, the functioning of the remainder of the machinery breaks down. Penned up in the ghettos of America, surrounded by his factories and all the physical components of his economic system, we have been made into “the wretched of the earth,” relegated to the position of spectators while the White racists run their international con game on the suffering peoples. We have been brainwashed to believe that we are powerless and that there is nothing we can do for ourselves to bring about a speedy liberation for our people. We have

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been taught that we must please our oppressors, that we are only ten percent of the population, and therefore must confine our tactics to categories calculated not to disturb the sleep of our tormentors. The power structure inflicts pain and brutality upon the peoples and then provides controlled outlets for the pain in ways least likely to upset them, or interfere with the process of exploitation. The people must repudiate the established channels as tricks and deceitful snares of the exploiting oppressors. The people must oppose everything the oppressor supports, and support everything that he opposes. If Black people go about their struggle for liberation in the way that the oppressor dictates and sponsors, then we will have degenerated to the level of groveling flunkies for the oppressor himself. When the oppressor makes a vicious attack against freedom-fighters because of the way that such freedom-fighters choose to go about their liberation, then we know we are moving in the direction of our liberation. The racist dog oppressors have no rights which oppressed Black people are bound to respect. As long as the racist dogs pollute the earth with the evil of their actions, they do not deserve any respect at all, and the “rules” of their game, written in the people’s blood, are beneath contempt. The oppressor must be harassed until his doom. He must have no peace by day or by night. The slaves have always outnumbered the slavemasters. The power of the oppressor rests upon the submission of the people. When Black people really unite and rise up in all their splendid millions, they will have the strength to smash injustice. We do not understand the power in our numbers. We are millions and millions of Black people scattered across the continent and throughout the Western Hemisphere. There are more Black people in America than the total population of many countries now enjoying full membership in the United Nations. They have power and their power is based primarily on the fact that they are organized and united with each other. They are recognized by the powers of the world. We, with all our numbers, are recognized by no one. In fact, we do not even recognize our own selves. We are unaware of the potential power latent in our numbers. In 1967, in the midst of a hostile racist nation whose hidden racism is rising to the surface at a phenomenal speed, we are still so blind to our critical fight for our very survival that we are continuing to function in petty, futile ways. Divided, confused, fighting among ourselves, we are still in the elementary stage of throwing rocks, sticks, empty wine bottles and beer cans at racist police who lie in wait for a chance to murder unarmed Black people. The racist police have worked out a system for suppressing these spontaneous rebellions that flare up from the anger, frustration, and desperation of the masses of Black



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people. We can no longer afford the dubious luxury of the terrible casualties wantonly inflicted upon us by the police during these rebellions. Black people must now move, from the grass roots up through the perfumed circles of the Black bourgeoisie, to seize by any means necessary a proportionate share of the power vested and collected in the structure of America. We must organize and unite to combat by long resistance the brutal force used against us daily. The power structure depends upon the use of force within retaliation. This is why they have made it a felony to teach guerrilla warfare. This is why they want the people unarmed. The racist dog oppressors fear the armed people; they fear most of all Black people armed with weapons and the ideology of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If a government is not afraid of the people it will arm the people against foreign aggression. Black people are held captive in the midst of their oppressors. There is a world of difference between thirty million unarmed submissive Black people and thirty million Black people armed with freedom, guns, and the strategic methods of liberation. When a mechanic wants to fix a broken-down car engine, he must have the necessary tools to do the job. When the people move for liberation they must have the basic tool of liberation: the gun. Only with the power of the gun can the Black masses halt the terror and brutality directed against them by the armed racist power structure; and in one sense only by the power of the gun can the whole world be transformed into the earthly paradise dreamed of by the people from time immemorial. One successful practitioner of the art and science of national liberation and self-defense, Brother Mao Tse-tung, put it this way: “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.” The blood, sweat, tears and suffering of Black people are the foundations of the wealth and power of the United States of America. We were forced to build America, and if forced to, we will tear it down. The immediate result of this destruction will be suffering and bloodshed. But the end result will be the perpetual peace for all mankind. Source: Huey Newton, “In Defense of Self Defense” (1967), reprinted in Huey P. Newton, The Huey P. Newton Reader (New York: Seven Stories, 2011), 134–137.

O Obadele, Gaidi (Milton Henry) (1919–2006) Gaidi Obadele was a nationalist, attorney, and minister who championed the civil and human rights of African people in America. With his younger brother Imari Obadele (b. Richard Henry), he was a leading force in the formation of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa, which sought reparations and self-determination by way of secession from the United States, claiming five states in the Black Belt region as the national territory of the descendants of enslaved Africans. A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Obadele was the eldest of eight brothers and four sisters raised in a tight-knit working-class household. His urban upbringing occurred at a time when Black families diligently strove for racial uplift through positive examples and professional accomplishments. Obadele’s father, a postal worker for 43 years, like many Black people during the 1920s and 1930s saw education as the major vehicle to success toward group elevation and access into mainstream American society. The Henry family was recognized in the 1950s by the National Urban League as the Detroit “Family of the Year” (Davenport 2015).

Education and Military During his formative years, Obadele adhered closely to integrationist aspirations. He enrolled in Temple University, but his education was disrupted with the outbreak of World War II, when he enthusiastically joined many Black people in enlisting in the military as an expression of American patriotism. He signed up with the majority white U.S. Army Air Corps, serving with the segregated but historically celebrated 99th Pursuit Squadron, otherwise known as the Tuskegee Airmen. The 99th Squadron was the first group of Black soldiers to be trained to serve in military air combat. The Black airmen were initially stationed at Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama, until racism within the corps resulted in their transfer to Moton Field, a segregated off-campus training base at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). At Tuskegee, they acquired a wide range of training that included “pilots, navigators, bombardiers, maintenance and support staff, instructors, and all the personnel who kept the planes and pilots in the air” (Tuskegee Airman, Inc. n.d.). Obadele was able to acquire training as a radio operator, an interest he possessed since his early youth.

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Despite his mild-mannered upbringing, Obadele began to break out of the accommodationist mold that characterized much of his generation as he continually resisted the widespread racism and segregation he faced in the air corps. While earning rank as an officer, he was never accorded the respect from fellow white soldiers that his position would demand if he were a white officer. Departing from the integration playbook of quietly ignoring racism and letting his accomplishments speak for him, Obadele openly confronted the racism within the air corps and filed numerous complaints. While his military prowess with the Tuskegee Airmen was widely celebrated in the Black community, he was continually courtmartialed for resisting discrimination and was eventually discharged from the military for insubordination (Davenport 2015, 113–116). Back at home Obadele resumed his studies at Lincoln University, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in political science and physics. He later enrolled in Yale Law School, where he earned his law degree in 1950.

Entry into Politics While still a student, Obadele began his political engagement by joining the Progressive Party in the failed presidential campaign of Henry Wallace against Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey in 1948. Obadele would become the party’s vice chair in Connecticut, and in that capacity he met and was influenced by Civil Rights champions Asa Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who recruited Obadele to start a local chapter of the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation. The organization mobilized a united front of Black leaders in opposition to discrimination and segregation, which eventually led to President Truman issuing Executive Order 9981 ending legal segregation in the military. After law school Obadele moved to Pontiac, Michigan, a small suburb outside Detroit. There he began a law practice as a defense attorney, started a small restaurant, and eventually dabbled in electoral politics, serving on the Pontiac City Com­ mission (1954–1960). Obadele was greatly admired by his younger sibling, Imari, who followed him to Pontiac and was eager to support the pursuits of his elder brother, including management of the short-lived restaurant (Davenport 2015, 118). In 1960, Obadele abandoned his seat on the city commission in disillusion. He wanted to uplift Black people but became frustrated at the limitations of his political office in a society dominated by the ongoing politics of white supremacy. In an effort to regain focus and clarity of purpose, he went on a spiritual tour of several African countries, including Liberia and the recently independent nations of Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria. Greatly inspired by his tour, Obadele observed African peoples diligently endeavoring to climb out of the morass created by centuries of European invasion, conquest, and colonialism toward self-determination. It is also suspected



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that it was in Africa that he first met Malcolm X, who was also on a tour of Africa on behalf of the Nation of Islam.

GOAL When Obadele returned to the United States, his outlook began to shift further away from integration and the passive tactics of the Civil Rights Movement, which was moving into a high tide of struggle throughout the South. In 1961 he, Imari, and Reverend Albert Cleage of Detroit’s Central Congregational Church of Christ (where the Obadeles were members before it was refashioned as the Shrine of the Black Madonna Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church) launched the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), a closed-membership organization that began on a four-prong platform seeking to confront some key issues facing the Black community at that time: schools, justice, jobs, and self-help. Operating its own radio show on the newly formed FM-WGPR, Detroit’s first Black-format radio station, and through its magazine NOW!, GOAL mobilized popular support around issues pertinent to the quality of life of the Detroit-area Black community. While GOAL was a small group staking out a vanguard position, it was moderately successful in pressuring the Detroit public school district to make changes in school textbooks. Heavily influenced by the lectures of Black nationalist-oriented Muslim minister Malcolm X, GOAL was responsible for bringing Malcolm to Detroit, where he delivered two of his most potent and popular speeches: “Message to the Grass Roots” (1963) and “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964). Obadele launched the AfroAmerican Broadcasting Company, which recorded Malcolm’s speeches so they could be made widely available. The Afro-American Broadcasting Company was responsible for scheduling Malcolm to speak at the Ford Auditorium, which happened to be the day after Malcolm’s home was bombed in New York. Having become a close friend and confidant of Malcolm X, Obadele also accompanied him to Africa in 1964 to attend the second conference of the Organization of African Unity. During that conference Malcolm X, who was invited as an observer, also submitted a well-received memorandum soliciting African support for the Black struggle for human rights in the United States. Obadele was with Malcolm when he was poisoned in Egypt but returned to the United States ahead of Malcolm. Obadele was tasked with delivering messages on behalf of the esteemed Muslim leader and received postcard reports from Malcolm at each stop along the remainder of his African tour (Henry 1966).

Freedom Now Party Approaching electoral politics from a different vantage point, the ever-evolving Obadele concluded that alignment with either of the two dominant parties was not

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very auspicious for Black people. Instead of party loyalty, he was concerned with deliverables. So, when in 1962 Republican George Romney, running for governor of Michigan, approached Obadele to join and support his bid, he accepted. Romney won, Black reality remained unchanged, and the following year marked another notable development in the trajectory of the increasingly radicalized Obadele. He was actively involved in and helped spearhead two initiatives that would shift him closer to the ideological affinity he held toward Malcolm X: the organization of the Freedom Now Party and Detroit’s March for Freedom. Instead of alignment with Democrats or Republicans, Obadele deemed timely the call made by Boston journalist William Worthy for an all-Black political party. Seizing upon the Civil Rights slogan “Freedom Now,” Obadele, Cleage, and a cross section of radical activists organized the Michigan chapter of the Freedom Now Party to run candidates for state and federal office. Having slated candidates to fill a range of local, state, and federal posts, Obadele, in addition to serving as the party’s state chairperson, ran for Congress in the 14th District in a failed contest against Detroit Democrat John Conyers. Among the notable candidates were Albert Cleage for governor, Grace Boggs for secretary of state, Henry Cleage for state prosecutor, Ernest Smith for state treasurer, and Helen Nuttal Brown and Louis Cleage, both pursuing a seat on the Wayne State University Board of Governors. Malcolm X supported the push for the Freedom Now Party and was invited, while still on his African tour, to be placed on the slate of candidates. Writing about it following Malcolm’s assassination, Obadele said that “[f]or a brief moment he seemed devilishly delighted,” but Malcolm declined the opportunity, preferring to agitate against the government as an outsider. Invited by GOAL and the Freedom Now Party to speak in Detroit in April 1964, Malcolm delivered the Detroit version of his “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech: Twenty-two million Black victims of Americanism are waking up and they’re gaining a new political consciousness, becoming politically mature. And as they develop this political maturity, they’re able to see the recent trends in these political elections. They see that the whites are so evenly divided that every time they vote the race is so close they have to go back and count the votes all over again. And that means that any block, any minority that has a block of votes that stick together is in a strategic position. Either way you go, that’s who gets it. (Malcolm X 1964) The effort was a dismal failure, netting less than 1 percent of all votes statewide. Critical to the failed support for an all-Black political party was Cleage’s coleadership with Reverend C. L. Franklin. Together the men organized the overwhelmingly successful Detroit Walk to Freedom in June, only four months before the elections. In a 20th anniversary remembrance of the 1943 race riot, the Walk to



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Freedom lured 125,000 participants in a march along Woodward Avenue that featured Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as keynote speaker. To much acclaim, the integration-oriented King would deliver the first version of his well-known “I Have a Dream” speech in Detroit, which effectively undermined support for an all-Black political party. Not long after the November election, the Freedom Now Party dissolved from demoralization and internal disputes over its next steps forward. As the Obadeles and Cleages drifted apart to pursue separate agendas, GOAL too would dissolve, giving way to yet another advance in the Obadele brothers’ revolutionary orientation.

From Malcolm X Society to Nation Building One week before his assassination, Malcolm X was invited to speak in Detroit by Obadele’s Afro-American Broadcasting Corp. The night before, Malcolm’s Harlem home was firebombed in a failed assassination attempt; his entire family was inside the home. After Malcolm X was assassinated in February 1965, the Obadele brothers launched the Malcolm X Society to pick up the legacy of liberation that Malcolm represented. In 1966 Imari wrote the small book War in America: The Malcolm X Doctrine, in which he distilled the core ideas from Malcolm X into a program for liberation. Among the core ideas were the transcending of Civil Rights and the pursuit of domestic governmental intervention. Instead they championed human rights and internationalism, land and independence as criteria of nationhood, and armed self-defense against racialist attacks. By 1968, those ideas articulated by Imari would result in the who’s who of the Black liberation/Black Power Movement convening in Detroit and issuing the New Afrikan Declaration of Independence and identifying five states in the southern states as the national territory of the New Afrikan people: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The founding (provisional) governmental body of the Republic of New Africa included a wide range of luminaries in the Black liberation/Black Power Movement, including Robert F. Williams as president-in-exile (he was in China on political asylum); Obadele, who shared the two-seat office of vice president with Betty Shabazz (New York), the widow of Malcolm X; Imari Obadele (Detroit) as minister of information; Queen Mother Moore (New York) as minister of health and welfare; Herman Ferguson (New York) as minister of education; Wilbur Grattan (Cleveland) as minister of state and foreign affairs; Mwesi Chui and H. Rap Brown (Dayton, Ohio) as ministers of defense; Maulana Karenga (California), Amiri Baraka (Newark), and Nana Oserjiman Adefunmi (Detroit) as ministers of culture; Joan Franklin (New York) as minister of justice; Raymond Willis (Detroit) as minister of finance; and Max Stanford (Philadelphia) as special ambassador.

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Armed Attack on New Bethel In March 1969 at the end of the first annual Black Nation Day event held at C. L. Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist Church, Detroit police launched a violent and unprovoked armed attack on the Republic of New Africa (RNA) gathering, wounding 4 and arresting the remaining 142 New Afrikan conferees who, after shooting started, took refuge inside the church. Obadele and some of the other RNA officers had only departed minutes earlier. Four New Afrikans sustained gunshot injuries; 1 police officer was killed and another was wounded in the violent clash. Later the same year, Obadele went to China and accompanied Robert F. Williams (president-in-exile) back to the United States; by end of the year, Williams disappointed New Afrikan citizens by stepping down from his position to focus on the charges that were leveled against him from his battles against racism in Monroe, North Carolina.

To Free the Land While the work of nation building continued, the violent New Bethel raid resulted in an ideological split in the newly formed provisional government between Obadele and his brother, Imari. Obadele and some other citizens of the Republic of New Africa were opposed to activism that resulted in violence. The familial ties between Obadele and his younger brother remained strong, and they continued to work together to free the land, yet Imari would take the lead, while Gaidi would continue to lend his legal expertise to the budding liberation movement. In 1970 Imari would take the struggle directly to the national territory, relocating with a small cadre of energetic New Afrikans to Jackson, Mississippi. There they sought to buy land and begin the work of cultivating a community of nation builders in a stretch along the delta region of the Mississippi River where a high concentration of Black people lived. As a result of covert government intervention, a land purchase agreement with a Black farmer was undermined, and local law enforcement frequently harassed the New Afrikans. On August 18, 1971, a joint task force of local police and federal agents raided the two residences occupied by the New Afrikan cadre. At one of the residences the attack was violent, resulting in yet another shootout between the revolutionaries and police, resulting again in no casualties among New Afrikans but one fatality and two injuries among the police task force. Eleven New Afrikans were arrested at the end of the melee, becoming known to history as the RNA 11. Imari Obadele was one of the prisoners. As a wide range of law enforcement and counterintelligence agencies were aggressively attacking New Afrikans in Jackson, Detroit, and other cities, Gaidi Obadele brought his legal expertise to bear on the issue. With Imari, Gaidi drafted

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a legal brief to establish the basis of nationality and nationhood of New Afrikans, arguing that the U.S. government lacked jurisdiction for the attacks and charges leveled against New Afrikans under Article 3 of the U.S. Constitution. The document, known as the “Article Three Brief,” deftly used history and U.S. legal precedent to argue for not only a dismissal of charges against the RNA 11 but also recognition of the Republic of New African as a distinct nation with rights of self-determination.

Pastoral Ministry As Obadele drifted away from active political struggle, he continued to practice law and would eventually launch a Christian ministry. Shortly after Malcolm X was assassinated, Obadele wrote about his time with the slain Muslim leader and told of him once taking the Muslim oath of faith and praying five times a day while they were in Africa together. In his writing of Malcolm’s last days, Obadele revealed Malcolm’s strong sense of Christianity as a message of liberation: On the day following Malcolm’s assassination, I stated on TV that I felt Malcolm’s killing was equal to the crucifixion of Christ himself.  .  .  . In Malcolm’s [last] eleven months, he preached in the wayside, just as did Jesus and Muhammad before him. He did not write, as is the case with most traditional theologians. Yet, let us not forget, that neither did Jesus or Muhammad write. It remained the task of their apostles and followers to reduce their work to written form. Jesus needed Paul and the other documentarians, who, after the shock of his murder had worn away, in the sixty years following his death, reduced the essentials of his speaking to gospel and scriptural form. Muhammad, likewise, needed his biographers to write in the Hadith, from memory, those things he had uttered, and, for twenty years following his death, Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Hisham, and others devoted themselves to the preservation of the truths he had been given to reveal. Malcolm will have his Gospel preserved, I feel sure. After a year of solid reflection and prayer we are more certain than ever that Malcolm will in time be central to the development of a newer, fuller, and more vibrant Islam in America and to the development of a code of conduct and a strategy by which Black people, now oppressed, can become free. (Henry 1966) In 1983 after Imari and many others of the RNA 11 had been released from prison, Gaidi Obadele graduated from Ashland Theological Seminary and was pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Southfield, Michigan, until his death at age 87 in 2006. Kwasi Akwamu

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See also: Boggs, James and Grace Lee; Group on Advanced Leadership; Malcolm X; Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry); Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa Further Reading Davenport, Christian. 2015. How Social Movements Die: Repression and Demobilization of the Republic of New Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henry, Milton. 1966. New Glory Visits Malcolm X. Now! March–April. Malcolm X. 1964. “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Malcolm X, April 12, http://malcolmx files.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-ballot-or-bullet-april-12-1964.html. Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. n.d. http://www.tuskegeeairmen.org/. Umoja, Akinyele. 2013. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: New York University.

Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry) (1930–2010) Imari Abubakari Obadele, born Richard Bullock Henry on May 2, 1930, was a freedom fighter, community leader, organizer, scholar, author, and teacher. Obadele was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and had 11 siblings. As a young adult Obadele moved to Detroit, Michigan, with his older brother, attorney Milton Henry, and helped to form the Group on Advanced Leadership, a civil and economic rights organization. Inspired by the “Message to the Grass Roots” speech that Malcolm X wrote and delivered at the 1963 Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference in Detroit, Imari and Milton, also acquaintances of Malcolm, founded the Malcolm X Society. It was around this time that Milton changed his name to Gaidi Abiodun Obadele. On March 30–31 less than a week before the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Obadele brothers organized and hosted the National Black Government Conference, which was also in Detroit. At the conference hundreds of attendees, including Betty Shabazz and Queen Mother Audley Moore, discussed reparations, citizenship, and the need to establish an independent Black nation-state within the United States. There was a consensus among conference attendees that Black people were merely “paper citizens” of the United States and that their human and Civil Rights had yet to be recognized by their fellow white citizens and the U.S. government. By the end of the weekend-long conference, a constitution and a declaration of independence were created and signed that declared five states—Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana—as the national territory for the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA). Imari was elected as the provisional government’s minister of information, Robert F. Williams was elected



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president, Gaidi was first vice president, Betty Shabazz was second vice president, and Baba Oseijeman Adefunmi was elected minister of culture. Kujichagulia (self-determination) and ujamaa (cooperative economics) continue to be major principles promoted by the PGRNA. These Swahili terms inspire New Afrikan citizens to define themselves and their destinies as well as work together to build economically independent and stable communities. The founding citizens of the Republic of New Africa and those who took oaths of citizenship during that weekend sought to provide the Black nationalist community in the United States with a physical and ideological space where possibilities could exist for the positive transformation of their realities. As the New Afrikan Declaration of Independence states, “Ours is a revolution against oppression—our own oppression and that of all people in the world. And it is a revolution for a better life, a better station for all, a surer harmony with the forces of life in the universe.” “Free the Land!” became the battle cry that New Afrikans use as a greeting or farewell. “The Land” in the phrase refers to the physical land within the national territory. The call to free this land is directed to both the U.S. government and New Afrikans; it demands that the U.S. government grant them sovereignty and calls on New Afrikans to be relentless in their struggle to win this land. In 1970, Imari was elected president and established the PGRNA headquarters in Jackson, Mississippi—one of the five states of the national territory. He sought to actualize the major tenets of the New Afrikan Creed. He and members of the New Afrikan People’s Council embarked on a door-to-door campaign around the state to introduce the PGRNA platform to Black Mississippians. Imari organized a plebiscite and had people vote on the question of New Afrikan versus U.S. citizenship and the right of Black people to sovereignty over the national territory. Following this, under Imari’s leadership the PGRNA held a successful reparations convention at Mt. Calvary Baptist Church, also in Jackson. A few months later on Wednesday, August 18, 1971, at 6:30 a.m. dozens of heavily armed Jackson policeman and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents surrounded the home that was operating as the Republic of New Africa headquarters. Seven people were inside including two teenagers (Karim, age 15, and Brother Chuma, age 19), Offoga, and Njeri Quduss (who was pregnant), Addis Ababa of Detroit, and Vice President Hekima Ana and his wife, Tamu Sana, who were visiting from Milwaukee. After giving the occupants only 90 seconds to vacate the home, the police and agents launched lethal rockets into the back bedroom window. This action resulted in a shootout that left a police officer dead. Imari and 10 other PGRNA leaders were arrested and charged with murder. Although he was found innocent of the murder, Imari served 5 years of a 12-year sentence for conspiracy to assault a federal agent. It was during this time that he became one of the first to be considered a political prisoner (by Amnesty International) in the Black freedom struggle.

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After his release from prison, Obadele earned a master’s degree and a PhD in political science from Temple University. He went on to teach political science and Black studies courses at Prairie View A&M University in Texas and at several other universities throughout the country. In addition to teaching, Obadele wrote and published dozens of articles and books. He edited the New African, a monthly newsletter and “official organ of the Republic of New Africa” published by the Ministry of Information. Consistent with other Black nationalists in the 1970s, the PGRNA and other elements of the movement began to spell Africa with a “k.” Ibidun Sundiata was also an editor, and members of the writing staff included political activists and organizers such as Yuri Kochiyama. Imari’s teaching and scholarship influenced and was greatly influenced by his experiences as minister of foreign affairs. In this position, he traveled nationally and internationally in service of the PGRNA and Black communities throughout the diaspora. He worked with and on behalf of indigenous people, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and North American anti-imperialists and antiracists. As the second and longest-serving PGRNA president, he had a sincere commitment and dedication to the people and to the cause. He often curated and presented court hearing briefs for Black political prisoners and political prisoners of war to elicit attention and increase support. In 1987 at a national conference of Black lawyers at Harvard University, Imari called for reparations and began to put together the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA). As Imari’s work reveals, the PGRNA was not just a fantastical dream, or what many may reduce to an idea, but instead was a vision that he executed with a detailed and informed plan that spoke to the nuances of the Black struggle. For instance, in his text A Brief History of the Black Struggle in America, with Obadele’s Macro-Level Theory of Human Organization, Imari identified international law agreements that supported New Afrikans’ rights to choose and have an independent New Afrikan nation-state. These agreements include United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514, 154, and 2625 and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. He described eight strategic elements necessary to win independence: rich land; healthy, strong, and creative people; skilled and well-motivated people; a limited objective; foreign support; domestic support; inherent military viability; and second-strike capability. He also outlined and widely disseminated four key “steps to victory,” which included the following: taking to the streets and educating New Afrikans about the development of the Black nation during slavery, New Afrikan men and women who rebelled during slavery, those who continue that legacy, and the formation of the PGRNA; winning the support of all Black people for the PGRNA; organizing people to participate in a people’s vote for independence, including selecting polling places, creating ballots, and arranging for exact and verifiable counting of the votes; and being ready to defend “ourselves” politically and militarily against those who try to interfere in this process as well as



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maintain pressure for support from the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and countries all over the world. While Imari Obadele died of a severe stroke on January 18, 2010, his legacy endures. Imari provided a firmly planted framework for continuing efforts toward Black liberation. To date, the Republic of New Africa does not have sovereignty over the land declared as “the national territory”; however, it persists as a site of ideological and cultural grounding for communities throughout the African diaspora. The Republic of New Africa as an ideology and sociocultural political practice continues to be a rich site of study and inspiration for scholars, activists, and artists alike. Manifestations of Imari’s vision and quest to “Free the People” and to “Free the Land” include the ongoing works of the PGRNA, N’COBRA, the New Afrikan Scouts Organization, the New Afrikan People’s Organization, and a number of African-centered educational and cultural institutes. Asantewa Sunni-Ali See also: Group on Advanced Leadership; Obadele, Gaidi (Milton Henry); Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa; Reparations Further Reading Afoh, Kwame, Chokwe Lumumba, and Ahmed Obafemi. 1991. A Brief History of the Black Struggle in America, with Obadele’s Macro-Level Theory of Human Organization. Baton Rouge: House of Songhay, Commission for Positive Education. Obadele, Imari Abubakari. 1975. Foundations of the Black Nation. Detroit: House of Songay. Obadele, Imari Abubakari. 1984. Free The Land! The True Story of the Trials of the RNA-11. Washington, DC: House of Songhay. Obadele, Imari A., ed. 1997. De-Colonization U.S.A.: The Independence Struggle of the Black Nation in the United States Centering on the 1996 United Nations Petition. Baton Rouge: Malcolm Generation. Obadele, Imari Abubakari. 2004. The Struggle for Independence and Reparations from the United States. Baton Rouge: House of Songhay.

Ocean Hill–Brownsville Campaign for Community Control of Schools More than one decade after the Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision, school integration in New York City was failing. African American leaders and community members living in the Ocean Hill and Brownsville neighborhoods of Brooklyn called for the right to control their educational institutions because of the poor conditions of the schools. White Americans in suburban areas

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had successfully decentralized their school districts and gained community control over their educational institutions with little to no resistance. Unfortunately, when African American and Puerto Rican parents attempted to make the same claim for their children, they were met with hostility, police force, a white backlash that culminated into three different teachers’ strikes, and political maneuvering that sought to silence any calls for Black Power. As with many urban areas, New York City public schools were racially segregated and overcrowded, lacked adequate resources, and were marked as academically low performing. In response to these structural conditions, African American and Puerto Rican parents demanded more African American and Puerto Rican teachers and administrators and the implementation of culturally relevant curriculum and sought to change how public schools in poor communities operated overall. The move toward decentralization—or community control—implemented by the New York School Board offered such an opportunity. This experiment was part of a larger response to the national movement toward reforming public schools. As part of these efforts, the board decentralized three school districts on a trial basis, which included the Ocean Hill–Brownsville neighborhoods. The board transferred some of their power to the local districts and parents as well as other community members. The Black and Puerto Rican community took this as an opportunity to make necessary changes in their children’s school experience by diversifying the teachers and staff, adding African American history to the curriculum, creating bilingual programs, encouraging more parent involvement, and making other necessary changes. To support their efforts the Ford Foundation provided a grant of $44,000 toward the experiment. The school’s planning council was made up of parents and community leaders, including some members of the Black Panther Party for SelfDefense. Administrator Rhody McCoy was an outspoken advocate of Black independent institutions and Black Power. McCoy’s association with Black Power leaders such as Malcolm X was a point of contention with the mostly white United Teachers Federation (UTF). White teachers and other UTF leadership perceived any talk of community control as a call for Black Power. In the summer of 1967 the local committee implemented a campaign to gain support from the community, and organizers canvassed the neighborhood to get parents involved and nominated candidates for a new local governing board. Reverend C. Herbert Oliver was named chairman of the board, which was made up of parents and activists. In the spirit of self-determination, a major underlying philosophy of the Black Power Movement, the local board sought to have control over curriculum, textbooks, budgeting, and other matters to ensure improvement in student performance and student learning outcomes. Some of the initial trouble between the local governing body and the UTF started because communitycontrolled schools signaled to white teachers that they would be forced to follow



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guidelines proposed by people whom they felt were not qualified. The board argued against these racist and classist claims, stating that community control was necessary because Black and Latino children were failing in school due to the terrible system, which overwhelmingly consisted of white teachers and administrators and was neglectful and hostile to students. Teachers and some members of the UTF used numerous tactics to ensure the demise of the community-controlled project. They tried to neutralize the board and any individual they felt had militant leanings such as Herman Ferguson, who had been nominated principal of Intermediate School 55. Some teachers claimed that the original proposal submitted to the Ford Foundation had changed, particularly concerning teacher evaluations and monitoring. White teachers complained that the initial Ford foundation proposal did not originally include requests, nor did it initially ask for the ability to hire and fire teachers. In addition, they believed that the local board possessed a posture that was both antiwhite and anti-Semitic. A major point of contention centered on the rejection of a policy by local board members that the UTF hoped to get passed concerning disruptive children. This new policy essentially allowed teachers to put Black and Puerto Rican students out of class more easily. Black teachers, especially those in the African American Teachers Association, rejected such a policy and what they saw as a very deliberate effort by white teachers to maintain the racial status quo. Finally, the UTF wanted to limit parents’ decision-making powers, especially those described as subscribing to a Black militant agenda. Tensions escalated in May 1968 when 19 teachers and administrators were notified that they would be transferred out of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville district because they were undermining the project. Involuntary transfers by the Board of Education had been uncommon, and they were not usually challenged by the UTF. However, in efforts to limit the powers of the local board, the UTF took action. It argued that the transfers were a direct violation of the teachers’ contractual rights, claiming that the transfers were actually “firings.” The UTF encouraged other teachers to walk out until the teachers were reinstated (Taylor 1997, 195). More than 300 teachers walked out in response. In August a trial was held. The local board was urged to reinstate the teachers, but the Ocean Hill–Brownsville administrator, McCoy, and parents would not back down. When the UTF called for a teachers’ strike in September 1968, the first day of school, shutting down most of the city’s schools, the seven Ocean Hill–Brownsville schools remained open. Black teachers and a few whites broke ranks and sided with the parents in helping to keep the schools open. During the strike the African American Teachers Association helped train parents. Teachers boycotted the schools that remained opened and blocked the way of parents, students, and teachers who did not participate in the strike. Schools closed for 36 days over the course of the three strikes between September and November. Throughout these three months there were

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several clashes between community members, students, and striking teachers. As a result, McCoy and several principals of Ocean Hill–Brownsville were fired for ignoring the New York School Board’s order to reinstate the remaining teachers who had not transferred out of the district. By 1969 the United Federation of Teachers won the battle and successfully put an end to any hopes of community-controlled schools. The local board had been neutralized, and the bill passed by the New York State Legislature made it nearly impossible for poor African Americans and Puerto Ricans to be part of the decision-making process when it came to the control of local schools. While some have described the Ocean Hill–Brownsville conflict as a matter of job security and labor rights, others view the encounter as a clear indication of white backlash to the Black Power Movement and to efforts by African American parents and teachers to determine the course of the education of African American and Puerto Rican children. Bayyinah S. Jeffries See also: Black Studies; Malcolm X; Shakur, Assata Further Reading Back, Adina. 2003. “Exposing the ‘Whole Segregation Myth’: The Harlem Nine and New York City’s School Desegregation Battles.” In Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980, 65–91. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gordon, Jane Anna. 2001. Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict over Community Control in Ocean Hill–Brownsville (1967–1971). New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Isaacs, Charles S. 2014. Inside Ocean Hill–Brownsville: A Teacher’s Education, 1968– 1969. New York: Excelsior Editions. Lewis, Heather. 2013. New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg: Community Control and Its Legacy. New York: Teacher College Press. Podair, Jerald E. 2004. The Strike That Changed America: Blacks, Whites and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Taylor, Clarence. 1997. Knocking at Our Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools. New York: Columbia University Press.

Olympic Project for Human Rights On October 16, 1968, at the Olympic Games in Mexico City, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two sprinters on the U.S. Olympic team, finished first and third, respectively, in the 200-meter dash—one of the premier events. The two received their medals at a traditional Olympic ceremony that evening, and as “The Star



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Harry Edwards, San Jose State sociology professor, meets with members of the Harvard University crew team. Edwards was the leader of the proposed boycott of the 1968 Summer Olympics to protest racial injustice. During a press conference at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 24, 1968, the five members of the nine-man crew gave a “moral commitment” supporting and sympathizing with Edwards and his movement, called the Olympic Project for Human Rights. (Cary Wolinsky/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Spangled Banner” played to acknowledge their accomplishments and to indicate the nation they represented, Smith and Carlos each thrust closed black-gloved fists above their heads to protest racial and class discrimination in the United States. The gesture was quickly adopted as a symbol of protest against white supremacy and corporate in loco parentis worldwide. A number of African, Black, and Third World athletes in Section 22 of the Olympic stadium immediately flashed closed fists in return to Smith and Carlos. Within weeks, students protesting racial discrimination and in loco parentis at universities in the United States used the gesture to disrupt campus events. Workers on strike at factories in South America also adopted the gesture as a symbol of solidarity. Years later, Blacks in West Africa and Algeria found that the fist earned them discounted rides with native cabbies. The Black Power fist, as it became known, continues to stand for power and pride in Black communities and defiance of white supremacy.

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Although the Smith and Carlos protest lasted less than one minute, it was a year in the making and a product of the larger Black Power Movement. The two were members of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), a group of Black Power, Black students, and athletic activists who campaigned for a Black boycott of the Olympics as a means of raising awareness of institutionalized racism, the poverty and structural and cultural racism that continued to denigrate the quality of life in Black communities. As late as 1964, Black workers earned approximately 56 percent of white workers’ earnings, and unemployment among Blacks remained almost twice that of the national average. Beginning in the summer of 1964, frustration with poverty and police brutality led Blacks to riot against ghetto conditions in urban areas. Over the next five summers, more than 250 civil disorders occurred in cities nationwide. In response to institutionalized racism and the socioeconomic desperation of Black communities, in July 1967 nationalists and other activists met at the National Black Power Conference to propose solutions. The conference passed several resolutions advocating the socioeconomic, political, and cultural self-determination of Black communities and alliances with Third World liberation movements. Attendees also passed a resolution urging Blacks to boycott the 1968 Olympics in protest of the state’s persecution of Muhammad Ali, who had been stripped of his heavyweight boxing title and boxing licenses for refusing to enter the military and publicly condemning U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. In September after his successful organization of a Black student movement at San Jose State College in California, Harry Edwards, a part-time sociology instructor and a former student-athlete, began organizing a Black Olympic boycott as a protest against institutionalized racism. Smith, who was a student at San Jose State, and Carlos, who arrived in San Jose in January 1968, were among the first Olympic-caliber athletes to support the OPHR. Despite the OPHR’s efforts to link the campaign to the Black struggle against institutionalized racism, the majority of the mainstream media labeled the proposed boycott unpatriotic, unnecessarily militant, and in a few quarters a communist plot. Vice president and Democratic Party presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey condemned the OPHR, and moderate Black organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League also distanced their organizations from the proposal. Edwards and the OPHR struggled against the mainstream’s perception to attract support to the campaign. The OPHR, however, obtained endorsements from a wide variety of Civil Rights and Black activists, including liberals, nationalists, and progressives. The most notable was Martin Luther King Jr., who joined Edwards at a New York City press conference in December 1967 to endorse the campaign. King noted that the campaign’s emphasis on eliminating institutionalized racism was representative of the next phase of the Black freedom struggle. Many liberal Black newspapers and



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Jackie Robinson also endorsed the OPHR for similar reasons. Nationalists, including the Nation of Islam and H. Rap Brown, and socialists, including the Daily Worker and William Patterson, also endorsed the campaign. The OPHR also gained a significant endorsement from the international antiapartheid movement. On February 15, 1968, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) extended an invitation to South Africa to participate in the Olympic Games. The governing Afrikaner Nationalist Party enforced a rigid system of racial apartheid in South Africa that denied the nation’s African majority citizenship and human rights. Within days, the other 32 African nations with Olympic teams pledged to boycott the games if South Africa participated. The Soviet Union also intimated withdrawal, and the People’s Republic of China, which did not field a team, also endorsed the boycott. The African bloc and leading antiapartheid advocates in the United States endorsed the OPHR as part of the campaign to bar South Africa from the Olympics. The assassination of King on April 4, 1968, also radicalized a number of Blacks into supporting the OPHR. The threat of a combined Third World and Black boycott or protests disrupting the games forced the IOC to issue a decision in late April to bar South Africa from the upcoming Olympics. The expulsion tempered support for the OPHR in several quarters, but Edwards, the chief strategist of the OPHR, managed to keep the campaign newsworthy by capitalizing on the media’s fascination with Black militants and speaking on college campuses across the country. On the advice of mentor and television reporter Louis Lomax, Edwards transformed himself into a stereotypical militant. He adopted the Black Panther Party’s Black beret, publicly associated with other Black militants, and made outrageous statements that drew the attention of the press. For example, in February 1968 he held a press conference with H. Rap Brown, who suggested that an alternative to protesting a track meet sponsored by a bigoted athletic club would be to blow up the meet’s venue, Madison Square Garden. In April 1968 following the assassination of King, Edwards stated that as a show of good faith to Blacks, the federal government needed to kill all white supremacists with a dull ax. He also attacked several of his Black critics, including former Olympian Jesse Owens and baseball stalwart Willie Mays, as “Uncle Toms” and “establishment” Negroes. By late August 1968, however, the inability of the San Jose–based OPHR to communicate effectively with several likely Black Olympians and mainstream pressure and state harassment made the boycott unlikely. From the start of the campaign in late 1967, the federal government’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) harassed Edwards, Smith, and several participating athletes. Beginning in 1967, the government targeted militant and leftist activists whose causes might increase susceptibility to a communist takeover in the United States. By the end of 1969, COINTELPRO had resulted in the death of at least 10 Black Panthers and the arrest of hundreds of other Black and antiwar activists. COINTELPRO files demonstrate that Edwards and Smith were under constant

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surveillance during the period of the campaign. Other activist student-athletes and their spouses lost jobs and scholarships. Smith, Carlos, and Lee Evans, also a student-athlete associated with the OPHR, suggested that sports officials attempted to keep them off the Olympic team by cheating them out of victories during the summer races that determined the Olympic team. The harassment and the OPHR’s inability to contact all potential Black Olympians led to discord and confusion among the athletes. In particular, Edwards failed to obtain an audience with the Black women Olympians, thus alienating a group whose participation was critical to the campaign’s success. Beleaguered but buoyed by the attention he attracted to issues of poverty, in August 1968 Edwards announced that there would be no boycott. The Black athletes, however, continued to meet among themselves. In Sep­ tember 1968 after Avery Brundage, the chairman of the IOC and an American, declared that there would be swift punishment for any athlete involved in political demonstrations at the games, several offended Black athletes, including Smith, Carlos, and Evans, decided that each athlete should act on his or her own conscience and approved individual demonstrations at the games. Smith and Carlos’s demonstration was the most demonstrative of the several protests and is primarily noted because it disrupted “The Star Spangled Banner.” The following day, the U.S. Olympic Committee banned Smith and Carlos from Olympic Village, further angering Blacks and their allies and prompting more protests at the games. As the symbol of the black fist came to represent power, pride, and protest over the next few decades, Smith and Carlos’s lives suffered in comparison to other Olympic champions. Both remained pariahs in mainstream sports circles for more than 30 years after the demonstration, and it affected their economic and social livelihoods. Smith played sparingly for the National Football League’s Cincinnati Bengals for 3 years. After retiring, he slept on friends’ couches until he found steady work as a track coach in the 1980s and 1990s. Carlos also played in the National Football League for a few seasons before working several odd jobs over the next decade. In 1977 his ex-wife committed suicide, which Carlos believes was induced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s continual harassment of his family. Edwards, by contrast, thrived. He completed a doctorate in sociology and is noted for conceiving the academic subfield of sports sociology. He retired as professor emeritus from the University of California at Berkeley and has worked as a counselor for several Bay Area sports franchises. Smith and Carlos’s demonstration stood for Black pride and resistance, but it has proved pliable and came to be used by workers, other minorities, and leftists to signal their struggles against inequality and solidarity with Black pride. By the early 1970s, the widespread adoption of the black fist as a symbol of resistance and pride had led to its commodification. Most common were Afro hair picks with a black fist handle, T-shirts, and medallions. The continued advertisement of these



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products in Ebony and Muhammad Speaks and during Soul Train, a syndicated Black music television show, as well as the presence of Smith/Carlos posters in dorm rooms and barbershops ensured that for more three decades after their demonstration in Mexico City, the moment continued to personify the spectacular ways that Black Power activists and campaigns made themselves heard in Ameri­ can and international discourses. Dexter L. Blackman See also: Ali, Muhammad; Black Panther Party; Edwards, Harry; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Nation of Islam; Vietnam War Further Reading Alcindor, Lewis, with Jack Olsen. 1969. “My Story, Part 3.” Sports Illustrated 10 (November). Edwards, Harry. 1969. The Revolt of the Black Athlete. New York: Free Press. Fists of Freedom: The Story of the ’68 Summer Games. 1999. HBO Films. Olsen, Jack. The Black Athlete, a Shameful Story: The Myth of Integration in American Sport. New York: Time-Life Books. Smith, Tommie, with David Steele. 2007. Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Operation Breadbasket Operation Breadbasket began as a campaign of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1962. The goal of the campaign, which began in Atlanta, Georgia, was to improve the economic conditions of African American communities around the United States. Using the power of the Black church and ministers, Operation Breadbasket served as an important component of the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements. Operation Breadbasket was modeled after the selective patronage program developed by Leon Sullivan, pastor of Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Penn­ sylvania. Its primary goal was to promote equal employment opportunities for African American workers. After witnessing a boycott that Sullivan led in 1958, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and SCLC leaders asked him to organize a similar campaign in Atlanta. Although King was the founder, the newly formed initiative was led by Fred C. Bennette Jr. The program was also directed by a steering committee of ministers. Shortly after its inception, Operation Breadbasket won promises of 5,000 jobs at local companies. By the end of the year, Breadbasket had negotiated new employment opportunities worth $25 million to the African American community.

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Operation Breadbasket also became a cultural phenomenon that provided opportunities for Black businesspeople, clergy, workers, and community activists to network on Saturday mornings. The program used its base in the Black church to establish the Operation Breadbasket orchestra and choir and other components of the program that would attract supporters. Economic empowerment, social policy, and political equality were important themes at the Saturday Breadbasket meetings. Student activist Jesse Jackson became an important leader in Operation Bread­ basket in Chicago, catapulting the campaign to new heights. Early in his service to Operation Breadbasket, he targeted white-owned grocery stores and dairy and soft drink companies that were profitable in African American communities. He also pushed for white financial institutions and the Black community to provide financial support to African American banks, seeing them as a route to economic development. During this period, Operation Breadbasket evolved into an ancillary campaign to the housing desegregation project, which called for the enforcement of open housing laws and desegregated public housing. Reverend Jesse Jackson’s efforts expanded the size and scope of Operation Breadbasket while at the same time maintaining its local vibrancy. Meanwhile, King has visions to expand Operation Breadbasket to other cities to help alleviate poverty in urban areas. On July 10–12, 1967, ministers from across the country attended the National Breadbasket Clergyman’s Conference in Chicago. Approxi­ mately 150 ministers attended the conference to learn about the Breadbasket strategy. The city of Chicago kept Jackson busy, since it was home to an emerging Black entrepreneurial class, a large and depressed ghetto economy, and an increasing number of poor and unemployed people. Jackson had little time to build a national network of Breadbasket’s operations. Thus, in 1968 King appointed Calvin Morris as associate director of Breadbasket for Chicago and Reverend Ed Riddick to be national research director in an effort to nationalize Breadbasket. After the death of Martin Luther King Jr., Jackson began to steer the program toward a sense of Black pride and unity. In November 1968, his first innovative idea was the inauguration of what he called “Black Christmas,” a celebration of Christmas from an Afrocentric perspective that doubled as a hard-nosed economic venture. This idea was birthed from a desire from other African American leaders to punish white businesses by boycotting their products at Christmastime while establishing positivity in Blackness. Black Easter followed Black Christmas as another opportunity to celebrate Blackness during the holiday seasons. Jackson used a simpler, more poignant symbol for the idea of resurrection: a black lamb, which both suggested Christ the Lamb of God and identified him with the proverbial creature cast out from the rest of the flock because of his color. Another initiative implemented by Jackson within Operation Breadbasket was the Black Minorities Business and Cultural Exposition. The Black Expo was an annual trade fair for local and national Black businesses and was also a celebration



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of Black capitalism. There were concerts by Black artists, parties, and an exhibition of paintings and sculptures. Central to this splendid spectacle were the business booths themselves, which were predominantly Black-owned. The expansion of Black Expo was so tremendous that in 1969 half a million people attended. The end of Operation Breadbasket paralleled the growth of Black Expo. Although the exhibition was a media, cultural, and financial success, accounting anomalies fueled rumors. In addition, the Chicago-centric focus led to its stagnation. Finally, disagreements with SCLC chairman Ralph Abernathy led to even more controversy. Martin L. Deppe, a founding pastor of Operation Breadbasket and a steering committee member, found that in the six years of Operation Breadbasket’s existence, its efforts led to 4,500 jobs for African Americans. The income from Black products and service contracts gained an estimated $57.5 million annually by 1971. Essentially throughout its existence, Operation Breadbasket worked to support African American entrepreneurship, economic growth, and prosperity. While the early years of Operation Breadbasket were dominated by Dr. King and the Black church’s concerns for economic justice and economic rights, during its last years the program became a vehicle for pursuing economic empowerment on behalf of the Black community. Jesse Jackson tactfully aligned Operation Breadbasket with both aspects of the Black church during the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements. Barrington D. Martin II See also: Jackson, Jesse L., Sr.; King, Martin Luther, Jr. Further Reading Beltramini, Enrico. 2013. “SCLC Operation Breadbasket: From Economic Civil Rights to Black Economic Power.” Fire!!! 2(2): 5–47. Carson, Clayborne, et al. n.d. “The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.” Stanford University, http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_operation_bread basket/. Deppe, Martin L. 2017. Operation Breadbasket: An Untold Story of Civil Rights in Chicago, 1966–1971. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Frady, Marshall. Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2006. House, Ernest R. 1988. Jesse Jackson & the Politics of Charisma: The Rise and Fall of the PUSH/Excel Program. Boulder, CO: Westview. Reynolds, Barbara A. 1975. Jesse Jackson: The Man, the Movement, the Myth. Chicago: Burnham.

P Pan-Africanism At its core, the concept of Pan-Africanism has always been a reaction to the dispersal of Africans from Africa, especially but not exclusively via the forcible transatlantic and Arab slave trades (the Maafa and the Zanj Yesir). Later during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, there have been many smaller-volume volunteer dispersals. The earliest form of Pan-Africanism is a remembrance of, nostalgia for, and need to reconnect to Africa by those dispersed (the diaspora). Specifically beginning in the 19th century, the resistance responses to the forcible colonization of Africa (as represented by the Berlin Conference, 1884–1885) was added to this dispersal core as a fundamental ingredient of what Pan-Africanism means. Pan-Africanism was born in the diaspora, mainly in the United States and the Caribbean. During the colonial and newly independent United States, free African Americans regularly established groups that reflected the need to stay connected to Africa. These groups included the Free African Society (1787), the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1816), the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (1821), the New York African Free Schools (1787), the African Grand Lodge of Free Masonry (1808), and the African Civilization Society (1859). This remembrance-reconnection aspect of Pan-Africanism was based on the exigent circumstances of Black people in the New World and diasporan versions of traditional African cultures, philosophy, and values, especially those of the Muntu, Ntu, Ubuntu, Kintu, Nommo, Kuntu, and Hantu peoples. These combined concepts included the idea that all people, things, ideas, and aesthetics have their own constantly interacting forces and that there is essentially a unity of all things— a balance that, though it can be lost temporarily, will ultimately be restored. PanAfricanism represents the return of the unity of African people (but unity without the necessity of uniformity). Early Pan-Africanism eventually included emigrationism, or a physical return to Africa, as reflected in the 19th-century Chief Sam Movement and popular slogans such as “Africa for the Africans; unity and redemption.” The 1839–1841 Amistad Affair in the United States was a major impetus for this phase of PanAfricanism, in addition to Paul Cuffe’s sailing ship expeditions to West Africa and the machinations of the American Colonization Society to attract free and freed African Americans to colonize Liberia for the United States. Many Black American and Caribbean writers, activists, organizers, adventurers, orators, preachers, and

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Portrait of Marcus Garvey, leading advocate of Pan-Africanism and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey advocated, “Africa for the Africans,” those at home and those abroad. Marcus Garvey’s work was an important forerunner to internationalism during the Black Power era. (Library of Congress)

missionaries pushed the idea of reestablishing a strong bond—including a physical one—with Africa. The first official use of the term “Pan-African” was by the Pan-African Association, established by attorney Henry S. Williams in London in 1896 and that organization’s convening of the first Pan-African Conference in the same city in 1900. Attended by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, a recent graduate of Harvard University, and Pauline E. Hopkins, columnist for the Colored American Magazine, among several other African Americans and African West Indians, this gathering represented the tangible starting point of the Pan-African movement. Of course, the 1900 conference did not coin the term “Pan-African,” and neither did Mr. Williams’s Pan-African Association. That was accomplished by the Chicago Advance newspaper (published from 1867 to 1917) reporting on the 1893 Chicago Congress on Africa, which was a part of the Chicago Exposition that year. The newspaper had described the Congress on Africa, a weeklong event from August 14 to August 21, 1893: “We have had pan-Presbyterian, pan-Methodist, pan-Anglican, and pan-Congregational councils before, but none signified more than this Pan-African conference.” During its evolution from the 19th through the 21st centuries, a clear definition of Pan-Africanism has been very hard to come by. Essentially, this has been a logical result of conflating Pan-Africanism as a political movement, with Pan-Africanism as an ideology and as a practical concept. Thus, most Pan-African authors have produced important insights on some aspects of the history of Pan-Africanism but

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have remained blurry about its concise definition and have included all sorts of activities as Pan-Africanist simply because African people were involved in them. Seven fundamental components of Pan-Africanism have characterized it as a concept and a movement since its origins. These are African emigrationism; oppositional reaction to slavery, discrimination, colonialsm, imperialism, and neocolonialism; color; the belief that Africa connects all people of African descent; mutual respect between African people worldwide; the belief that all future generations of Africans will be fully liberated; and action, thought, and writing with the common theme of antislavery, anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, and antineocolonialism. The African Union is the primary organizational representative of what 21stcentury Pan-Africanism is. Twenty-first-century Pan-African unification (the goal of the African Union) will be achieved, but only with relentless community-based organizing, government action, mass political mobilization, international networking, and technological expertise by Africans. There is a strong relationship between the Black Power Movement in the United States and the evolution of Pan-Africanism. Essentially, the Black Power Move­ment had a counterinfluence on the modern development of Pan-Africanism. Kwame Nkrumah noted this in his autobiography. This influence can be seen in two specific relationships. The first is Kwame Nkrumah’s involvement and interactions with the Garvey movement (the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, the bedrock forerunner organization for the various Black Power groups of the postwar period) in Harlem during the 1930s while he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania and Lincoln University. Garvey’s view of Pan-Africanism—Black people of the world would only be respected once Africa was unified, free, self-reliantly independent, and commercially viable—appealed to and became a cornerstone of Nkrumah’s own driving ideology. Once Nkrumah became the first prime minister and then the first president of the Republic of Ghana, he named the shipping company the Black Star Line in honor of Marcus Garvey. Nkrumah then designed the Ghanaian flag with a black star in the center of it, and he named the national soccer team the Black Stars. More important, he announced that Ghana’s independence meant nothing without the total unification of Africa; organized the first All-African Peoples Conferences of Independent States; financially and physically supported other West African states such as Guinea, Mali, and Upper Volta (Burkina Faso); and helped organize the first all-continental African body, the Organization of African Unity. Second, in addition to President Nkrumah, Guinea’s Sékou Touré, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, and Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, other Pan-Africanist leaders included avid readers about the evolution and exploits of Black Power groups in the United States. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party (BPP), Eldridge Cleaver of the Panthers, and several other prominent activists regularly did

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speaking tours in friendly African countries, keeping communities informed of the progress of the Black Power Movement. Additionally, Black student unions and other student organizations regularly discussed and kept up with the activities of the various African liberation groups. After 1963, activists in the United States and elsewhere have annually celebrated African Liberation Day on May 25 (Africa Day) as a very important connecting holiday. During the 1970s and 1980s, student groups and Black nationalist gatherings fervently and forcefully participated in the antiapartheid divestment movement and regularly promoted news concerning African leadership that seemed to be Pan-Africanist in character, including that of Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau. As a final specific example, Carmichael, as the former chair of SNCC, had helped to develop the first all-Black political party—the Lowndes County Freedom Party of Alabama. The symbols used by that political party—a white flag with a snarling black panther painted on it—became the symbol of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense organized by Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and others in Oakland, California. Carmichael was the coauthor of the book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (with Charles V. Hamilton in 1967). Later, Carmichael became the honorary prime minister for the BPP for a short time. After breaking with the BPP he moved to Guinea-Conakry in Africa, took the name Kwame Ture, worked with Kwame Nkrumah, made speeches, and wrote more essays. Ture eventually published a collection of those essays in 1971 titled Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan Africanism and, with the death of Kwame Nkrumah, took over the task of completing the coordination and dissemination of the AllAfrican People’s Revolutionary Party (created by Kwame Nkrumah in 1968) and set up chapters of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party in both Africa and the United States. Ture also worked with Howard Fuller and other activists to found Malcolm X Liberation University in North Carolina to espouse the principles of Pan-Africanism and education he had learned from Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s President Sékou Touré. Ture became the most eloquent example of the merger and cross-pollination of the Black Power Movement centered in the United States and the evolution of modern Pan-Africanism. David Horne See also: Black Panther Party; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Lowndes County Freedom Organization; Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley; Seale, Bobby; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Azevedo, Mario, ed. 1993. Africana Studies: A Survey of Africa and the African Diaspora. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.



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Garvey, Amy Jacques, ed. 1986. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, or Africa for the Africans. Dover, MA: Majority Press. Walters, Ronald W. 1993. Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Parks, Rosa (1913–2005) Rosa Parks, whose 1955 bus stand galvanized a yearlong bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, was never the meek seamstress, as she has often been cast. Standing up to white terror and intimidation, from the Scottsboro case to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Parks “always felt it was my right to defend myself if I could” (Parks with Reed 1992, 17). Having long believed in the moral right of self-defense, she was a steadfast critic of racism in the criminal justice system and a proponent of the farreaching social change necessary to ensure real Black equality. “I’m in favor of any move to show that we are dissatisfied,” she told an interviewer in 1964 (Mahan 1964). To Parks, Black demands were often mired in delay to give the appearance of progress without actual change. “As long as we formed little committees,” Parks recalled about the years before the boycott, “. . . and asked to be treated like human beings and continued to travel on the bus nothing happened” (“‘I’d Do It Again’ Says Rights Action Initiator” 1965). Increasingly frustrated by the languid pace of change, she had refused to go to yet another meeting with the bus company the summer before her arrest. “I had decided I wouldn’t go anywhere with a piece of paper in my hand asking white folks for any favors” (Parks with Haskins 1992, 129). Chafing under the admonitions that Black people were demanding too much, in 1967 she told an interviewer that “I don’t believe in gradualism or that whatever should be done for the better should take forever to do” (Civil Rights Documentation Project 1967, 33). A longtime admirer of Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, Queen Mother Moore, and Robert F. Williams, Parks embraced multiple approaches, given the systematic and pervasive character of American racism. A full biography of Parks thus shows her “life history of being rebellious,” as she put it, across the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, North and South (Burns 2004, 18). To her, a united front was key to the Black struggle. She had long hated the ways “a militant Negro was almost a freak of nature to them, many times ridiculed by others of his own group,” and did not appreciate attempts to try to divide the Black community by demonizing its more radical elements (Rosa Parks Papers at the Library of Congress n.d., Box 18, Folder 10). Across her life, she took heart in the energy and militancy of young people.

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Born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, Rosa Louise McCauley grew up in Pine Level, Alabama, with her mother and grandparents. Her grandfather was a supporter of Marcus Garvey, and when white violence escalated after World War I, he would often sit out at night on the porch to protect their home from attack. Sometimes a six-year-old Rosa would sit vigil with him because she wanted to see him “kill a Ku Kluxer” (Rosa Parks Papers at the Library of Congress n.d., Box 18, Folder 11). Her adult political life began when she met and fell in love with Raymond Parks, “The first real activist I ever met” (Parks with Haskins 1992, 68). At the time Raymond was working to free the Scottsboro Boys, nine young men caught riding the rails who were then charged with rape and quickly sentenced to death. Rosa and Raymond married in December 1932, and she joined him in this organizing work. In 1943 seeking to find ways to become more active and aspiring to register to vote, Rosa Parks joined the Montgomery National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). To her it was galling that Black people such as her brother Sylvester were serving during World War II and yet were denied the right to vote at home. For the next decade she and the militant Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters leader E. D. Nixon worked to transform the Montgomery branch into a more activist chapter, over the severe objections of some of its middle-class members (much like Robert Williams would do in the 1950s with the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP chapter). They pursued Black voter registration and independent Black political power. And they focused on criminal justice, both to defend wrongfully accused Black men and to pursue justice for Black people under the law, particularly Black women who had been raped by white men. Finding heart in the spirit of young people, she founded the youth branch of the chapter and encouraged young people to take stands against segregation. Working alongside the leftist activists from the Scottsboro case to her attendance at a two-week workshop at Highlander Folk School the summer before her arrest and her lifelong commitment to the school to her association with United Automobile Workers Local 600, Parks refused the red-baiting of her era. She also knew that registering to vote, taking her youth group to see the Freedom Train exhibit, and galvanizing an organized bus boycott were revolutionary acts in the postwar South. “Pushed as far as she could be pushed,” Rosa Parks refused bus driver James Blake’s order to give up her seat on the bus on the evening of December 1, 1955. She was “startled” by the community’s reaction to her arrest and thrilled by the ensuing boycott (Rosa Parks Papers at the Library of Congress n.d., Box 4, Folder 8). She lost her job five weeks into the boycott (as did Raymond), and she spent most of the boycott year traveling the country, helping to turn a local struggle into a national one and raising money to support the boycott (despite her own family’s severe economic troubles). Even after the boycott’s successful end, they couldn’t



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find steady work and continued to get death threats. Eight months later in August 1957, the Parks were forced to leave Montgomery for Detroit, where Rosa Park’s brother and cousins lived. There in the “northern promised land that wasn’t,” Rosa Parks would spend the next four decades fighting the racial inequality of the Jim Crow North (Brinkley 2000, 67). Indeed, her enduring commitment to racial justice and human rights formed a bridge between the Civil Rights struggle in Montgomery and Black liberation in Detroit. Like many younger activists, Rosa Parks had grown frustrated with the pace of change and the adamancy of white resistance to Black demands for equality in jobs, housing, schools, public services, and policing. Parks’s political activities and associations in 1960s and 1970s Detroit illustrate the continuities and connections between the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, overlooked by many commentators at the time. Many of the underlying tenets of Black Power were not new to her. A set of political commitments that had run through her work for decades—self-defense, demands for more Black history in the curriculum, justice for Black people within the criminal justice system, independent Black political power, community empowerment and economic justice—intersected with key aspects of Black Power. Parks described Malcolm X as her personal hero (he reminded her of her grandfather, and she loved his unflinching critique of American and liberal racism). They had met for the first time in 1963 because Malcolm X wanted to meet her, and in 1965, a week before his assassination, they appeared on the same program at Ford Auditorium in Detroit. Seeing no contradiction between her love and abiding respect for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Parks had grown increasingly disillusioned with the ways that nonviolent direct action had repeatedly been met with white violence: I can’t say how useful it [nonviolence] is . . . because during the time nonviolent technique was rather popular and in use, if it had been received for what it was it would still work. But my belief is that if we are going to have nonviolence and love and all that, it should be on both sides; it should not be met with violence because you actually can’t remain nonviolent too long with the kind of treatment that would provoke violence. And to me, of course, self protection . . . if we can protect ourselves against violence it’s not actually violence on our part. (Civil Rights Documentation Project 1967, 20) In 1966 as a key organizer with Friends of SNCC in Detroit, Parks journeyed to Lowndes County, Alabama, to support the independent Black political party that local residents were building with SNCC’s help (Branch 2006, 455; Theoharis 2010a). In the fall of 1966 when Stokely Carmichael stepped to the podium in Detroit, he called Rosa Parks his hero (Schmidt 1966). In August 1967, Parks served as a juror on the People’s Tribunal held in the wake of the police killing of three young men at the Algiers Motel during the Detroit Rebellion in July of that

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same year. When no indictment of the police followed and Detroit’s newspapers refused to pursue it, young militants took up H. Rap Brown’s call for a “People’s Tribunal.” One of the tribunal organizers, Dan Aldridge, described their decision to ask Parks to serve based on her reputation and respect in the community; she agreed, saying that if she could be helpful she would come (Theoharis 2010a). This was largely her approach throughout the Black Power Movement. Having been hired in 1965 by newly elected congressman John Conyers to do constituent work in his Detroit office, Parks took part in a growing and diverse Black Power Movement in the city and across the nation. Keeping herself above the ideological fray, she signed petitions, attended lectures at Reverend Al Cleage’s Shrine of the Black Madonna, attended numerous study groups at Vaughn’s bookstore, and immersed herself in all the Black history she could find (Theoharis 2010b). She abhorred U.S. involvement in Vietnam and complicity in South African apartheid and thus took part in numerous mobilizations, meetings, and rallies to publicly object. She protested police brutality, spoke out on behalf of Black prisoners, and joined local prisoner-defense committees. She was a lifelong supporter of organized labor and militant unionism. Above all, she wanted to be helpful—and if her presence allowed more people to pay attention to an important issue affecting the Black community and work on behalf of justice, then by all means she would try to come. According to the Pittsburgh Courier, Rosa Parks was part of a “militant group” of Black people at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago who refused to back any presidential candidate because none were significantly accountable to the Black community and issues of racial and social justice (“Black Militants ‘Won’t Back Any Presidential Candidate’” 1968). She attended a number of key Black Power events: the Third National Conference on Black Power in Philadelphia in 1968, the Gary Convention in 1972, and the Black Panther Oakland Community School in the 1979–1980 school year. Ericka Huggins who ran the school noted how students and teachers all delighted in Parks’s visit and criticized the “myth that people in the Black Panther Party had no high regard for people [like Rosa Parks]” (Theoharis 2009). Indeed, for many younger activists, such cross-generational solidarity was precious, bringing encouragement, protection, and a broader historical scope to their work. Sometime in the 1990s, an older Rosa Parks doodled over and over on a paper bag “The Struggle Continues . . . The Struggle Continues . . . The Struggle Continues” (Rosa Parks Papers at the Library of Congress, Box 19, Folder 2). To the end of her life in October 24, 2005, she insisted that the movement was not over and that there was much struggle ahead. Jeanne Theoharis See also: Black Panther Party; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Malcolm X; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee



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Further Reading “Black Militants ‘Won’t Back Any Presidential Candidate.’” 1968. Pittsburgh Courier, August 31, https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/38383534/. Branch, Taylor. 2006. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968. New York: Simon and Schuster. Brinkley, Douglas. 2000. Rosa Parks: A Life. New York: Penguin. Burns, Stewart. 2004. To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King’s Sacred Mission to Save America, 1955–1968. New York: HarperCollins. Civil Rights Documentation Project. 1967. Rosa Parks, Interview with Civil Rights Documentation Project. Moorland Spingarn Research Center, September 28. Washington, DC: Howard University. “‘I’d Do It Again’ Says Rights Action Initiator.” 1965. Los Angeles Times, December 16, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2630299/rosa-parks-says-she-felt-mist reated.pdf. Mahan, A. F. 1964. “Active Rights Movement Began on a Bus.” The Record, August 26. Parks, Rosa, with Jim Haskins. 1992. My Story. New York: Dial. Parks, Rosa, with Gregory Reed. 2000. Quiet Strength. New York: Zondevan. Rosa Parks Papers at the Library of Congress. n.d. https://www.loc.gov/collections /rosa-parks-papers/about-this-collection. Schmidt, Carol. 1966. “Individualism a Luxury We Can No Longer Afford.” Michigan Chronicle, October 8. Theoharis, Jeanne. 2009. Author interview with Ericka Huggins, July 6. Theoharis, Jeanne. 2010a. Author interview with Dorothy Aldridge, October 24. Theoharis, Jeanne. 2010b. Author interview with Edward Vaughn, September 10. Theoharis, Jeanne. 2015. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Boston: Beacon.

Police Brutality Police brutality has been one of the most pressing problems plaguing Black communities since the creation of police forces in the United States. Not only was police brutality one of the most formidable barriers to Black equality confronted by Black Power advocates, but their personal engagement with police brutality also shaped Black Power ideology itself. A tool of social control, not unlike lynching, police violence was used to uphold white supremacy and is central to understanding the tenor and shape of the Black Power Movement. While police violence has been nearly impossible to measure, African Americans throughout the 20th century defined police brutality as unnecessary and/or excessive force, particularly when accompanied by racist language and/or practices. Police were known to brutalize Blacks while unlawfully attempting to coerce confessions, demanding shown deference to police, during labor disputes, or when

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In front of city hall in Los Angeles, Joan Kelly speaks against police repression of Black Power activists after the December 8, 1969, attack against the Black Panther Party headquarters. The attack resulted in a 5-hour shoot-out between the Black Panther Party and Los Angeles Police Department. (Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge)

Blacks asserted political or social equality. Police brutality was symptomatic and constituent of an unjust legal system. In short, police brutality was simply another means to keep Black people in their “place.” Indeed, police violence was a concern for African Americans nationally. Throughout the 20th century several tactics were employed to curb police brutality including demands to hire more Black police officers, improve police training in race relations, and increase accountability through civilian review of police misconduct coupled with appeals to local, state, and federal government officials and the Department of Justice. During the Black Power era activists initiated surveillance programs to watch the police, advocating armed self-defense and direct community control of the police. Ending police brutality was a central plank in the Civil Rights platforms of organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Nation of Islam (NOI), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).



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Prosegregation violence organized by terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or mobs of angry whites was often condoned by law enforcement officials and led many Blacks to discuss the legitimacy of self-defense in Black struggles for equality. Groups such as the Deacons for Defense and the NOI asserted the right of self-defense. Yet in 1959 even the NAACP and Martin Luther King Jr. affirmed the use of violence in self-defense against unlawful attacks. In his essay “The Social Organization of Non-Violence,” King rejected outright the use of violence as an end in itself or as a strategy but acknowledged that some use of weapons could be necessary (King 1959). Individually and collectively, the reevaluation of nonviolence laid the foundation for the Black Power Movement’s subsequent embrace of self-defense as a means to combat police brutality. At the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, SNCC chairman John Lewis’s speech “The Revolution Is at Hand” was censored due to its criticism of President John F. Kennedy’s proposed Civil Rights bill, which Lewis deemed impotent. Lewis signaled a growing criticism of Civil Rights reform among Black people, saying that the bill was “too little too late” and that there was nothing in the bill protecting Black people from police brutality. In Lowndes County, Alabama, the desire to end police brutality was central in voter registration campaigns that led to the emergence of the independent political Black Panther Party (BPP), from which the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense drew inspiration at its founding in 1966. Blacks in Lowndes County argued that political and economic power was the only remedy to white supremacy, a lesson that made a lasting impression on Stokely Carmichael, the SNCC activist who popularized “Black Power!” first a as slogan and later as an ideology. Yet, Black people were no more able to remedy police brutality in the era of the Civil Rights Movement than they were throughout the 20th century. Increasingly, police violence became a catalyst to greater Black protest in many American cities. Between 1965 and 1969, many of the more than 300 urban rebellions in 257 cities were ignited by police misconduct in Black neighborhoods. Police violence not only sparked urban revolts; indeed, many Black people saw the use of excessive and unjustified violence by police as being as pressing a concern as unemployment and housing discrimination. In 1965, flyers distributed by the Watts Action Committee during the urban rebellion in Los Angeles demanded an end to police brutality, claiming that no police officer was ever brought to trial for violence used against members of the Black community. Indeed, the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders found that police brutality, harassment, verbal abuse, and discourtesy were problematic in themselves, but for many Blacks police brutality was also a symbol of an entire corrupt system of law enforcement and criminal justice. The U.S. Riot Commission Report suggested that enhanced racial pride, self-esteem, and solidarity fostered among Black people by Black Power were as important a “cause” of these “riots” as

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frustrations with the white power establishment, the inequities of Black life in America, and white resistance to Black equality. At the same time, the report underscored the problem of police brutality plaguing Black people across the nation, a problem that shaped the Black Power Movement itself. As “Black Power!” shifted from a rallying cry to an ideology and revolutionary praxis, Black Power advocates articulated a range of theories on police violence as a tool of Black oppression. The Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), founded in Philadelphia in 1963 to liberate Black people from exploitation, became involved in several police brutality cases, protesting “racist fascist, police tactics.” SNCC drew attention to police brutality in its position paper, “We Are Going to Use the Term ‘Black Power’ and We Are Going to Define It Because Black Power Speaks to Us,” stating that African Americans were “the only people who have to protect ourselves from our protectors” (Bracey, Meier, Rudwick 1970, 475–476). SNCC knew this through its organizing efforts in the North and the South, where Blacks were regularly brutalized by the police who opposed their efforts to attain Black equality. Black Power revolutionaries came to theorize the police as an occupying force in the “ghettos” of America whose sole purpose was to control Black people. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense’s view that police were used to occupy Black communities, as foreign troops occupied enemy territory, was also uttered by figures such as political activist James Boggs, who termed police presence in Black communities “a blue occupation army” (Bracey, Meier, Rudwick 1970, 523). In this light, Black Power militants viewed community control of the police as being central to attaining community control as a whole and ultimately to attaining power to free their own lives and communities from racial and economic oppression. Organizations such as the BPP that promoted the radical concept of creating a Black people’s police force simultaneously signaled the idea that Black Power heralded revolutionary change and breathed life into the idea of “power to the people.” Thus, for many in the Black Power Movement, police brutality was more than an unjust practice; the police literally stood between Black people, selfdetermination, and freedom. The 1960s–1970s was a period of increasing police militancy buoyed by calls for law and order and given substance by the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that gave police greater financial and political resources, latitude, and ability to share information on political activists. Civil disobedience, mass demonstrations for equality and against the war in Vietnam, the urban rebellions of the 1960s, and a fear of “crime” led to the creation of police units armed with military equipment and tactics, such as the SWAT units in Philadelphia and Los Angeles and Stop Robberies and Enjoy Safe Streets in Detroit. President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act and the Omnibus Crime



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Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 funded the militarization of state and local police, mightily increasing their capacity for violence even as police brutality continued to plague Black communities. Police brutality was the catalyst that brought the BPP into existence in 1966. Influenced by Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, and SNCC’s work in Lowndes County and steeped in the philosophies of Franz Fanon, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin, the first organized action of the BPP was against police violence. Aware of their rights under California State law, BPP members began following the Oakland police armed with loaded weapons, cameras, law books, and tape recorders. “Policing the police” served multiple functions by dispelling the fear of police that pervaded Black communities, preventing harassment, advising African Americans of their legal rights, and recruiting new membership. Point 7 of the BPP’s 10-point plan (1966) demanded an end to “POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.” The BPP innovated the use of the term “pig” to describe police as “brutal, gross, and uncaring” and “ugly and offensive” (Newton 2009, 176). The BPP’s radical stance on the police and its advocacy of revolutionary change in America brought Black Power militants into conflict with the U.S. government. The FBI’s COINTELPRO monitored, disrupted, and attempted to destroy radical organizations such as the BPP, the Young Lords, and the American Indian Movement. By 1968, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the BPP the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” State and local police united with FBI agents arrested and detained numerous Black Power activists. Other tactics included the deployment of informants and agent provocateurs, the circulation of disinformation and rumors, electronic surveillance, and assassinations in a successful effort to breed distrust and hostility within and between organizations, drain funds, and divert the focus of groups such as the Us organization and the BPP. The intense conflict between Black Power militants and police and FBI agents led to the death of numerous police and militants, including the 1969 police murder of BPP leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, Illinois. In the Black Power era self-defense was employed against the lawlessness of police themselves, and leading the way was the Black Liberation Army to combat police repression and preserve the integrity of the movement. Police brutality was no less important in the Black Arts Movement. Throughout the period Black poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and musicians deployed Black Power ideologies to voice a critique of police brutality through art. Amiri Baraka wrote the anti–police violence plays Police and Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself, while the poets Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Gil Scott-Heron, and Haki Mudhubuti penned and performed poems against police brutality. Meanwhile, singers such as Marvin Gaye sang plaintively about “trigger-happy policing” (Gaye 1971). Elaine Brown, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Angela Davis,

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Stan Greenlee, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Assata Shakur were among the many Black Power authors who directed positive attention to police brutality. Muhammad Speaks, RAM Speaks, and the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service were but a few of the numerous publications distributed widely in Black communities that consistently focused on police misconduct and police violence. The Black Power Movement created a language of dissent to critique police violence still present in American society. By the 1980s numerous Black artists from Common, Digable Planets, Ice Cube, N.W.A., and KRS-One to Public Enemy deployed Black Power ideology and iconography to protest police brutality, while renewed efforts to bring police forces under civilian review and the growth of community policing initiatives stemmed from the Black Power Movement. Although Black Power radicals were unable to end police brutality, through its focus on police violence Black Power reshaped African Americans’ understanding of resistance and expanded the terrain on which the struggle for Black equality was fought. Luther Adams See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Arts Movement; Black Panther Party; Boggs, James and Grace Lee; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Lowndes County Freedom Organization; Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee); Malcolm X; Nation of Islam; Newton, Huey P.; Revolutionary Action Movement; Seale, Bobby; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Us Organization Further Reading Baraka, Amiri, and Larry Neal, eds. 1968. Black Fire! An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. New York: William Morrow. Bracey, John H., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds. 1970. Black Nationalism in America. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Gaye, Marvin. 1971. “What’s Going On.” Motown Records. Jefferies, Hasan Kwame. 2009. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. New York: NYU Press. Jones, Charles. 1998. The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered]. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1959. “The Social Organization of Non-Violence.” Stanford University, http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/Vol05Scans/Oct1959 _TheSocialOrganizationofNonviolence.pdf. Newton, Huey P. 2009. Revolutionary Suicide. New York: Penguin Classics. Ogbar, Jeffery O. G. 2005. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Reconfiguring American Political History). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. U.S. Riot Commission Report. 1968. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. New York: Bantam Books.

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Primary Document Description of Police Raid That Killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, 1979 In Hampton v. Hanrahan, 600 F. 2d 600-1979, the mothers of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark appealed an original court decision regarding the December 4, 1969, police raid in Chicago that resulted in the death of their sons. The following excerpt from the appeal includes a detailed description of the raid and the legal aftermath. 600 F.2d 600 Iberia HAMPTON et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Edward V. HANRAHAN et al., Defendants-Appellees. UNITED STATES of America ex rel. Honorable Joseph Sam PERRY, Appellee, v. Jeffrey H. HAAS, Attorney at Law, Contemnor-Appellant. UNITED STATES of America ex rel. Honorable Joseph Sam PERRY, Appellee, v. G. Flint TAYLOR, Attorney at Law, Contemnor-Appellant. Nos. 77-1698, 77-1210 and 77-1370. United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit. Argued Aug. 14, 1978. Decided April 23, 1979. As Amended April 30, 1979. Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc Denied Sept. 12, 1979. Jeffrey H. Haas, G. Flint Taylor, Jr., James D. Montgomery, Dennis Cunningham, Charles Hoffman, Jonathan C. Moore, Chicago, Ill., for plaintiffs-appellants. John O. Tuohy, Camillo F. Volini, Chicago, Ill., for defendants-appellees. Before FAIRCHILD, Chief Judge, and SWYGERT and PELL, Circuit Judges. SWYGERT, Circuit Judge. Advertisement 1 This appeal concerns a civil rights action for monetary damages brought by members of the Black Panther Party and the mothers of two deceased party

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members against federal and state law enforcement officers. The suit arises from a gun battle which occurred in Chicago during the early morning hours of December 4, 1969. Two Black Panthers were killed and four other Panthers were injured by the gunfire. The action was tried in the district court before a jury in 1976–1977. At the close of plaintiffs’ case, the district court directed verdicts for some of the defendants. The district court directed verdicts for the remaining defendants at the conclusion of the trial. We reverse as to most defendants and remand for a new trial. I. BACKGROUND 2 At 4:30 a. m. on December 4, 1969, fourteen Chicago police officers, detailed to the Special Prosecutions Unit of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, arrived at an apartment building located on the near west side of Chicago. They were equipped with a search warrant issued the previous day by a judge of the Cook County Circuit Court authorizing the search for and seizure of “sawed-off shotguns and other illegal weapons,” at the first floor apartment, 2337 West Monroe Street. This apartment was occupied by nine members of the Black Panther Party (“BPP”). Seven officers took “cover” positions at the front and rear entrances of the apartment; seven entered the apartment. Immediately upon the police entry there was an enormous burst of gunfire. Two of the occupants, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, died as a result of the gunfire and four others, Ronald Satchel, Blair Anderson, Brenda Harris, and Verlina Brewer, were wounded. Louis Truelock, Deborah Johnson, and Harold Bell escaped without physical injury. 3 Many reverberations followed the incident. Among these were the arrest and imprisonment of the surviving occupants of the apartment, their prosecution by the Cook County State’s Attorney for criminal offenses, a coroner’s inquest, and an internal investigation by the Chicago Police Department. A federal and two state grand jury investigations were initiated. Indictments were returned by the Special Cook County Grand Jury against several of the present defendants for conspiring to obstruct justice. The case terminated when defendants’ motions for acquittal were granted at the close of the prosecution’s case. Finally, this civil action was initiated.

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4 The mothers of Hampton and Clark, as administratrices of their sons’ estates, and the seven survivors of the December 4 incident filed four separate actions in 1970 against a number of city and state defendants. The actions were consolidated in an amended complaint filed in the district court in April 1972. 5 The defendants moved to dismiss the complaint. The district court denied the motions by the fourteen police officers participating in the raid. The court dismissed the complaint as to the remaining defendants. Upon appeal this court affirmed in part and reversed in part. Hampton v. City of Chicago, 484 F.2d 602 (7th Cir. 1973), Cert. denied, 415 U.S. 917, 94 S.Ct. 1413, 39 L.Ed.2d 471 (1974), (“Hampton I”). Thereafter plaintiffs requested this court to supplement its mandate by directing that the case be reassigned to another judge for trial. We denied the request. 6 In December 1974 plaintiffs amended their complaint by naming four additional defendants, all connected with the federal government. In October 1975 plaintiffs moved to have the district judge recuse himself or to reassign the case. The motion was heard by another district judge and was denied. 7 The trial began January 5, 1976 and lasted approximately eighteen months. Thirty-seven thousand pages of testimony were taken. At the conclusion of plaintiffs’ evidence, defendants moved for directed verdicts with costs. The motion was granted except for the seven police officers directly participating in the shooting incident, the court ruling that “no Prima facie case of a conspiracy or joint venture has been established as alleged in the Amended Complaint. . . .” The trial continued as to the seven remaining defendants and at its conclusion the case was submitted to the jury. After three days deliberation the jury announced it was deadlocked. The trial judge then directed verdicts in favor of these defendants and assessed costs against plaintiffs for $100,000. This appeal followed. . . .

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B. Raid 66 The fourteen raiders met at the State’s Attorney’s Office for a briefing at 4:00 a. m. the morning of the raid. Groth described the apartment’s layout and informed the other officers that it was a BPP dwelling frequented by Fred Hampton. Armed with a machine gun, a sawed-off shotgun, a semi-automatic .30-caliber carbine, and other weapons, they arrived at the apartment at 4:30 a. m. Groth instructed seven officers (the nonshooters) to guard the apartment’s exterior. Groth, Jones, Gorman, and Davis approached the front of the apartment while Broderick, Carmody, and Ciszewski circled to the rear door. 67 Before the raid began, Clark, Truelock, Bell, and Harris were in the living room on chairs and mattresses scattered around the room. Satchel, Anderson, and Brewer were asleep in the front bedroom which was located directly south of the living room. The rear bedroom of the apartment, directly south of the front bedroom, was occupied by Hampton and Johnson. . . . 68 A factual dispute exists as to the activity inside the apartment. Plaintiffs’ testimony depicts a violent, well-armed, unprovoked attack on the apartment. Plaintiffs testified that the officers did not announce their purpose when they arrived at the apartment. After hearing a knock at the apartment door, Truelock and Bell ran to the rear bedroom to awaken Hampton. Davis burst through the door into the living room and began firing into the darkened room. Clark, in the northwest part of the room about three or four feet from the door, was struck in the heart by a bullet from Davis’ rifle. According to Harris, Clark’s gun went off as he fell. Groth also began firing into the living room from the apartment doorway. Harris was shot as she lay in bed. She testified at trial that she neither fired nor handled a gun during the raid. 69 The attack from the rear of the apartment was precipitated by the sound of a shotgun blast from within. Carmody broke through the back door and entered

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the kitchen. Using a .38 revolver, he fired five times. Corbett, Ciszewski, and Broderick followed him into the kitchen, the latter two firing into the two bedrooms from the dining room area. Bell, Truelock, and Johnson emerged from the back bedroom during a pause in the shooting. 70 Meanwhile, Gorman had entered the living room and began firing his machine gun into the south wall toward the bedrooms. Davis also began firing into the south wall. Carmody entered the back bedroom and found Hampton lying on his bed. Carmody went to the head of the bed clutching a revolver in his right hand. During the course of the firing, Hampton was shot several times in the body and the head. The bullets which went through his brain were never found. Carmody emerged from the bedroom dragging Hampton’s body by the left wrist. In Carmody’s firearms report, he indicated that he had critically wounded a suspect. He recorded that his first shot was fired from a distance of ten feet and noted the distance of his second shot by a question mark. 71 Meanwhile the other shooters were moving toward the front bedroom where Satchel, Anderson, and Brewer lay huddled on the floor. Broderick, located in the bathroom, and Ciszewski, positioned in the dining room, fired several blasts from their shotguns into the front bedroom. Simultaneously, Gorman advanced down the hallway and approached this bedroom. Seeing the forms of Anderson and Brewer rising between the beds, he aimed and fired his machine gun into the bedroom. At that point Carmody charged through the front bedroom doorway and the occupants surrendered. When the guns were stilled, Satchel had been struck four times, Anderson and Brewer, twice. All three plaintiffs denied firing weapons. While the survivors were gathered into the kitchen the nonshooters entered the apartment. According to the survivors’ testimony, they were then physically and verbally abused. 72 The evidence introduced by defendants at trial produces a portrait of the incident which barely resembles the one depicted by plaintiffs. All the officers testified that they were fired on from within the apartment as they attempted

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to serve the search warrant. Groth testified that he and his men announced their purpose to the occupants on the morning of December 4 while standing on the apartment porch. After receiving no response, Davis struck down the front door of the apartment. As he lunged into the living room a shotgun blast flashed through the room from Clark’s gun. Seeing Harris’ gun directed at the front entrance door, he fired and hit her in the leg. Fearing for Davis’ life, Groth stepped into the living room and was met by the barrel of Harris’ gun aimed in his direction; believing that she had fired a shot at him, Groth responded by firing at her. Davis noticed Clark rising from his chair, “pumping” his shotgun, and turning toward him. Davis fired three shots while simultaneously rushing at Clark. A struggle for Clark’s gun followed and the men dropped to the floor. In the meantime, Gorman had entered the living room and grabbed the shotgun from Harris who was sitting on a bed next to the south wall of the living room. The officers testified that during the next few seconds they observed flashes of firing exiting from both bedrooms. Testimony was given that a cease-fire was called, but was broken by two shots, one from each bedroom. 73 At the same time, Carmody broke through the kitchen door into the rear of the apartment. Observing flashes of firing exiting from the back bedroom, he lunged into the kitchen. He advanced to a position in the dining room and fired into the bedroom. Ciszewski and Broderick followed Carmody’s lead. Ciszewski pointed his flashlight into the back bedroom and Bell surrendered. 74 A second cease-fire was called. It too was broken when flashes were observed again in the rear of the apartment. When Gorman and Davis fired through the living room wall, their volleys were returned by more firing from the bedroom. 75 Truelock and Johnson emerged from the back room during a third cease-fire. Carmody then entered the back bedroom where he saw Hampton’s body on the bed. While Carmody dragged the body from the room, Ciszewski entered to remove weapons. A bullet ripped through the north wall of the bedroom and struck Ciszewski in the ankle.

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76 Having secured the living room and back bedroom, the raiders concentrated their efforts on the front bedroom. Gorman ran to the bedroom after shooting through the south wall of the living room. He fired his machine gun into the front bedroom as he saw Anderson rising between the beds with a shotgun clutched in his hands. Anderson was hit by Gorman’s volley. Gorman also spotted Brewer with an object in her hands, but no shots were exchanged. Carmody and Broderick also fired into the north bedroom. According to a tape of a radio dispatcher’s communication with the raiders that morning, the apartment was under control within seven minutes. 77 In addition to the raiders’ testimony, the statements of several plaintiffs given to their lawyers after the incident were presented by the defense at trial. In these statements, both sworn and unsworn, several plaintiffs said they picked up weapons during the course of the raid and Truelock said he fired two shots at the raiders. These statements were offered as further proof that the officers were fired at and that they perceived themselves to be in great danger during the course of the raid. 78 Countering this defense evidence and in support of their trial testimony in which the survivors denied firing at the raiders, plaintiffs introduced the expert testimony of Robert Zimmers, a ballistics examiner with the FBI crime laboratory. Zimmers also was qualified as an expert to testify regarding the angle a shot entered a surface based on evidence of its impact point. According to his testimony, he examined the weapons seized from the apartment, the shooters’ weapons and their bullets, bullet fragments, and shotgun casings and cartridges found in the apartment. He also analyzed impact points on the walls and furniture in the apartment. On the basis of this examination and his analysis, he concluded that there was no evidence of a shotgun blast coming from the corner of the living room where Harris was during the raid. He also concluded that there was no evidence of shotgun shots exiting from the front bedroom where Satchel, Anderson, and Brewer were sleeping, and found no evidence of a shot being fired from within the rear bedroom where Johnson, Hampton, Truelock, and Bell were located.

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79 On the other hand, Zimmers determined that there were forty-two bullet holes created by shots fired from the living room through its south wall into the front bedroom. Additionally, there were thirty-three bullet holes of entrance found in the south wall of the front bedroom (the wall between the front and rear bedrooms), twenty-five of which entered from the living room. There were fourteen bullet holes of entrance found in the south wall of the back bedroom occupied by Hampton and Johnson. Six of these bullet holes came from shots that originated in the doorway of the north bedroom. Zimmers also testified that on the basis of his examination only one shot shell was identified with the seized weapons and that this shell corresponded with a hole of exit in the living room door; further, he stated that a bullet removed from the body of Hampton was fired from the .30-caliber carbine carried on the raid by Davis. C. Post-Raid 80 After the firing ceased, Gorman telephoned Jalovec from the back bedroom to report what occurred and to inquire whether Jalovec would be directing the evidence collection at the apartment. Jalovec responded that the men should leave the apartment immediately to avoid creating a riotous situation and should bring the seized weapons to the State’s Attorney’s Office. The other raiders were searching the apartment, overturning furniture and seizing books and files in the process. The raiders retrieved bullets and other ballistics material but failed to identify the recovered items. According to Groth, the seized weapons were neither tagged for identification purposes nor fingerprinted, and the locations were not specifically recorded. Consequently, when the Mobile Crime Unit of the Chicago Police Department arrived at approximately 5:15 a. m. to collect evidence, its task was hindered greatly by the raiders’ search. The Unit, headed by Koludrovic, nevertheless recovered a number of ballistics items from throughout the apartment which were taken to department headquarters for examination by experts in firearms identification. The officers retained their own weapons, and the weapons found inside the apartment were taken to the State’s Attorney’s Office.

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81 Immediately after the raid, the four wounded occupants were taken to a hospital and the three other survivors were incarcerated in Cook County Jail. On the basis of sworn complaints which stated that the plaintiffs fired at the raiders, charges of attempted murder, aggravated battery, and unlawful use of weapons were filed against the survivors. Bond was set for each at $100,000. (Several survivors remained in jail until December 21 when their bond was lowered.) 82 As the day unfolded, an atmosphere of confusion and tension developed in Chicago’s black community. Hanrahan met with the raiders and decided to engage in a series of media activities because “there were no methods of getting the officers’ story to the public as effectively.” The initial phase began around noon on December 4 when he issued a statement to the press in the presence of Jalovec, Groth, and other raiders. Although aware of conflicting stories, he adopted the raiders’ version of the incident and urged the support of the citizens of Chicago for the courageous actions of the police officers. He frequently emphasized his words by pointing to a display of seized weapons and, in particular, to a revolver which he said was “used by Hampton in the course of the attack on the police.” 83 On December 8, amidst the continuing storm of controversy surrounding the raid, Hanrahan called his second press conference. Reading from a prepared statement, he reiterated the raiders’ account of the incident and summarily dispelled conflicting reports referred to by reporters. Despite further potential pre-trial prejudice to the survivors’ criminal defense, Hanrahan continued to publicize the incident and decided to employ additional media tactics to promote the raiders’ version of the incident. At his behest the Chicago Tribune published an exclusive interview with the raiders on December 11. The article stated that the occupants initiated the firing and contained photographs provided by the State’s Attorney’s Office which showed holes in walls and doors of the apartment which purportedly represented shots originating from guns fired in the bedrooms. At trial a reporter for the newspaper testified that his sole

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source of material for the article was the information obtained from Hanrahan, Jalovec, and the raiders during an interview. 84 The following day a reenactment of the raid was filmed by CBS-TV in Chicago. Hanrahan asked the broadcasting company to film the story for television without editing by CBS. A set was constructed at the State’s Attorney’s Office, and Jalovec assisted the production directors. All the raiders were present for the event and those who participated in the reenactment were informed that the film could be cut as the raiders desired. To insure the production’s conformity with his previous press statements, Hanrahan visited the set during portions of the taping. The broadcast was aired the same evening. Hanrahan held his final press conference the following day. When confronted with questions from reporters that focused on the photographic misrepresentations contained in the Chicago Tribune article, Hanrahan again confirmed the accuracy of the officers’ stories without investigating the conflicting reports. At trial Hanrahan testified that he believed his publicity efforts were necessary to maintain the integrity and reputation of law enforcement in the community. 85 The role of the federal defendants continued in the post-raid period. Mitchell, Piper, and Johnson testified that they first learned of the raid through the news media the morning of December 4. Later that day, they received information from the State’s Attorney’s Office that Hampton’s body had been positively identified. Johnson then approved the transmission of an “urgent” teletype to FBI headquarters in Washington reporting the raid. Pursuant to Piper’s instructions, Mitchell spoke with Jalovec and Groth at the State’s Attorney’s Office to obtain more details. At this meeting Jalovec asked Mitchell whether he would be concerned if “it got out” that Mitchell was the source of the preliminary information for the raid. 86 The FBI continued to monitor BPP activities through O’Neal’s assistance, and it was during this early post-raid period that FBI officials wrote a series of memoranda highlighting their involvement in the raid. Piper sent a memorandum to Bureau headquarters on December 11 which requested a bonus for O’Neal.

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The request was “justified” on the grounds that the raid was based on information furnished by O’Neal and that this information was not available from any other source. Shortly thereafter, a three hundred dollar bonus was approved. On December 12 Mitchell wrote a memorandum which stated for the first time that federally illegal weapons had been present in the apartment a few days prior to the raid. The memorandum also noted that the FBI communicated with the State’s Attorney’s Office around the first of December regarding the illegal weapons. Mitchell’s memorandum was not sent to the Washington office of the FBI but instead was placed in the Chicago FBI’s “O’Neal” file which also contained the floorplan that had been furnished to Mitchell prior to the raid. 87 A series of investigations and inquests followed the December 4 raid. On December 12 Hanrahan requested Chicago Police Superintendent Conlisk to initiate an internal police investigation. Internal investigations generally were conducted by Ervanian and Kukowinski, director of the Internal Investigations Division of the Chicago Police Department (IID) and head of the Excessive Force Unit of the IID, respectively. This investigation, however, was placed under the direct supervision of Mulchrone, a deputy police superintendent. Meade, a police department legal advisor, was placed in charge of the investigation by Mulchrone. Meade designed a few questions based on Groth’s official report and typed in answers which, as Mulchrone stated, “would justify the use of entry and force by the officers.” Ervanian and Kukowinski were informed of the limited nature of the inquiry and of Meade’s and Mulchrone’s decision that all of the raiders’ statements were to be identical. Although dismayed at the proposed procedures, neither protested. Copies of Meade’s material were distributed to Assistant State’s Attorneys Sorosky and Meltreger who were advising the officers at the December 16 questioning. Jalovec, Kukowinski, Ervanian, Mulchrone, and Meade also were present at the interviews. Prior to the commencement of the inquiry, Groth was shown the prearranged questions and answers and then requested to give his account of the raid. Thereafter the other raiders met privately with Jalovec and Sorosky and were shown copies of both the Meade material and Groth’s statement. During the interviews each officer was asked substantially the same four questions: 88 Does Groth’s statement describe what occurred at the apartment?

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89 Did you use excessive force in effecting these arrests? 90 Did other officers use excessive force in effecting these arrests? Is there anything you wish to add? A. Shooters 123 Plaintiffs seek recovery against the shooters on the ground that these defendants, acting under color of state law, made an illegal entry into the West Monroe Street apartment and used deadly and excessive force in addition to committing assault, battery, and other abusive acts on its occupants. Our discussion of the facts concerning the propriety of the search warrant which defendants assert justified their entry into the apartment is found in our analysis of Groth’s refusal to identify the informant he used to support the affidavit for the warrant. See infra, pp. 635– 639. Even if the officers were acting pursuant to a search warrant validly issued, the question remains for the jury’s determination whether the force used by the raiders within the apartment was reasonable under the circumstances. The officers had a right to use some degree of force in executing the warrant and defending themselves. As noted in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 23, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 1881, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968), “it would be unreasonable to require that police officers take unnecessary risks in the performance of their duties.” The record is replete with factual disputes regarding the activities of the shooters on the morning of December 4. For example, it reasonably could be inferred that Mark Clark’s gun fired during his struggle with Groth rather than when the police officers first broke through the door. Additionally, plaintiffs testified at trial that none of the survivors fired a gun during the raid. And Zimmers’ expert testimony corroborated these assertions. Numerous other questions of fact are present in the record, including the issue of whether Fred Hampton was drugged at the time of the raid and shot deliberately after Johnson, Truelock, and Bell had left the bedroom. 124 Assessing the credibility of witnesses and weighing the evidence are matters within the sole province of the jury. In granting the directed verdicts, the trial

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judge repeatedly usurped this function. For example, the judge concluded in his Summary that “Brenda Harris fired a shot which went past Groth’s shoulder.” This finding was made in disregard of Harris’ testimony to the contrary and the physical evidence offered at trial. Additionally, the trial court ignored the testimony of Johnson and Truelock and determined that “the evidence is conclusive that (Hampton) was shot three times and that he was dead when Deborah Johnson and Louis Truelock left the bedroom.” The court also weighed the conflicting evidence of the experts and found that the evidence introduced by plaintiffs’ toxologist, Dr. Eleanor Berman, was “in error.” 125 In light of the evidence presented by plaintiffs, the question of the seven shooting police officers’ liability should have been submitted to the jury. Accordingly, we reverse the verdicts directed in favor of these police officers on the individual counts. B. Nonshooters 126 In addition to their conspiracy allegations, plaintiffs have presented a prima facie case under section 1983 against the nonshooters on the basis of their nonfeasance at the BPP apartment. This court previously imposed liability in damages for nonfeasance in Byrd v. Brishke, 466 F.2d 6 (7th Cir. 1972). The facts in Byrd are strikingly similar to those alleged in the case at bar. In Byrd Chicago police officers failed to deter other officers who, in their presence, beat the plaintiff with fists and clubs. Holding that purposeful nonfeasance of such magnitude could serve as the basis of tort liability under section 1983, we stated that “one who is given the badge of authority of a police officer may not ignore the duty imposed by his office and fail to stop other officers who summarily punish a third person in his presence.” 466 F.2d at 11. 127 Plaintiffs in this case assert that the nonshooters are liable, under the rule in Byrd, for failing to assist or protect the wounded occupants. The officers entered the apartment immediately after the firing ceased and plaintiffs testified that the nonshooters were present during the beatings and abuse which they

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said followed the shootout. In light of our decision in Byrd, the fact if found by a jury determination that these men did not personally participate in the abuse, but instead callously chose to watch, would not preclude their liability. Accordingly, this issue should have been submitted to the jury. We hold that the directed verdicts in favor of the nonshooters regarding their activities in the raid were improperly granted by the trial court. Source: Hampton v. Hanrahan, 600 F. 2d 600 (1979).

Political Prisoners and Exiles Political prisoners are political activists incarcerated for their political beliefs or activities. The Black freedom struggle has also experienced inmates who were incarcerated for social crimes but became politicized during their internment. Malcolm X fits into this category. Politicized prisoners are often targets of political repression and harassment due to their political activism and beliefs. Black Power Movement activists and revolutionaries also pointed to the United Nations Geneva Convention Protocols I and II, which defined Black oppression as colonialism, a crime against humanity. As victims of colonial overlords, many of the imprisoned freedom fighters identified as captured combatants and prisoners of war (POWs). In particular, those Black Power activists held captive for participation in armed resistance were identified as POWs. They argued that under international law Black people had a right to resist and that POWs of the Black Power era should come under the Geneva Convention. The Black Power Movement also has activists who went into exile, or sought political asylum in countries outside of the United States. Some countries officially offered asylum to Black Power activists and did not extradite Black revolutionaries to the United States. By 1967, the Black Power Movement in the United States had become a primary target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) “neutralization” campaign to destroy the Black freedom struggle and other fights for self-determination and social change. The most vocal members of the Black freedom movement would remain at the top of the government’s list of domestic political dissidents into the 21st century. Through special police units the FBI and other federal agencies as well as state and local governments tracked activists and revolutionaries to annihilate, defame, or imprison them. Black people who effectively built organizations to end racist oppression were those most often targeted. The existence of political prisoners is one of the enduring legacies of the Black Power Movement.



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Repression of social movements was not new. Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association were the primary targets of J. Edgar Hoover and the newly formed Bureau of Investigation as early as 1919. The federal government honed its mechanisms to track political dissidents even more in the 1930s, when it focused on organizers of labor. Arrests of intellectuals and political writers reached a new plateau during the McCarthy era. By the early 1950s surveillance and imprisonment of suspected communists and communist sympathizers was a nationwide phenomenon. The rise of the international independence movements and local freedom movements created new political boogeymen for the government’s agents of repression. As the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements became more dynamic, the U.S. agencies trained their domestic undercover police surveillance and repressive apparatus on the Black freedom struggle. The repressive measures intensified in the 1960s. The FBI feared “the rise of a black messiah” who could unite the movement. Some of the earliest targets of the FBI’s Black nationalist hate group campaign were Max Stanford of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and H. Rap Brown of the Student Nonviolent Coordi­ nating Committee. Both Stanford and Brown would be sought and ultimately incarcerated on politically related charges. Black Power political dissidents would be charged with crimes, tried, and given lengthy prison sentences.

Black Panther Party By 1969, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the Black Panther Party (BPP) as a great threat to U.S. internal security. An estimated 100 members of the BPP were now charged with crimes against law and order, often due to alleged hindering, harm, or killing of police officers. Juries of white Americans were easily convinced of BPP criminality. If in doubt, BPP writings were introduced in trials. The government handily won life in prison sentences for most of the Panthers who were charged. Panthers incarcerated under the Counterintelligence Program’s (COINTELPRO) nefarious operations, complete with manufactured evidence and false testimony, include Sundiata Acoli, Herman Bell, Joseph Bowen, Veronza Bowers, Marshall Eddy Conway, Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald, Robert “Seth” Hayes, Kamau Sadiki (Freddie Hilton), Mumia Abu-Jamal, Mondo Langa (aka David Rice), Abdul Majid, Jalil Abdul Muntaquin (aka Anthony Bottom), Sekou Odinga, Ed Poindexter, Russell Maroon Shoats, Herman Wallace, Kenny Zulu Whitmore, and Albert Woodfox (BPP prisoners released or deceased prior to 2013 are not included here). The cases of Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt and Mumia Abu-Jamal represent two of the highest-profile BPP political prisoners. Geronimo ji-Jaga was framed for the 1968 tennis court murder of an elementary school teacher, Caroline Olsen, in Santa Monica, California. The FBI’s own surveillance put ji-Jaga at a meeting of the

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BPP’s Central Committee in Oakland on that same date. Despite evidence that he was 400 miles away, the court accepted the testimony of paid FBI informant Julio Butler. Butler misled the jury by denying his relationship with the FBI during cross-examination during the trial. Ji-Jaga served 27 years before his conviction was overturned. The most widely known case of entrapment and incarceration of a supporter of political prisoners is that of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former member of the BPP. AbuJamal was a reporter who investigated a police raid on the MOVE organization’s family village in Philadelphia. MOVE was a Black Power organization with a naturalist and Pan-Africanist ideology. The MOVE compound was home to men, women, and children when it was the subject of a police operation on August 8, 1978. The city’s complaints about the followers of John Africa had to do with hygiene and the removal of waste in an urban environment. Police shot into the home, and ultimately policeman James Ramp was killed by a shot in the back of his neck. MOVE members say that the death resulted from police friendly fire, but the courts held accountable all of the nine adult MOVE members who were present. Each was sentenced to 100 years in prison. Two years later in 1981, Abu-Jamal was beaten and shot by police who claimed that he shot a police officer. Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death for a shootout, although eyewitnesses say that they saw another man. International protests resulted in a new sentencing hearing, and Abu-Jamal’s sentence was changed to life without parole.

Ordeal of Angela Davis During the government’s onslaught against the freedom fighters, it was difficult to know which members of Black organizations were acting as government agents or where the next police breakup of a movement house or headquarters would occur, and activists were overwhelmed with trying to get their comrades out of jail and prison and with their own legal cases. Despite the extreme duress that the government’s attack created for the movement, the freedom fighters devised case-by-case strategies to disrupt the government’s plans for annihilation and incarceration of Black Power leadership. One of the few publicity campaigns that worked to liberate a Black Power Movement revolutionary was the case of Angela Davis. A survivor of Ku Klux Klan racial violence in her neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis studied overseas during the apex of the Civil Rights Movement. She joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where she came under scrutiny and calls for her removal for being a member of the Communist Party USA. At UCLA, Davis spearheaded efforts to free the Soledad Brothers, George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Cluchette. The Soledad Brothers were Black activist prisoners who were charged with the murder of a prison guard. Davis and other activists hoped to unravel what they believed



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were false murder charges leveled against the political prisoners. George Jackson was serving a sentence for armed robbery but became politicized and a leader among prisoners in the California prison system as well as an author and a field marshal in the BPP. Davis became especially close to Jackson, whose anticapitalist analysis and politics of liberation were like her own. Davis went from being on the faculty of UCLA to being on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list. On August 7, 1970, 17-year-old activist Jonathan Jackson led a guerrilla action at the Marin County Courthouse, where three Black prisoners, Ruchell Magee, William Christmas, and James McClain, were participating in a trial. Jackson armed Magee, Christmas, and McClain and took the judge, a juror, and the prosecutor hostage. Jackson’s guerrilla action was designed to negotiate release for his brother George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers. The 17-year-old and the three prisoners left the courthouse with their hostages and entered a van to leave the scene. Jackson, Christmas, McClain, and Judge Harold Haley were killed by gunfire from California prison guards to prevent the rebels’ escape. The prosecutor was paralyzed as a result of the gunfire, and Magee and the juror were wounded. The guns that Jackson used and distributed in the incident had been purchased by Angela Davis. Charged with murder and kidnapping as well as conspiracy to liberate prisoners and to committee murder, Davis now went underground to escape capture and became one of the most wanted fugitives in the United States. After being captured in New York months later, Davis was extradited back to California. Only after an international campaign to free her did she win an acquittal.

New Afrikan Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War On March 31, 1968, 100 Black Power advocates signed a Declaration of Inde­ pendence from the United States and founded the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA). The founding document, signed in Detroit, Michigan, called for a sovereign African nation-state inside the United States to be composed of five southern states: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. PGRNA founder Imari Obadele moved to Mississippi to organize in Black majority counties to persuade the local population to vote for independence in a United Nations–supervised plebiscite (election). The U.S. government and Mississippi state and local police attacked the PGRNA before the PGRNA could initiate its independence campaign. Obadele was among the RNA (Republic of New Africa) 11 who were arrested after defending themselves from a predawn FBI and police raid on their group’s residence in Jackson, Mississippi, on August 18, 1971. While Obadele was not at the PGRNA residence, he was charged and convicted for allegedly conspiring in an assault of an FBI agent. Obadele challenged the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts to hear his case, arguing that he

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possessed sovereign immunity as the official of a provisional government of a national liberation movement. Members of the New Afrikan independence movement referred to the RNA 11 as POWs, also challenging the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts to hear the case. New Afrikan citizen Herman Ferguson is an example of a political activist whom political repression forced into exile. Ferguson’s early political involvement came as a member of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity and Muslim Mosque, Inc. Following Malcolm’s assassination, Ferguson founded the Black Brotherhood Improvement Association and the Jamaica Rifle and Pistol Club. He also was active in RAM and emerged as a leader in the Ocean Hill– Brownsville School movement to rid the New York City neighborhood schools of racist curriculum and to establish local control of public education. By 1967, Ferguson had been targeted by COINTELPRO and charged with sedition against the U.S. government. He was convicted in 1970 of conspiracy to assassinate Roy Wilkins, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Whitney Young of the National Urban League. In 1969, Ferguson left the United States and went into exile in Guyana, South America. When he returned to the United States in 1989 after 19 years abroad, he had made the decision to complete the prison sentence imposed upon him for the alleged conspiracy. He did so to be reunited with his family. Upon his return to the United States, Ferguson led the Malcolm X Commemorative Committee and the Jericho Movement to Free Political Prisoners and served as a judge and district representative of the Republic of New Africa. He and his wife Iyaluua provided leadership for these organizations until his health led to his retirement in 2008. As if to warn movement activists not to come for captured comrades, the government opened FBI case files on activists working to free political prisoners. Dr. Mutulu Shakur was recruited into the Black Power Movement and the New Afrikan independence movement by Herman Ferguson, who was his principal in junior high school. Shakur’s life’s work was as a doctor of acupuncture. He utilized acupuncture in the process of detoxing addicts from heroin addiction in his work at the Lincoln hospital in the Bronx, New York, from 1971 to 1978. Shakur also cofounded the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture and the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America. Ferguson recruited Shakur into RAM. Shakur was also active in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville struggle for community control of public schools. When Ferguson faced incarceration, Shakur worked on his mentor’s defense committee. He later worked on defense efforts for the Wilmington 10, Sundiata Acoli and Assata Shakur, Geronimo ji-Jaga, and the Panther 21 and also worked diligently on the legal cases of captured members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). After the exposure of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, Shakur along with his partner Afeni founded the National Task Force for COINTELPRO Litigation and Research. Shakur’s national task force made



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progress in documenting the FBI’s illegal activities against political dissidents and low-level warfare against Black activists. This activity brought him under greater surveillance. Shakur also traveled to Africa in 1980 to observe the independence elections in Zimbabwe as the guest of the Zimbabwe African National Union. In 1982 he was charged with racketeering and conspiracy, including the prison break of Assata Shakur. The movement celebrated the “liberation” of Shakur as a victory; however, the federal government treated this and other revolutionary activities as crimes and acts of terrorism. Shakur was captured in 1986 and sentenced to 60 years in prison.

Black Liberation Army The Black liberation movement also had underground military formations such as the BLA. The BLA’s soldiers were composed of Panthers and other Black Power Movement members as well as a network of allies. One of the bittersweet victories of the movement was the liberation of Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard). Shakur started her political life as a member of the BPP. She ultimately jointed the BLA and was accused of being an accomplice in the shooting of a state trooper on the New Jersey Turnpike who had shot into the vehicle that she was in. During the ordeal she was shot, and companion Zayd Shakur was killed. She and comrade Sundiata Acoli were accused of killing the state trooper. Convicted in 1977, Shakur was incarcerated in several facilities and was ultimately sent to New Jersey’s Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. In 1979 through a masterful BLA-organized extraction, Shakur was liberated from prison and subsequently granted political asylum in Cuba in 1984. Mutulu Shakur, Silvia Baraldini, Sekou Odinga, and Marilyn Buck were charged, convicted, and incarcerated for allegedly helping Shakur escape. More typically, the government, Hoover’s FBI, and the courts succeeded in separating revolutionaries from their families, organizations, and communities through incarceration in remote venues. One example is Albert “Nuh” Washington of the BPP, who was forced underground while working against police violence in San Francisco and soon joined the BLA. Washington was arrested with Jalil Abdul Muntaquin of the BPP and charged with the death of a New York police officer. Washington was sentenced to life and like many other political prisoners was moved frequently with the goal of disrupting local support group efforts working on his behalf.

Continued Advocacy for COINTELPRO-Era Political Prisoners By 1988 Amnesty International began declaring that some incarcerated members of the Black Power Movement seemed to have been imprisoned based on their political beliefs. Local supporters of freedom fighters publicized the manufactured evidence

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in political prisoner cases. The government’s modus operandi in denial of parole for political prisoners, harassment by guards, demands that the imprisoned activist’s views be recanted or that they apologize for crimes they did not commit, and extreme isolation (solitary confinement) was often the norm for both men and women. However, information about the torture, sensory deprivation, and abuse of female political prisoners at the Lexington control unit for women in Kentucky resulted in the prison being shut down. That same year, the book Can’t Jail the Spirit was published. This biographical description of political dissidents criminalized by U.S. police, the FBI, and the courts system marked the first time that the activist community could document the breadth of the government’s assault on movement people. Public pressure to end the FBI’s invasion of privacy and misconduct would lead to the official disbanding of COINTELPRO after the Frank Church Committee in the U.S. Senate investigated its covert and illegal activities. However, those imprisoned under COINTELPRO were granted no relief, and activists argue that the core functions of the program—surveillance and internment of radical political organizers—continued. The prison industry builds special cells to meet government expectations for containment of political prisoners. Specially designed control units are constructed inside of supermax facilities, where members of the Black Power Movement, once captured, are relegated to live out a solitary existence. “Nuh” Washington once wrote that he not only experienced sensory deprivation for 23 hours per day and interrupted sleep—because the lights were kept on all night—but that even his 1 hour of recreation per day was spent alone. Activists argue that the continuation of political prisoners from the COIN­ TELPRO and Black Power era in the 21st century represents the continuation of hostility. Most surviving Black Power–era political prisoners are senior citizens. As such, they face health-related concerns exacerbated by conditions of imprisonment. The Jericho Movement was founded in 1998 as an advocacy organization for COINTELPRO–era political prisoners. Jericho has documented that political prisoners consistently receive longer sentences than others convicted of similar crimes and are routinely subject to extreme isolation and harassment by prison guards and that courts almost uniformly refuse to commute their sentences to a specific number of years, which would make them eligible for parole. FBI head J. Edgar Hoover’s plan to dismantle the Black Power Movement by incarcerating its leadership nearly became reality. Virtually all political prisoners continue to teach and organize inside of prison, despite continued repression while incarcerated. Several political prisoners and former political prisoners have published memoirs and articles and have written extensively for the movement during incarceration. Political prisoners who are also authors of movement history include Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Safiya Bukhari, Marshall Eddie Conway, Mondo Langa, Sekou Odinga, Assata Shakur, Mutulu Shakur, and Russell Maroon Shoats, among others.



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Advocacy for COINTELPRO–era U.S.-held political prisoners from the Black Power Movement happens through online petitions for executive clemency, appeals in state and federal courts, and applications for compassionate or medical release that continue unabated along with decades of habeas corpus writs and ongoing efforts for retrials citing wrongful imprisonment for convictions based on falsified testimony and manufactured evidence. Tekla Ali Johnson and Jihad Abdulmumit See also: Black Liberation Army; Black Panther Party; Brown, Hubert “H. Rap”; Counterintelligence Program; Davis, Angela Yvonne; Jackson, George L.; Pratt, Geronimo ji-Jaga; Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa; Shakur, Assata; Shakur, Mutulu (Jarel Williams); Stanford, Max (Muhammad Ahmad) Further Reading Bukhari, Safiya. n.d. Lest We Forget. n.p.: Self-published. Bukhari, Safiya. 2010. The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind. New York: Feminist Press of CUNY. Bush, Rod. 2007. “The Panthers and the Question of Violence.” In In Search of the Black Panther Party, edited by Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, 59–66. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Can’t Jail the Spirit: Political Prisoners and POW’s in the U.S. 1988. Chicago: Committee to End the Marion Lockdown. Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. 1990. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars against Domestic Dissent. Boston: South End Press. Cunningham, David. 2004. There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davis, Angela Y. 1988. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York: International Publishers. Davis, Angela Y. 2005. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. New York: Seven Stories. Ferguson, Iyaluua, and Herman Ferguson. 2011. Herman Ferguson: An Unlikely Warrior. Hollysprings, NC: Black Classic Press. Jackson, George L. 1972. Blood in My Eye. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Jones, Charles, ed. 1998. The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. O’Reilly, Kenneth. 1994. Black Americans: The FBI Files. New York: Caroll and Graf. Shakur, Assata. 1987. Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. Shakur, Mutulu. 2011. Justice and Amnesty: Applying the South African Truth and Reconcilation Process to the North American Black Liberation Movement. n.p.: Selfpublished. Theoharis, Jeanne, and Komozi Woodard. 2005. Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America. New York: New York University Press.

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Political Prisoners of the Black Power Movement Political prisoners of the Black Power Movement are listed below according to organization they were in when targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An exception is that members of the Black Panther Party (BPP) who went on to other organizations within the movement may be listed twice. An asterisk is used to indicate those individuals. The National Jericho Movement’s website (http:// thejerichomovement.com) provides a list of current U.S. political prisoners.

Black Panther Party Political Prisoners Mumia Abu-Jamal* Sundiata Acoli* Kuwasi Balagoon Herman Bell* Safiya Bukhari Eddie Conway Sekou Kambui Kamau Sadiki Veronza Bowers Jr. Chip Fitzgerald Bashir Hameed Ali Bey Hassan Seth Hayes Teddy “Jah” Heath Geronimo ji-Jaga Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen We Langa Abdullah Majid Jalil Muntaquin* Sekou Odinga* Ed Poindexter Assata Shakur* Mutulu Shakur Russell Maroon Shoats Michael Cetewayo Tabor Albert “Nuh” Washington Herman Wallace Warren Wells Albert Woodfox (BPP Commemoration Committee 2013)

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Note: This list does not include Panthers who were incarcerated but released prior to 2013.

New Afrikan, Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), MOVE, and Other Pan-African Political Prisoners Mumia Abu-Jamal (BPP, MOVE) Consuewella Dotson Africa (MOVE) William Phillips Africa (MOVE) Hanif Shabazz Bey (United Caribbean Association) Mark Cook (BPP) Herman Ferguson (RAM, New Afrikan) Bashir Hameed (Black Liberation Army [BLA]) Abdul Haqq (New Afrikan political prisoner) Richard Mafundi Lake (New Afrikan) Maliki Shakur Latine (Black political prisoner and BPP) Abdul Majid (BLA) Jalil Abdul Muntaquin (BPP) Sekou MGOBOSI Abdullah Odinga (BPP, New Afrikan political prisoner) Hugo A. Oahariki Pinell Mutulu Shakur (Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa) Gary Tyler (accused of murder/retaliating against racist mob who surrounded his school bus) Sababu Na Uhuru (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Afrikan Liberation Support Committee) Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown)*

In Exile A number of activists from the Black Power Movement fled into exile to avoid political repression: Assata Shakur Nehanda Abiodun Pete O’Neal Charlotte O’Neal

Solitary Confinement and Black Power Movement Prisoners Solitary confinement, or what the New York Civil Liberties Union has defined as “extreme isolation,” has been used disproportionally on political prisoners

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and prisoners of war. These special housing units keep a person in isolation and in a cell for 23 hours a day. The 1 hour out of the cell per day is spent outdoors in another cell, also alone (New York Civil Liberties Union 2015). Similar treatment is used on political prisoners across the country.

Further Reading Black Panther Party Commemoration Committee. 2013. Remembering Our Political Prisoners. Film festival pamphlet. Committee to End the Marion Lockdown. 1998. Prisoner of Conscience Project “Can’t Jail the Spirit: Political Prisoners in the U.S.” 5th ed. Chicago: Committee to End the Marion Lockdown. Lopez, Oscar. 1992. “Oscar Lopez-Rivera: Puerto Rican Prisoner of War.” In International Tribunal of Indigenous People and Oppressed Nations in the USA, P13. Freedom Archives, http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC510_scans/Native _Prisoners/510.international.tribunal.indiginous.program.10.2.1992.pdf. National Jericho Movement. www.theJerichoMovement.com. New York Civil Liberties Union. 2015. Boxed In: The True Cost of Extreme Isolation in New York’s Prisons. New York: New York Civil Liberties Union.

Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr. (1908–1972) Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was one of the most important Black political leaders of the 20th century. He is best known as a courageous, provocative, and pioneering politician. Powell was the first African American elected to the New York City Council and to the U.S. House of Representatives from the state of New York. He condemned racial discrimination and challenged presidents, members of Congress, and the federal government to make the United States a true democracy. Powell was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1908. His family moved to New York City when he was a few months old and raised him in Harlem, an increasingly Black section of northern Manhattan. His father, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., was an outstanding Black Baptist minister who became the pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church. Abyssinian became one of the largest Black churches in the United States. Powell Sr. prepared his son for the responsibility of leading a major Black Baptist church. Accordingly, Powell Jr. succeeded his father as senior minister of Abyssinian in 1937. Powell Jr.’s family history and experiences shaped his identity and political commitment. His parents were children and grandchildren of slaves and free Blacks who grew up in poverty amid racism in Virginia and West Virginia in the post–Civil War period. After years of hard work, study, and ministering at various



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churches, Powell Sr. became a member of the small group of educated Black leaders at the turn of the century. By the time Powell Sr. left his church in New Haven to assume leadership of Abyssinian, his family enjoyed a degree of material comfort that was rare among African Americans. Powell and his older sister Blanche received personal support and educational opportunities that their parents did not have growing up. The Powell family traveled throughout the United States and took boating trips and vacationed in Europe. During the Great Depression, Powell Jr. demonstrated his own political leadership skills. In his 20s, Powell showed tremendous talent in rallying African Americans throughout the economic crisis. Using Abyssinian Church as his base of operations, Powell wrote columns for the New York Post and the Amsterdam News documenting the challenges, tragedies, and conditions Black people faced. Powell organized African Americans to take advantage of government assistance and condemned racial discrimination in government programs. Powell also led numerous protests, marches, and strikes targeting store owners and institutions that refused to hire and respect Blacks. During this time, Powell worked well with diverse leaders and organizations fighting for Black people and thrived in the racial, ethnic, class, and political diversity of New York City politics. He worked with Republicans, Democrats, socialists, communists, Black nationalists, and others who were outraged at the discriminatory treatment that Black citizens received. Important Black figures in New York during this era included young leaders such as Benjamin Davis, Roy Wilkins, and Herbert Bruce as well as established leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Phillip Randolph. In the 1940s, Powell founded a weekly Black newspaper, the People’s Voice, and printed columns by many of the leaders he worked with and admired. Powell’s activism and leadership were rewarded. He was elected to the New York City Council in 1942. Although he had not completed one year in office, he was encouraged to run for the newly created congressional district in Harlem. Powell was elected the first Black member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York in 1944. He would remain a controversial member of Congress for the next 26 years. When Powell entered Congress, there was only one other Black representative, William Dawson, a Democrat from Chicago. Both lifelong Democrats, they were very different in style and personality. Dawson was a relatively quiet member of Congress and a product of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s political machine. Powell, the opposite of Dawson, was a loud, independent political maverick who fought New York Tammany Hall machine politics off and on for decades. Congress was a segregated institution when Powell was elected to serve. But he refused to accept the mandates of racial segregation and made it his personal mission to battle for equality throughout his tenure in the House of Representatives.

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He denounced racial segregation from the floor and argued that he was entitled to all the perks, privileges, and advantages extended to other members of Congress. Even though the Democratic Party controlled the presidency and the Congress in the late 1940s, Powell quickly realized that key leaders of his party were hesitant to push for legislation to eliminate racial discrimination. Some of those members were even white racist segregationists who held powerful committee chairs and used their seniority and power to maintain white supremacy. Consequently, Powell felt justified in working with members of the Republican Party to support Civil Rights legislation and to garner other resources to improve his personal power and leverage. He further challenged racism among Democrats by traveling throughout the country giving speeches, especially at Black churches and colleges and universities, criticizing American politicians who would lecture the world about democracy when millions of African Americans did not have the right to vote and were living under authoritarian conditions. In 1961, Powell had the best opportunity to achieve success in the legislative arena. He now had seniority and was selected as chair of the important Education and Labor Committee. John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, and the Democratic Party had majorities in the House and Senate. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights activism of the 1950s further bolstered possibilities for passing progressive national legislation. Powell commanded his new committee staff members to research the latest developments in education and labor and led his committee in preparing legislation and holding hearings. The assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 thrust Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson into the presidency. Powell believed that Johnson was a more effective political operator than Kennedy in Congress. Powell supported President Johnson’s domestic policy agenda. The War on Poverty, the Economic Opportunity Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Great Society Programs were initiatives that Powell helped to get approved in the House of Representatives. He traveled throughout the country supporting the new legislation. He sent staff to different cities and rural areas to make sure the programs were being properly implemented. When he found abuses, he tried to get them addressed by the Johnson administration. Powell established direct ties with the Johnson White House and committed himself and his congressional committee to doing everything possible to pass strong and unprecedented Civil Rights legislation. Powell was an energetic leader working with Johnson aides and congressional members as well as staffers in his continued challenge to segregationist members of Congress. Powell’s activism did not go without challenges. Despite his growing popularity, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had a dim view of Powell’s work and alliances with political radicals. Powell’s political style also created enemies, who considered him vain. Black activists were now calling for Black Power. Young



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people and progressives were denouncing the American war in Vietnam. Powell appeared publicly as vacillating between Civil Rights and Black Power activism, which led to squabbles between him and other activists. In response, Powell alternatively praised and challenged, publicly and privately, Civil Rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins. Powell also acknowledged the growing support in the Black community for the Nation of Islam and its New York leader Malcolm X. Powell spoke at events organized by Malcolm X and had Malcolm X speak at Abyssinian. In November 1966, Powell was reelected to the House of Representatives. However, in 1967 his colleagues in the House voted to exclude him and prevent him from taking his seat. Powell’s years of bold and challenging leadership combined with his years of fast living and corruption scandals had alienated his fellow politicians. He had miscalculated. He knew that his type of private and public misbehavior had been tolerated with other members of Congress. He incorrectly believed that his fellow congressmen would continue to tolerate him. Powell had obviously underestimated the negative impact that bad publicity and relentless demands for racial equality would have on his career. The most prominent example of Powell’s miscalculation was demonstrated when he was held in contempt of court in New York City. He had been found guilty of libel against Esther James, a Black woman he accused of being a bag lady for illegal gambling, in 1963 and refused to cooperate with the court and resolve or settle the case. Consequently, Powell spent years going to New York only on Sunday to avoid being arrested or served legal papers. Powell’s Harlem constituents were angry that their representative had been refused entry into Congress. In his effort to fight back Powell sued Congress, charging that his exclusion was unconstitutional given that the only formal requirements for serving in the House were American citizenship, a minimum age of 25 years, and state residence at the time of election. Powell was reelected in 1968. His more conservative colleagues in the House were outraged and vowed to again prevent him from taking his seat. Calmer heads prevailed, and a compromise was forged. Powell would be allowed to take his seat but would be stripped of his seniority and fined $25,000. He had already lost his chairmanship and would be regarded as a freshman member of the House of Representatives in 1969. In June 1969, the Supreme Court ruled in Powell v. McCormack that Powell had been improperly excluded from the House of Representatives. By this time, Powell was in poor health. His lifestyle and the constant political battles had taken their toll. Powell was worried about his financial situation. He had three former wives, three children, numerous former girlfriends, and legal bills. Powell spent most of his time in Bimini, an island 60 miles from Florida. In 1970 Powell was defeated in the Democratic Party primary by Charles Rangel, one of his former supporters. Powell retired from Abyssinian Church and

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electoral politics, wrote his memoir, and lived a quiet life as his health deteriorated. He passed away on April 4, 1972, at the age of 63. Ollie A. Johnson III See also: King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X; Nation of Islam Further Reading Hamilton, Charles V. 1991. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma. New York: Atheneum. Haywood, Wil. 1993. King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr. 1971. Adam by Adam: The Autobiography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. New York: Dial.

Pratt, Geronimo ji-Jaga (1947–2011) Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt is one of the most celebrated political prisoners of the Black Power Movement. He joined the Black Panther Party (BPP) after serving in the U.S. Army as a special forces ranger in Vietnam. Pratt is known for his involvement in training paramilitary units of a variety of Black Power organizations, particularly the BPP. Because of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), and the Los Angeles County district attorney conspiracy to arrest, indict, and convict him on manufactured charges, Pratt spent 27 years in California penitentiaries. He was released after a vigorous and popular international campaign exposing the role of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in his captivity. Elmer Gerard Pratt was born on September 13, 1947, in Morgan City, Louisiana. He was born into a loving family that would nurture and provide him with support throughout his life. However, life was not easy for the young Pratt. He grew up in a community where he and other youths had to fight white supremacists from the “other side of the tracks.” Pratt said that he was encouraged to join the U.S. military by his community elders, who had roots in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Deacons for Defense. Pratt’s objective was to learn military skills for the defense of his community and his people. He was a decorated soldier, earning two Bronze Stars, a Silver Star, and two Purple Hearts. He distinguished himself as a sergeant and a ranger in the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army. After returning from two Vietnam combat tours, Pratt’s Morgan City community elders instructed him to move to the greater Los Angeles area. There he would work with Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, the principal organizer of the southern



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California chapter of the BPP. Carter and Pratt both became students at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). They participated in the Black student movement and the formation of the Black Studies Department at UCLA. Pratt rose to leadership in the Southern California chapter and national BPP after Carter and Captain John Huggins were murdered in an FBI COINTELPRO inspired internecine conflict between the Us organization and Panthers on the UCLA campus in September 1969. Pratt quickly became a primary target for elimination by the FBI and the LAPD based on his commitment, organizing ability, and military skills and the popularity of his comrades. December 8, 1969, four days after BPP members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated in a pre-dawn raid in Chicago, Illinois, the LAPD launched a military strike in South Central Los Angeles, with Pratt as its principal focus. This raid was the first time that the infamous SWAT unit would be deployed in the United States. The Los Angeles Panthers, composed mostly of teenagers and young adults, engaged in a five-hour-long gun battle, which can be attributed to the fortification, preparation, and training of their headquarters provided by Pratt. During 1969, many Panthers were arrested and/or killed. Pratt’s response was to help build the BPP’s capacity to defend itself around the United States. He also collaborated and served as a consultant to other defense formations nationally and internationally. He assisted in establishing the groundwork for what would later be known as the Black or Afro-American Liberation Army, the underground segment of the Black liberation movement. Pratt and other comrades were arrested in Dallas, Texas, in December 1970. The impact of their ideological differences coupled with the FBI’s divide-andconquer tactics resulted in his expulsion from the BPP by the Oakland-based national leadership. This was the event that led to the organizational split of the BPP in 1971. Lacking support from his organization, Pratt was convicted and sentenced in September 1972 for the December 18, 1968, murder and robbery of Caroline Olsen in Santa Monica, California. Pratt steadfastly maintained his innocence, stating that he was more than 400 miles away from Santa Monica in Oakland, California, for a BBP Central Committee meeting at the home of David Hilliard. Among those present at that meeting was party leader Kathleen Cleaver, who testified, along with many other alibi witnesses, at Pratt’s trial. Government agencies, primarily the FBI, had surveillance records of Pratt at this time. These records would prove that he was in the San Francisco Bay Area from December 13, 1968, to at least December 26, 1968. The FBI, the LAPD, and the LA County District Attorney’s Office conspired to convict Pratt based on the false testimony of a paid confidential informant, Julius Butler, infiltrating his legal defense team and concealing/withholding crucial evidence that would later exonerate him.

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During 1971 while Pratt was imprisoned, his first wife and comrade in the revolutionary nationalist underground, Sandra Pratt (aka Nsondi ji-Jaga) was murdered while eight months pregnant. She was found in a ditch in Lawndale, a neighbor city to Los Angeles. Pratt and his comrades considered her murder a political assassination. Pratt was imprisoned for 27 years in the California penal system for a murder he did not commit. His first 7 years were in solitary confinement in an attempt to stifle his ability to organize. Pratt remained active in his legal defense and managed to politicize and organize other prisoners while behind bars. He maintained that he was a prisoner of war because he continued to organize and instruct New Afrikan people in self-defense. Inspired by the New Afrikan independence movement (particularly the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa and the African People’s Party), Pratt declared himself a New Afrikan citizen while incarcerated. He strongly believed that Black people would vote to establish an independent New Afrikan republic if given the opportunity. He was a strong advocate of organizing a plebiscite—an election for Black people to determine their relationship with the United States. Pratt choose the last name “ji-Jaga” while incarcerated. The term ji-Jaga is Bantu for “of the Jaga people.” The Jaga or Imbangala people of West Central Africa formed kilombos (warrior societies) after being dispersed from a variety of African ethnic groups during the period of the Maafa (or Great Disaster) and the height of the Middle Passage. While in prison, Pratt met and married Ashaki jiJaga. Two children were born from this union, a daughter Shona and eldest son Hiroji Geronimo. They also shared a beautiful granddaughter, also named Ashaki. In the late 1970s, the National Task Force for COINTELPRO Litigation and Research, under the leadership of Dr. Mutulu Shakur and Afeni Shakur, developed the legal strategy that would ultimately lead to the vacating of the wrongful murder conviction of Pratt. The task force believed that by invoking the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI would be forced to release confidential surveillance documents that would corroborate Pratt’s alibi, proving that he was actually in Oakland at the time of Olsen’s murder. The task force obtained attorneys, specifically Stuart Hanlon, to assist with Pratt’s case. The original murder trial attorney, Johnnie Cochran, rejoined the legal team following the notoriety he received in the acquittal of O. J. Simpson. The international and national support that Pratt’s case received was essential in exposing the conspiracy against him, the BPP, and the Black liberation movement. Victoriously, Pratt was eventually released in 1997. The U.S. government and Los Angeles County were forced to pay a $4.5 million settlement for the premeditated calculated conspiracy against him. Pratt did not stop working for his people after he was released. He continued to offer his good name to support amnesty for other political prisoners and prisoners



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of war. He worked and provided financial support for young people in his hometown of Morgan City. Pratt also committed himself to supporting economic development and educational projects in Ghanaian and Tanzanian local villages. Pratt married Joju Cleaver after his release. Their union produced a son, Kayode. He later married Laila Minja in Tanzania, who gave birth to his youngest son, Tkumsah. Pratt died of a heart attack on June 2, 2011, while in Tanzania. He was a New Afrikan, Pan-African, and international hero. He is considered in the great pantheon of freedom fighters for our liberation and self-determination. Watani Tyehimba and Akinyele Umoja See also: Black Panther Party; Carter, Alprentice “Bunchy”; Cleaver, Kathleen Neal; Political Prisoners and Exiles; Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa; Shakur, Mutulu (Jarel Williams) Further Reading Olsen, Jack. 2001. Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt. New York: Anchor. Umoja, Akinyele O. 1998. “Set Our Warriors Free: The Legacy of Political Prisoners and the Black Panther Party.” In The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, edited by Charles E. Jones, 417–442. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Umoja, Akinyele O. 2001. “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party.” In Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, edited by Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficus, 3–19. New York: Routledge.

Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa The history of African American political thought and activism includes a political tendency called territorial nationalism. Proponents of this inclination view liberation as being dependent on the ability to secure territory, because they equate a land base with potential power. Calling themselves New Afrikans, Black Power– era territorial nationalists dedicated themselves to an independence movement that sought to secure five states in the U.S. South: Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. They considered this land to be the Republic of New Africa. New Afrikan “citizens” and their government, the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA), hoped to make this land independent and sovereign. They coupled their land claim with advocacy for reparations. In many ways, the Black Power–era struggles for land and reparations continue to resonate with activists.

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The PGRNA developed as the result of organizing efforts by Milton Henry (1919–2006) and Richard Henry (1930–2010), who were also known, respectively, as Gaidi Abiodun Obadele and Imari Abubakari Obadele. Originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the two moved to Detroit in the 1950s to pursue opportunities that were closed to them in the “City of Brotherly Love.” Specifically, Milton was a lawyer and wanted to use his legal expertise to challenge racial injustice. He found opportunities to do so in Detroit in the early 1950s. Richard followed him shortly thereafter, and the two worked together on Civil Rights activism. The Henry brothers helped cofound the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL) and participated in the Michigan Freedom Now Party (FNP). GOAL was a Civil Rights organization that challenged discriminatory urban renewal practices and tackled other important issues affecting Black Detroiters. Activists created the FNP as an experiment in independent Black third party politics. Found primarily in New York and Michigan, the FNP ran Black candidates for public offices at all levels of local and state government. Although they achieved some minor victories, these and other efforts for racial justice taught the Henry brothers that they could achieve only nominal freedom within the existing U.S. governmental system. After listening to Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Roots” speech in late 1963, the Henry brothers began developing a plan for Black independence. The push for independent land gained momentum following the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. The Obadele (Henry) brothers’ Malcolm X Society worked with Queen Mother Audley Moore (1898–1996), former members of the Revolutionary Action Movement, and others to host the National Black Government Conference held in Detroit on March 30–31, 1968. At this meeting, participants discussed Black people’s relationship to the South. It was the region where the majority of enslaved Africans and their descendants resided. On that land especially, white Americans exploited Africans as enslaved laborers and then as sharecroppers to develop individual wealth and political power and to secure the economic strength of the United States of America. For these reasons, those five states were the closest thing to a historic homeland for Africans in the United States. Before concluding the meeting, attendees declared independence, formed a provisional government, identified the five above-mentioned states as the New Afrikan National Territory, and demanded reparations from the United States. The PGRNA designated itself as the pre-independence governing leadership of the “captive Black nation” in the United States. As a governmental body, the original structure consisted of executive, judicial, and legislative branches. The executive branch included a president, first and second vice presidents, a treasurer, and ministers of diverse functions. At the founding of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), participants elected exiled activist Robert F. Williams (1925–1996) as president, Gaidi Obadele as first vice president, Malcolm X’s widow Betty Shabazz



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(1934–1997) as second vice president, and Imari Obadele, a chief theorist, as minister of information. The judicial branch eventually included several judges, including PGRNA cofounder Joan Franklin and Chokwe Lumumba (1947–2014). The legislative branch did not come into existence until the early 1970s, but the PGRNA did develop several consulates that organized local recruitment efforts and cadre development activities in several cities across the country. Finally, the PGRNA developed a military wing called the Black Legion, which its later renamed the New African Security Force. These various levels of leadership worked together with citizens, ultimately hoping to secure a southern land base upon which it could build an independent Black nation-state. The PGRNA argued that African people were never presented with the option to choose whether they should be U.S. citizens and that the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should have come with such an option. Instead, the PGRNA contended that the United States used the Fourteenth Amendment to force citizenship upon them. By 1968, the PGRNA decided that Black people should use a United Nations–monitored plebiscite to determine where to place their political allegiance and consent of citizenship. The PGRNA simultaneously advocated for reparations in the form of $300 billion and hoped to use the payment to build a new society for Black people and to begin addressing the effects of enslavement, racist terrorism, discrimination, subpar housing and education, and more that resulted from the white supremacist “war” being waged against them since the 15th century. Advocating such audacious goals earned the PGRNA the enmity of the U.S. government and contributed to two well-known shootouts involving New Afrikans and American policing agencies. The first, the New Bethel Incident, took place during the first anniversary celebration of the RNA’s founding in Detroit. The assault at New Bethel Baptist Church occurred when Detroit police officers Michael Czapski and Richard Worobec observed armed guards from the Black Legion outside of the church building. Shooting began, and when the smoke cleared Czapski was dead and Worobec was seriously wounded. A police raid on the church shortly thereafter left four attendees injured and resulted in 143 arrests. Local Black judge George Crockett released most of the arrestees the following morning; three young men went to trial for their alleged involvement in the shootout. All three were acquitted, but one defendant, Chaka Fuller, was murdered outside of his home shortly after the legal victory. The next major shootout took place on August 18, 1971, in Jackson, Mississippi. At approximately 6:30 a.m., police and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents shot tear gas into a residence, and four of the occupants responded with gunfire. They fatally wounded one police officer before the seven New Afrikans surrendered. Nearby at 1320 Lynch Street, President Imari Obadele and three others surrendered to police and federal agents before bullets flew. Although there was no

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gun battle, the residents, including Obadele, were arrested. Together, these New Afrikans became the RNA 11, and their cases became a major focus of PGRNA organizing over the next decade. These episodes of spectacular violence had important consequences regarding the structure of the PGRNA. In the aftermath of the New Bethel Incident, Gaidi Obadele (then acting president) reorganized the governmental structure and hierarchy. He disposed of the first and second vice presidents, replacing them with four regional vice presidents. The PGRNA later adopted the People’s Center Council (PCC) and the People’s Revolutionary Leadership Council (PRLC). The PCC and its chair functioned as the top decision-making body in the PGRNA, followed by the president. Local PRLCs replaced the consulates. The Jackson shootout diverted attention and resources away from organizing in local communities as New Afrikan citizens and allies built campaigns to defend the RNA 11. Although they were largely unsuccessful and most of the 11 served prison time, this situation placed New Afrikan prisoners in positions to increase prison organizing on behalf of the independence effort. Further, defense campaigns became the basis for creating International African Prisoner of War Solidarity Day and other public demonstrations publicizing the PGRNA and ideas about independence and reparations. The New Bethel Incident and the Jackson shootout were two of many violent interactions between the state and Black revolutionaries during the Black Power era. The consequences of these battles included the loss of New Afrikans’ and police officers’ lives, activist imprisonment, destruction of New Afrikan and community property, and the stagnation of the New African Independence Movement (NAIM), not to mention the controlling perception of New Afrikans as violent criminals. Yet, these actions did not crush the PGRNA or the NAIM. Some citizens continued working for independence from behind prison walls across the United States. Those who remained on the outside utilized the images of their imprisoned comrades to organize and mobilize for New Afrikan liberation. The PGRNA is but one entity seeking New Afrikan independence and reparations. (Consistent with other Black nationalists in the 1970s, the PGRNA and other elements of the movement began to spell Africa with a “k,” thus “New Afrika.”) Since 1968, organizations such as the Islamic Republic of New Africa, the New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO), the Spear and Shield Collective, and the Afrikan Peoples Party have taken up that cause and sought solidarity with nations seeking liberation in Africa and elsewhere. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement involves youths and adults in various activities that expand the original goals of the PGRNA. What is more, New Afrikans Imari Obadele, NAPO cofounder attorney Chokwe Lumumba, and activist lawyer Nkechi Taifa, among others, played an essential role in bringing about the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. These organizations are just some of the efforts and

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organizations of the post–Black Power era whose origins began with the territorial nationalism of the PGRNA. Edward Onaci See also: Group on Advanced Leadership; Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley; Obadele, Gaidi (Milton Henry); Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry); Revolutionary Action Movement Further Reading Berger, Dan, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. 2010. “‘The Struggle Is for Land!’: Race, Territory, and National Liberation.” In The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, edited by Dan Berger, 57–76. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Davenport, Christian. 2014. How Social Movements Die: Repression and Demobilization of the Republic of New Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lumumba, Chokwe. n.d. The Roots of the New Afrikan Independence Movement: A Response to the Inaccurate and Politically Immature Attacks on the New Afrikan Independence Movement by the African People’s Socialist Party. Jackson, MS: New Afrikan Productions. Onaci, Edward. 2015. “Revolutionary Identities: New Afrikans and Name Choices in the Black Power Era.” Souls: Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 17(1–2): 67–89. Umoja, Akinyele Omowale. 2013. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: New York University Press.

Publications Since the early 19th-century appearance of John Russwurm’s and Samuel Cornish’s Freedom’s Journal on March 16, 1827, publishing has long been a key aspect of African and African diasporic protest traditions. Subsequent generations of activist journalism emerged with considerable force in the early 20th century, as seen through The Crisis edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crusader under Cyril Briggs, the Messenger under A. Phillip Randolph and Chandler Owen, and Marcus Garvey’s Negro World under the critical editorship of Hubert H. Harrison. Despite their differences in approach and emphasis, all were concerned with the survival and success of African and Afro-diasporic communities. Since that time, thousands of newspapers and journals came and went well before the emergence of Black Power. However, those Black-owned and -run publications that were still being distributed in the 1960s were greatly impacted by the sense of social urgency forged in the Black Power era. Print culture, including journals, magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, posters, and books, was critical to advancing the politics, aesthetics, and criticism of the

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Black Power era from 1965 to 1975, though revolutionary impulses extend on both ends of that 10-year period. Virtually every city with an organization devoted to the espousal of Black Power was also home to a publishing organ that served to disseminate that organization’s ideological focus, social commentary, and political analysis. These publications served various functions as independent Black institutions, bully pulpits, assemblages of community-based knowledge, and training grounds for young writers, artists, and budding journalists. The following provides an overview that observes Black Power publications as critical forms of knowledge production, key sites of politicized Black vernacular culture, and locally produced periodicals that imagined liberation for the entire Black world.

Producing Knowledge, Vocalizing Autonomy Black Power publications definitively shaped the organizational life of the groups that produced them. They offered visibility and voice, if not attitude, to their organizational view of society and marked specific movement initiatives. As sites of exchange and debate, these publications mark the formation, shifts, and searching for collective identity. Publications in the Black Power era emphasized shared commitment and political autonomy. They demonstrate the interconnectedness of political and cultural vision. The political aspect marked the urgency of revolutionary change, while the cultural aspect urged the need for a non-Western sense of aesthetics, performance, and expressive values. Both required creativity and imagination. As inseparably linked pillars of Black Power, together these aspects worked to counter mainstream political and art world representations of Black activism and cultural production. These publications varied in terms of style and presentation. Some were hastily published, with a mimeographed presentation. Others, such as the Black Panther: Intercommunal News Service, was printed as a newspaper in print quality and size, while other publications such as Freedomways, the Negro Digest/Black World, and Liberator were journals with a magazine-style presentation. Not all of these publications experienced long runs. Some only lasted a few issues, while others ran for over a decade or two. Most of the publications had staffs headed by men. However, women often filled many of the editorial committee positions or spearheaded distribution networks that ensured widespread reception. Publishing outlets by and about Black women would emerge in the 1970s with force. Not all of these were periodicals, as women authors published anthologies, novels, and collections of poetry in this period. Although there were numerous regional periodicals dedicated to women’s liberation and gender equity in this era, very few of these were centered on the concerns of Black and brown women. Black Power–era publications such as the Black Panther, Freedomways, and the Negro Digest/Black World frequently carried the writing, thought, and strategy of Black

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women activists, artists, and intellectuals. Overlapping with and in some ways inspired by the Black Power Movement, the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) in Berkeley, California, published Triple Jeopardy, which focused on the inter­ sections of race, gender, and class while also standing against militarism and imperialism. Early issues of the periodical carried images of women of different hues, one brandishing a rifle, with a caption that read “Smash! Capitalism, Racism, and Sexism.” Founding members of this organization, such as Fran Beale, editor of Triple Jeopardy, had been active in earlier groups more closely associated with the militant Civil Rights Movement than with Black Power. Beale’s time challenging sexism in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee through the internally organized Black Women’s Caucus (BWC), for example, laid a basis for her pivotal work with the TWWA. The impactful run of Triple Jeopardy notwithstanding, the Black Power–era periodicals run by and for women were dismally low. Located in cities around the world including Detroit, New York, and Oakland as well as Paris, Bermuda, and Accra, these publishing spaces documented local, national, and international concerns and news affecting people of African descent. They formed translocal and transnational networks linking multiple publics both domestically and internationally. Moreover, these spaces helped individual activists and communities sharpen their political outlooks and also bolstered their sense of pride in Black diasporic culture and heritage. Black Power–era periodicals served the multiple functions of announcing the particular perspective, philosophy, and analysis of their organizations while informing an Afro-diasporic readership about relevant local and global events.

The Black Space of the Page Black Power–era publications were Black people’s opportunity to engage governmental policies on their own terms and in their own voice. The publications offered a platform for writers to speak in vernaculars that Black communities spoke and understood. Direct connection to communities often determined the relevance of these publishing sites. Frequently left out of national debates, used as leverage, or vilified when included, these publications were the spaces where activist communities redefined the significance of struggles for racial justice. In this way these publishing spaces offered a form of direct community engagement and movement-inspired political literacy. Writers of the Black Power era saw themselves as a rising tide of intellectual, cultural, and political activity aimed at giving Black people around the world a new vision and material reality, a vision unapologetically for, by, and about themselves. These periodicals opened space for writers to hone their skill sets, and few were trained journalists. Their identities as writers, critical thinkers, social analysts, creative writers, poets, playwrights, and concerned citizens were their

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credentials. In this sense they formed tapestries of communication, dialogue, and community exchange. Black Power–era publications were an attempt to establish writers in a time when mainstream publications ignored Black politics and Black Arts that challenged the status quo. Most of all these periodicals were an example of community ownership over content and presentation. Though Black Power periodicals emphasized political and cultural autonomy, this was a position that did not exclude other community sites of gathering and political exchange. These periodicals often were connected to or drew writers and artists from or were otherwise engaged with bookstores, schools (especially colleges), local libraries, theaters and theater workshops, writers’ workshops, local museums, art spaces, art collectives, artistic ensembles, and religious spaces, such as mosques and churches. The importance of Black Power–era periodicals remained tied to the desire of authors to speak for themselves and their community. These publications provided coverage of issues and points of view not found anywhere else. More than presenting the news, these periodicals strove to create public opinion on a range of issues. Common themes included critiques of U.S. domestic state-sanctioned violence and inequality, police brutality, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the War on Poverty, and school desegregation. Foreign policy concerns chiefly included African independence, self-determination of the Third World, and the Vietnam War. These periodicals engaged Black politics generally, including critiques and debates of elected officials, Black leadership, and public policy from below. In these pages could be found calls for the formation of an independent Black political party and campaigns for the defense of imprisoned or exiled activists alongside reports from international writers’ festivals and spirited discussions of African literature and politics. Articulations of Third World solidarity also grew in frequency in this era. Publications thus helped to define a critical Black perspective on coalition building and solidarities around the globe. While explicitly engaging politics, these periodicals were equally concerned with culture. These periodicals put in print multiple definitions of cultural awareness, Black cultural sensibilities, and Afro-diasporic performance reviews and offered some of the most enduring forms of Black cultural criticism not seen since the Harlem Renaissance. One of the distinctive aspects of Black Power– and Black Arts–era publications was the search for the “Black aesthetic,” defined as an autonomous cultural tradition, worldview, and sensibility derived from inherited ancestral wisdom and self-definition absent white European standards of beauty and possibility. Moreover, these were sites of sophisticated Black political humor that offered a general sense of irreverence for individuals and institutions defending the status quo. Those who were deemed enemies or threats to the rising call for Black Power were heavily ridiculed and discredited, evidenced most clearly in the Black Panthers’ use of the pig as a recurring symbol to describe police and a host

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of detrimental actions, policies, and viewpoints that impeded Black autonomy, justice, and spatial democracy. Black leaders were also fair game for criticism, the most notable being Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who for much of the 1960s represented a style of politics that the Black Power era and radicals preceding it vehemently opposed. Black Power publications also aimed critiques at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which demonstrated a center-right if not conservative reformist position in this era. Its perspective could be seen in attempts to silence and isolate Robert F. Williams and by the consistent effort to bolster U.S. citizenship rights of African Americans by aligning Black political fortunes with the White House. Williams established the radical periodical The Crusader as well as Radio Free Dixie, each carrying a message of Black liberation, updates, and commentary on national and international politics combined with the audio tapestry of revolutionary jazz music. Such disagreements indicate a great deal of ideological diversity as well as collaboration among Black leaders, activists, and everyday Black citizens in this period. However, the perspective, ferocity, and commitment toward Black liberation fashioned by Malcolm X was the lens through which most Black Power–era publications the world over interpreted, approached, and imagined Black political futures. Even as a few periodicals had white staff members, whites were not the target audience of these publications. Exceptions included criticizing white-owned and -controlled mainstream institutions and targeting them as impediments to Black liberation. Otherwise, white workers could be challenged for lacking classconsciousness, and white liberals and progressives could be urged to provide supports (often financial and/or legal) that Black communities could not. Yet, some publications and individuals were in frequent communication with white radical or progressive activists, the white intellectual Left, or selected white intellectuals. For example, the socialist periodical Studies on the Left, in operation from 1959 to 1967, published the revolutionary theorizing of Harold Cruse in the early 1960s. His 1962 article “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American” proved influential to a host of Black and white student activists. Additionally, Students for a Democratic Society in Madison, Wisconsin, published the heady journal Radical America. In its pages could be found Black artists and writers debating the politics of Black struggle. Its summer 1968 issue was themed “Historical Roots of Black Liberation” and featured poetry by Sonia Sanchez, David Henderson, and Ethe­ ridge Knight as well as a speech on the internationalism of the Black liberation struggle by C. L. R. James and a historical essay by George Rawick. Editors of Radical America, chiefly Paul Buhle, and contributors such as Dan Georgakas were examples of white radicals who wrote favorably of or expressed sympathies with the politics of Black liberation and the urgency of African independence and were not averse to the claims and imaginings of Third World autonomy.

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Multiregional Outlets Black Power–era publications emphasized the urgency of a collective revolutionary vision. Periodicals sought to make explicit connections between local experiences throughout the “Chocolate Cities” of the United States and around the world. Forging a critical sense of social justice that challenged racial capitalism, these Black spaces of the page experienced various degrees of longevity. Some were gravely short-lived, only lasting through a handful of issues, while others survived for decades. Each held distinctive importance to the communities they emerged from and the communities they reached, producing a sense of translocalism that challenged spatial isolation between cities, communities, and circles of activists. Periodicals channeled movement energies by rewriting vernacular and political landscapes and reimagining civic engagement while offering the world new vocabularies and histories of struggle. As a result, the multiregional aspect of these outlets underscores the impact beyond their specific sites of publication.

New York New York was home to short-lived Black Arts journals such as Umbra (1962– 1963) and the Harlem-based and short-lived magazine Freedom, which was chiefly concerned with African history and the politics of African liberation and was founded by Paul Robeson. New York was also home to periodicals with considerably longer runs such as Freedomways (1961–1985), Liberator magazine (1961–1971), and Muhammad Speaks alongside venerable newspaper outlets such as Amsterdam News. Black Power’s impact among other African diaspora communities is readily observable in the formation of the Young Lords Party, considered the Latino counterpart of the Black Panther Party (BPP). The Young Lords, a Black Power–era organization with explicit roots in Puerto Rican heritage and political identity published the bilingual paper Palante as the centerpiece of the Latin Revolutionary News Service. New York–based Puerto Ricans, or selfdescribed Boricuas, sharpened the anticolonial spear of Black Power by emphasizing the largely ignored African heritage of Puerto Ricans while highlighting the uniqueness of Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory. The Jones Act of 1917 guaranteed U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans, yet similar to African Americans, their ability to exercise that citizenship remained a stiff challenge. Importantly, for a time Palante was published both in the United States and on the island of Puerto Rico. Finally, New York was also the home of the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement led by Carlos A. Cooks, who published the short-lived newsletters the Black Challenge and the Street Speaker. Though these two periodicals predate the Black Power era, the political perspectives they relayed would carry into subsequent generations of Black nationalists and Pan-Africanists. In Newark, New Jersey, the Congress of

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African People, led by Amiri Baraka, published Unity and Struggle, while Black workers at the Ford Motor Plantation in Mahwah, New Jersey, circulated their demands for workers’ rights, Black nationalism, and Third World solidarity in a publication called the Black Voice. Impressively, their raison d’être included demands for worker transportation, waivers for Vietnam War veteran workers, regular medical checkups, overhauls in the existing grievance procedures, and the printing of employee information, manuals, and employment applications in multilingual (specifically Spanish and Creole) formats. Elsewhere in the North, collectives of organized Black laborers in Boston published The Hammer under the auspices of the United Community of Construction Workers.

Chicago By far Chicago, one of the hubs of Black print culture, was unique in that it could boast a long-standing Black print culture owing to the success of the more mainstream Chicago Defender while also being the central location of the John H. Johnson empire that gave birth to arguably the most well-known periodicals in Black culture—Jet and Ebony. The success of these periodicals provided enough of a mainstream readership and advertising revenue required for their more assertively intellectual activist offshoots, Negro Digest and later Black World, to thrive long enough to significantly impact the political and intellectual life of a generation of African American and African students, writers, and activists. Under the respected editorship of Hoyt Fuller, Negro Digest/Black World was arguably the most far-reaching of all periodicals outside of the Black Panther Newspaper in the Black Power era. The Windy City was also home to the Black Arts periodical Nommo, published by the influential Organization of Black American Culture, which consisted of stalwarts of the Black Arts including Abdul Alkalimat, Haki Madhubuti, Fuller, Sterling Plumpp, and Angela Jackson. Chicago was also home to the short-lived BWC News, published by the Black Women’s Committee for the Protection of Our Children, as well as the base of activity for local BPP leader Fred Hampton. Last but not least, Chicago served as the hub of the Nation of Islam (NOI). Although Muhammad Speaks was the main organ of the NOI and the principal media platform of leader Elijah Muhammad, its readership and contributors extended beyond its Muslim devotees. Established by Malcolm X in 1960, Muhammad Speaks was essentially a periodical of the African world broadly conceived to include Africa and its diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. As such, it covered the central tenets of the NOI and the specific concerns of Black people around the world struggling against American apartheid in housing, education, the economy, and the courts. The editorial impact of longtime Black radical media activist Richard “Dick” Durban demonstrates that the lines between

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revolutionaries and Black religious organizations were more porous than they were perceived to be. Moreover, secular readers could appreciate the NOI’s message of African and Black independence, self-respect, and millenniarist redemption while offering a counter to Western (white) Christian hegemony.

Detroit Outside of the juggernauts of Chicago and the New York region, Detroit competed as a premier host to the highest number of independent Black Power publishing outlets. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers alone launched several notable periodicals, including the Black Vanguard, DRUM, the Inner City Voice, and the South End, whose masthead spoke to the class fissures between two key constituencies engaged in the Black freedom struggle: “One class-conscious worker is worth 100 students.” Yet for a time, high school students at Detroit’s Central High organized their own newsletter called Black Student Voice. The Motor City was also home to NOW!, edited and published by Richard B. Henry (Imari Obadele). Though it held the rather general tagline “News of the Nation and the World,” the periodical was decidedly focused on Black concerns for radical social justice. Along with his brother Milton Henry, Richard was instrumental in establishing several key organizations in Detroit, including the Group on Advanced Leadership, the Freedom Now Party, and the Republic of New Africa throughout the 1960s.

California (Los Angeles and the Bay Area) California also emerged as a fertile site for the growth of Black Power publications, owing to the robust organizational presence of the BPP and the Us organization; traditions of Black activist journalism that reached back to the California Eagle, under the editorship of Charlotta Bass; and increasing political awareness of the post–World War II Black migrant communities of Los Angeles and Oakland. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense published the Black Panther: Inter­ communal News Service weekly and later a publication called Right ON!, and members of the Black Panther Party of Northern California published Black Power. Northern California was home also to a proto–Black Power collective known as the Afro-American Association (AAA) as well as chapters of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), which published Afro-American Dignity News and Soulbook, respectively. The AAA, headed by Donald Warden, who also edited Dignity News, was pivotal in radicalizing many young activists and students throughout the Bay Area. Much as these periodicals served as the breeding ground for debates among Black nationalist, revolutionary nationalist, and Black transnationalist viewpoints, ideas that would mature in the pages of the

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Black Scholar by the late 1960s under the direction of Dr. Nathan Hare and later Robert Chrisman. Anticipating Black Power, RAM would also publish Black America, “the theoretical journal of RAM—Revolutionary Action Movement, Black Liberation Front of the U.S.A.”; another fiery outlet titled Burn, Baby, Burn; and a short-lived publication that blended revolutionary ideals with a sense of African spirituality called Vibration. Importantly, RAM, through the translocal networking of Muhammad Ahmed (Max Stanford) with ties to Philadelphia and Cleveland, sought to establish networks of student radicals through the formation of the Afro-American Student Movement (AASM). The AASM established chapters in Nashville, Detroit, northern California, and Los Angeles, allowing it to successfully host a national conference on Black nationalism in May 1964.

District of Columbia and the South In Washington, D.C., the African Liberation Support Committee disseminated its radical transnational perspective in the pages of Finally Got the News, identifying itself as a “newsletter of anti-imperial and anti-racist struggle,” while the National Association of Black Students in the nation’s capital mobilized support through its organ, Struggle! Voice of the Black Student-Worker. Outside of the urban North there were a few notable publications concerned directly with Black Power and Black Arts. In Greensboro, North Carolina, the Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU) published the SOBU Newsletter before renaming it the African World, and a collective of militants in St. Petersburg, Florida, produced an organ called the Burning Spear under the auspices of the Junta of Military Organizations. Atlanta was home to First World, and New Orleans was the soil from which Nkombo emerged, while a Black Arts publication called Hoodoo featured the work of poets and visual artists throughout Louisiana.

Student and Student-Faculty Collaborations With the emergence of Black student unions (BSUs) from 1968 onward at college campuses across the United States, Black Power and Black Arts print culture flourished. Nearly every BSU ran its own paper or magazine. At the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, students and faculty coproduced a periodical called DRUM; students at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), produced a newspaper titled Collective Spirit; students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, vocalized their political aspirations in a periodical called Drums; and students at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, produced Black Americans for Democracy News. Finally, on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara,

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students ran a paper that spoke to the anticolonial attitudes of the Black Power era called Third World News.

Black Power International Recent scholarship has revealed that Black Power’s reach was never confined solely to the borders of the United States. Black Power inherited earlier forms of radical thought and activism and inspired myriad new approaches around the globe. Internationally, intellectuals and activists of African descent, especially in the Francophone world, published their views on Black global culture, anticolonialism, and the possibilities and challenges of African independence in the pages of Présence Africaine (Paris). Founded by scholar Alioune Diop in 1947, it remained a critical international site of debate and cultural exchange for many in the African world, including the diaspora of the United States throughout the Black Power era. As Mildred A. Hill-Lubin notes, Black activist-intellectuals such as Sonia Sanchez, Harold Cruse, Langston Hughes, Ted Joans, John Henrik Clarke, and Amiri Baraka all published writing in Présence Africaine. One of its signature contributions to the transnational exchange of African thought is the collection Africa Seen by American Negroes, published in 1958. This collection featured scholar St. Clair Drake, historian William Leo Hansberry, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, Du Bois, scholar Adelaide Cromwell Hill, librarian and bibliophile Dorothy Porter, and the historian Rayford Logan, among other Pan-African intellectual luminaries. Elsewhere, the magazine Revolution Africaine embraced the Third World vision of revolutionary change and disseminated anti-imperialist social and political analysis throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Black Power’s impact was also felt in the Caribbean, as noted by scholars Quito Swan and Kate Quinn. While undoubtedly influenced by the articulations of Black Power in the United States, these efforts were primarily responsive to long-standing local exigencies that kept power out of the hands of the poor, working class, and dispossessed of these islands even as they had experienced or were experiencing constitutional independence in this period. And similar to the translocal exchanges found among Black communities in the United States, here too activists paid careful attention to inequality, police brutality, state repression, class and ethnic antagonism, political suppression, and disaffection in neighboring countries. As such, Bermuda, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda, Curaçao, Suriname, and numerous other sites experienced the full range of Black Power activism, from dramatic disturbances of the status quo and the issuing of demands and protests calling for shifts in power to the formation of short-term and long-term organizational structures. The activism of the page extended and deepened the impact of these efforts. Like their U.S.-based radical counterparts, these

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publications experienced varying degrees of longevity and ideological diversity from hard Left to left of center. The Jamaica-based Abeng newspaper, under the editorship of Rupert Lewis, Robert Hill, George Beckford, and Horace Levy, ran for nine months in 1969, though the group remained together until 1974. The paper was open to a range of viewpoints yet held firm that a radical analysis of Jamaican history and society would be its anchor. In Guyana, the Pan-Africanist organization African Society for Cultural Relations with Africa (ASCRIA), under the leadership of Caribbean Black Power pioneer Eusi Kwayana, published its organ, the ASCRIA Bulletin. In Antigua and Barbuda, Tim Hector, heavily influenced by C. L. R. James, was instrumental in establishing the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement’s periodical Outlet as a trusted resource of Pan-African and Black radical thought. In Bermuda, the Garvey-influenced Bermuda Recorder responded favorably to emergent calls for Black Power; however, the periodical Umoja: The Bermuda Voice of the Black Power Conference was a direct outgrowth of a new expression of militancy in this era. Finally, the influence of Caribbean and U.S.-based Black Power reverberated in Canada, where its impact could also be felt. Owing in large part to significant numbers of Afro-Caribbean intellectuals who came of age as students in Canada, by the late 1960s it too had experienced a range of Black Power activism. More than any other event, the Congress of Black Writers, which met in Montreal in 1968, is perhaps the best demonstration of Black Power’s presence in Canada. Like many political gatherings of this period, the congress speaker list excluded women. As elder male leaders such as James and Richard B. Moore embraced younger male activists including Walter Rodney and Stokely Carmichael, it would be their vision of a liberated Black world that would be remembered. Periodicals such as Umoja, which ran from 1969 to 1970, and The Black Voice, in print from 1972 to 1974, are two of the standout publications that offered Black Canadian activists, students, and intellectuals political visibility at the grass roots.

Turning the Page In their own ways, each of these periodicals affected the shape, tenor, and texture of Black Power outlooks and Black political possibility. In these newsletters, pamphlets, and journals could be found the contours of Black expressive culture aimed at opening up new possibilities and registers of social visibility and political engagement. These publications gave space to new voices in Black literary, cultural, and political criticism by privileging Black vernacular culture and militant political outlooks that could not be found in the mainstream. Black Power–era publications cultivated the possibilities of militant public culture that spoke to current conditions and future challenges. They were invested in

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getting on the page the sense of urgency and emotive potency that could galvanize Black readers of all (and sometimes competing) social classes to be unapologetic in the search for alternatives to the cultural and political status quo that ensnared Black possibility. In terms of aesthetics, these periodicals especially privileged points of view steeped in African and Afro-diasporic cultural traditions, while explicitly political points of view were decidedly anti-imperialist and anticapitalist in their denouncements of white supremacy and racism. Thus, Black Power periodicals shaped important contours of political struggle, and the energy that went to print in turn profoundly influenced the publications’ producers. Editors studied and read the columns of other editors. Writers wrote for multiple publications. Activists joined the staffs of publications in order to direct content and perspective. They shared panels and pulpits. In this sense there was a great deal of content overlap and shared interest, while ideological shadings varied. Though several of these periodicals experienced long, healthy publishing runs, many more went out of operation after a few years. By the late 1970s only a few periodicals from the Black Power era were left standing. Increasing publishing costs and declining revenue streams, changes in technology, attrition among key staff, divisions within and between organizations, rival publications, and general declines in movement activities all contributed to the decline of Black Power–era publications. Additionally, by the end of the era the best writers had other opportunities to publish in the mainstream. Some such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Harold Cruse, and Maya Angelou, as a few examples, were able to survive the decline and continue their craft by having their works reach broader publics. Others such as Dudley Randall (Broadside Press) and Haki Madhubuti (Third World Press) maintained a commitment to autonomous Black publishing and continued to print Black poetry and essays long after the decline of Black Power into the present day. Though periodicals were forced to turn the page and close office doors, this hardly meant the death of Black thought. Moreover, many of the notable articles in magazines and journals continue to be anthologized in book form or digitized years after they first appeared in print. The Black Scholar and lesser-known periodicals established in the 1970s such as Contributions in Black Studies indicate a continuity of activist-intellectual knowledge production concerned with the Black world into subsequent decades. Black Power publications catered equally to the politically literate and readers just cutting their teeth in political debates. But more often than not, these publications required an astute, socially conscious Black reading public that could relate to its content. Publications were most influential among a robust readership even if these periodicals often had the same audiences in mind. Thus, the Black Power era benefited from and served a politically charged, intergenerational collection of writers and artists. Chiefly concerned with bolstering political literacies and organizing communities, periodicals gave voice, context, and perspective to the

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demands, contested solidarities, and militancy pertinent to a Black global community on the verge of social transformation. Christopher M. Tinson See also: Bambara, Toni Cade; Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Studies; Black Women’s Alliance/Third World Women’s Alliance; Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee); Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry); Sanchez, Sonia Further Reading Ahmad, Muhammad (Max Stanford). 2007. We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960–1975. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing. Austin, David. 2009. “All Roads Led to Montreal: Black Power, the Caribbean, and the Black Radical Tradition in Canada.” Journal of African American History 92(4) (Autumn): 516–539. Baraka, Amiri, and Larry Neal, eds. 2007. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Bracey, John H., Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst, eds. 2014. SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Collins, Lisa Gail, and Margo Natalie Crawford, eds. 2006. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hill-Lubin, Mildred A. 1992. “Presence Africaine: A Voice in the Wilderness, a Record of Black Kinship.” In The Surreptitious Speech: Presence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, edited by V. Y. Mudimbe, 157–173. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Neal, Larry. 1989. Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings. New York: Thunder’s Mouth. Quinn, Kate, ed. 2014. Black Power in the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Smethurst, James. 2005. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Swan, Quito. 2009. Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

R Religion and Black Power While often considered a secular movement, Black Power had an impact on Black faith traditions and on religious institutions in the United States. Religion is one’s chosen method of faith and worship, often in a supreme being or beings. Black Power is a concept adopted by Black Americans that emphasizes self-sufficiency and self-determination through personal affirmations and political and economic power. Religion and Black Power are often conceptualized as mutually exclusive and divergent concepts. However, Black Power ideology served to deify Black consciousness and self-determination and ingrain them as part of spiritual heritage. Religion is often portrayed in the mainstream to be a vehicle of cohesion and peace, and Black Power is depicted as violent and divisive. However, this framing religion and Black Power as a dichotomy can be problematic because these two have intersected throughout American history, though in ways that precede the articulation of the concept of Black Power. The seeds of resistance and Black Power were planted prior to the Middle Passage in Africa, gestated throughout slavery, and blossomed with the Civil Rights Movement. In the agrarian antebellum period, religion was used as a liberation vessel whether it was to provide encoded instruction for escape or to galvanize and mobilize for armed resistance. This way of life would continue through the American Civil War and into Reconstruction, when the Black church was transformative in its purpose. Not only was it the spiritual hub for religious service, but the buildings themselves were often multipurpose facilities, addressing the communal needs for weddings, politics, and other gatherings for large crowds. Church walls were relatively safe spaces for Black Americans to gather and organize and exercise their collective powers as citizens following the Civil War. After fighting for their own liberation, Black Americans in the United States still found themselves marginalized. State imposed structural and systemic discrimination infested their daily lives. White supremacy threatened all aspects of Black American life, including Blacks’ livelihood and their own personal safety. When African Americans sought their slice of the American pie, there were often rebuffed by the establishment, sometimes violently. This cauldron of circumstances begat the Civil Rights Movement in which Black Americans sought to redefine their existence in the United States. For some, this also meant the reconceptualizing of their faith in a higher power.

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It was easy to lose faith in a deity shared by the oppressors who had shown that they would exercise any means necessary to subordinate you. The crimes of the white establishment in the United States were also the crimes of their God, the white Jesus who has presided over slavery, Jim Crow, and injustice but provided no recompense for its victims. As a result, there was no more room for a Christ depicted as a white man, condemning Black Americans from on high, because this Christ’s mere existence contrasted the very essence of Blackness. The idea that Black dignity and equality had to be denied only to be posthumously actualized in spirit form was not palatable. The Nation of Islam (NOI) did not insist on delayed gratification of subservience in the afterlife for its followers, advocating for self-sufficiency and dignity in the present. The NOI saw an explosion of membership, growing exponentially from 400 individuals in 1952 to more than 40,000 in 1960. The NOI taught parishioners that they were the lost people of the original nation of African descent called the tribe of Shabazz. Historically, the tribe of Shabazz was captured, exploited, and dehumanized to serve as slaves. The NOI’s goal is the uplift of the Black community with a knowledge of God and of themselves, ultimately leading to self-independence with a superior culture and a higher civilization than they had previously experienced. A notable member of the NOI was Malcolm X, the outspoken Civil Rights leader who was popularized by his “any means necessary” ideology, which called for Blacks to employ whatever was necessary for the actualization of their rights. Portrayed as being militant, Malcolm popularized the idea that Black salvation was not rooted in whiteness and white iconology; in fact, he lambasted the establishment for the physical and psychological trauma inflicted on people of color. The NOI and Malcolm X would provide a critique of the hypocrisy and racism of mainstream American Christianity. The ideas they championed became the model for future theological thought. Therefore, when Stokely Carmichael articulated the concept and phrase “Black Power” with the ideological baton he acquired from Malcolm X and NOI parishioners, there existed an audience with an insatiable appetite for self-affirmation and self-propulsion. In the transformative 1960s liberation ideology was transformative within the Black community, and this meant a fundamental redefining of Blackness, the Black experience in Amer­ ica, and what Black Americans strove for. Black Americans sought to be more than legitimized; they sought to control their own destiny. Black Power represented a cognitive shift from being subordinate and a second-class citizen. Black Power meant no longer cowering in shame and using deferential behaviors because of the hues of one’s skin. In a sense Black Power became its own religion, pleading internally for soulful devotion from Black people to celebrate their Blackness. Black people needed ideologies that aligned both with their experiences and with their newfound striving in the social order. For



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many people, the aforementioned NOI fulfilled the theological and social needs that Black Power marketed. Militant Black theologians reconceptualized Christianity through the lens of Black Power. For example, Congregationalist pastor Albert Cleage was heavily influenced by Malcolm X and identified a need to imbue self-sufficiency into communities of color. Early in his ministry, Cleage was inducted into the leadership of integrated congregations but found that his ideas of Black leadership clashed with the established leadership structure of the church. Therefore, he left to establish denominations that ministered to those who were poor and downtrodden. He authored The Black Messiah in 1969 in which he urged congregations to repurpose the depiction of Jesus, arguing that Jesus is a Black revolutionary leader. In 1972 Cleage, now known as Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, meaning “liberator, holy man, and savior of the nation,” founded the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church and authored his second book, Black Christian Nationalism. Reverend James Cone authored Black Theology and Black Power, which argues the central importance of Black people conceptualizing Jesus as Black. Cone emphasized the intertwining racial politics into religion so that it could be relevant to Black people. He used the Bible to argue that God sides with the oppressed. Cone credits some of his inspiration to Gayraud Wilmore, author of Black Religion and Black Radicalism, published in 1972. These and other scholars posited that God’s ministry was timeless and applicable for people of color, and this premise is rooted in the fact that Christianity was rooted and practiced in Africa and in the East. Depictions of Jesus also took on Blackness to help parishioners affirm their identity during social crises. Cleage was instrumental in spreading the installation of the Black Madonna during the 1960s in Easter services, which depicted Jesus and his mother Mary as persons of color. The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham has a stained glass effigy commemorating the bombing that took the lives of four girls in 1963. The Welsh Window, as it is called, portrays a Black Jesus, and his posture on the cross carries meaning: his right arm repels hatred and injustice, while his left arm extends in an offering of forgiveness. However, the association of Black Power with Christianity didn’t stop with ideas and monuments, as it included tangible resistance. This, for theologians such as Cleage, Cone, and Wilmore, was where Black Power and Christianity intersected: interceding on behalf of the poor and destitute. For example, in 1968 the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party conducted sit-ins within the Catholic churches of the area. The goal here was to advocate for the marginalized people of color in this community so they could have a voice regarding the affairs of the church. In 1969, James Forman led a similar effort regarding church sit-ins as part of his Black Manifesto, where he demanded reparations from white congregations as recompense for the damages of slavery. As a result, he was able to enlist the financial support of these institutions that were sympathetic to the ideas of his cause.

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Those who chose not to be Christian or members of the NOI found other expressions of faith. Some identified with traditional African religions, which can include beliefs in mystical powers and cultural heritage. Two faiths like this include Yoruba and Akan. Oba Efuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi, born Walter Eugene King, renounced his Baptist upbringing to become an ordained priest of Obatala. Adefunmi intertwined Black revolutionary thought with Yoruba teachings, working with Black nationalists such as Queen Mother Moore and Imari Obadele to found the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa. In 1970, Adefunmi established the Oyotunji village in Beaufort County, South Carolina, which continues to operate under the traditional Yoruba heritage and culture. An influx of African and Caribbean immigrants at the turn of the 1970s also saw African Americans turn to Afro-Caribbean religions such as Vodou and Santeria. These faith systems were also embraced by some Black Power advocates as an alternative to Christianity and Islam. Tim Brown See also: Black Panther Party; Forman, James; Malcolm X; Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley; Nation of Islam; Reparations Further Reading “The Black Church: A Brief History.” n.d. African American Registry, http://www .aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/black-church-brief-history. Cleage, Albert B., Jr. 1987. Black Christian Nationalism: New Directions for the Black Church. Detroit: Luxor Publishers of the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church. Cone, James H. 1997. Black Theology and Black Power. New York: Orbis Books. “The Declaration of Independence: Full text.” n.d. UShistory.org, http://www.ushistory .org/declaration/document/. Forman, James. 1969. “The Black Manifesto.” Africa Today 16(4): 21–24. “Get to Know Us.” n.d. Oyotunji.org, http://www.oyotunji.org/. Harding, Vincent. 1968. The Religion of Black Power. Boston: Beacon. Maffly-Kipp, Laurie. 2001. “The Church in the Southern Black Community: Introduction.” Documenting the American South, May, http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/intro.html. Muhammad, Tynetta. n.d. “NOI History.” Nation of Islam, https://www.noi.org/noi -history/.

Reparations The struggle for reparations has deep roots that began with the enslaved. It remained an important aspect of Black political agendas into the 1960s when the call for

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Black Power rang out among African American activists. Reparations efforts began to cohere into a broad-based movement during the Black Power era due to the efforts of the Black Panther Party (BPP), James Forman, “Queen Mother” Audley Moore, the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa, and many others. These groups and individuals brought a range of people together, even those who did not always share political perspectives. Therefore, Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Conyers joined Huey Newton and Betty Shabazz in this pursuit. Black Power–era activism continues to inform and influence the struggles for reparations, especially since the founding of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) and other similar activist formations. As a moral project, reparations advocates have demanded a formal apology from the U.S. government, corporations, and private citizens. Many proreparations activists argued that money was due to the victims and survivors of the human rights violations that African Americans endured throughout American history. Though African people have always championed various aspects of repairing the damages perpetrated and condoned by the white citizenry, the broadbased effort that is common in the 21st century is largely the result of the Black Power activism that took place during the 1960s and 1970s. Social movement organizations, economists, lawyers, and individual activists were considering the cultural, political, and economic results of racial oppression in ways that sought to challenge the long-standing popular vision of redressing racial problems through full inclusion alone. Instead, Black Power advocates argued that unrestrained participation in the American polity and access to white social spaces, even if desirable, would not yield full equality to African Americans if the country did not adequately address the roots of Black exclusion. Economically, this required that the U.S. government and white citizenry provide restitution for the human rights abuses they inflicted on African-descended people through slavery and its legacies, including continued economic exploitation, social discrimination, political exclusion, and systematized legal and extralegal violence. The Black Power pursuit of back pay for stolen labor and remedy for the moral and economic malevolence since the American Civil War were not new. The predecessors to these efforts include the freedom lawsuits of the postindependence era during which enslaved Africans demanded freedom from slavery and the emancipated sued for compensation for their unpaid labor. Continuing into the 19th century, the Civil War and Reconstruction saw efforts to remunerate newly freed people as they sought to establish new lives. During this time, General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order 15 originated the long-standing call “40 Acres and a Mule.” Simultaneously, Congress battled with President Andrew Johnson over whether and how to compensate former slaves. Radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens sought to redistribute confiscated confederate land to people recently freed from chattel slavery. Johnson, on the other hand, favored

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pardoning and restoring land to the ex-confederates. The president and his allies succeeded. In the midst of the debates and the rising anti-Black violence, formerly enslaved African people began to sound the call for pensions. The National ExSlave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association and the National Industrial Council and National Liberty Party were just two organizations seeking to secure payments to former slaves. Their efforts lasted into the first quarter of the 20th century. More immediate precursors to Black Power reparations efforts included those by “Queen Mother” Audley Moore (1898–1996) and her various reparations organizations, including the African Descendants Nationalist Independence Partition Party (AD-NIP) and the Reparations Committee of Descendants of U.S. Slaves, Inc. Born in New Iberia, Louisiana, Moore was a Garveyite and a former member of the Communist Party USA. She dedicated her life to championing the causes of Black people, including the struggle to secure independent land. In the early 1960s, she began to focus on efforts to obtain reparations. She was the minister of foreign of relations for AD-NIP, whose members declared their independence from the United States in 1962, established a provisional government, and demanded reparations from the U.S. government in the amount of 19 states and $500 trillion. AD-NIP explained that a reparations payment was due to the enslaved Africans and their descendants for 450 years of enslavement. Moore helped lead the Reparations Committee, which demanded monetary compensation for what it considered genocide against African Americans. Its members sought monetary payment to help alleviate African American poverty and the other harmful effects of chattel slavery and its aftermath. Some of the more recognizable organizations and individuals of the 1960s also weighed in as advocates of reparations. The Nation of Islam (NOI) sought land as part of a broader reparations package. In particular, the NOI wanted to establish separate Black territory in the United States or elsewhere and stipulated that white descendants of the former slave owners were responsible for supplying NOI state builders’ needs in the separate territory for at least 20 years. This organization had a direct influence on the activists who would carry the banner of Black Power into the mid-1970s. It is important to note that even some activists who eventually endorsed Black Power with some caution sought reparations for centuries of racist oppression against African-descended people. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929– 1968), for example, made an explicit contribution to the demand for reparations with the publication of his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait. He was among the most influential activists and thinkers of the era and had a profound influence on the young activists who would soon sound the call for Black Power. The NOI and King joined with others, such as economist Robert S. Browne (1924–2004), who would have a direct influence on the Black Power–era effort to attain Black reparations.

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Among the Black Power–era organizations that at least spoke to the concept of Black reparations, the most popular in historical memory is the BPP. The BPP began in Oakland California in October 1966 when cofounders Huey Newton (1942–1989) and Bobby Seale (1936–) first drafted “The Ten-Point Program.” Typically, point seven calling for the end of police brutality receives overwhelming consideration, as do the points that the Panthers transformed into their Serve the People and Survival programs. Less discussed, point number three in “What We Believe” argued that African-descended people were due financial compensation as retribution for centuries of enslavement and racial violence. Pointing to the German reparations arrangement with Israel, Newton and Seale justified their demand as a modest one, considering the human toll of racist oppression on Black people. The BPP followed its original statement with a petition to the United Nations and a statement demanding reparations for the loss of life suffered in Vietnam. Another important reparations effort was the Black Economic Development Conference. Organized during the April 1969 National Black Economic Development Conference, such as gained significant attention when James Forman (1928–2005) infamously interrupted Sunday service at the Riverside Baptist Church in New York City on May 4, 1969, to read the leftist-oriented Black Manifesto. A Chicagoan by birth, Forman was an educator and activist. He became the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) executive secretary in 1962 and later attempted to form an alliance between SNCC and the BPP. The Black Manifesto, which he coauthored with members of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, implicated white Christian churches of America as being essential to the creation of the racist, capitalist system that benefited from African enslavement. It stated also that churches and Jewish synagogues continued to profit from exploitation and brutality following emancipation. Further, the document stated that American Christians and Jews were complicit in a global system of white hegemony that limited the rights and humanity of people of color everywhere. As a starting point for repairing the said damage, Forman and others called for $500 billion, which would finance nine interrelated programs. These included a southern land bank, mass communications operations (TV, radio, and print media), a National Welfare Rights Organization, a National Black Labor Strike and Defense Fund, the International Black Appeal, a research skills center, and a Black university. As a step in the process of correcting the conditions of racial oppression, the institutions and programs outlined in the Black Manifesto would help create conditions for thorough revolutionary change and the creation of a new society free from capitalism and imperialism. The Black Manifesto gained immediate recognition and criticism, both of which led to broader scholarly, legal, and activist-oriented dialogue about the moral and political justification for Black

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reparations in the United States. For example, Forman inspired lawyer Boris I. Bittker to publish the book The Case for Black Reparations, a text that continues to receive scholarly attention. Another enduring call for and effort to procure reparations during the Black Power era began in late March 1968 when more than 500 Black nationalists came together to declare independence from the United States. Gaidi Obadele (also known as Milton Henry) and Imari Obadele (née Richard Henry), along with Betty Shabazz (née Betty Sanders), Queen Mother Moore, and many others asserted the right to decide whether they, as African-descended people, should be U.S. citizens since their ancestors were not given an opportunity to provide their informed consent. They concluded that their people’s best chance for a self-determined future was in the creation of an independent Black nation-state. These Black nationalists selected five states in the U.S. South as their territory: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The land would constitute the Republic of New Africa (RNA). New Afrikans simultaneously demanded reparations for enslavement and subsequent inhumane treatment that helped characterize the Black experience in America. Beginning with the RNA Declaration of Independence, New Afrikans sought reparations as compensation for the grievous injuries inflicted upon Africans and their descendants at the hands of U.S. citizens, businesspeople, courts, and more. In 1972 after four years of organizing and internal change, the RNA Provisional Government (PGRNA) released the “Anti-Depression Program of the Republic of New Africa to End Poverty, Dependence, Cultural Malnutrition, and Crime among Black People in the United States and Promote Inter-Racial Peace.” This document clarified the reasons for reparations, what New Afrikans demanded of the U.S. government, and how compensation would aid in repairing Black communities damaged by years of racist violence and discrimination. Organized around three “legislative requests,” New Afrikans first suggested an act that would allow the RNA to peacefully take control over land and exercise sovereignty wherever African Americans voted for independence. Second, they pursued an act authorizing a payment of $300 billion as compensation for enslavement of and unjust war against African people. Finally, New Afrikans recommended an act that would permit a commission of the RNA to negotiate with a commission of the United States. These negotiations would help determine the details of paying reparations to New Afrikans. Taken together, the legislative requests would permit New Afrikans to build an independent nation-state outside of the direct influence of white America. Only at this point, they claimed (as did their NOI predecessors), would Black people be able to repair the damage of brutal enslavement and its legacies of financial depravation, widespread anti-Black violence, and dehumanization.

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Although born as a Black Power–era project, the RNA Anti-Depression Program had a lasting impact, as it influenced efforts of the late 1970s and into the 1980s. For example, activists organized an international tribunal in Washington, D.C., in 1982. During that meeting, they founded the African National Reparations Organization (ANRO), a group that sought to organize Black people to indict the United States for human rights violations and demand reparations. ANRO chairperson Dorothy Lewis utilized some of the ideas put forth by the RNA. In particular, she argued that Black people had U.S. citizenship imposed on them through the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when it should have been offered as a choice. Therefore, she promoted African Americans’ right to organize a United Nations– monitored plebiscite, or vote, through which they could formally decide whether to remain American citizens, even as they pursued a reparations settlement. Lewis and others, including many New Afrikans, regarded the Japanese reparations settlement as an opportunity to enter a new stage in reparations activism. Con­ sistent with other Black nationalists in the 1970s, the PGRNA and other elements of the movement began to spell Africa with a “k”—“New Afrika.” In 1989, they created N’COBRA. N’COBRA has since grown into one of the leading Black reparations organizations in the United States. In addition, the NOI, the Black Radical Congress, the New Afrikan People’s Organization, and many other organizations with direct ties to the Black Power activism of the mid-20th century continue to place the issue of reparations on their agendas. They join African-descended activists in Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere who continue to argue that Europe and the United States owe monetary and moral recompense for enslavement, colonialism, and apartheid. Edward Onaci See also: King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley; Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa Further Reading Brophy, Alfred L. 2006. Reparations: Pro & Con. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lumumba, Chokwe, Imari Abubakari Obadele, and Nkechi Taifa. 1993. Reparations Yes! The Legal and Political Reasons Why New Afrikans—Black People in the United States— Should Be Paid Now for the Enslavement of Our Ancestors and for War Against Us after Slavery. 3rd ed. Baton Rouge: House of Songhay Commission for Positive Education. Martin, Michael T., and Marilyn Yaquinto, eds. 2007. Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States: On Reparations for Slavery, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA). http://ncobra .org/index.html. Winbush, Raymond A., ed. 2003. Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations. New York: HarperCollins.

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Revolutionary Action Movement The Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) was a national network of Black radical activists that promoted the ideology of revolutionary nationalism. RAM began as a campus organization at Central State College in 1962 and by 1964 consolidated with other revolutionary Black students and youth collectives to form a national organization. RAM contributed to the development of Black Power as a national movement primarily through its promotion of revolutionary nationalist ideology. RAM came into existence after a year of organizing for student rights and involvement in the Civil Rights Movement among a collective of undergraduate students at Central State College (now University) in late May to early June 1962. RAM ran candidates for student government in the spring of 1962 and won all the offices in the student government. The mentors of RAM cadres (based in Phila­ delphia and Ohio) were Donald Freeman of Cleveland, Ohio, chairman of the African American Institute; Ethel “Azell” Johnson, an activist from Monroe, North Carolina, who provided political education to RAM founders; and “Queen Mother” Audley Moore, who was an adviser. The first community branch of RAM was established in December 1962 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The local Philadelphia organization became public in January 1963. RAM engaged in voter registration and education drives, organized community support for the economic boycotts, and held free African and African American history classes at its office at 2900 Diamond Street in North Philadelphia. RAM also participated in demonstrations to support the struggles being waged in the South to end racial apartheid (segregation). RAM worked with Cecil B. Moore, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in mobilizing approximately 3,000 African Americans in slightly over a week to demand inclusion into semiskilled and skilled jobs in the building trades at a construction site in the Strawberry Mansion section of North Philadelphia in May 1963. RAM aligned itself with radical Black youths in Chicago during the NAACP Convention of 1963. A mass demonstration forced Chicago mayor Richard J. Dailey to halt his address to the convention and leave the stage. A similar protest would result in National Baptist Convention president Reverend John Jackson ending his speech at the conference. Chicago would become an important center of RAM activity, primarily operating through such RAM-affiliated organizations as the Pan-African Students Association, the National Afro-American Organization, the Afro-American Students Association, the Umoja Student Center, and the Black Women’s Committee for the Protection of Our Children.



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RAM was also active in coalitions to eliminate police brutality against the African American community and sought to reach parity in jobs through is participation in mass demonstrations in labor (economic), education, politics, and housing. RAM supported African American businesses and encouraged African Americans to patronize them. It did not believe that the questions of integration or separation were relevant, because RAM felt that in order to achieve any objective, socialism would first have to be established in the United States. African Americans would have to institute the right of self-determination and decide for themselves what they as a people wanted to do. RAM publicized itself as a revolutionary nationalist-internationalist organization based around the tactics of using confrontational self-defense to achieve its ends. RAM also upheld the right of African Americans to use armed self-defense to protect themselves against racist violence. RAM believed in collective leadership, had a governing Central Committee, published a bimonthly journal titled Black America and a free weekly two-page (printed on both sides of 8.5 × 11 paper) newsletter titled RAM Speaks.

A National Organization Young Black radicals convened in Cuba in June at the invitation of exiled Black freedom fighter Robert F. Williams. The Cuban Revolution served as an inspiration to Black radicals and many in the U.S. Left. Williams was the leader of an armed self-defense movement in Monroe, North Carolina, and received national and international notoriety for organizing resistance to the Ku Klux Klan. He was forced to flee the United States after bogus charges of kidnapping. Williams and his wife Mabel continued to promote armed resistance and radical internationalism through The Crusader, a newsletter that began in the Monroe movement. The couple also produced Radio Free Dixie, a political pro–Black liberation radio show broadcast into the United States from Cuba. Robert Williams became an important figure and symbol of resistance for Black people in the United States, particularly those disenchanted with the hegemony of nonviolent philosophy in the Civil Rights Movement. Max Stanford of the foundational RAM group traveled to Cuba independently. At the same time, members of California Bay Area and Detroit Black revolutionary nationalist collectives traveled to Cuba as part of a delegation sponsored by a predominately white leftist organization, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). The Bay Area Black radicals were Ernie Allen and Vincent Lynch, part of a group associated with the production of the journal Soulbook. The Detroit participants were members of the radical youth collective UHURU. The UHURU group included General Gordon Baker, Charles Simmons, Luke Tripp, and Charles “Mao” Johnson. The Bay Area and Detroit Black radicals intentionally distinguished

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themselves from the PLP and the white left. The UHURU group, Allen, and Lynch took a photo displaying a banner with the name “Black Liberation Front.” Robert Williams convened Stanford, Allen, Lynch, and the UHURU group in Cuba and presented the possibility of forming a national revolutionary nationalist network under the umbrella of RAM, which would serve as a Black Liberation Front (BLF) in the United States. They left Cuba with the vision of building a national revolutionary Black liberation movement, with Williams as its international chairman. RAM was reorganized as an underground organization that would operate through front organizations. One such front organization was the Afro-American Student Movement (AASM). At the Nashville, Tennessee, historically Black college Fisk, the AASM student organization was composed of many students sympathetic to revolutionary nationalist politics and RAM. The AASM organized two conferences that impacted the development of RAM. The first AASM gathering was the Afro-American Conference on Student Black Nationalism held May 1–4, 1964. RAM leader Don Freeman (no relation to Soulbook’s Ken and Donald) stated that the purpose of the conference was to “form a Black Nationalist Youth Movement.” The second conference, titled “The National Afro-American Student Conference on Afro Youth: The Black Revolution’s Relationship to the Bandung World,” was also at Fisk University on October 3–November 1, 1964. Allen, Lumumba, Donald Freeman, and Isaac Moore traveled to Nashville to attend the second gathering. The second AASM conference continued the collaboration built by the young radicals earlier that year in Cuba to build a revolutionary nationalist network that included militants from Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New York, and the California Bay Area. Allen, Lumumba, Freeman, and Moore returned to California committed to be a part of the underground RAM-BLF intent on building an insurgent Black movement in the United States. The collective became RAM members and began to organize an insurgent, clandestine, Black network in the California Bay Area. From its meetings in Nashville, RAM developed a 12-point program in June 1964, when it became a national organization. It read: Development of: • • • • • • • •

A National Black Student Organization Movement Ideology (Freedom) Schools Rifle Clubs A Liberation Army Propaganda, Training Centers and a National Organization An Underground Vanguard Black Workers “Liberation Unions” Block Organization (Cells)

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• • • •

A Nation within a Nation Concept, Government in Exile A War Fund (Political Economy) Black Farmer Cooperatives An Army of Black Unemployed

RAM attempted to politicize participants in the spontaneous urban rebellions of 1963–1968 through its theoretical journal Black America and its various other publications, such as the Black Power newsletter in northern California. RAM cadre participated in agitation and propaganda in the Detroit and Cleveland rebellions. Slogans such as “America’s the Blackman’s Battleground” were promoted to politicize the uprisings. Besides struggling for economic, social, and political equality in the North using various names, organizing African American students on Black and white college/university campuses, and raising the demand for Black studies, RAM sent field organizers into North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Texas and also worked with the Deacons for Defense. RAM was the first African American organization to denounce the U.S. government’s war of aggression against the people of Vietnam and support the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam in 1964. In 1966, RAM attempted to form a national, popular, independent Black political party, the Black Panther Party (BPP). The concept of a Black Panther political party originated in the Alabama Black Belt. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers discovered that the process of establishing a political party was not difficult in the state of Alabama. Since both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party ignored or were hostile to Black voting and human rights, local people with the assistance of SNCC staff formed the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in 1965. The image of local Black Alabama citizens, often armed, with Black Panther symbols was an inspiration to young militant Blacks in urban centers. Max Stanford wrote to Stokely Carmichael of SNCC to get permission for RAM to form Black Panther parties in northern cities. Since RAM was an underground organization, Black Panther parties would serve as a vehicle to organize Black working people, students, and intellectuals into activism around an independent Black Power political agenda to “break African-American allegiance to the Democratic and Republican parties and eventually the capitalist system.” RAM established the BPP in Harlem, New York, in June 1966. National RAM leadership sent directives to other cadres to establish Black Panther parties. SNCC members and affiliates also established Black Panther affiliates in northern cities such as Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles. Following the national RAM directive, the BPP of Northern California (BPPNC) was initiated into the Bay Area RAM group in August 1966.

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Student activist Huey Newton and former RAM member Bobby Seale formed another group in October 1966 in Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPPSD). The principal difference with Newton and Seale’s BPPSD is that it proposed openly carrying rifles, shotguns, and handguns to confront police officers. The BPPSD formed armed patrols to challenge police misconduct in Black communities. RAM believed that Seale and Newton’s tactic of openly carrying weapons was “adventurist” and increased the potential for repression. RAM preferred not to reveal its membership or the organization’s principal leadership. Conflict and accusations intensified between the Bay Area BPP groups. One example of the antagonisms occurred when both organizations and members of the Malcolm X Commemoration agreed to do armed security for Betty Shabazz, widow of the slain Black nationalist leader Malcolm X, when she addressed a Bay Area memorial program for her husband on February 21, 1967. The BPPSD discovered that Roy Ballard, one member of the committee, carried an unloaded weapon. While Ballard was not a member of the BPPNC or RAM, the story was spread that the BPPNC/RAM members carried unloaded weapons while securing Shabazz. Physical confrontations and fights occurred between the groups, as the BPPSD was determined to be the only Black Panther group in the Bay Area. National RAM leadership was also concerned about political repression directed at Black Panther groups, given the confrontational tactics of the BPPSD. Division within New York RAM’s BPP project brought its demise by the early months of 1967. National RAM leadership decided to abandon its BPP efforts. In 1967, RAM united street gangs in various cities into a youth organization called the Black Guard that fought against racial oppression. The Black Guard was a radical youth-oriented, paramilitary organization. While the Black Guard was a political organization, uneven development occurred, since more criminalized street elements were often recruited, creating division and dissension within its ranks. In 1968, facing repression from the intelligence agencies of the U.S. government coordinated with local police departments, the national Central Committee dissolved RAM as an organization. RAM cadre organized other organizational forms, including the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Black Liberation Party, the African People’s Party, and the House of Umoja, after the demise of the organization. Muhammad Ahmad and Akinyele Umoja See also: Black Panther Party; Cuban Revolution; House of Umoja; League of Revolutionary Black Workers; Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley; Stanford, Max (Muhammad Ahmad); UHURU; Williams, Mabel



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Further Reading Ahmad, Muhammad. 2007. We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960–1975. Chicago: Charles Kerr Publishing. Joseph, Peniel E. 2007. Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Macmillan. Kelley, Robin D. G. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon. Umoja, Akinyele. 2013a. “From One Generation to the Next: Armed Self-Defense, Revolutionary Nationalism, and the Southern Black Freedom Struggle.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 15(3–4) (Fall): 218–240. Umoja, Akinyele. 2013b. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: NYU Press. Young, Jasmin A. 2010. “Detroit’s Red: Black Radical Detroit and the Political Development of Malcolm X.” Souls 12(1): 14–31.

Revolutionary Nationalism Revolutionary nationalism as a political expression argues that Black liberation would not be possible without the overthrow of the political establishment and the capitalist economic system. Revolutionary nationalism has the political objective of securing self-determination and state power for Black people and a radical transformation of the social, political, and economic order. During the Black Power era, revolutionary nationalists embraced confrontational and insurgent political action, including nonviolent direct action and armed struggle.

Origins of the Term As applied to the Black freedom movement, the term “revolutionary nationalism” was first used in a 1962 article by Harold Cruse titled “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” published in the radical journal Studies in the Left. Cruse wrote that a radical ideological alternative to Marxism for the Black freedom struggle is essential. He cites the example of revolutionary Cuba, when Fidel Castro conflicted with orthodox Marxists in the early days of the revolution. Cruse argues that the classical Marxists analysis of struggle in the United States recognized class dimensions of the Black freedom movement but ignored the relationship of African descendants to anticolonial revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He further argued that the Black freedom movement was “the leading revolutionary force” in the United States. The revolutionary nationalist political trend evolved out of a pro–armed selfdefense tendency that existed even before the Black Power Movement began. It

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included early activists such as Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, Harry Haywood of the Communist Party USA, and groups such as the Nation of Islam (NOI). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Black pro–self-defense tendency included elements of the militant wing of the grassroots and southern Civil Rights Movement activists, individual revolutionary nationalists such as Robert Williams and Gloria Richardson, and organizations such as the Deacons for Defense and the Lowndes County Freedom Party. The pro–armed self-defense orientation rejected and openly critiqued philosophical nonviolence as a strategy for Black freedom. Robert Williams argued that genocide would occur if African Americans did not pick up weapons to defend themselves from white racists. The revolutionary nationalist trend indicated an acceptance of Williams’s argument and Cruse’s proposition that the Black liberation struggle presented the insurgent vanguard of the revolution in the U.S. empire, not the predominately white American working class.

Revolutionary Nationalist Organizations The first self-identified revolutionary nationalist organization was the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), which emerged from a student activist organization formed at Ohio’s Central State College in 1962. This group studied and incorporated Cruse’s ideas. The original RAM group left the campus in 1963 but eventually attracted and consolidated with other young Black radical collectives in Philadelphia, Cleveland, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and northern California. A seminal moment for the consolidation of these young Black radical collectives was a trip to Cuba in 1964 by representatives of these collectives who convened with one of their mentors, Robert F. Williams. While in exile, Williams maintained his influence in U.S. Black radical circles through the distribution of his newsletter, The Crusader, and the broadcast of his radio program, Radio Free Dixie, from Havana to the United States. The principal national organizer for RAM was Philadelphia-born and -bred Central State student activist Max Stanford. In a 1963 article titled “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American Liberation Movement,” Stanford argued that revolutionary nationalism represented a “third force” between integration and separatism. According to Stanford, the two conflicting ideologies of the AfroAmerican struggle are integration and separation. The integrationists believe that Afro-Americans will become a part of the mainstream of American life, while the separationists assert that the majority of white people in the United States are either racists or fascists who will never accept Black people as equal and thus that Black people needed to separate from them. The third force became revolutionary nationalism. Stanford argued that the third force identified with the militant confrontation tactics of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the



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Congress of Racial Equality after they opposed integration and nonviolence during the Civil Rights Movement. The third force was also associated with the selfdetermination and self-reliance represented in the NOI and other separatists but was distinguished by the willingness of revolutionary nationalists to participate in protest activities. RAM hoped that its engagement in the Civil Rights protests that had captured the support and attention of the African American community could inject a more insurgent and radical consciousness and organization into the mass movement. Influenced by the Black radical tradition of the Black Left, RAM articulated an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist politics with a class analysis. RAM connected the Black liberation movement with anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles around the globe. RAM literature often spoke of a “World Black Revolution” and interchanged the term “Black revolutionary nationalism” with “Black internationalism.” RAM also utilized a class analysis to assess the Black freedom movement and criticized Civil Rights activists as being “bourgeois reformists” and the NOI as being “bourgeois nationalists.” The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) comprised the largest Black Power Movement organization. The BPP identified its ideology as revolutionary nationalism from its inception in 1966 until the early 1970s, when BPP founder and theoretician Huey Newton proposed a new framework, intercommunalism. Some BPP members never embraced Newton’s intercommunalism and maintained their revolutionary nationalist position. In its revolutionary nationalist stage, BPP stood in the same anticapitalist, prosocialist tradition as RAM. During a 1968 interview from prison, Newton asserted that socialism was an eminent part of revolutionary nationalism. The BPP’s flamboyant style and popular influence among urban Black youths helped to spread its notions of revolutionary nationalism, including armed revolution, socialism, and internationalism. SNCC would define itself as a revolutionary nationalist organization in 1967. The organization dropped “Nonviolent” from its name to become the Student National Coordinating Committee because of its embrace of armed struggle as a means of achieving revolutionary Black Power. The group abandoned the rhetoric and advocacy of nonviolence and the “beloved community.”

Different Emphasis of Revolutionary Black Nationalists Black Power advocates who identified themselves as revolutionary nationalists did not all have the same strategies. Black labor organizers in Detroit merged revolutionary nationalism with Marxism-Leninism. Former RAM members General Baker, Charles Simmons, Luke Tripp, Charles Johnson, and John Williams were all student organizers for the leftist Black nationalist organization UHURU.

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They became principal organizers of Black worker organizations, including the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement in 1967 and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in 1969. Both groups believed that a Black worker led–revolution could occur in the United States through insurgent, disruptive actions of organized Black labor at the point of production, particularly in automobile, steel, oil, and other forms of manufacturing. Organized Black labor would be the primary vehicle for revolutionary Black Power. The Black Liberation Army (BLA) believed that Black revolutionaries need to organize guerrilla groups to strike at economic, civil, and military infrastructure to weaken the capitalist and imperialist system. The BLA believed ultimately that the Black Power Movement needed a people’s army to defeat the United States militarily. Armed struggle would be a primary method, along with disruptive civil disobedience (strikes, occupations, boycotts) by Black workers, youths, and students and alliances with American Indian, Puerto Rican, Chicano, Asian American, and white anti-imperialist revolutionary groups. The cultural nationalist Us organization on occasion was identified as “revolutionary Black nationalists.” Led by activist intellectual Maulana Karenga, Us believed that cultural revolution and an emphasis on identity building and ideological transformation should be the emphasis to achieve a political revolution. The United States believed in guerrilla warfare but, unlike the BPP, did not promote the open display of guns. The self-described revolutionary nationalists and the cultural nationalists are often considered to be in conflict during the Black Power Movement.

Legacy of Revolutionary Nationalism Radical and insurgent nationalism became the major target of counterinsurgency campaigns of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies. Revolutionary nationalist organizations were targeted for repression and experienced assassination, incarceration, and exile of its leaders, members, and supporters. Despite repression, movement activism continued but in a more diminished state. Much of the activism centered on the support of political prisoners from the wave of repression from the late 1960s and the 1970s. Revolutionary nationalists made efforts to reorganize themselves from their internal contradictions and state repression during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Efforts such as the National Black Human Rights Coalition, the National Black Independent Party, the National Black United Front, and the National Task Force for COINTELPRO Litigation and Research and efforts to reclaim Malcolm X represented movement activity of revolutionary nationalism to assert itself as an ideological trend in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Akinyele Umoja



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See also: Black Liberation Army; Black Panther Party; Brown, Hubert “H. Rap”; Karenga, Maulana; League of Revolutionary Black Workers; UHURU; Us Organi­ zation Further Reading Ahmad, Muhammad. 2007. We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960–1975. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Cleaver, Kathleen, and George Katsiaficus. 2001. Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party. New York: Routledge. Umoja, Akinyele. 2013. “From One Generation to the Next: Armed Self-Defense, Revolutionary Nationalism, and the Southern Black Freedom Struggle.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 15(3–4) (Fall): 218–240.

Richardson, Gloria (1922–) Gloria Richardson was the chair and primary voice of the Cambridge Non-Violent Action Committee (CNAC). Although her activism was regularly featured on the front page of the major newspapers, she has been all but erased from the gallant history of 1960s activism, including academic scholarship. Richardson was a fierce opponent of the rampant segregation in Cambridge, Maryland, as well as the steep divide in wealth between Blacks and whites. Her ideas and activism were distinguished from other participants in the Civil Rights Movement. She was one of the early leaders to openly advocate for economic justice and challenge nonviolent tactics. Richardson, like most women, was excluded from discourse among the mostly male leaders of the Civil Rights Movement as well as those among the rising Black Power Movement. Despite this, she led one of the most combative movements of the early 1960s. CNAC, an affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), began as a movement to desegregate movie theaters, restaurants, and other public facilities. Eventually the movement began to focus on economic rights and, because of the white terrorism, used armed selfdefense to protect Civil Rights workers and the Black community. Richardson was born on May 6, 1922, as Gloria St. Clair Hayes in Baltimore, Maryland, to the St. Clair family, a well-educated middle-class Black family. Her family moved to Cambridge, Maryland, when she was six years of age. Even as a child, Richardson identified with poor and working-class Blacks, in part because her family stressed that their privileged position was a direct result of the Black community’s support of their family-owned grocery story. Her grandfather, Herbert Maynaidier St. Clair, was an elected city councilmen and a rather prominent business owner. Nonetheless, Richardson knew that despite her grandfather’s political notoriety he still faced poor treatment at the hands of whites. It became

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A member of the Maryland National Guard talks with Gloria Richardson, leader of the Cambridge Movement, and Stanley Branche, field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as he attempts to halt picketing at a segregated drug store in Cambridge, Maryland, 1963. (AP Photo/Harvey Georges)

apparent to Richardson that her grandfather’s status could not and would not insulate them from the racism ingrained in Cambridge’s culture. Richardson attended Howard University, graduating in 1942 with a BA in sociology. While at Howard she studied under historian Rayford W. Logan, theologian Howard Thurman, and literary scholar Sterling Brown. Based on the teachings of these scholars, Richardson learned about the difficult circumstances facing Black people in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. While a student at Howard, she had her first taste of activism. She and other students picketed a segregated Woolworth Store in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Howard, Richardson worked in Washington, D.C., as a social worker for two years during World War II. She later returned to Cambridge and married, becoming Gloria Richardson. With her husband she had two daughters, Donna and Tamara. Although Richardson was college educated and hailed from an affluent family, she experienced job discrimination, which shaped her ideas on class and race issues. In Cambridge, the kind of jobs afforded to Blacks were teaching in Black schools, shucking oysters, farming, and limited factory work. Richardson opted to forego these options and went to work in her grandfather’s pharmacy. While



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working there, she became further attuned to the plight of working-class Blacks who frequented the pharmacy. These experiences influenced her leadership style during the Cambridge Movement. In 1961 SNCC Freedom Riders arrived in Cambridge. Richardson’s 17-yearold daughter Donna became involved with SNCC. It was through Donna that Richardson joined the movement for Civil Rights. Richardson identified with SNCC’s more grassroots style of organizing and its direct-action methods as opposed to the better-established organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Congress of Racial Equality. In 1962 Richardson took up the leadership of CNAC. She was appointed cochair of the group along with 19-yearold Enez Grubb. The Cambridge Movement was unique for several reasons. It was the first major grassroots movement outside the Deep South. It was the first major movement to be led by a woman, who had an unconventional leadership style and agenda. It was also the first to focus on economic rights rather than Civil Rights, and hence this focus preceded Martin Luther King Jr.’s late 1960s shift from Civil Rights to economic justice. In fact, Black people in Cambridge had exercised the right to vote for several decades prior to the national Civil Rights Movement, which also shaped the Cambridge movement and its demands for justice. Finally, the federal government’s intervention at the local level made the movement newsworthy. Upon being selected as the movement’s leaders, Richardson and Grubb’s first call of duty was to canvass the Black community to document the most pressing issues faced by Black citizens. From these efforts CNAC learned that segregation policies impacted Black people’s employment options and housing opportunities and created inadequate schools and poverty. Richardson articulated needs beyond desegregation as the movement’s agenda, much to the chagrin of the established Black leadership of Cambridge. On Monday, May 25, 1963, Richardson and Grubb went before the city council with their list of demands—complete integration immediately. The alternative was public protest if the city council did not comply. The city council asked for time to implement change and a halt to all demonstrations until it could make legislative changes. Richardson did not accept the gradualist approach, and in the summer and spring of 1963 she spearheaded several protests including sit-ins and demonstrations at the theater, city hall, and the county courthouse. She enlisted the support of students from Brown University, Swarthmore College, Harvard University, Morgan State University, and the University of Maryland, many of whom were arrested. Richardson and her daughter and mother were also among the demonstrators arrested that summer. Rich­ ardson’s acceptance of the SNCC philosophy “jail, no bail,” a commitment to serve jail time and not pay bail, was also negatively viewed by the established leadership in Cambridge.

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Long-standing resentment between Blacks and whites came to a head during the warm months of 1963, and violence erupted. On June 10, 1963, tensions peaked when two young demonstrators, Dinez White and Dwight Cromwell, were arrested and sentenced to indeterminate sentences in juvenile facilities. The harsh sentences outraged the Black community, and marches were held that were met by large crowds of angry white people. The Black community organized armed defense units to guard Black homes in preparation for a potential attack. Richardson openly challenged the philosophy of nonviolence as the only permissible tactic of the movement. Between June 11 and June 14, gunfire was exchanged between Blacks and whites. Two white men were shot in the chest, several white businesses were torched, and the state police were called in. As a result, the National Guard remained in the city for over 18 months. Despite the presence of the National Guard, gun battles continued to take place. On Friday, July 12, 1963, Blacks and whites exchanged gunfire, leaving six white persons injured. Two days later Governor J. Millard Tawes met with Richardson and other leaders to persuade them to stop the protests in hopes that the violence would subside. The governor promised to “integrate schools, see that a Black person was hired in the State Employment Office, make application for a federal loan for a Black housing project, pass a public accommodations ordinance, and name a biracial commission to work on the other problems that could not be solved immediately by legislation” in exchange for a yearlong moratorium on demonstrations (Brock 1990, 131). Richardson rejected the proposal, describing the governor’s offer as too vague. She recognized that the ban on demonstrations would hinder CNAC’s ability to organize in the African American community and dimensions national attention to the Cambridge movement. Because of the events in Cambridge, U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy called a meeting with Richardson, which was the first of many. The two discussed potential solutions to alleviate the problems impacting Blacks in Cambridge, but no consensus was met. Weeks later at another meeting with Kennedy, Richardson agreed to the governor’s proposal. The agreement allowed for one Black woman to be hired at the state employment office, and a promise was made to integrate hiring in new positions in housing and desegregation. Richardson viewed these concessions as nothing more than acts of appeasement. However, the arrangement broke down almost immediately when the all-white Dorchester Business and Citizens Association filed referendum petitions to overturn the agreement. Richardson took a principled but controversial stance when she announced that CNAC would not take part in voting on the referendum. She became at odds with several leading Black figures of the movement, including Martin Luther King Jr. She argued that Black people should not have to vote for rights that were already due to them. Throughout the summer of 1963 violence and tensions continued to mount between the Black community and white segregationists. In mid-July, a shootout



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occurred in which armed whites drove down the Black section of town on Pine Street firing shots at Black people, and Blacks returned the fire. Later it was discovered that three of the men in the car were uniformed members of the National Guard. The area was declared a war zone, and Richardson was criticized for not denouncing the violence. The local NAACP broke its ties with Richardson, and King privately questioned her political stance, particularly on nonviolence and the referendum; many churches and other Civil Rights figures also began to avoid associating with her. In the fall of 1963, Richardson’s position as a leader was perhaps made clear when she attended the Northern Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference in Detroit hosted by the Group for Advanced Leadership. The keynote speaker for the conference was Malcolm X. It was at this speaking engagement that he gave one of his most famous speeches, “Message to the Grass Roots.” Malcolm’s position on self-defense and nonviolence mirrored the position that Richardson took in Cambridge. The protests that took place between 1962 and 1964 had a lasting impact on the Civil Rights Movement and foretold a shifting paradigm, as historian Sharon Harley argues. After 1964 some federal money was ushered into Cambridge for public accommodations, schools, parks, and public housing. However, problems in Cambridge were not erased by the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In August 1964 Richardson resigned from CNAC and moved to New York with her new husband and youngest daughter; her departure left a void in the movement. CNAC changed its name to the Cambridge Black Action Federation, and in 1967 H. Rap Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin), chair of SNCC, was invited by Richardson to speak on Black Power. Brown spoke on July 24, 1967, to a crowd of several hundred people; his speech was a critique of U.S. white society and the violence that characterized American culture. After the gathering, an uprising occurred in Cambridge in which gunfire was exchanged between white gunmen and Black shooters. According to law enforcement Brown’s speech incited the “riot,” and he was arrested. Richardson made every attempt to quell the uprising, even calling for the National Guard. Although she lived in New York, she still held an important role in the Cambridge movement. The uprising of 1967 reflected the surmounting sentiment of Blacks across the country. Richardson’s leadership and efforts in Cambridge between 1962 and 1964 prefigured the calls that Black Power activists made in the late 1960s. Her focus on economic issues rather than Civil Rights certainly set her aside from her contemporaries. Her emphasis on working-class issues, housing, schools, health, and human rights laid a foundation that Black Power organizations would take up in full force throughout the late 1960s and the 1970s. Her position on self-defense and nonviolence also set her at odds with prominent Black Civil Rights leaders, and in this regard she also recast the role of women in the movement.

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Currently, Richardson resides in New York. She still has ties with people in Cambridge but never went back to the city. Alana Barnes See also: Brown, Hubert “H. Rap”; Group on Advanced Leadership; Kennedy, Florynce “Flo”; Malcolm X; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Brock, Annette K. 1990. “Gloria Richardson and the Cambridge Movement.” In Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 121–144. Bloomington: University of Indiana. “Civil Rights Pioneer Gloria Richardson, 91, on How Women Were Silenced at 1963 March on Washington.” 2013, Democracy Now, August 27, https://www.democracynow .org/2013/8/27/civil_rights_pioneer_gloria_richardson_91. Foeman, Anita K. 1996. “Gloria Richardson: Breaking the Mold.” Journal of Black Studies 26(5): 604–615. Harley, Sharon. 2001. “Chronicle of a Death Foretold.” In Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Right–Black Power Movement, edited by Betty CollierThomas and V.P. Franklin, 174–193. New York: New York University Press. Levy, Peter B. 2003. Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Millner, Sandra Y. 1996. “Recasting Civil Rights Leadership: Gloria Richardson and the Cambridge Movement.” Journal of Black Studies 26(6): 668–687. Robnett, Belinda. 1996. “African-American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965: Gender, Leadership, and Micromobilization.” American Journal of Sociology 101(6): 1661–1693.

Ricks, Willie (1943–) Willie Ricks, also known as Mukassa Dada, was an activist in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Ricks was a key organizer in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) and was beloved for his ability to galvanize crowds. Ricks is oftentimes not given credit for the popularization and proliferation of the phrase “Black Power”—a phrase that would come to encapsulate an entire mode of struggle after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Ricks’s political development in the 1960s and 1970s increasingly moved away from a Civil Rights reference point to a Black Power perspective that encapsulated internationalist solidarity, critiques of the economy, and indictments of the U.S. government in addition to the propagation of Black liberation.



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Ricks’s parents, born on a plantation in the South, had Ricks in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1943. Ricks’s childhood was marked by an eyesight problem that was not diagnosed until later on in his life, resulting in him being failed by teachers repeatedly. By the time Ricks’s eyesight issue was properly diagnosed he had already become disillusioned with school, choosing instead to cut class, smoke with his friends, and steal iron off railroads. Ricks says that the way he learned to really read and write was when he started hanging out in poolrooms in his late teens. Ricks’s previous disdain for education began to change through that experience, and he actually became so interested in school that he would visit his younger sister at school, roam the halls, and ride the bus with her. Ricks was first introduced to movement thought when the Freedom Riders came to visit Chattanooga and then later when a representative from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People came to speak in the town about nonviolent demonstration. Ricks had been tangentially involved with sit-ins and riots as a young man. Hearing of nonviolence was at once bizarre and intriguing to him. He watched as the nonviolent Civil Rights activists were punched, slapped, and spit on as part of their demonstration to Ricks and others. Ricks had never considered nonviolence as an ideology and a tactic. From that point onward he became involved in movement work. Ricks started by attending demonstrations and events. Folks from SNCC identified him as militant and committed in character and thus recruited him to their group. He was relocated to Atlanta as a part of SNCC and worked with Julian Bond there. Much of the work that Ricks was involved in toward the beginning of his tenure in SNCC was around voter registration projects. One of these projects took place in Lowndes County, Alabama. There Ricks, as field secretary, organized alongside Stokely Carmichael and others to create an independent political party. In many ways, the LCFO was the predecessor to the Black Panther Party. The LCFO’s symbol was a Black panther, which was chosen in direct contrast to the racist Democratic Party’s symbol of the white rooster, which was meant to protect white supremacy. The LCFO organized for alternative political power in Lowndes County and later on in other parts of the South that were abused and misrepresented by the white establishment parties. Ricks said that organizing for this independent political party was not only about building electoral power but was also about having Black people in these areas process and speak out loud about the injustices they were facing. This form of consciousness-raising allowed for organizing and the beginnings of building power. Although Stokely Carmichael is often credited with the creation and proliferation of the phrase “Black Power,” it is his collaboration with Ricks that promoted the phrase into popularity. Ricks popularized the phrase at a large rally in 1966 called the March Against Fear. There the phrase gained such enthusiasm that the majority of the crowd joined Ricks in a chorus of “Black Power!” As part of a SNCC political initiative, Ricks began using the phrase as an organizer in Lowndes

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County, which was plagued by anti-Blackness and white rage. Using the phrase “Black Power” allowed Ricks to help people defeat the feelings of hopelessness that permeated places such as Lowndes County. Famously, figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. opposed the phrase “Black Power,” equating it to “white power.” Despite the ideological differences that Ricks and King had, King respected Ricks’s ability to rouse crowds and move people. In his 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here?, King called Ricks “the fiery orator of SNCC.” According to Ricks, King also controversially said of Ricks once that he was “an illiterate Carmichael.” Such experiences revealed differences to the young Ricks between King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and SNCC. The differences between the SCLC and SNCC were not the only contradictions coming to light to Ricks as an organizer in the 1960s. His propagation of the phrase and ideology behind Black Power and the responses of figures such as King revealed to Ricks the differences between the ideology of integration and nonviolence and that of Black Power. According to Ricks, Black Power signified the liberation of Black people and pride in being Black. Black Power strived for the recognition of the beauty and the history of Black people. It did not placate to the state, which he saw as an illegitimate force. To Rick, being recognized by the state through things such as the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act did not get at the heart of the imperialist, racist function of the government and therefore did not go far enough. To Ricks, Black Power was not about equality at the cost of Blackness but instead was about liberation through the celebration of Blackness. Ricks was seen as one step removed from many of the more widely recognized leaders of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. For instance, he was to be appointed the chairman of SNCC when Stokely Carmichael, also known as Kwame Ture, stepped down. When H. Rap Brown was unexpectedly appointed instead, Ricks was still asked to act as a guide and teacher to Brown in the struggle. Ricks has taken part in many famous and even dangerous actions. He was shot at by police while organizing in Georgia. He also was one of the key organizers of the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968 where dozens of students were shot. Due to his success as an organizer, Ricks was named among the 10 most dangerous people by the Georgia government in 1973. Ricks currently identifies as a Pan-African socialist and has strong internationalist tendencies. He believes strongly in the redistribution of wealth. Ricks looks at Cuba as an exemplar of a socialist country. He also believes in the right of land as a response to imperialism. In this sense, Ricks believes that Black people in the United States of America have a right to land here and land in Africa as the motherland that Blacks in America were separated from, thus displaying Black nationalist tendencies. He also believes in the power of grassroots organizing and teaching militants the skills to be able to speak to others and coalesce power. Ricks does not believe that voting is an adequate form of democracy, since voting



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assumes that the state is a legitimate force providing reasonable options when in fact it is a violent, oppressive, and imperialist force. Furthermore, since the passage of laws that allow Black people to vote, Black people’s lives have not improved much but instead have changed form. Ricks says that “prison ain’t nothing but the modern-day slave ship.” In fact, he says that since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, Black people have less independent economic power because Black neighborhoods are being torn apart. Ricks lives on today as a teacher to the movement for Black liberation. He frequents discussions on college campuses, conferences, and the like in the hopes of continuing the flame of movement building and Black Power. Just a few years ago Ricks visited Morehouse College at the behest of a professor in order to speak to a class. Ricks was immediately escorted off the campus when police officers spotted him. The officers cited his banishment from the campus many decades ago as the reason for removing him. Ricks, despite knowing of the citation, unabashedly came to the campus in order to speak to the youths of previous struggles. In this sense, Ricks continues to inspire and move those committed to the struggle for Black liberation. Sarah Abdelaziz See also: All-African People’s Revolutionary Party; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Lowndes County Freedom Organization; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Ajabu, Mmoja. 2017. “Willie Ricks 60s Civil Rights Worker.” ChickenBones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes, http://www.nathanielturner.com /willierickscivilrightsworker.htm. Cobb, Charles. 2017. “Interview with Willie Ricks.” SNCC Digital Gateway, https:// snccdigital.org/people/willie-ricks/.

Rodney, Walter (1942–1980) Walter Anthony Rodney, a foremost Pan-Africanist, historian, Marxist scholar, activist, and leader, was born on March 23, 1942, and was assassinated by agents of the dictatorship in his native Guyana on June 13, 1980. During his lifetime he interacted with many leaders of the Black world, becoming one of the most important activists and thinkers of his generation, particularly in relation to Pan-African, anticolonial, antineocolonial, Black Power, nonaligned, and other revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. He is perhaps the most recognizable face of the Black Power and Pan-African movements to emerge from the Caribbean in the postindependence era of neocolonialism and U.S. empire, where he had a broad

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impact especially in the histories of the two countries. In Jamaica he was arguably the most significant figure in its Black Power period, which led to a rebellion of historical significance still felt today, and in Guyana he helped lead its most effective multiracial party to date, the Working People’s Alliance, directly opposing the divisive politics of racial polarization and unswervingly challenging an increasingly repressive dictatorship. His work remains in print, having achieved renowned status in Black and critical communities throughout the world, especially How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and The Groundings with My Brothers. His scholarship, speeches, and other works have seen many new editions, conferences, and volumes dedicated to elaboration and engagement and remain very relevant and increasingly appreciated today by those continuing to fight for social justice. Rodney was born into a working-class family influenced by and participating in the major political movements of that period in Guyana, including the nationalist/ independence movement and the continuing effects of Garvey and Garveyism at a time when Guyana was at the forefront of anticolonial movements in the Caribbean. During Rodney’s youth Guyana was the first Caribbean nation to elect a multiracial socialist government, which was soon suspended by the British for its exercise of democracy and desire to decolonize. In these tumultuous times of decolonization Rodney showed himself to be an outstanding student, winning scholarships at every level of his education from primary to high school and then university. He also developed his skills as a debater in team competitions, often surpassing his age group in securing victories against more senior teams and garnering his first national exposure. These intellectual skills eventually resulted in prestigious regionwide scholarships to the University of the West Indies (Mona) in Jamaica, where he earned a first-class honors degree in history and then a PhD in African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, both of which were formative educational experiences. Rodney was part of one of the earliest groups of students from the former and recently liberated colonies to enter and challenge from within the very conservative, Eurocentric, and racist institutional context of imperial higher education. In graduate school, he heightened his disciplinary training and skills as a historian, mastering and surpassing the state of the art of writing history at that time so he would be able to argue from within the academy radical positions that had previously been kept largely outside it. Rodney already spoke Spanish, but in order to interrogate original historical documents and colonial records only available in Portugal and Italy, he learned both languages for his research. In 1966 at age 24, he produced a dissertation (A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800), defending his thesis on the same day that his son Shaka was born. Rodney’s thesis was published in 1970 and remains foundational in the study of West Africa today. At the same time, Rodney’s political education and involvement continued mostly outside the university, where he became a noted orator in Hyde Park and London and



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a member of C. L. R. and Selma James’s Marxist study group with fellow West Indian intellectuals. It was probably here, as much as in Guyana, that Rodney’s lifelong engagement of the complexities of both race and class deepened and cohered; certainly, he was already concerned with the complex historical specificity of any given community of oppressed people and their struggles for liberation. In these ways, Rodney might be thought of as part of the first wave of Black Power professors in the predominantly white academy. Whereas W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, John Henrik Clarke, and many other great PanAfrican thinkers generally operated from historically Black colleges and universities or from altogether outside the academy, Rodney consistently worked both inside and outside the academy. He asserted a Black presence within the academy while always maintaining ties and involvements outside it in the community among the working class. At the same time that Rodney was finishing his dissertation and taking up his first full-time academic appointment at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1966, the Black Power Movement in the United States was already asserting its presence and its escalating demand for Black studies programs that exploded in 1968. Rodney returned to his alma mater, the University of the West Indies, Mona, as a lecturer in history in 1968 at the age of 26. Unlike other professors at the university, he chose to live outside the insular university housing compound, spending much of his time learning from and connecting with working-class and disenfranchised Jamaicans, in particular the Rastafarian communities. Rodney quickly began to bring his scholarly and firsthand knowledge of the African continent, its social and political conditions, and its social movements and radical organizations to the service of marginalized and oppressed communities who were very much in search of this knowledge of their African roots and culture. He encountered a Black Power Movement in Jamaica, already well under way, and his arrival and rapidly deepening engagement was a palpable accelerant. Rodney was asked to give speeches on Black Power at the university’s Student Union and was engaging youths, Rasta communities, and anyone who had a thirst for knowledge. He provided a framework that critically examined the impact of slavery and colonialism and gave a foundation for interpreting the current situation of Black and oppressed peoples in these newly independent countries who continued to be marginalized. His acceptance in these spaces, even though he was a middle-class university lecturer from another country, speaks volumes about both his scholarly knowledge and his ability to connect with the people. In Jamaica, Rodney informed the people but also simultaneously exemplified the process of grounding—learning from and listening to the people and to the wisdom of the community, learning the local history, and reasoning together. The way Rodney that engaged society as a university lecturer was considered so strange that it was interpreted as a challenge to the establishment. Less than 10

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months later, he was declared persona non grata and banned by the government from reentering the country after attending the 1968 Black Writers Conference in Montreal. What started as a student protest off campus escalated into an outpouring of disdain for and frustration with the system. This set off the Rodney Riots or Rodney Rebellion, one of the three major mass uprisings in Jamaican history. Though Rodney was removed, the impact of his work with students and the community did not fade. Rodney’s speeches in Jamaica were published in London a year after his ban as The Groundings with My Brothers (1969) and quickly became a classic of the Caribbean Black Power period. Rodney’s path in Jamaica serves as a kind of parallel case in the global trajectory of the Black Power intervention in institutional higher learning, often referred to now as the academic industrial complex. His experiences and his ultimate rejection and his banning from Jamaica by the state were a kind of precursor to the explosion of Black studies in the United States. The parallels are significant, as they rode the same global anticolonial wave seeking a radical transformation of society. They also both exemplified the organic and incendiary nature and potential of the relationship between regular people and the few dedicated representatives inside the academy. Rodney’s experience in Tanzania was similar in terms of sustained groundings but lasted much longer and ended on somewhat better terms. He had been a lecturer there for a year before taking the position in Jamaica, and after a short period of uncertainty he returned to Dar es Salaam during 1969–1974. The Groundings with My Brothers (1969) had already been published, making more widely available Rodney’s direct engagement of Black Power in Jamaica (Chapter 1) and the West Indies (Chapter 3) world/philosophically (Chapter 2) and in relation to Africa and African history (Chapters 4–5). This volume was a precursor to his best-known work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, which was published three years later in 1972. In it, Rodney was more explicit in his Marxist analysis and precisely described the complex relationship between Europe and its colonies in historical detail. Like Ground­ ings, the book was written in an accessible style to make it understandable to a wide audience and was widely sold on the streets of major cities throughout the African diaspora, from Harlem and Dakar to Havana and Nairobi. How Europe Under­ developed Africa was a widely needed antidote to Eurocentric histories in which Africa had no history and in which Europe’s rise was treated as entirely independent of its exploitation of Africa and its other colonies. The book is a kind of Black Power economic history of Africa, a major work of Black Marxism, with implications for all oppressed societies emerging from centuries of direct outside rule. Dar es Salaam was at that time the most important hub of radical thought and organizing activity in Africa, maybe in the world. Many leading thinkers, underground movements, and students gravitated toward this radical, intellectual, culturally open society, flourishing under the progressive, revolutionary influence of Julius Nyerere’s African socialist government. Rodney quickly became one of the



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most dynamic and leading thinkers and continued to engage not just within the walls of the ivory tower but also among the people of Tanzania during the historic ujamaa socialist experiment and the peak of frontline activity against apartheid South Africa. Some of Rodney’s most important work was produced during these years—on Tanzania, Mozambique, development theory, and radical pedagogy— and he engaged deeply and sincerely with the revolution under way at that time. Though supportive of the intent of Nyerere’s socialism, Rodney was willing to critique the government. He remained the epitome of the public intellectual, famously debating his friend Issa Shivji on ujamaa policy in Tanzania and memorably defeating the more conservative senior scholar Ali Mazrui in debates at Makerere University in Uganda on the subject of African colonialism and neocolonialism. In 1972, Tanzania was experiencing external political and economic pressures along with domestic political issues, and Rodney realized that he could not adequately engage in the struggle as a non-Tanzanian. His decision to return to Guyana was professional to take the position of head of the Department of History at the University of Guyana and for family reasons. Rodney’s desire was to serve Guyana, his homeland, where he could directly engage with the masses. Despite his renown as an academic global thinker and leader, Rodney was nevertheless denied the right to take up his post in Guyana by the openly hostile and repressive government of Forbes Burnham. The premise was that this would force Rodney to seek employment elsewhere and not return to Guyana. Undeterred, he remained in Guyana and took up speaking engagements and various visiting professorships in the United States, Canada, and Europe to provide for his family. Rodney engaged more deeply in Guyana, becoming a coleader of the Working People’s Alliance as it confronted a society purposefully divided on the basis of race and held down by an increasingly brazen dictatorship. His historical analysis of African enslavement and Indian indenture helped these divided majority communities respect their own histories and their shared colonial experiences and develop shared aspirations—not for a color-blind society but instead for a just context in which different communities could all benefit from development, the economy, and civil society. He spoke publicly about these histories and about their misrepresentation, mostly at “bottom house” gatherings, public meetings, and rallies that were increasingly attacked by government forces. In addition to his political work Rodney deliberately engaged in research and writing, penning a number of academic and political texts, some of which were published posthumously. These include A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (1981), People’s Power, No Dictator (1979), and a series of children’s books about the origins and history of each major ethno-racial community in Guyana, starting with Kofi Baadu: Out of Africa (1980) and Lakshmi Out of India (2000). Sadly, the children’s series, Volume 2 of his History of the Guyanese Working People, and other works in progress were cut short when he was murdered.

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This was the high point globally of the non-aligned movement, and Rodney as both a thinker and specifically as a participant in the struggle in Guyana was a major player in its unfolding. Some conjecture existed that he was destined to become head of state in Guyana had not the forces of imperialism and national dictatorship intervened. Though we can never be sure, we do know that Guyana would have gone a different route under his leadership, and since his death the country has reverted to the neocolonial racial divide that enables inequality, corruption, and exploitation to continue unabated. Rodney’s trajectory toward nonaligned national, regional, and Pan-African leadership puts him in the company of Patrice Lumumba, Maurice Bishop, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Amilcar Cabral, and Thomas Sankara. That this list was so heavily repressed and targeted speaks to the power of the movements they led to potentially transform global systems and bring about a new more socialist and less racially divided world. Some interpret Rodney as having begun his life with Black Power and racial politics before progressing toward a more orthodox Marxist analysis as he matured and became a scholar. Rodney was indeed a strong proponent of Black consciousness, pride, and power. However, this is a falsely dichotomous reading that bifurcates his contingent and historically grounded analytic, which was always attentive to the complex conditions of real people and their humanity. Rodney deepened his early exposure to socialism by serious study of Marxism and the socialist revolutions in Russia, Cuba, Tanzania, and other places, consistently deploying a critical dialectical approach. This attention to history and cultural specificity makes his work an unacknowledged precursor of the Michel Foucault/Edward Said–driven cultural turn in which the relationship of power and knowledge is made explicit. Rodney always advocated for nuanced readings of the presence and agency of Africans on the continent and abroad, including in Latin America. His writing was a constant challenge to normative Eurocentric thinking for which he was often unfairly attacked by establishment scholars. He was one of the earliest scholars to use the more humanizing language of “enslaved Africans” instead of the more common “African slaves” in his peer-reviewed publications. In 2014 after decades of struggle by his immediate family and activists, the government of Guyana initiated the first official international Commission of Inquiry (COI) into his assassination. The final Commission Report (2016) revealed new details about not only his political murder but also those of other activists at the hands of the dictatorship at that time. However, the findings and recommendations of the COI were rejected by the next government in office, ostensibly on grounds of technicality and expenses but really because they heavily and directly implicated the former Burnham regime and the highest level of state actors. Supporters of the legacy of Rodney argue the fight for justice for him, his brother



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Donald Rodney, their family, and for truth for Guyanese people and Pan-Africanists everywhere had therefore been deferred and encouraged continued agitation. The legacy of Walter Rodney’s scholarship and activism continues decades after his assassination. Largely due to the assiduous efforts of his family and the Walter Rodney Foundation, the reissuing of his scholarly works, engagement through a Speakers Series, the annual Walter Rodney Symposiums (including an ongoing series of community groundings), and the establishment of the Walter Rodney Papers at the Atlanta University Center’s Robert W. Woodruff Library, new generations are discovering Rodney and promoting his thought via social media and turning to his critical works, noting the intersections with Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements. Rodney’s work continues to be deeply engaged as a primary source of epistemological, political, and economic perspectives of lasting relevance. As was the case among mourners at the time of his funeral in Guyana in 1980, “Walter Rodney Lives!” continues to be chanted in the United States, the Caribbean, and throughout the African continent. Note: Special thanks to Asha Rodney and Patricia Rodney for their especially close reading of the text, factual corrections, and other unique insights. Jesse Benjamin See also: Black Marxism (Book); Institute of the Black World; Pan-Africanism Further Reading Lewis, Rupert Charles, 1998. Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. “Report of the Commission of Inquiry Appointed to Enquire and Report on the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of the Late Dr. Walter Rodney on Thirteenth Day of June, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty at Georgetown [Guyana], report issued February 8, 2016.” 2016. Digital Commons, http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/wrcoi/1. Rodney, Walter. 1966. “A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800.” PhD dissertation, University of London. Rodney, Walter. 1969. The Groundings with My Brothers. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications. Rodney, Walter. 1970. History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545–1800. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Rodney, Walter. 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped African. London: BogleL’Ouverture Publications. Rodney, Walter. 1980. Kofi Baadu Out of Africa. Georgetown, Guyana: Guyana National Lithographic. Rodney, Walter. 1981. A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rodney, Walter. 2000. Lakshmi Out of India. Georgetown, Guyana: Guyana Book Foundation.

S Sadaukai, Owusu (Howard Fuller) (1941–) Born in 1941, Howard Fuller, also known as Owusu Sadaukai, is a master organizer, Civil Rights activist, academic, and public servant. He is known throughout the country as an educational reform advocate. Growing up poor was definitely a hallmark for Fuller’s activism. He wanted to make sure that low-income and working-class parents had the ability to make powerful choices about their children’s education. Fuller’s charismatic leadership style made him an important and significant Civil Rights leader in the South, most notably in North Carolina. In the 1960s and 1970s, his views on the Black freedom movement took many opposing stances and at times often contradicted each other. However, many leaders of the Black Power Movement including Fuller had different strategies, which demonstrates the complexity of coalition and movement building during this time. Fuller rose to prominence in his work as a community organizer in the Civil Rights struggle in Durham, North Carolina. He was involved in a student takeover at Duke University on October 26, 1969. This led him to being a cofounder of the Malcom X Liberation University in 1969. The goal of the university was to teach Black liberation to the Black community. The university remained open for three years and ceased to operate due to high turnover of staff and lack of funding. The university curriculum embraced Pan-African and Marxist philosophies and a framework to build the African race by dismantling capitalism. Fuller later attributed the school’s failure of funding to its heavy focus on Pan-Africanism and not the African American experience. Fuller was a staff member of Operation Breakthrough, an antipoverty program that mobilized the community from within to take action and build on their own strengths. In the 1970s, he was a chief organizer of the African Liberation Day celebration and took the name Owusu Sadaukai, a well-regarded leader in the Pan-African movement in the United States. With the acknowledgment as leader of the Pan-Africanist movement in the United States, he was often under surveillance by federal and state agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for his militant views on self-empowerment for Africans and African Americans.

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Fuller later was invited to participate as a member of the National Committee of Black Churchmen (NCBC) to coordinate efforts of clergy in America and Africa. He was called to speak about the work of Malcolm X Liberation University. On August 18, 1971, he left with NCBC delegates and staff members from various churches to spend over a month in Mozambique with freedom fighters of the Portuguese Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front, FRELIMO). This experience helped shaped his view regarding the role that African Americans should play in supporting the movements in Africa. He came back immediately and organized 50 leaders who represented Black leadership and then formed the African Liberation Day Coordinating Committee and set a date of Saturday, May 27, 1972, as an organizing date. Fuller faced criticism from several Black community activists and communities who argued that more focus should be on the status of African Americans on the United States. Even though tested and not revered by other Black Power Movement leaders, Fuller was still able to raise significant resources through fund-raising and material support for the FRELIMO organization in Mozambique. Fuller was also involved in several organizations with a Pan-Africanist worldview including the Student Organization for Black Unity, which later changed its name to Youth Organization for Black Unity (YOBU). Later on YOBU joined forces with Marxist-Leninists in the African Liberation Support Committee to form a Black Marxist group called the Revolutionary Workers League. This organization argued that America’s capitalist system was intended to keep poor people in their place, and his country needed an alternative structure. From this organization, his work began with other New Communist community groups. There were several clashes in ideologies and membership procedures with these newer Marxist society groups. These new groups would subject their members to torture, humiliation, and expulsion of members for not memorizing Joseph Stalin’s and Vladimir Lenin’s philosophies. Fuller realized that this direction was not the direction he wanted for his members and immediately left these associations and moved back to Milwaukee. In Milwaukee, he was hired as an insurance agent until he was offered a job at Marquette University in the 1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s Fuller had a number of appointments in the field of education, including superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, secretary of the Winston Department of Employment Relations, and associate director of the Educational Opportunity Program at Marquette Uni­ versity. He later returned home to Milwaukee to work in a number of programs in the public-sector focusing on college access and public education initiatives. In 2000, Fuller founded the nonprofit Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) to help poor children across the country get access to vouchers. While he was a strong critic of traditional education, Fuller embraced the voucher system as a strategy to make access to quality public education more equitable across the



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country. His nonprofit advocacy organization received significant funding from conservative foundations such as the Bradley Foundation and the Walter Foundation. He also received grants for educational reform initiatives from the George Soros Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Fuller’s views on vouchers often had him in disagreement with many liberal groups, unions, and educational and Civil Rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Today, the BAEO continues to thrive and has a members­hip consisting of charter school advocates, community organizers, and African American parents throughout the country. He continues as the chair of the BAEO and of the Milwaukee Collegiate Academy. He serves on the board of Teach for America, the Milwaukee Charter School Advocates, and the CEE Trust. He is also an advisory board member of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association for Charter School Authorizers. In 2014, Fuller released his memoirs about his career in Civil Rights, education, academics, and the Pan-African movement. His book titled No Struggle No Progress: A Warrior’s Life from Black Power to Educational Reform highlights the life of an activist starting from humble beginnings—attending a segregated high school and college to starting a university and organizing a liberation movement and a national radical school reform effort. Organizing on the dirt roads of North Carolina in the 1960s and touring the war-torn villages and mountains of Africa in the 1970s helped shaped his philosophy and led to him becoming a proponent of grassroots organizing and of communities and individuals making decisions for themselves. Fuller’s work highlights the struggles and achievements of a Civil Rights activist. He wrote this book to inspire the next generation of young people to take action. He believes that education reform is a critical and crucial social issue that needs to be addressed, and he plans to spend the remainder of his years helping Black and poor communities get access. George R. Greenidge Jr. See also: African Liberation Support Committee; Black Marxism (Book); Johnson, Nelson; Malcolm X Liberation University Further Reading Fuller, Howard, with Lisa Frazier Page. 2014. No Struggle No Progress: A Warrior’s Life from Black Power to Educational Reform. Marquette, WI: Marquette University Press. Layton, Lyndsey. 2014. “Howard Fuller: A Civil Rights Warrior or Billionaire’s Tool?” Washington Post, September 9, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/howard -fuller-a-civil-rights-warrior-or-billionares-tool/2014/09/09/3aedeff4-37c1-11e4-9c9f -ebb47272e40e_story.html?utm_term=.8bc5b151975c&wprss=rss_education.

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Salaam, Kalamu ya (1947–) Background Kalamu ya Salaam (Vallery Ferdinand III) was born on March 24, 1947 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He changed his name in early adulthood to Kalamu ya Salaam (Kiswahili for “Pen of Peace”). His life and work are a commitment to raising Black consciousness as an award-winning poet, author, community organizer, activist, music producer, and arts administrator. Salaam’s parents, Vallery Ferdinand Jr. and Inola Copelin Ferdinand, reared three boys, Salaam being the oldest. A scion of the city’s distinctive working-class majority Black Lower Ninth Ward, Salaam attended New Orleans public schools through junior high and graduated from St. Augustine, an all-boy Catholic high school. Salaam left his hometown in 1964 to attend Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Homesick, he dropped out in the spring of 1965. Entering the U.S. Army during the summer of the same year, Salaam served three years on a Korean missile base. He returned home in 1968 with military training, limited patience for second-class status, and a fire for political activism that has lasted his entire life and has taken him around the world. Salaam attended Southern University for a year but was expelled in 1969 because of his leadership in the student movement. He went on to complete a business administration degree at Delgado Junior College in the 1970s. Early in that decade, he also married Tayari kwa Salaam (formerly Cicely St. Julien). An activist in her on right, Tayari organized alongside Kalamu throughout the Black Power Movement as the couple parented five children.

Free Southern Theater/BLKARTSOUTH During the Black Arts Movement, Kalamu ya Salaam drew inspiration from earlier writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown. Salaam’s passion for the written word led him to organizations such as the Free Southern Theater (FST), which was founded by John O’Neal. FST was renamed BLACKARTSOUTH in 1969. BLACKARTSOUTH’s spirit of self-determination and communal environment functioned as an incubator. There, Salaam produced plays such as The Breath of Life, BLK Love Song #1, and Homecoming, inspired by his military service and the treatment of African Americans in the Vietnam War period. During the height of the Black freedom struggle and beyond, Salaam’s words filled the pages of cultural and political publications such as Black World, Black Scholar, the Black Books Bulletin, Callaloo, and the Journal of Black Poetry. He also cofounded and wrote for the Black Collegian magazine, which he edited from 1970 until 1983.



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Salaam was also influenced by Maulana Karenga’s and Amiri Baraka’s expressions of kawaida doctrine. Salaam, however, was an outspoken critic of romanticizing the Back-to-Africa movement by what he viewed as the cult-ofpersonality leadership in such Black Power organizations as Us and the Congress of African People (CAP), and of the Marxist-Leninist turn in the mid-1970s leftist Pan-Africanism. Salaam instead emphasized the importance of balancing the ideas of a global Black aesthetic, African Americans’ singularity as a “tribe,” and a political vision that placed African people and their art at the center of the Black liberation struggle. Salaam also foregrounded New Orleans’s unique culture in both his literary work and his approaches to activism. Citing influences ranging from the writings of West African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral to participatory elements of local cultural practices such as second-line parades, Salaam was a key figure in articulating and operationalizing some of the more egalitarian forms of kawaida-influenced Pan-African nationalism during the Black Power era.

Ahidiana Salaam was especially central to the process of perpetuating and extending Black Power Pan-African nationalism not only through artistic pursuits but also by way of institution building and public programming. In the realm of institutional development, Salaam cofounded Ahidiana alongside Tayari as well as other family and community members in the Crescent City. Having grown out of the Dokpwe Work/Study Center, a study collective, cooperative organization, and independent school formed in 1971, Ahidiana emerged the following year as a separate vanguard Black liberation group of about 20 adult activists and their children. Ahidiana functioned as a premier southern branch of Pan-African nationalists affiliated with CAP member groups. Ahidiana’s advocates committed to an alternative lifestyle, which modeled their vision for the coming Black nation. Kalamu ya Salaam’s theorizing helped shape Ahidiana into one of the relatively more democratic kawaida-influenced Pan-African nationalist organizations of the Black Power struggle. The group’s consensus-based decision-making process and comparably less rigid gender roles contrasted the hierarchical male-headed organizational models that dominated contemporary Pan-African cultural-nationalist formations. Ahidiana’s practices also focused on operationalizing its ideology at the neighborhood level, using such tenets as the kawaida-based Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles) to address community issues. Group members also believed that local people’s needs should continually inform the organization’s theories. Ahidiana administered several enterprises serving the Lower Ninth Ward in the spirit of cooperative economics and familyhood and in service of Black liberation. Their endeavors included a larger community organization, a bookstore, a printing

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press, and a school. New Afrika Books was a space where advocates fostered literacy practices, which were aimed at helping African Americans develop a stronger sense of history and self-awareness, much in the vein of Salaam’s literary work. The bookstore hosted Black Arts figures such as Haki Madhubuti. It provided publications for adults and children on topics ranging from Black poetry, literature, and music to Third World independence struggles. Significantly, New Afrika Books also carried works printed by the organization’s Ahidiana Habari press. Ahidiana Habari featured pieces by accomplished writers such as Salaam as well as the work of aspiring authors of African descent. Salaam participated in sustaining the organization’s Work/Study Center school, although Tayari and other female Ahidiana advocates attended to its daily functions. The Work/Study Center emerged in 1973 as one of the organization’s longest-running endeavors. The center served three- to eight-year-old children living in the Lower Ninth Ward and, moreover, was part of a larger trend of independent Black educational institutions aimed at instilling a sense of Black pride and consciousness and orienting students toward radical struggle on behalf of African people and their descendants. Unfortunately, the center’s 1986 closure due to funding challenges and advocate fatigue signaled the end of Ahidiana’s existence. Salaam was also at the center of Ahidiana’s public programming efforts. The group was one of the first to spread Kwanzaa celebrations within various African American communities through citywide observances in early 1970s New Orleans. Beyond and sometimes in conjunction with Kwanzaa programs, Salaam and his fellow Ahidiana members developed platforms for advocating Black women’s equality and for developing female leaders. One such example includes the Black Women’s Conferences, which convened at Southern University of New Orleans during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The conferences featured artists such as Sonia Sanchez and Sweet Honey in the Rock. Due to such issues as insufficient funding, insularity, and the dissolution of the group’s core families, Ahidiana ceased functioning by 1987. Although it was a small group in operation for only 15 years, Ahidiana’s influence has been greater than its size and limited time of existence. The institution building and public programming that Salaam helped orchestrate through Ahidiana inspired the formation of other New Orleans–area organizations, including the Community Book Center, the West Bank Kwanzaa Coalition, and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center.

Conclusion A music critic and ambassador in the 1980s, Salaam was executive director for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation and hosted radio programs featuring the city’s music. He also cofounded a Black public relations firm called Bright



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Moments. Prior to displacement by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Salaam had been living in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans with his wife Nia (Beulah McCoy) and mentoring through the Students at the Center Project (SAC). Ever committed to the struggle for Black lives, Salaam returned to the city, resumed his work with SAC, and began to tell survivors’ stories after the devastating storm through the Listen to the People project. Kenja McCray and Rachanice Candy Tate See also: Black Arts Movement; Cultural Nationalism; Karenga, Maulana; Kawaida Further Reading McCray, Kenja. 2017. “Complements to Kazi Leaders: Female Activists in KawaidaInfluenced Cultural-Nationalist Organizations, 1965–1987.” PhD dissertation, Georgia State University. Penner, D’Ann R., and Keith C. Ferdinand. 2009. “Kalamu ya Salaam.” In Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond, 80–88. New York: Palgrave. Salaam, Kalamu ya. 1994. What Is Life? Reclaiming the Black Blues Self. Chicago: Third World Press.

Sanchez, Sonia (1934–) A prominent figure in the Black Arts Movement, Sonia Sanchez, born Wilsonia Benita Driver, is a poet, activist, author, educator, and playwright. She has published dozens of plays, anthologies, and collections of poetry that explore gender relations in Black America and offer a radical reimagination of Black life. Her poetry brought together a fusion of Black aesthetic traditions, including jazz and blues, while her militant, biting tone well positioned her alongside her male peers such as Amiri Baraka (1934–2014) and Larry Neal (1937–1981). Sanchez has continued to shape the tradition of Black Arts through her collaborative projects with contemporary hip-hop artists. Sanchez was born on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama, to Wilson L. Driver and Lena (Jones) Driver. Sanchez’s mother passed away a year after her birth, leaving her husband and his mother to care for young Sanchez and her sister. Driver quit his job as a musician and club owner in Alabama to ferry his children with him to Harlem, New York. Sanchez began attending New York public schools where, at the age of six, she found her passion for writing. Upon completing her high school studies she attended Hunter College, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in political science. However, her love for writing inspired her to study

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Poet laureate Sonia Sanchez gestures as she makes remarks during a news conference in Philadelphia, 2011. The poetry of Sanchez embodied the sentiments and style of the Black Arts Movement. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

poetry at New York University under Louise Bogan. With Bogan’s counsel, Sanchez published her work in the Transatlantic Review and the Minnesota Review. Years later, she married Albert Sanchez. The pair divorced, and in 1969 Sonia Sanchez married fellow poet Etheridge Knight. They had three children— Anita, Morani, and Mungu—before they divorced a year later. Sanchez’s political activities, along with Amiri Baraka’s network of poets and Malcolm X’s ideas about liberation and Black self-determination, informed much of her writing. Before meeting Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Sanchez did not view herself as a poet. However, her outlook changed when, during a chance meeting in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, Baraka asked the novice poet to send along some of her writing. He later published her submissions in Revolution, a Parisbased journal that printed and distributed works that addressed decolonization movements. Simultaneously, Sanchez became politically active as a member of the New York chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an integrated Civil Rights organization. As a CORE activist, Sanchez participated in direct-­ action protests that sought to desegregate trade unions and public housing. Her involvement with CORE introduced her to Malcolm X and many other Black activists. Sanchez met Malcolm X following one of his well-known street corner



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speeches. Although Sanchez did not entirely agree with Malcolm X’s ideas at that moment, she came to identify with his views about Black nationalism years later. As the Black Power Movement evolved and Civil Rights groups struggled to define the role of whites in the new movement for Black self-determination, Sanchez became much more attracted to the strain of Black nationalism that informed Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka’s networks. She continued to write and served as a member of Harlem Youth Opportunities-Unlimited (HARYOU-ACT) and Bara­ ka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School during the mid-1960s. Sanchez was one of the formative figures of the Black Studies Movement. Following Malcolm X’s death, she moved to the West Coast where she worked as a lecturer at San Francisco State College (now University). There, she helped the school’s young Black student activists develop the nation’s first Black studies department. Sanchez’s experiences with college courses that marginalized Black history and culture spurred her to support campus activists’ efforts to reform the university’s Eurocentric curricula. As a pioneer in the Black Arts Movement, which claimed that art had to speak to the lives and struggles of Black people, Sanchez used her poetry to bring to the fore ideas about Black pride, the destruction of white supremacy, and Eurocentric notions of beauty. Using African American Vernacular English, Sanchez used her writing to offer a vision of freedom that placed women at the center. Her poetry explores themes such as Black womanhood, social justice, and Black nationalism. Homecoming (1969) and We a BaddDDD People (1970) placed her among the movement’s most well-known figures. Her collections and plays include Wounded in the House of a Friend, Love Poems, Under a Soprano Sky, A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women, The Bronx Is Next, Sister Son/ji, Uh Huh: But How Do It Free Us?, Black Cats Back and Uneasy Landings, Dirty Hearts ’72, I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t, and Malcolm Man/Don’t Live Here No Mo’. Sanchez is also the editor of two anthologies: Three Hundred Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin’ at You and We Be Word Sorcerers: Twenty-five Stories by Black Americans. During the 1970s, Sanchez went on to teach at Rutgers University, City College, City University of New York, Amherst College, and Manhattan Community College. In 1977, she found another academic home at Temple University. Her autobiography Homegirls & Handgrenades (1984) won the 1985 American Book Award. In 1999, she won the Langston Hughes Poetry Award. Sanchez has continued to inspire young artists of the hip-hop generation. In 2000, she appeared on the album The Rose That Grew from Concrete, Vol. 1, which features celebrity readings of the late rap artist Tupac Shakur’s collection of poetry. Sanchez’s reading of “When URE Heart Turns Cold” appears alongside readings from Nikki Giovanni, Danny Glover, Mos Def (Yasin Bey), Jasmine Guy, and Dead Prez. In 2012, Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter named Sanchez the Poet Laureate of

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Philadelphia. She is also the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History’s Ford Freedom Scholar. Dara R. Walker See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Arts Movement; Black Studies; Congress of Racial Equality; Neal, Larry Further Reading Burton, Jazmyn. 2012. “Philadelphia Names Sonia Sanchez First Poet Laureate.” Temple Now, http://news.temple.edu/news/philadelphia-names-sonia-sanchez-first-poet-laureate. Carnali, Lauren. n.d. “Sanchez, Sonia (Wilsonia Benita Driver).” Pennsylvania Center for the Book, http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Sanchez__Sonia.html. Clifton, Lucille, and Sonia Sanchez. 2002. “A Conversation, Eisa Davis, Lucille Clifton and Sonia Sanchez.” Callaloo 25(4): 1038–1074. Joseph, Peniel. 2006. Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Henry Holt. Smethurst, James. 2005. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Scott-Heron, Gil (1949–2011) Gil Scott-Heron (April 1, 1949–May 27, 2011) was an African American musician, author, and poet. He was best known for his spoken word poetry that infused his work with elements of soul and jazz. His use of jazz music with political poetry led many people to consider him one of the most important progenitors of rap music. He rejected the idea that his work prefigured rap and preferred to call himself a “bluesologist.” Scott-Heron asserted that his work built upon the Black traditions of blues, jazz, and Harlem Renaissance poets. Nevertheless, his catalog has inspired rap artists since the 1980s. Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Bobbie Scott and Gil Heron. His mother was an opera singer, and his father was a Jamaican soccer player who became the first Black man to play for the Celtic Football Club in Glasgow. After his parents separated, Scott-Heron grew up in Jackson, Tennessee, with his maternal grandmother, Lillie Scott. He returned to live with his mother in the Bronx in New York City after his grandmother passed away. After finishing secondary education at the prestigious Fieldston School, he followed in the steps of his greatest literary influence, Langston Hughes, and enrolled in Lincoln University. The titles of Scott-Heron’s first novels were an indication of his provocative writing and lyrical style. The Vulture, a murder mystery, and The Nigger Factory were written when he was around 20 years of age, during his college years.



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Inspired by the Last Poets, a collective of poets who came out of the growing Black nationalist movement of the late 1960s, he dropped out of Lincoln University and dedicated his life to expressing himself in poetry. Although he never finished his undergraduate degree, he received his master of arts in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in 1972. He also began teaching literature and creative writing at Federal City College in Washington, D.C. The same year as his first publications appeared, Scott-Heron’s first record, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, was released under the guidance of Bob Thiele. Thiele had worked at several important record labels including Decca, Impulse! Records, and BluesWay Records. Through the 1960s, Thiele worked with the jazz greats Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, and Louis Armstrong. Small Talk’s 14 tracks highlighted life in New York, the incompatibility of Black revolutionary thought and the white middle-class, and consumerism. “The Revo­ lution Will Not Be Televised” is Scott-Heron’s most famous spoken-word poem. The poem appeared first on Small Talk at 125th and Lenox and was rerecorded with a band for his second album, Pieces of a Man. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” has become a rallying cry for political action against a society that looked to television for information. The poem speaks directly to the listener, arguing that sitting at home and watching television does not make for a revolutionary. In this powerful poem, Scott-Heron argues that political action takes place on the street. “You will not be able to plug in, tune in, and cop out,” he implores his listeners. Throughout the poem, Scott-Heron references President Richard Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew, the actor Steve McQueen, singer Johnny Cash, and the baseball player Willie Mays. For Scott-Heron, these figures are not within the political realm but are instead figures of popular culture whom one can primarily watch on television. “There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers on the instant replay” is another part of the poem that signifies his stance. For ScottHeron, the violence that affects the Black community, which is omitted from television, already would likewise be invisible when the revolutionaries take back the streets. Along with the rerecorded “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Scott-Heron’s second album, Pieces of a Man, moved away from the spoken-word poetry of his first album and used more standard song structures. The album reflects Scott-Heron’s growing interest in incorporating jazz and R&B into his work. He was especially drawn to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, produced by Bob Thiele. Pieces of a Man’s standout track was “Home Is Where the Hatred Is,” a dark and grim meditation on Black urban life. The poem’s narrative expresses the sadness of living in the American ghetto, filled with drug addiction, destroyed lives, and death. The opening lines of the poem establish the heartache of the narrator: “A junkie walking through the twilight, I’m on my way home. I left three days ago, but no one seems to know I’ve gone.” Riffing on the common expression “Home is where the heart is,” Scott-Heron sees the

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American ghetto as quite different from the ideal home that many white Americans experience in suburbia. Instead of home being where one feels the deepest affection and desire to return, home is a place of pain and self-loathing that is only temporarily healed by the use of drugs. The deeper one goes into drugs, the more one is pulled away from the hope that home and community promise. Throughout the 1970s Scott-Heron showcased his stylistic approach to poetry. His targets included the Vietnam War, the epidemic of alcohol and narcotics, the Watergate Scandal, and racial injustice. In 1979 he participated in the No Nukes Concerts at Madison Square Garden on September 19–23, organized by Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Rait, and John Hall. Scott-Heron’s performance of “We Almost Lost Detroit” can be heard on the live double album released in 1980. In 1983, Scott-Heron opened for Stevie Wonder on tour for Hotter Than July in 1981. As part of the 41-city tour across the United States, he also joined Wonder’s campaign to turn Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday into a federal holiday, which would come into effect in 1983. In 1985 Scott-Heron joined Steven van Zandt’s Artists United Against Apartheid, a protest group founded by activists and performing artists. Along with Afrika Bambataa, Jackson Browne, Bobby Womack, Ringo Starr, Bono, Bob Dylan, George Clinton, Jimmy Cliff, and others, ScottHeron recorded “Sun City.” The song was named after a luxurious resort and casino in the Northwest Province of South Africa. Although the United Nations had imposed a cultural boycott on South Africa, the resort offered significant monetary incentives for artists to perform. The artists who had performed included the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Linda Ronstadt, and Elton John. In response, the Artists United Against Apartheid’s Sun City album repeated the refrain “Say I ain’t gonna play in Sun City. Everybody say, we ain’t gonna play Sun City.” Before “Sun City,” Scott-Heron had used his voice to speak about the atrocity of apartheid in South Africa in “Johannesburg,” a song on his 1975 album From South Africa to South Carolina. Similar in tone to “Sun City,” the song announced to his listeners that Americans needed to know about the struggle for freedom in South Africa: “Sister, have you heard from Johannesburg? They tell me that our brothers over there are defying the Man. We don’t know for sure because the news we get is unreliable, man.” In many ways, the lyrics told a similar story to his renowned “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Like his earlier single, “Johan­ nesburg” told listeners that television was an unreliable source of information and that one had to find other sources of knowledge to learn about systems of oppression in the world. Although lyrically simple in comparison to Scott-Heron’s other poetry, he continued to fight for racial justice into the 1980s. By 1982 after releasing over a dozen critically acclaimed albums, Scott-Heron experienced near-debilitating drug addiction. It was during his disappearance from the public stage in the 1980s that he was hailed as the “Godfather of Rap.” His struggle with addiction culminated with two convictions for cocaine possession in



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2001. While out on parole, he was arrested for possession of a crack pipe during the editing of his BBC documentary Gil Scott-Heron: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. He served a sentence at Rikers Island in New York for the parole violation. Despite problems of addiction and criminal charges, Scott-Heron began making public concert appearances in 2007 and then in 2010 released his final album, I’m Not Here. The album saw Scott-Heron reflecting on his own life and opened with “On Coming from a Broken Home (Pt. 1),” a biographical poem about his grandmother Lily Scott, who raised him. Yet more than a eulogy to his grandmother, the song saw Scott-Heron own the label as the Godfather of Rap. He sampled Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights” from Graduation (2007). In many respects, this was returning the favor for West’s sampling “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” from Late Registration (2005) for “My Way Home.” Yet Scott-Heron’s album also paid homage to his bluesologist roots with “Me and the Devil,” the last single he released before his death. Backed by a heavy electronic beat, “Me and the Devil” adapts Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues” from 1937. The use of West’s beats followed by Johnson’s blues made the album a statement to the long history of Black recorded music in the 20th century. The use of Robert Johnson’s lyrical references to the devil and the afterlife seemed to also suggest Scott-Heron’s own life, especially as he dealt with his own drug addiction, HIV, and arrests. He died shortly after the release of his last album in 2011. Paul J. Edwards See also: Black Aesthetic; Black Arts Movement; Black Music Further Reading Hamilton, Jack. 2011. “Pieces of a Man.” Side A: Fifty Years; Transition Celebrates Its Storied History, special issue of Transition: An International Review 106 (July): 113–126. Scott-Heron, Gil. 1970. Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. Flying Dutchman Records. Scott-Heron, Gil. 1971. Pieces of a Man. Flying Dutchman Records. Scott-Heron, Gil. 1975. From South Africa to South Carolina. Arista Records. Scott-Heron, Gil. 2010. I’m New Here. XL Recordings. Scott-Heron, Gil. 2012. The Last Holiday. Grove: New York.

Seale, Bobby (1936–) Robert “Bobby” George Seale, a cofounder along with Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1936. Seale grew up

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in meager circumstances, and like many poor people he moved around frequently. Along with his parents and three younger siblings, Seale lived in Port Arthur and San Antonio, Texas, before landing permanently in Berkeley, California, in 1944. He dropped out of high school during his senior year and joined the U.S. Air Force in 1955. His military career was cut short three years later when he left the service with a dishonorable discharge that stemmed from a racially motivated altercation with his commanding officer. Back home in California, Seale worked at various jobs including stints as a sheet metal mechanic and a comedian. He eventually returned to night school, where he finally earned his high school diploma. With an interest in engineering, Seale enrolled in Oakland’s Merritt College in 1960 to improve his employment prospects. Almost immediately Seale became enmeshed in campus politics, eventually joining several organizations, including the militant Soul Students Advisory Committee (SSAC). It was in the SSAC where he met Huey Newton, a young street radical who like many Bay Area youths was becoming politicized by local, national, and world events. From revolutionary activity that included uprisings and sustained protests in the American South to revolutions in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, the time was ripe for young Americans to reevaluate the meaning of freedom and justice for all. By 1965 Blacks in the Watts section of South Central Los Angeles had become riotous, which resulted in dozens of deaths and millions of dollars of property damage. An assassin’s bullet felled Malcolm X the same year, and the Vietnam War shifted into higher gear. When Seale and Newton found that campus groups had little interest in serving the Black community, they left the college campus to form their own organization. Viewing the murder of Black people by police officers as the number-one concern of Blacks in both the Bay Area and nationwide, the two college friends created an organization in 1966 that they named the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. With Newton serving as minister of defense, Seale simultaneously be­­­ came the organization’s chairman. Seale and Newton had previously surveyed residents of the Black community to find out what they most wanted to see addressed in the community and based on this information created a document called the “The Ten-Point Program.” Enumerating their demands on such issues as fair housing, full employment, quality education, and fairness in the courts, this document laid out the Panthers’ philosophy. Point seven of the platform called for an immediate end to the murder of Blacks by police officers, and it was this point on which the group initially focused. To prevent further murders, Seale, Newton, and other Panthers, with their guns in tow, followed the police around Oakland during what the young militants described as police patrols. When these patrols helped the Panthers recruit dozens of Blacks into their ranks, law enforcement officials demanded that state lawmakers do something to prohibit the Panthers from carrying weapons in public, an act that at the time was perfectly legal under California law. Nevertheless, state lawmakers complied with the police request and debated the



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merits of anti-Panther gun legislation. This bill, which became known as the Mulford Act, received an unexpected boost when members of the Black Panther Party (BPP) arrived at the state capitol to protest its passage. On May 2, 1967, Seale and more than 20 other armed Panthers caravanned from Oakland to Sacramento to demonstrate their opposition to the impending law. Once inside the capitol, the band of militants mistook the general assembly where legislators debated bills for the viewing gallery, where citizens were allowed to observe legislative proceedings. Though the Panthers were quickly escorted out, cameramen and reporters seized the opportunity to interview the gun-wielding militants. Identifying Seale as the group’s leader, television cameramen questioned the Panther founder about its purpose. Seale, reading from the Panther’s “Executive Mandate #1,” explained that Blacks needed to arm themselves against the terror of police murder and white vigilante violence. He provided a brief history of white violence and genocide against Native Americans, the Japanese, and the Vietnamese and warned that the same violence was being visited upon Blacks in the form of lynching and police murder. His electrifying speech aired on TV news and radio shows throughout the nation. Practically overnight, Seale had succeeded in putting the Panthers on the minds of millions of people. News of the Panthers’ “invasion” of the state capitol prompted Blacks throughout the country to ask for a BPP chapter in their town. In less than two years the Panthers had spread from California to New York City, with chapters in Seattle, Chicago, and Baltimore. It was Seale’s leadership and political courage that inspired many of these new recruits. Despite the auspicious start, the result of the Sacramento incident foreshadowed the life that Seale would lead over the next several years. Though they had left the state capitol without incident, Seale and his companions were later arrested at a Sacramento gas station for violating obscure fish and game laws that specified how weapons should be handled. The Panther founder spent six months in jail after being convicted of what many decried as trumped-up charges. Seale emerged from jail in 1971 ready to continue his work. He had been busy directing the expanding organization when Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents kidnapped him as he was driving through Oakland traffic. They whisked the Panther chairman to Chicago, where he was later charged with inciting a riot in connection with the widespread unrest associated with the 1968 Democratic National Con­ vention in Chicago. Though he did give a rousing speech denouncing Richard Nixon and the Republicans who supported him, Seale had not incited people to riot. The Chicago police, directed by Mayor Richard J. Daley, mercilessly beat and tear-gassed hundreds of people who showed up to protest the Vietnam War and the heavy-handed law-and-order policies espoused by Nixon and his vice presidential candidate, Spiro Agnew. Charged with seven others, including activists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Seale later had his case severed, and the Chicago 8 trial quickly became the Chicago 7 trial. Seale’s arrest had been a key action of the

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FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which sought to destroy the Black freedom struggle by discrediting and criminalizing political dissidents. When Seale demanded his right to choose his own counsel and his right to defend himself, trial judge Julius Hoffman refused to allow it. To prevent Seale from declaring these rights in open court, the judge ordered Seale bound by chains to a chair, then directed bailiffs to gag him with a dirty cotton cloth. Though the case ended in a mistrial, the judge found the Panther leader guilty of several counts of contempt and sentenced him to four years in prison. Seale’s lawyers later succeeded in proving that the judge had violated the Panther leader’s constitutional rights, and an appeals court overturned the conviction. Upon his release in 1970, Seale went back to his duties as chairman. In addition to organizing and directing many of the party’s community service programs, instilling discipline in the ranks, and building coalitions to help free Huey Newton, who had been jailed after a shootout with police officers left one officer dead and another wounded, Seale also engaged in a tremendous amount of public speaking. From high schools and colleges to churches, synagogues, and public parks, he maintained a speaking schedule that kept him moving most days of the week. Because the federal government hoped to destroy the party, it soon came up with yet another case to entrap the intrepid Panther spokesman. Directed by the federal agents who administered COINTELPRO, Connecticut authorities arrested Seale for the murder of Alex Rackley, a member of the New York chapter of the BPP. Panthers based in New Haven, Connecticut, encouraged by visiting Panther field marshal George Sams, had tortured and killed the teenage activist after accusing him of being an FBI spy. Local authorities conspired to convict Seale of this murder by alleging that he ordered Rackley’s death during a brief visit to the New Haven Panther headquarters in the spring of 1969. In an effort to support the commencement of a nationwide Student Strike, Seale had given a rousing speech at Yale University prior to visiting the Panther pad. Once again, the Panther leader found himself in jail on spurious charges. Placed on trial in October 1970, he mounted a vigorous defense and cast serious doubts about the allegations in the minds of the jury, which refused to convict the Panther leader. While he avoided prison, Seale had once again been removed from circulation and spent two years of his time fighting charges that the authorities knew were fabricated. Returning to the Bay Area in 1971, Seale continued to build the Panthers’ base and reach out to Blacks and all other ethnic groups in an effort to secure allies for what he termed the Panthers’ fight against fascism. Despite his hard work and dedication, Seale, like so many other Panthers, fell victim to the internal strife that eventually crippled the organization. Ultimately, philosophical disagreements between Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver and Minster of Defense Huey Newton led to a schism in the party. While the majority of Panthers left the organization after this rift developed, others sided with Newton and sought to carry on the practice of organizing Black communities by



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providing important community services for youths, the elderly, and poor people. Those who insisted on revolutionary methods to achieve liberation sided with Cleaver and subsequently carried on a protracted war with the police. Seale sided with Newton and continued to use his considerable people skills to rally the troops and to direct a range of activities, including establishing and supporting caucuses in labor unions, creating free busing to prisons programs, and providing free quality education to Bay Area children. Seale helped to create free food, free shoes, free pest control, and free clothing programs. He also advocated on behalf of political prisoners and organized voter registration campaigns. The early 1970s ushered in a period of tremendous change for the party. Internal purges, external attacks, incarceration, and death had wracked the organization from the time it became a national phenomenon in 1968. While Newton floated in and out of court on various charges, Seale presided over the major changes that the organization experienced. No longer rough around the edges or dominated by a lumpen-centered philosophy, the new and improved Panthers were required to wear business clothing, carry brief cases, and speak properly and politely when dealing with the public. This new image attracted many in the community, and the Panthers succeeded in maintaining their hold on those at the grassroots level. Within a year of implementing these changes, Seale and other party leaders chose to enter the political arena. In 1972 Panther leader Elaine Brown ran for city council, and Seale ran for mayor of Oakland. The Panthers reasoned that if they could win political leadership in Oakland, they could serve as an example for how to do the same in other major urban areas where Blacks were quickly becoming the majority. To secure victory, Seale directed Panthers from chapters throughout the country to shut down their offices, move to Oakland, and assist in ensuring Seale’s mayoral victory. While hundreds of Panthers heeded the call, most chose to stay in their own cities or simply left the party. The newly arriving Panthers joined their Bay Area comrades and helped to register thousands of new voters throughout the city of Oakland. Under Seale’s direction, the Panthers and their supporters installed more than 200 county registrars. All of this work paid off when Seale garnered enough votes to be in a runoff with incumbent John Redding. Despite the tight race, Seale failed to convince the majority of voters that his candidacy represented Oakland’s best chances for a bright future. He lost to Redding by more than 30,000 votes. After losing the mayoral race, Seale understandably wanted to take some time off to rest and to spend time with his family. This transition was made easier after it became clear that Newton wanted to use the party to take over the vice trade in Oakland. Unable to convince Newton to turn away from his criminal activity, Seale left the BPP in 1974 and returned to private life. In 1978 Seale emerged from his shell with a second book, an autobiography he titled A Lonely Rage. He sought to help the reader understand his anger and the choices he made by focusing on his turbulent childhood and the political

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maelstrom in which he came of age. The book did not sell nearly as well as his Seize the Time, and the aging revolutionary soon faded from the limelight. During the 1980s Seale publicly supported gun control, a stance for which he received considerable criticism. He went on to serve as a community liaison for Temple University’s Africana Studies Department, where he also taught courses. In addition to appearing in ads for Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Seale published a third book titled Barbeque’n with Bobby Seale: Hickory and Mesquite Recipes (1987). Twenty years after Seale had helped to create the BPP he retained his affinity for serving the people, as he directed a significant amount of the proceeds of his cookbook to various nonprofit social service organizations. Ever the organizer, Seale returned to Oakland in 2002 and continues to work with youth organizations and other entities engaged in social justice work. Curtis Austin See also: Black Panther Party; Brown, Elaine; Malcolm X; Newton, Huey P.; Vietnam War Further Reading Newton, Huey, Toni Morrison, and Elaine Brown. 2009. To Die for the People. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers. Seale, Bobby. 1996. Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Seale, Bobby, and Stephen Shames. 2016. Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Shih, Bryan, Yohuru Williams, and Peniel E. Joseph. 2016. The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution. New York: Nation Books.

Primary Document Handwritten Statement Submitted by Defendant Bobby Seale, 1969 In October 1966 Bobby Seale, a former member of the U.S. Air Force, became the founding chairman of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Seale caught the attention of the nation after he led armed Panthers into the California State Capitol to openly challenge antigun legislation. As with other leaders of the party, Seale faced constant surveillance and harassment for his political participation. One of his most noted arrests occurred in 1968 after he spoke at an anti–Vietnam War rally. Seale and seven other defendants, including Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman,

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and other white activists, were accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the Democratic National Convention. The eventual defendants became known as the Chicago 8, and their trial was well known for its circus-like atmosphere. Seale was charged with disruptive behavior after he demanded to represent himself and choose his own attorney. At one point, he referred to the judge as a racist and fascist. Eventually Seale was bound to a chair and gagged during the trial and separated from the other defendants. The judge ordered Seale to serve four years in prison for contempt of court, but the charges were eventually dropped. In 1973 Seale ran a formidable campaign for mayor of Oakland, coming in second. I, Bobby G. Seale, submit the following in my hand writing to Judge Julius Hoffman of this court in the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division of the U.S.A. where presently the trial of so-called “Conspircy to riot” is being held, 9-26-69, and I, Bobby G. Seale being one of the defendants of eight have been, by denied motion, the right to speak out in my behalf where my constitutional right to have “Legal council of my choice who is effective,” namely, Attorney Charles R. Garry who is on record in this court as my defence council that I have made agreement with by my choice only that he will assist me in my defense during this trial. I submit to Judge Julius Hoffman that the trial be post phoned until a later date where I, Bobby G. Seale, can have the “legal council of my choice who is effective,” Attorney Charles R. Garry and if my constitutional rights are not respected by this court Then other lawyers on record here representing me, except Charles R. Garry, do not speak for me or represent me as of this date, 9-26-69. I fire them now until Charles R. Garry can be made avaible as chief council in this trial of so-called “conspiracy to riot” and infact be my legal council of choice who is effective in assisting me in my defence. The only defense attorney I know of who can defend me and be effective is Charles R. Garry who is presently my attorney on record in this court. If I am continuosly denided this constutional right of legal defense council of my choice who is effective by the Judge of this court Then I can only see Judge Hoffman as a Blatant racist of this U.S. court with gross prejudictial error toward all defendants and my self in particular. (Signed) Bobby Seale Chairman Black Panther Party Source: Transcribed statement by defendant Bobby Seale (original spellings retained), United States v Dellinger et al. (1969), Criminal Case Files, 1873–1991, Record Group 21: Records of District Courts of the United States, 1685–2009, National Archives.

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Shakur, Assata (1947–) Within radical Black Power culture, Assata Shakur’s iconic persona encompasses the conflicts and prohibitions concerning physical responses to state employees authorized to use lethal force and intimidation against Blacks. Her declaration of “war” on the oppression of Black people is linked to moral and legal arguments for the right to rebel against repression. A former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and a past political prisoner who is now a fugitive exiled in Cuba, Shakur links her criminalization to racist oppression and the codification of white supremacy in economic/political institutions, law, and police enforcement. Despite the havoc wreaked upon individuals, families, and communities, from statesanctioned violence to stabilize political and social orders detrimental to the progress of a Black mass (as opposed to an elite), the majority of Blacks did and do not embrace revolutionary struggle, particularly if that struggle entails physical defense against racist violence. Born Joanne Chesimard in 1947, Shakur was raised in New York City and attended Manhattan Community College, where she became politicized against the Vietnam War and U.S. military interventions that destabilized and exploited the Third World. She joined the Harlem branch of the BPP to work on its sickle-cell anemia, educational, and children’s breakfast programs. Her autobiography, Assata, chronicles her radicalization amid increasing police surveillance, persecution, and prosecution of the BPP by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). In 1969, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover disseminated a memo that rationalized antiBlack political violence; his COINTELPRO directive asserted that the BPP—composed of several hundred young people in an organization formed in 1966 in Oakland after the police killing of a 15-year-old boy, who was shot in the back—posed the greatest internal threat to the security of the United States. In December 1969, city and federal police in a predawn raid on the Chicago Panther headquarters assassinated Fred Hampton and Mark Clark while they slept. (The federal government later distributed financial settlements to survivors and family members, somewhat similar to “compensations” paid by Baltimore, New York, and other cities to Black families whose kin die by police homicide.) In New York, COINTELPRO targeted the Panther 21. FBI, NYPD, and prosecutors arrested 21 BPP leaders, disrupting social services delivered to the community. Bails were set extraordinarily high. The BPP leaders were charged with crimes, and investigators used mentally ill informants who would have endangered their own communities. Some Panthers were incarcerated for nearly two years (Afeni Shakur, Tupac Shakur’s mother, was pregnant with him while incarcerated); others went underground. Shakur also became a target of COINTELPRO.



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Assata Shakur, member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, leaves Middlesex County courthouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Shakur was convicted in 1977 of killing a New Jersey state trooper and was sentenced to life in prison but escaped to Cuba, where she continues to reside. (AP Photo)

In 1971, all 21 defendants were acquitted of 157 charges after less than two hours of jury deliberations. For Assata Shakur, beatings, incarceration, and killings of Black radicals at the hands of the police and the FBI made joining the BLA a “rational choice” as a militant activist. As organizers were driven underground, coordinating above­ ground services for impoverished communities was effectively disrupted. In 1973 when New Jersey trooper Werner Foerster made a traffic stop of a car with three Black occupants, a shootout followed during which Foerster was killed along with Assata Shakur’s companion, Zayd Shakur. Shakur was wounded and arrested (police state that one of her two male companions shot Foerster), and Sundiata Acoli escaped but was later captured, tried, and sentenced to prison. Despite conflicting perspectives, police suggested that Zayd Shakur shot Foerster. While Shakur was underground from 1971 to 1973, the NYPD and other governmental agencies accused her of numerous crimes: bank robbery, extortion, kidnapping, and attempted murder. Those charges were eventually dismissed or rejected in mistrials, acquittals, or dismissals. Shakur’s aunt, Evelyn Williams, served as her lead attorney during the first trials that ended in acquittal or mistrial. Documented in her memoir Inadmissible Evidence, the legal malfeasance, racism, and police intimidation—directed at defendant and attorneys—derailed a fair trial. From her arrest to the conviction in 1977, Shakur was indicted on at least six different charges unrelated to the 1973 New Jersey Turnpike shooting, including

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murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, bank robbery, and kidnapping; all of these charges resulted in acquittals and dismissals for Shakur. A disagreement on legal strategy and politics led Shakur and Williams to part as a legal team. Shakur briefly represented herself; other attorneys included feminist Florynce Kennedy, Civil Rights attorney William Kunstler, and Lennox Hinds, who remains her attorney to date. Shakur was convicted in 1977 by an all-white jury as an accomplice to the murder of Foerster and for assault with intent to kill on trooper James Harper. Despite the convictions, Shakur still asserts her innocence. Claims of her innocence are buttressed by Harper’s seeming perjury and the testimony of expert witnesses that medical evidence showed that Shakur had been shot in the clavicle and partially paralyzed while her hands were raised and so was physically incapable of firing a weapon. In addition, no gunpowder residue was found on her, and an all-white jury, some with personal ties to state troopers, convicted her. The judge barred presentation of any evidence of COINTELPRO repression or an investigation of a break-in at the office of her defense counsel, where extensive legal documents relevant to the defense had been stolen. Pretrial media convicted her too. New Jersey police and the FBI gave daily interviews to journalists, who were barred from speaking to the defendant. First confined in a men’s prison under 24-hour surveillance without adequate medical resources during the trial, Shakur conceived a baby with her codefendant. She later gave birth to her daughter while in prison. Postconviction, she was relocated to a women’s correctional facility in Clinton, New Jersey. Initially housed in facilities alongside the Aryan Nation sisterhood, the Manson family, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who had attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford, Shakur maintained that fear of being murdered in prison led her to plan to escape. In 1978 the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (coheaded by Angela Y. Davis), and the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice brought Shakur’s case as a political prisoner before the United Nations. Shakur’s memoir recounts her grandmother’s dream, instructing her to leave—the trauma of seeing her young daughter during visitation was reinforcement. In 1979, Shakur escaped from New Jersey’s Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. In 1984 she received political asylum in Cuba, where she remains today. Shakur’s communiqués from Cuba invoke the language of enslavement, abolitionism, and maroons. Incensed by Shakur’s public defiance as well as mourning for the death of a trooper and the deaths of other police resulting from confrontations with the BLA, government efforts to capture or kill her expanded, with increasing financial incentives in “Dead or Alive” bounties. Black Power was a public threat; thus, Hoover’s intent codified in the 1960s sought to discredit all Black activism that refused to repudiate and condemn Assata Shakur. Law-and-order narratives also seek to minimize the impact of Shakur’s influential 1983 memoir that garnered her international supporters.



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In 1998, protesting the first bounty, $50,000, placed on Shakur, the exonerated Panther 21 members penned “An Open Letter to New Jersey Governor [Christine Todd] Whitman,” referencing the Fugitive Slave Act and asserting that Shakur had acted similarly to Harriet Tubman. In 2005, President George W. Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzalez raised the bounty to $1 million and identified her as a domestic terrorist. In 2013, President Barack Obama’s FBI director James Comey increased the bounty to $2 million and placed Shakur on the “Most Wanted” terrorist list (the first woman to be placed there) with operatives of Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. Although targeted and imprisoned, along with other members of the BPP and the BLA, decades before the 9/11 attacks, Shakur is central to the law-and-order narrative that Black “political prisoners” and Black revolutionaries were and are not survivors of a U.S.-led war against Black Power. Instead, they are the embodiment of security threats to the homeland, the twin evil of international terrorism that targets civilians, children, clergy, and women. Shakur’s case demonstrates that Black Power activists are considered worthy if not priority targets for neutralization in the decades-old U.S. wars against terror. Decontextualizing and depoliticizing Shakur and the revolutionary Black struggle are a prelude to punishment. In 2015, New Jersey’s Kean University rescinded an invitation to rapper Common as a commencement speaker due to his 2000 recording “A Song for Assata.” Later that year, officials at Marquette University’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center whitewashed a mural of Shakur and fired the director for allowing members of the Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) to paint it. The sorority members said that the university approved their social justice theme, while the national office of the AKA issued a statement that it does not support violence of any form. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, which endorsed Donald Trump as the law-and-order candidate, New Jersey governor Chris Christie theatrically “prosecuted” (presumptive) Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, intoning that by supporting the normalization of relations with Cuba, Clinton had supported a nation that harbored the “cop killer,” “Joanne Chesimard.” Despite the vilification cemented in a conviction (challenged by her supporters) and a fear of terrorists and U.S. repression of dissidents, Shakur’s ideology and activism remain influential. Black Lives Matter feminist founders have cited her writings. In 2015, the Chicago grassroots activist group against police violence Assata’s Daughters organized to “share respect, love, and power of Assata Shakur as Black feminists and organizers” and worked with Black Lives Matter on increasing oversight of police violence. An antagonist and embarrassment for lawand-order advocates, Shakur remains a political inspiration for those who believe in her innocence and the right to Black activism and self-defense. Shakur’s resistance politics highlight Black radicalisms that are censored or criminalized. Most of her supporters rarely reference her role in the BLA and largely focus on her political analysis of state power and the needs of Black communities. Shakur’s ideology evolved after her escape from prison. Refusing to

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reduce revolutionary war to violence, she asserts in her memoir that a “people’s war” precludes elite vanguards and romanticism concerning “armed struggle.” She also comments on sexism and mistakes in the organizations she joined. For Assata Shakur, defense of self, family, and community from emotional, intellectual, political, physical, and spiritual denigration and from poverty and violence are the hallmarks of Black Power. A cogent claim to Black Power rests on memories of her instruction set by Black sorority members under the whitewash of a university wall: “No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.” Joy James See also: Black Liberation Army; Black Panther Party; Newton, Huey P.; Seale, Bobby Further Reading bin Wahad, Dhoruba. 2015. “History 101: The Panther 21, Police Repression, the BLA and Cointel-Pro.” Hip Hop and Politics, December 14, http://hiphopandpolitics.com/2015/12/14 /the-panther-21-case-a-glimpse-intothe-future-past-of-racist-police-repression/. FBI Most Wanted. 2017. “Joanne Deborah Chesimard.” Federal Bureau of Investigation, https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists/joanne-deborah-chesimard. Goodman, Amy. 2013. “Angela Davis and Assata Shakur’s Lawyer Denounce FBI’s Adding of Exiled Activist to Terrorists List.” Democracy Now, May 3, http://www.democ racynow.org/2013/5/3/angela_davis_and_assata_shakurs_lawyer. Izadi, Elahe. 2015. “After Outcry, Marquette University Removes Campus Mural of Assata Shakur.” Washington Post, May 20. Shakur, Assata. 1973. “To My People.” The Talking Drum, July 4, http://www.thetal kingdrum.com/tmp.html. Shakur, Assata. 1978. “Women in Prison: How We Are.” Black Scholar 9(7) (April), http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Underground_News/pdf/Best_of_The_Black_Scholar.pdf. Shakur, Assata. 1983. Assata: An Autobiography. New York: Lawrence Hill Books. Shakur, Assata. 2003. “Message of Condolences on the Transition of Our Revolutionary Sista, Comrade and Friend, Safiya Bukhari.” It’s About Time, http://www.itsabouttimebpp .com/memorials/safiya_bukhari.html. Williams, Evelyn. 1993. Inadmissible Evidence: The Story of the African-American Trial Lawyer Who Defended the Black Liberation Army. New York: Lawrence Hill Books.

Shakur, Mutulu (Jarel Williams) (1950–) Dr. Mutulu Shakur is a revolutionary health worker and activist in the New Afrikan Independence Movement. He is believed to be a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and defines himself as a New Afrikan prisoner of war (POW). He



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has been incarcerated since 1986 and remains an active voice in the Black freedom struggle. On August 8, 1950, Mutulu Shakur was born in Baltimore, Maryland, as Jeral Wayne Williams. When he was seven years old he moved to Jamaica, Queens, New York City, with his mother and younger sister. He often served as an advocate for his household at an early age since his mother was disabled with blindness. This situation of negotiating the social service system challenged young Williams to develop his activist skills. Through this experience he learned that the system did not operate in the interests of his community and their need for self-determination and control over their own affairs.

Teenage Revolutionary Jeral Williams became an activist in the Black Power Movement at the age of 16. His junior high school principal was Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) leader and Malcolm X associate Herman Ferguson. Jeral began working with Ferguson in RAM activities. Ferguson later joined the newly established Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA), which endorsed the founding of an independent New Afrikan (Black) republic and the establishment of an independent Black state in the southern United States. He began to work with the security of the PGRNA. The PGRNA security and the Detroit police had a major gun battle at the Black nationalist second annual national gathering in Detroit in March 1969. The Detroit police retaliated after one of its officers had been fatally shot by invading the gathering. With tear gas in the air and bullets flying, young Jeral placed his body over Ferguson and his companion (later wife) Iyaluua to protect them from gunfire. While working with the PGRNA, Shakur became aligned closely with the Jamaica-Queens branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP), led by his classmate Anthony Laborde (aka Abdul Majid). Although Shakur never formally joined the BPP, he was responsible for political education for the Jamaica-Queens branch. His close association with Harlem BPP members Zayd and Lumumba Shakur and their father Aba influenced him to take their last name, Shakur. As many PGRNA members, he abandoned his birth (or slave) name and adopted the African name Mutulu.

Health Care Activist and Institution Builder Mutulu Shakur was an important leader in the grassroots occupation of Lincoln Hospital in Bronx, New York. The Lincoln Detox program was established in 1970 in concert with the BPP, the PGRNA, and the Puerto Rican nationalist Young Lords Party. Lincoln Detox was innovative in utilizing acupuncture to assist in the withdrawal from heroin addiction. The program centered on the belief that understanding

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the conditions that led to narcotics addiction was essential to successful withdrawal and recovery. Shakur and other Lincoln Detox staff advocated detoxification through acupuncture and political education as opposed to methadone, which had its own addictive qualities. Shakur served as a political education teacher and counselor for patients withdrawing from heroin addiction. This advocacy was in conflict with the mainstream medical hierarchy, including the American Medical Association. Witnessing the efficacy of acupuncture, Shakur worked to become a doctor of acupuncture in 1976. He also served as assistant director of Lincoln Detox until 1978. During this time Lincoln Detox received recognition from the national and international health care associations, including the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the National Acupuncture Research Society, and the World Academic Society of Acupuncture. Shakur cofounded (with Dr. Richard Delaney) the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA) and the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture after the close of Lincoln Detox in 1978. The BAAANA clinic, located in Harlem, treated thousands of indigent and elderly patients who generally had no access to treatment of this type. BAAANA also served as a vehicle for training doctors of acupuncture and alternative health care.

Human Rights Activist By the late 1970s Shakur’s work in acupuncture and drug detoxification was nationally and internationally known, and he was invited to address members of the medical community around the world. He lectured on his work at many medical conferences and was invited to the People’s Republic of China. In addition, he developed the antidrug program for the Commission for Racial Justice of the National Council of Churches. As a proponent of human rights, Shakur focused much of his work on support and freedom for political prisoners and POWs. Political prisoners are activists incarcerated due to their political beliefs or activities. Prisoners of war are those engaged in armed struggle or self-defense when captured by the state. Shakur was an organizer in the defense of his mentor Ferguson, who faced conspiracy charges due to his affiliation with RAM. Shakur founded the National Committee to Free Political Prisoners, which supported political prisoners and POWs. Along with his wife Afeni Shakur, he founded the National Task Force for COINTELPRO Litigation and Research to investigate the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other government agencies in infiltrating the Black Power Movement, manufacturing evidence against activists, and engaging in divide-and-conquer tactics and other forms of counterinsurgency against the freedom struggle. Shakur engaged in work to support the legal defense of countless political prisoners, including Imari Obadele and the RNA (Republic of New Africa) 11, Reverend Ben



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Chavis and the Wilmington 10, Reverend Charles Koen, Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt, Assata Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, and other members of the BLA.

Captivity The BLA claimed responsibility for the expropriation of an armored truck in Nyack, New York, in October 1981. Months later, Shakur and 10 others were indicted by a federal grand jury under the federal conspiracy law called Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO). RICO was originally developed to aid the government in its prosecution of organized crime. Shakur was charged with conspiracy and participation in a revolutionary, clandestine organization that expropriated money from several banks and armored vehicles between December 1976 and October 1981. The prosecution claimed that the funds supported community-based institutions, political organizing and mobilizations, families of political prisoners, solidarity with African liberation movements, and the building of a network to oppose white supremacist and right-wing paramilitary activity. Shakur was also charged with participation in the 1979 prison escape of Assata Shakur. Mutulu Shakur eluded a national manhunt for five years but was arrested in Los Angeles, California, in February 1986. He was convicted of the RICO conspiracy and sentenced to 40 years. He has advocated for a truth and reconciliation process in the United States—like in postapartheid South Africa—as an alternative dispute mechanism. Shakur has also been acknowledged by hip-hop artists partially due to his relationship to Tupac Shakur, whom he raised during his marriage to the Rap artist’s mother, former Black Panther Afeni Shakur. Akinyele Umoja See also: Black Liberation Army; Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry); Political Prisoners and Exiles; Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa; Revolutionary Action Movement; Shakur, Assata Further Reading Umoja, Akinyele O. 1999. “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Legacy of the Black Panther Party.” New Political Science 21(2) (June): 131–155.

Shields, Rudy (1931–1987) Rudolph “Rudy” Arthur Shields was born on December 12, 1931, in Columbus, Ohio. He was the principal boycott organizer during the Black freedom struggle in Mississippi. Shields organized several boycotts in the state from 1965 through the

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1970s. He organized successful boycotts of white business establishments in several counties in Mississippi, including Adams, Forrest, Claiborne, Sunflower, Sharkey, Humphreys, Monroe, Yazoo, Clay, and over 30 Mississippi towns, including Belzoni, Hazelhurst, Natchez, Jackson, and Yazoo City. His practice and advocacy of armed resistance and other militant rhetoric are reflective of the transition from Civil Rights to Black Power in Mississippi. Shields became active in Civil Rights activities in Mississippi in 1964, joining state National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) secretary Charles Evers, who reentered Civil Rights activities after his brother, Medgar, was assassinated. After completing high school and one year of college, Shields served in the U.S. armed forces from 1950 to 1954 until he was honorably discharged from the military. Though born in Columbus, he later moved to Chicago and then Mississippi, which is where much of his Civil Rights organizing took place. Shields was successful in organizing boycotts of white establishments because he aggressively used intimidation tactics and coercion to discourage Black citizens from shopping in boycotted businesses. He also used psychological warfare to coerce and manipulate white supremacists and the white power structure. Shields is affiliated with the armed resistance movement and the Black Power Movement, holding membership in the Deacons of Defense, participating in outreach with national organizations such as the Black Panther Party (BPP), and consulting with members of the Republic of New Africa. In addition, he participated in nonviolent voter registration drives before and after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and took part in the democratic process on the municipal level by demanding integration and representation of Black officials and employees in decision-making and employment practices. In addition to boycotts, Shields participated in voter registration drives in the early 1960s as a member of the NAACP. However, as he moved toward an ideology of armed resistance and Black Power, NAACP leaders, who championed litigation and legal change, began to distance themselves from Shields’s militant methods, and though he advocated for desegregation and civil and human rights, his philosophy and rhetoric began to resemble insurgent Black nationalism (Umoja 2014, 173). Akinyele Umoja describes Shields’s abandoning the NAACP as his organizing vehicle. Shields utilized the Black United Front (BUF) as his organizing vehicle after 1969 in Aberdeen, West Point, and Jackson.

Black Power in Mississippi Though not as expansive in its reach or national membership, Shields’s Black United Front was similar to the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), which was founded in Mississippi in 1961. The Black United Front was an umbrella



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organization that advanced a common Black agenda, utilizing representation among several Black organizations. Both of these umbrella organizations differed in their ideologies and tactics. COFO ascribed to a more nonviolent stratagem that aimed to reduce tensions between national and state Civil Rights organizations by dividing political territories in Mississippi as organizing grounds and challenging local, state, and national policies; BUF ascribed to a Black nationalist ideology that unabashedly used Black-centered recruitment, armed resistance, and self-defense strategies in order to boycott local white business establishments, challenge hiring practices, and demand that courtesy titles such as “mister” and “miss” be used to address Black citizens. Founded in 1968 in Washington, D.C., during a meeting that was called by Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), the BUF was an organization that was created to expand the lines of communication between all the Black people in the D.C. area. Employing a representational membership style, the BUF sought to include membership to interested Black organizations as long as their memberships consisted of at least 50 percent Black people. The Black United Front was housed in West Point, Mississippi, and was the driving force behind the Mississippi Black freedom struggle during the Black Power Movement across several towns, including West Point. During the West Point boycott of September 1970, the BUF issued a list of 21 demands, among which was the demand that Blacks be employed in the private sector in jobs such as at banks. The West Point network also demanded that public schools be desegregated in the town and that all-Black schools that had been forcibly closed due to stalled desegregation plans be reopened. Additionally, along the lines of education, the BUF demanded a Black advisory board to participate in the decision making for the desegregation plans and required the appointment of Black officials to the West Point Board of Education. Other concerns addressed by the West Point BUF network concerned housing, infrastructure, recreation and other services, and police brutality. The BUF in West Point, along with its activism across the state, participated in a form of Black nationalist, Civil Rights and human rights activism that did not call for separatist policies and instead called for the fair and equal treatment of Black Mississippians. Shields also proved to be an adequate student organizer, capitalizing on the velocity of the May 1970 massacre of Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Gibbs to mobilize students at Jackson State College (JSC) in the fall of 1970. JSC students were participating in nationwide antiwar peace protests to contest the involvement of the U.S. military in Southeast Asia. Similar shootings happened at Kent State, which led to the massacre of peacefully protesting students. Shields, in addition to the newly transplanted Jackson Black United Front and student activists, attempted to put pressure on the City of Jackson’s municipal government to take disciplinary action against the Jackson Police Department officers who were involved in the shootings. No disciplinary action was taken. Instead, after the

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murders because of the racial tensions, the city government took steps to relocate Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) away from its location near downtown Jackson to what student activists considered the backwoods. The city planned to convert the facilities at JSC into federally subsidized housing and the classrooms into vocational training centers. Shields mobilized students to attend city council meetings, making alliances with radical whites who had started an underground newspaper that was characterized as anti-establishment. Shields and the student activists at JSC did not participate in disruptive protests except on one occasion at the city council meetings. Instead, they had peacefully participated in the democratic process, taking stances against the relocation of JSC, demanding that the City Planning Board add a competent Black person to the board, standing up for the labor rights of Jackson sanitation workers, and successfully advocating for a Black male to be appointed on the Jackson School Board—the first appointment of a Black person on a previously all-white school board. At each of these city council meetings in Jackson, which lasted from December 1970 to February 1971, Shields served as the official spokesperson. Due to his militant tactics of intimidating local Blacks from patronizing white business establishments and his association with radical organizations such as the BPP and the Republic of New Africa, Shields became labeled as an extremist by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was placed on the Agitator Index in Jackson, Mississippi. Because of his activism he was arrested numerous times for his political mobilizing, oftentimes for petty crimes, including loitering, trespassing, possession of an unregistered weapon, no driver’s license, carrying a concealed weapon, and misdemeanor assault.

Decline of Black Power in Mississippi Shields’s radical activities declined as the Black Power Movement lost momentum and his health deteriorated—his nervous system was particularly challenged. Shields died in 1987 in Yazoo City, Mississippi. He is buried in the New Hope Church cemetery in Benton, Mississippi. In Yazoo City, the Rudy Shields Memorial was symbolically placed at Campanella Park at the corner of 7th Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, which is the site where King and other Civil Rights marchers camped during King’s visit to Yazoo City in June 1966. Theron Wilkerson See also: Black Panther Party; Black United Front; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); King, Martin Luther, Jr. Further Reading Dittmer, John. 1995. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.



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Spofford, Tim. 1988. Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Umoja, Akinyele O. 2014. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: NYU Press.

Sixth Pan-African Congress Between June 20 and 29, 1974, the sixth in the series of Pan-African Congress meetings occurred in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, at the University of Dar es Salaam. The first congress, held in 1900, was organized principally by Trinidadian attorney Henry Sylvester Williams and took place in London. An attendee at that 1900 gathering, W. E. B. Du Bois, then took up the organizing mantle for five succeeding international gatherings to discuss and pass resolutions regarding defeating colonialism, improving African affairs, and emphasizing Africa’s relationship with world progress. Called Pan-African Congresses by Du Bois to underscore the intention of passing strong mandates and legislatively influential decisions regarding African people, in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945 these gatherings took place in London, Paris, Brussels, New York, and Manchester, respectively. Intrinsically, these gatherings mainly involved the educational and activist elite among North American, Caribbean, and continental African delegations. The African masses were fervently discussed at all of these meetings, but representatives of the African masses rarely attended. The Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in 1945, was considered at the time the largest and most consequential, as it spawned the first generation of independent African leadership in a post–World War II environment, including attendees such as Hastings K. Banda (future first president of Malawi), Kwame Nkrumah (future first prime minister and president of Ghana), Wallace Johnson (future prime minister of a revived Liberia), and Jomo Kenyatta (future first president of Kenya). The Sixth Pan-African Congress (6PAC), hosted by the newly independent Tanzanian government (representing the practical political union of Tanganyika and the island of Zanzibar), was the first Pan-African Congress held on African soil. The coordinators and organizers of that gathering did so in honor of Du Bois (who had died in 1963 as a citizen of Ghana) and Kwame Nkrumah (who had died in 1972 as copresident of Guinea and as one of the 1963 founders of the Organization of African Unity). While the six earlier Pan-African gatherings had been relatively small, with none of them attended by more than 200 participants, 6PAC was the largest PanAfrican gathering in history, hosting more than 1,400 delegates and participants, with 300 attendees from the United States.

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The 6PAC was also the first Pan-African Congress that relied on extensive community organizing and made a very serious attempt to involve all elements of African people in discussion—for example, official government representatives, academic intellectuals, then-existing African national liberation movements, students, grassroots folk, and elders. The previous Pan-African Congresses had generally been elite affairs, organized by, promoted to, and participated in by intellectual activists, writers, and those who would traditionally have been called the intellectual bourgeois and the petit bourgeois. Participants had to be able to afford international travel. The previous Pan-African Congresses decried European colonization, imperialistic exploitation, and racism in resolutions, speeches, and manifestos. By the fifth conference, the call for African independence and Pan-African territorial unification had entered the top of the conversation. The 6PAC focused on finishing the movement toward African national independence (within the borders established by colonialism) and achieving economic viability. This sixth gathering was also about trying to achieve consensus on the best way forward for African states and how to more fully incorporate diaspora support in that effort. The older arguments on whether Pan-Africanism meant a collective union of all African states under some brand of scientific socialism (the earlier argument of the Casablanca group, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Morocco, Libya, Algeria, and Egypt) or a racially focused coalescing of mainly sub-Saharan states into a Pan-African grouping that emphasized territorial sovereignty and continued engagement with former colonial powers (the argument of the opposing Monrovia group, including Liberia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Mada­ gascar, Senegal, Chad, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Tunisia, Dahomey, and Congo-Kinshasa) resurfaced in Tanzania with a big bang. The resulting clamor left the general impression (for audiences that did not attend) that this larger 6AC was a failure in pushing Pan-Africanism forward. This was and is a mistaken impression. At the Bermuda Black Power Conference of July 1969, Trinidadian scholar C. L. R. James, who had attended and participated in the 1945 congress in Manchester, chaired a political workshop that included a special discussion on Pan-Africanism. His closing remarks contained strong advocacy for the organizing of a new PanAfrican Congress. According to William Sutherland, who was a leading participant at the conference, there were two more crucial meetings held in Bermuda and in the United States during the following two years, 1970 and 1971, that resolved to reenergize the Pan-African movement in the wake of the early work of the Organization of African Unity and the ongoing African liberation movements. The attending groups of African Americans and Africans from the Caribbean, many of whom were experienced in Civil Rights and Black Power organizing, agreed to produce a Sixth Pan-African Congress that would have as its theme the



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self-reliance, self-determination, and unity of Black people globally and would focus on Black and African progress and competency in science and technology and convince the government of Tanzania, recognized as the most progressive African state at that time, to host the 6PAC. The meeting participants all agreed that the next congress must be held on African soil for maximum credibility. Professor James, a popular teacher at the Federal City College (later the University of the District of Columbia) and Howard University from 1966 to the mid-1970s, used his academic platform to begin preparing for the new congress. He organized a coordinating group from the principal survivors of the 1945 Manchester congress, including T. Ras Makonnen, Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897– 1969), and Shirley Graham Du Bois (1907–1977). Their names as public sponsors and supporters provided an early luster to the effort. Additionally, Professor James induced some of his more progressive students to join, including Guyanese Walter Rodney, former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member Courtland Cox, Marvin Holloway, and Bill Sutherland. Based in Washington, D.C., the Provisional Secretariat for a Sixth Pan-African Congress emerged. The initial organizational plan produced by this Provisional Secretariat called for the creation of regional committees for North America, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. The addition of European, Asian, and Pacific supporters was to be recognized by the secretariat on a case-by-case basis. In 1972, the secretariat issued its first public call to the Sixth Pan-African Congress, written largely by Professor James, Rodney, and Cox (and edited by Geri Stark). In 1973, it issued a 6PAC briefing paper. Rodney, who had moved to Tanzania and was teaching at the university, produced a provocative and much discussed paper, “Toward the Sixth Pan-African Congress: Aspects of the International Class Struggle in Africa,” which was distributed by the secretariat in April 1974. A 1945 speech by W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Pan-African Movement,” was also reprinted and distributed by the organizers during early 1974. Between 1972 and 1973, three large regional meetings for North America—at Kent State University; at the Center for Black Education (CBE) in Washington, D.C.; and in Atlanta, Georgia—were held. One result was the establishment of the Temporary Organizing Committee for a Sixth Pan-African Congress, also headquartered in Washington. Courtland Cox from SNCC and the CBE was elected international secretary-general by acclamation. Sylvia Hill, also from the CBE, was elected secretary-general for North America, and Julian Ellison of Columbia University and the Black Economic Research Center (BERC) was elected asso­ ciate secretary-general for North America. This trio became the Temporary Sec­ retariat for 6PAC. Professor James Turner of Cornell University later accepted an invitation from this secretariat to head the future North American delegation. At a later North American regional meeting in Atlanta, Cox, Hill, and Ellison were formally elected as permanent officers. Cox, with Geri Stark as information officer, then left to establish a 6PAC headquarters in Dar es Salaam.

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Official North American delegates to the 6PAC included Amiri Baraka of the Congress of African People, Barbara Britton of BERC, Carroll Clarke of Brooklyn College, David L. Horne from the University of California–Los Angeles, Oba T’Shaka of San Francisco State University, Haki Madhubuti of Black Books Bulletin publishers, Julianne Malveaux of the Massachusetts Institute of Techno­ logy, Gay McDougall of Yale University, Matthew Meade of Yale, “Queen Mother” Audley Moore, Wentworth Ofuatey-Kodjoe of the City College of New York, and Owusu Sadaukai of Malcolm X Liberation University, the latter two the California western regional coordinators. On June 9–10 at a final meeting of the delegates at Columbia University, Clarke and Ellison finalized drafts of North American position papers. The Caribbean and South American Regional Steering Committee elected Eusi Kwayana chairman, with Tim Hector and Maurice Bishop among those selected as delegates in March 1974. However, no official nongovernmental delegation from this region participated in the 6PAC. Postponed for two weeks, the 6PAC finally opened on June 20, 1974, in Nkrumah Hall at the University of Dar es Salaam. In the first order of business, Nyerere was elected president of the congress. Cox and Aboud Jumbe, the vice president of Tanzania (and president of Zanzibar), conducted the opening plenary session as comasters of ceremonies. They played a recorded message from Ahmed Sékou Touré, the president of Guinea. Scholars presented papers on the three major issues of the congress—politics, science and technology, and economics—the last of which Ellison persuaded the secretariat to add. Samora Machel and Peter Onu, deputy secretary-general of the Organization of African Unity, gave speeches devoted to politics. D. M. Nomvete of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa presented an economics paper. The congress proceeded, with daily plenary sessions followed by simultaneous sessions of Committees A, B, and C for political issues, economic development, and African science, technology, education, and culture, respectively.

Accomplishments of the 6PAC According to Courtland Cox, the three primary objectives of the 6PAC were A. Broaden the African international community’s understanding of the issues of achieving and maintaining African independence, including the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and white settler colonialism in Rhodesia, and to increase the concrete base of support for the African liberation movements; B. Discuss ways of decreasing and ending African economic dependency and exploitation, while pushing forward with examples of African self-reliance,



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increased economic self-sufficiency in production, distribution, development, the application of science and technology, and economic cooperation between African communities; C. Agreement on ways to complete the movement toward African political independence, including achieving African political unity, a federation of Caribbean states, bringing the masses into the struggle, and broadening the political cooperation between African states and African communities. (Cox 1974) Did the 6PAC achieve these objectives? For the most part, yes it did. It certainly demonstrated both the intellectual potential and the political maturity of the North American delegation and led to a cementing of interest and permanent involvement of the Black Power advocates in the United States and Pan-African activism. For example, Sylvia Hill, one of the principal organizers, along with her colleagues Gay McDougall, Judy Claude, and Kathy Flewellen, organized the Southern Africa Support Project (in alliance with Trans-Africa) in the aftermath of the conference and helped to nationalize the antiapartheid struggle in the United States and the Caribbean. Their efforts led to the divestment movement and the yearlong protests in front of the South African embassy to end apartheid. Hill’s group also organized Nelson Mandela’s post–Robben Island tour in the United States. The 6PAC also led to the relocation of thousands of African American and Caribbean émigrés to Africa. Leaders such as Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, Uganda’s president Idi Amin, and Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie put out permanent invitations for such residential transference. A large group of Jamaica Rastafarians settled in Ethiopia on land donated by Emperor Selassie. Additionally, Preston Wilcox, the Harlem activist and Black nationalist friend of Malcolm X, long known for his advocacy of Black community control over schools that educated Black youths, used his involvement in the 6PAC to inspire the cofounding of the National Association of Black Teachers, his involvement in the National Black Power Conference in 1972, and the establishment of AFRAM (acronym for African American), a Black community service agency and multinational library of newspapers, periodicals, magazines, books, and pamphlets. These publications covered progressive events in the African world community. He later donated those items to the Schomburg Center in New York. Also at the 6PAC, Drs. Fletcher Robinson, Don Coleman, and Neville Parker made a very compelling presentation for the establishment of a Pan-African center for science and technology. That center was to serve all of Africa and be financed by independent African states. Because the idea did not garner enough votes to gain traction, it fell by the wayside. The North American delegation also pumped itself up with daily inspirational speeches at the 6PAC but never could hammer out any agreement on a shared position forward at the congress. African American

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delegates were, however, treated to exceptional courtesy by their Tanzanian hosts and were invited to travel to Somalia, Zanzibar, and Uganda (where they were granted symbolic African citizenship). The positive impact on their delegation was a higher level of interest in African affairs. Partially because of the 6PAC, there is a very large and informed population of African diasporans who became involved in the production of the Seventh Pan-African Congress in Uganda in 1994 and remained inspired to help build and develop the major institution of 21st-century Pan-Africanism, the African Union. The 6PAC strongly maintained the energy and impetus toward achieving real Pan-African unity and self-reliance. David Horne See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee); Malcolm X Liberation University; Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley; Pan-Africanism Further Reading Cox, Courtland, 1974. “The Sixth Pan African Congress.” Black Scholar 5(7): 32–34. Esedebe, P. Olisanwuche. 1994. Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776–1991. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Falola, Toyin, and Kwame Essien. 2015. Pan-Africanism and the Politics of African Citizenship and Identity. New York: Routledge. Rabaka, Reiland. 2016. The Negritude Movement: W. E. B. Du Bois, Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and the Evolution of an Insurgent Idea. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Walters, Ronald W. 1997. Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora: An Analysis of Modern Afrocentric Political Movements. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Smith, Barbara (1946–) Barbara Smith is one of the most important Black feminist theorists to emerge from the Black Power Movement. Over the last several decades she has led the way in Black women’s studies and Black feminist theory. Among the critical documents she helped to produce is the widely read 1977 “Black Feminist Statement” for the Combahee River Collective, an organization she helped to establish. Smith challenged the Black Press, which did not have publishing outlets for Black lesbian feminist creative expressions. As a result she cofounded the first publishing collective by women of color, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. As a Black lesbian activist she also opposed white feminist spaces that often excluded Black lesbian concerns. Smith was born on November 16, 1946, in Cleveland, Ohio, immediately before her twin sister Beverly Smith. Their mother died when they were in



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elementary school, and as a result Smith has been passionate about addressing the multiple factors that impacted the lives of Black women. Inspired by the strategy, risk-taking, and vision of the young people who led the Civil Rights Movement, especially the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, she dedicated her life to creating a just world. The first demonstration she participated in was a school desegregation action in 1964 in Cleveland. She became involved in the Cleveland chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality as a teenager in 1965. Smith’s work as a Black feminist and an out Black lesbian activist is rooted in her belief in multifaceted freedom. While many participants in the Black Power Movement had private lives that include same-sex relationships, Smith embraced Black lesbian feminism as a political stance and as a catalyst to enable Black freedom that goes beyond patriarchy, capitalism, and homophobia. She believed that it was her duty to be outspoken on issues of sexuality as an out Black lesbian. This stance came at a cost to Smith in a homophobic society; still, her decades of brave work have helped make it possible to struggle to end all forms of oppression, not just one at a time or one at the expense of another. In 1974 Smith cofounded the Combahee River Collective, an organization of Black lesbian socialist feminists in Boston. Originally the collective was a chapter of the National Black Feminists Organization (NBFO), which was founded in 1973, but upon realizing that their vision of freedom was far more radical than that of the NBFO, the group chose to break apart from the head organization and formed their own. In 1977, three members of the collective—Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier—wrote a statement documenting the activities of the collective and articulating their philosophy. The “Black Feminist Statement” was widely read and clearly articulated the interlocking forms of oppression that Black women suffer. The manifesto argued that “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” and also emphasized the importance of eradicating homophobia in the Black liberation struggle. Smith worked to create coalitions to address violence against women, imperialism, homophobia, and racism and actualized this vision of ending oppression. The Combahee River Collective mobilized in response to 12 murders of Black women in Boston in the first four months of 1979. The police did not respond to the murders, and the Black nationalist community addressed the issue by encouraging Black women to stay at home. The Combahee River Collective held marches, vigils, and self-defense classes for women and helped build institutions for women surviving violence along with a coalition called CRISIS. During this time, Smith clarified her vision of Black liberation, realizing that the survival of Black women had to include immortalization in print. In 1978 in the fourth issue of Conditions (a feminist magazine with a focus on lesbian literature), Barbara and Beverly Smith coedited a collection of letters between Black

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feminists. In their introduction they explain the urgency of collecting letters between contemporary women who were still writing to each other at the time: “There is no guarantee that we or our movement will survive long enough to become safely historical. We must document ourselves now.” Barbara Smith is responsible for helping these ideas move across generations with her activist publishing. She coedited Conditions 5: The Black Women’s Issue in 1979 along with Lorraine Bethel, creating one of the first collections of writing by Black women with a focus on feminist and lesbian writers. The success of that issue of Conditions, which went into multiple printings, led Smith to compile Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology in 1983 in order to keep the voices of Black feminists available for courses, study groups, and the larger movement. Smith also made a major founding contribution to Black feminist literary criticism and Black women’s studies as a whole. In her pathbreaking essay “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism” she emphasized the importance of sexuality in reading Black women’s literature and defined Black feminist literary women’s literature. “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism” was first published in 1977 and was widely read. In 1978 Smith was invited to the Howard Black Writers Conference; her talk was based on her essay, but the audience responded with homophobic critiques. The essay is taught and cited to this day as a founding document of Black feminist literary criticism. Smith was also very involved in the Modern Language Asso­ciation (the academic association of English departments and English professors) in order to ensure that Black feminist criticism and Black women’s writing were included in curricula around the United States. In order to create a resource and a foundation for Black women’s studies as a field, she coedited All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies along with Gloria (now Akasha) Hull and Patricia Bell-Scott. As early texts by Black feminists and feminists of color that had been published by white feminist presses began to go out of print, Smith and the acclaimed Black lesbian poet and activist Audre Lorde had a conversation about creating an autonomous press. In 1980 a group of African American and Afro-Caribbean women including Smith and Lorde founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which kept foundational texts such as Home Girls and This Bridge Called My Back in print and published women of color writers around the world with a focus on work by lesbian writers. They also published the Freedom Organizing Pamphlet series with important speeches and essays by feminists of color, including Angela Davis and Audre Lorde. Throughout the past four decades Smith has been consistently involved in activism on the local and national levels from workers rights to antiviolence work to the educational system. She also served on the Albany, New York, Common Council from 2006 to 2013. She has had a major impact on improving educational access for people of color and breaking through the police brutality against youths of color, which was routine in the Albany Police Department’s practices, by



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helping to force out a commissioner and the chief who created an environment for racist brutality and escalation and by crafting a robust civilian review board. Smith’s example has empowered generations of activists who refuse to compartmentalize their visions for a just world. Alexis Pauline Gumbs See also: Combahee River Collective; Congress of Racial Equality; Davis, Angela Yvonne; National Black Feminist Organization; Publications; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Combahee River Collective. 1982. A Black Feminist Statement. Institute of English American Studies, http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_9699.pdf. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. 1995. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: New Press. Smith, Barbara. 1983. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Smith, Barbara. 1992. “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” Black Scholar 22(1–2): 90–93. Smith, Barbara. 1998. The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Smith, Barbara. 2014. Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Edited by Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks. New York: SUNY Press. Smith, Barbara, Gloria T. Hull, and Patricia Bell Scott, eds. 1982. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY. Springer, Kimberly. 2005. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Smith-Robinson, Ruby Doris (1942–1967) Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson was a no-nonsense leader even as a child. Maturing during a sensitive time of transformation within America’s racial and gender climates, Smith-Robinson was a woman with a strong sense of consciousness, a powerful personality, and a dedication to independence. Even before her attendance at Spelman College and participation in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she was dedicated to being a voice that stood up for the voiceless and against any injustice she witnessed. As the first and only female to serve as executive secretary of SNCC, Smith-Robinson was a powerful voice in the Black Power Movement and the struggle for the liberation of and equality for Black America.

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Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordi­ nating Committee listens as Stokely Carmichael, right, new chairman of the organi­ zation, describes integration as a “subterfuge for white supremacy” at a news conference in Atlanta, May 23, 1966. At the table with Smith-Robinson is James Forman, outgoing executive secretary, and Cleveland Sellers, program secretary. (AP Photo)

Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 25, 1942, to two independent, hardworking parents, J. T. Smith and Alice Smith, and was the second of seven children. Her family resided in an African American middle-class neighborhood. At 794 Frazier Street, Ruby grew up among African Americans in the 1950s in a predominately Black environment that was supported by Black patronage instead of white support. With both of her parents being small business owners—her mother’s hair salon and her father’s grocery store were attached to her home—she was exposed to Black independence and self-sufficiency. Due to Alice’s dedication to her children’s education and Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson’s natural brilliance, Smith-Robinson excelled throughout her academic career. Living in an all-Black neighborhood while being educated in Atlanta’s segregated school system, she admits to not being around many white people early on in life but always being dedicated to the liberation of her people. Even as a teenager attending Price High School, Smith-Robinson was an active member in her community. In high school, she participated in multiple activities including the school marching band, where she performed as a majorette. As a high school graduate in the post–World War II world with chants of women’s rights and racial equality, it is no surprise that Smith-Robinson, like many



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middle-class African American women in Atlanta, chose to attend Spelman College. At Spelman College, in the Atlanta University Center, Smith-Robinson eagerly sprang into activism. Smith-Robinson joined multiple activist groups, such as the Atlanta Student Movement and the Atlanta Committee on Appeal for Human Rights. In April 1960, she and other students attended a meeting at Shaw University arranged by Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The conference was held to discuss avenues for marshaling student protests. During this gathering SNCC was born from the minds of bold young activists, including Smith-Robinson. When the SNCC field office was established in Atlanta, she immediately began devoting her power, energy, and most of her time to the fledgling organization. The 1960 sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, galvanized African American students across the South. Smith-Robinson was inspired, to say the least. During her time at Spelman, she participated in sit-ins and picketed throughout Atlanta; sometimes she even marched, chanted, and protested by herself. For instance, she staged a sit-in at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta with six other Black students in a restaurant; the cashier would not take their orders and refused to serve them. Instead, the cashier ran upstairs to find the governor. The cashier was clearly unaware of the tenacious, strong-willed young woman she was engaging with. When the governor came down to the restaurant and told them to leave, Smith-Robinson refused. She and all of her colleagues refused to leave under the hostile and prejudiced demands of the workers at the capitol. Instead, they proudly went to jail. By the time she was 18 years old, Smith-Robinson had clearly established a reputation as a committed activist. Hers was a respected voice that was heard in many of the SNCC debates. By 1961, Robinson adopted and began to popularize SNCC’s “jail, no bail” strategy. This tactic forewent bailing activists out of jail after mass arrests, which would have depleted the funds of the organization. In February, Atlanta students volunteered to travel to Rock Hill, South Carolina, to join the campaign to desegregate lunch counters and work alongside the Rock Hill Nine, which consisted of local South Carolina students. Smith-Robinson, alongside other student activists including Charles Sherrod, Diane Nash, and Charles Jones, sat in and committed to serve their 30-day jail sentence. These young activists also served time on the chain gang. At that time, the Atlanta Inquirer featured Smith-Robinson stating that she was “Ready, if necessary, to do it again.” She was fully and openly committed to doing whatever was necessary to propel the movement forward. In May 1961, Smith-Robinson joined the SNCC-organized Freedom Rides, where she was physically harassed and arrested. Participants, both Black and white, fought racism, judicial oppression, and physical violence as they rode desegregated buses throughout the South. Smith-Robinson served her 45-day jail sentence at Parchment Penitentiary after being seized in Jackson, Mississippi.

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Beyond her work in the field, many activists agreed that she contributed to the stability and continuation of the Freedom Rides. Escalating violence throughout the nation created the need to replace Freedom Riders who were arrested. SmithRobinson was the organizer who worked to recruit new student Freedom Riders. Her actions both helped to sustain the program and put pressure on the John F. Kennedy administration to protect Freedom Riders. Smith-Robinson then moved to McComb, Mississippi, to help coordinate voter registration drives. Boldly defying segregation and Jim Crow, Smith-Robinson was a talented field activist and an effective administrator. James Forman referred to her as “One of the true revolutionaries of the civil rights movement.” By 1962, Smith-Robinson’s natural leadership skills and dedicated personality made her so well known within the SNCC movement that she was elected to be one of three at-large members of the SNCC Executive Committee. By the end of 1963, Smith-Robinson was formally wed to Clifford Robinson and was elected to the position of SNCC’s executive secretary, the only woman to serve in that position. In 1965 the couple had a son, Kenneth Toure Robinson, named after President Sékou Touré of Guinea, who spent an ample amount of time in SNCC’s Atlanta office. At the time that Smith-Robinson assumed the position as SNCC’s executive secretary, the organization needed her straightforward touch. The organization and its members were being drained by its decentralized structure that allowed a variety of empty promises and unfulfilled obligations by activists and volunteers to impair its function. Once Smith-Robinson was elected into her executive administration position in 1966, most knew that to contact SNCC in Atlanta meant coming in contact with Ruby Doris. Many activists in SNCC believed that Smith-Robinson, in replacing former executive administration James Forman, would be able to revitalize the organization. She assured the field secretaries that they would receive what they needed, and media releases were better coordinated. In the midst of the organization’s financial and administrative chaos, Smith-Robinson worked to enhance the budget and evaluate projects. In the spirit of her commitment and mentorship, she would travel to SNCC chapters across the nation to assess and assist in their organizing efforts. Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson had a vision for SNCC. A considerable amount of her time spent working with the organization was dedicated to ensuring that it strived for realistic change, avoiding impossible ideals. In 1964, Smith-Robinson concluded that Civil Rights was an exhausted issue that had little relevance to poor African Americans struggling to acquire basic life necessities. She called for a new strategy that obviously affected the power structure; she proposed limiting the number of northern whites participating in the organization prior to the infamous split of the organization. Smith-Robinson also believed that SNCC no longer needed to respond to all incidents of oppression and racism. Rather, SNCC needed definitive ideologies, a stable media image, and unambiguous goals.



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In 1966 on James Meredith’s March Against Fear in Greenwood, Mississippi, Stokely Carmicheal (Kwame Ture) and Willie Ricks (Mukasa Dada), both SNCC spokespersons and organizers, introduced Black Power—a racial and political slogan—to the world. Prior to June 16, 1966, the idea of Black Power had been discussed by freedom fighters such as Richard Wright and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. The idea of Black Power grabbed the culture and the nation. Black Power tapped into nascent streams of Black nationalism. It encouraged a Black consciousness and a need for an acceptance and appreciation of Blackness as well as Smith-Robinson’s ideas on Black separatism. Smith-Robinson held Pan-Africanist ideals and believed in the unity of all African diasporic peoples. In her view, racism spawned economic inequality and oppression, which fortified African American powerlessness. Throughout most of Smith-Robinson’s rise to leadership within SNCC, neither she nor her colleagues considered her gender to be a major factor or limitation. She was often described as assertive, powerful, and outspoken and held sway with men and women in the movement. Like many other women during this period, Smith-Robinson considered her race and class to be more problematic to her wellbeing than her gender, and she encouraged men to take a stronger position within the movement. Although women leaders were accepted in SNCC, there were gender issues. As Civil Rights blended into the Black Power Movement, gender discord became even more pronounced. The new Black Power philosophy emphasized the role of Black male leadership and characterized women as doing “a man’s job.” The sexist ideologies portrayed strong Black women as castrators and threatened Black womanhood and leadership. The notion that Black liberation would be achieved by reestablishing Black manhood was prevalent. Smith-Robinson scrutinized this image of Blackness and its impractical concepts as well as slogans without substance. Unfortunately, Smith-Robinson was only able to serve as SNCC’s executive secretary for a short time. Within a year, a rare cancer took her young life. She was remembered in the hearts of her husband, son, family, and colleagues as a powerful spirit in the movement and an unstoppable leader. Alexzandra Strickland See also: Forman, James; Pan-Africanism; Political Prisoners and Exiles; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Fleming, Cynthia Griggs. 1993. “Black Women Activists and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: The Case of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson.” Journal of Women’s History 4(3) (Winter): 64. Fleming, Cynthia Griggs. 1998. Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

738 | Stanford, Max (Muhammad Ahmad) (1941–) Fleming, Cynthia Griggs. 2001. “Black Women and Black Power: The Case of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.” In Sisters in the Struggle, edited by Betty Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, 198. New York: New York University Press. Holsaert, Faith S., et al., eds. 2010. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. King, Mary. 1987. Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. New York: William Morrow. “Ruby Doris Smith (Robinson).” 2017. SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University, https://snccdigital.org/people/ruby-doris-smith-robinson/.

Stanford, Max (Muhammad Ahmad) (1941–) Max Stanford (aka Muhammad Ahmad) was a principal organizer and theoretician of the Black Power Movement. He was a founder of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a seminal Black Power organization. Stanford was also one of the most important theoreticians of the ideology of revolutionary nationalism. Due to his role in the Black Power Movement, Ahmad was targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Counterintelligence Program. After being indicted on conspiracy charges, Ahmad lived underground for four years, and charges were dropped after months of incarceration. Ahmad continued activity as a scholar activist and elder in radical movements after surviving political repression. Muhammad Ahmad was born Maxwell Curtis Stanford Jr. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 31, 1941. Ahmad credits his relatives who were members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Nation of Islam (NOI) for his socialist ideas. His father, Maxwell Stanford Sr., was a member of the NAACP who supported Robert Williams’s advocacy of armed self-defense in Monroe, North Carolina. Local and national racial politics of younger Stanford Jr.’s youth, particularly the lynching of Emmett Till and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, also influenced his political and social consciousness. Stanford attended Philadelphia’s public school system and graduated from West Philadelphia High. In high school he participated in student government and athletics, particularly track and field. From 1960 to 1962 he attended Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio. At Central State, Stanford began to work with the African American student organization Challenge, led by radical organizer Donald Freeman, and recruited students to participate in the Freedom Rides. Challenge members founded RAM as a campus organization and vehicle to win student government elections. According to Freeman, RAM had to borrow the nationalism of the NOI but incorporate the confrontational activism of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating



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Committee (SNCC). Instructed by Freeman, Stanford dropped out of college and returned home to Philadelphia to build RAM in the community and work full-time as an organizer. Stanford and another RAM founder Wanda Marshall initiated a study group in Philadelphia in 1962. The RAM Philadelphia group received guidance from veteran radicals such as Ethel Azalea Johnson and Queen Mother Audley Moore. The group moved from study to activism, penetrating local NAACP pickets, demonstrations, and other Civil Rights activism. From Philadelphia, Stanford began to publish a theoretical journal titled Black America to promote revolutionary nationalism and Black internationalism. His essays were often featured in Black America along with those of Robert F. Williams and James Boggs. Freeman and Stanford began to connect with radical collectives in other parts of the United States, including Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit. Stanford participated in the 1963 NAACP National Convention in Chicago, where he coordinated with revolutionary nationalist activists to disrupt addresses by both Mayor Richard J. Daley and conservative Black minister John Jackson of the National Baptist Convention. Stanford was also solicited to submit an article articulating RAM’s politics in the August 16, 1963, Muhammad Speaks. In 1964 at a meeting hosted by Robert and Mabel Williams, Stanford met other Black radical activists from Detroit and northern California to form a national revolutionary nationalist network under the banner of RAM/Black Liberation Front. Later that year, Stanford worked with the Afro-American Student Movement (AASM) in Nashville, Tennessee, at historically Black Fisk University to host two national conferences utilized to consolidate revolutionary nationalist youths and students. The first AASM gathering was the Afro-American Conference on Student Black Nationalism held May 1–4, 1964, to “form a Black Nationalist Youth Movement.” The second conference, titled “The National Afro-American Student Conference on Afro Youth: The Black Revolution’s Relationship to the Bandung World,” was held from October 3 to November 1, 1964. After the first AASM gathering, Stanford traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, to work with the SNCC project there to promote armed self-defense and Black nationalism. Stanford found SNCC workers and other Mississippi activists already practicing selfdefense and receptive to his nationalist message. He would leave Mississippi because his elders feared that he might have been targeted after he published an article on RAM in the left publication Monthly Review and with SNCC leadership banning RAM members from the Greenwood project. National SNCC leaders were concerned about RAM’s presence in the project after Greenwood SNCC workers were armed in the organization’s Freedom House. Besides his close relationship to Robert and Mabel Williams, Stanford was also in communication with and received direction from veteran Black nationalists such as Malcolm X, Queen Mother Audley Moore, and Detroit revolutionaries James and Grace Lee Boggs. Stanford took lessons from these veterans and others

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to develop theory and strategy in further building RAM. RAM followed the ideology of revolutionary Black nationalism and Black internationalism. Urban rebellions became a frequent occurrence after the 1965 Watts Rebellion. RAM was encouraged by the revolutionary potential of the street forces. In Philadelphia, RAM began to organize street and youth organizations into Black nationalist paramilitary groups called the Black Guard. Stanford and RAM were inspired by SNCC’s project to form an independent Black political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), in a Black majority Alabama county in 1965. The LCFO was organized as an alternative to the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and used a black panther as its symbol. RAM envisioned establishing Black Panther parties in urban centers across the United States as vehicles to organize resistance for the emerging Black Power Movement. Stanford requested permission from SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael to establish Black Panther parties in northern cities. RAM formed a Black Panther Party in Harlem in August 1966. The group was short-lived due to internal dissension. Stanford ordered the RAM cadre to abandon the Black Panther project after the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPPSD) gained national attention for marching on the California state capitol openly displaying guns. RAM believed that this action would lead to repression and wanted to distance itself from the BPPSD. Stanford was also supportive of the emergence of radical Black labor organizing in Detroit under the leadership of former RAM members. Former RAM cadre were in the center of organizing the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement in 1967 and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in 1969. Always inspired by the Cuban and Chinese revolutions as well as the Vietnamese national liberation struggle, Stanford intensely studied Marxism-Leninism and attempted to apply it to the United States. RAM would not escape being targeted by U.S. repressive agencies. Stanford in particular was named (along with H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael) in J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous Black nationalist hate groups memorandum. Hoover once referred to Stanford as “the most dangerous man in America.” Stanford was arrested with 17 other RAM members and associates on conspiracy charges in 1966, but he was ultimately released. In 1967 he was arrested on more conspiracy charges. Knowing that he was constantly surveilled and targeted and also fearing assassination, Stanford went underground in 1968, where he continued to organize. RAM was also disbanded due to the same repression that caused Stanford to live clandestinely. During this period he would still write articles appearing in the Black Scholar and other Black Power publications and began to use the Arabic name Akbar Muhammad Ahmad, reflective of his Islamic faith. Ahmad was captured by the FBI in San Diego in 1972 and extradited to New York. Charges were ultimately dropped against him. His capture led to defense



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efforts to win his release and the surfacing of survivors of the RAM network to form the Afrikan People’s Party (APP) the same year as his capture. The APP would organize in Black communities in Philadelphia, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles until its demise in 1982. It helped to fight police terror, political repression, and internationalist solidarity and also fought for the rights of Black workers during a period of decline of Black Power activism. Twelve years after leaving Central State, Ahmad returned to college at the University of Massachusetts, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1976. He later earned a master’s degree from Atlanta University and a PhD from Union Institute and University. He has taught at Wilberforce University, Kent State University, and Cleveland University before serving as a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. He will always be remembered for his role in Black Power as an organizer and theoretician. Akinyele Umoja See also: Brown, Hubert “H. Rap”; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Lowndes County Freedom Organization; Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley; Revolutionary Action Movement; Revolutionary Nationalism; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Williams, Robert F. Further Reading Ahmad, Muhammad. 2007. We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960–1975. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Bracey, John H., and Sharon Harley. 2003. The Black Power Movement: Part 3, Papers of the Revolutionary Action Movement 1962–1996. Bethesda, MD: LexisNexis, http:// cisupa.proquest.com/ksc_assets/catalog/16313.pdf. Countryman, Matthew. 2006. Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Joseph, Peniel E. 2007. Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Macmillan. Kelley, Robin D. G. 2002. “Stormy Weather: Reconstructing Black (Inter)Nationalism in the Cold War Era.” In Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, edited by Eddie S. Glaude, 67–90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”) was one of the most prolific organizations of the 1960s. SNCC formed to give younger Blacks a voice in the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s; by the

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end of the decade, SNCC had captivated the nation’s attention, organized thousands of students across the country, and helped spur a new wave in the Black freedom struggle—the Black Power Movement. By the time Stokely Carmichael called for “Black Power” in June 1966 at a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, SNCC had already begun to accept the principles of Black Power with a new emphasis on self-determination, Black political power, economic justice, and self-defense. The organize helped to lay the foundation for many of the Black Power Movement’s most enduring efforts. In February 1960, southern Black college students captured the nation’s attention by using sit-ins to boldly defy segregation. Eager to help the young people build on the energy unleashed by their direct-action, longtime activist Ella Baker (1903–1986) organized an Easter weekend meeting for the student leaders. Though existing Civil Rights organizations were anxious to bring the sit-in students under their wings, Baker ran interference, insisting that the young people had earned the right to form their own organization and even to make their own mistakes. With Baker’s backing, the students established SNCC. Initially founded as a vehicle for facilitating communication between various southern student protest areas, SNCC quickly became the driving force for the Civil Rights Movement. The direct action that characterized SNCC’s methods always remained part of the group’s strategic arsenal, but the organization is perhaps most important for its community organizing work. Living and working with local people, SNCC adopted and replicated Baker’s organizing approach and facilitated the emergence and development of strong grassroots leaders throughout the rural South. From the beginning, SNCC brought together students who had a moral and philosophical commitment to nonviolence with other students whose focus was always political and practical. The latter group embraced nonviolent direct action as a strategic and effective tactic but not as a philosophy. Both groups were prepared to put their bodies on the line to force the country to reckon with white supremacy. And in the early years (1960–1964), they hoped that moral suasion would influence policy makers and the broader American public. As Stokely Carmichael explained, direct action provided a way for large numbers of people to struggle. The sit-ins led to immediate success in some areas, desegregating lunch counters, for instance. They were also effective at recruiting people into the movement. With strong support and considerable help from Ella Baker, the young people in SNCC met regularly, searching for ways to sustain and intensify movement activism. For example, SNCC representatives addressed subcommittees at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in the summer of 1960, while the organization’s first paid staffer, white southerner Jane Stembridge, edited a newsletter, The Student Voice, and organized an October 1960 South-wide convention. In February 1961, SNCC took an important step toward full-time



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movement work by voting to support students in Rock Hill, South Carolina, who were jailed for their efforts to desegregate lunch counters. Atlanta SNCC workers voted to travel to Rock Hill and support the Rock Hill Nine and implemented Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson’s strategy of “jail, no bail,” a commitment to serve jail time and not pay bail. The decision to go into Rock Hill signaled a growing willingness by the young people in SNCC to commit full-time to the movement. After 30 days in a Rock Hill jail, Fisk student Diane Nash (b. 1938) dropped out of school to work for the Nashville movement, commenting that classes on the poet Chaucer could no longer hold her attention. In April 1961 SNCC threw its support behind the Freedom Riders, a group of Civil Rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated South. When white thugs brutalized Freedom Riders in Alabama, Diane Nash stepped up and led the way by insisting that the rides continue. And in the face of considerable skepticism and discouragement, the Nashville affiliate of SNCC, joined by others, took up the Freedom Rides, refusing to be stopped by white violence or the ambivalence of the federal government. With this, the young people in SNCC once again put themselves at the forefront of the movement, a position they solidified by organizing two significant community-based movements in the summer and fall of 1961. While SNCC leveraged nonviolent direct action with the Rock Hill jail-in and the Freedom Rides, a key contingent affiliated with the group began pushing for voter registration while also searching for a way to support a full-time field staff. This group got a boost in the summer of 1961 when Bob (Robert Parris) Moses (b. 1935), a New York math teacher, made his way to Mississippi to work on voter registration with Amzie Moore (1911–1982), a World War II veteran and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader. The two men had met the summer before when Moses, using Ella Baker’s contacts, traveled through Deep South states where SNCC had few connections. Moses recruited Moore and others to attend SNCC’s October conference, but more important, he and Moore became immediate allies and together began mapping out what would soon become SNCC’s voter registration project in Mississippi. Moore admired the students but was not interested in sit-ins for Mississippi. He was quite clear that what African Americans in the Mississippi Delta needed was the vote and political power. Sharing population information, district maps, and analysis about the impact of Black disfranchisement on Congress and the nation, Moore inspired Moses with his vision of African Americans from the Delta using the vote to influence the decisions that affected their lives and elect one of their own to Congress. While Moses was getting started in McComb, Mississippi, where the local NAACP leadership had asked Moore for student help with voter registration, Ella Baker was mediating a fierce debate at SNCC’s August 1961 Coordinating

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Committee meeting. The group was on the verge of splintering over whether to continue to pursue direct action or move in the direction of voter registration, but she convinced them to stay together with a wing for each strategy. Though Moses played no role in the debate, SNCC’s voter registration advocates quickly joined his fledgling project in McComb. A number of the Freedom Riders, newly released from Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary, soon followed, and before long the project expanded to include direct-action workshops for the community’s young people, eager to test segregation. In the fall of 1961 with modest funding from activist and entertainer Harry Belafonte, about 16 people put school and jobs on hold to become SNCC’s staff. Most were doing fieldwork in Mississippi and Georgia, and all were working for subsistence wages. Two of these staffers, Charles Sherrod (b. 1937) and Cordell Reagon (1943–1966), moved to Albany, Georgia, planning to focus on voter registration in the surrounding Black counties. However, when African American students were arrested for testing local compliance with the November 1, 1961, Interstate Commerce Commission ruling (prompted by the Freedom Rides) banning segregation at bus and train stations, the entire community was energized. Arrests inspired mass meetings, which led to mass marches that triggered mass arrests. Hundreds of southern African Americans, including adults and a cross section of the community, openly challenged white supremacy—risking jail, jobs, and violence. In Albany, the emergence of a strong people’s movement drew Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to town. With King, other leaders, and hundreds of community members in jail, the white power structure negotiated and quickly reneged on a deal with King’s staff. After a brief return in the summer of 1962, King and the SCLC decided that the Albany movement was a failure and left the area. SNCC stayed the course, continuing and expanding its voter registration work and direct-action protests. Many local activists had a much more positive view of the events occurring in Albany. For example, Bernice Johnson Reagon (b. 1942) asserted that the Albany movement “gave me a real chance to fight and to struggle and not respect boundaries that put me down” (Reagon 1978, 21). These competing approaches continued throughout the movement, as SNCC tended to focus on long-term organizing, while the SCLC preferred to mobilize for short-term victories. These organizational differences have also influenced popular understandings of the Civil Rights Movement, prompting many people to believe that King-led marches and demonstrations were the movement, obscuring SNCC’s grassroots work. Back in McComb, when voter registration work expanded into nearby rural areas at the request of local farmers, white retaliation was quick and deadly. On September 25, 1961, Black farmer Herbert Lee, who had been helping Moses, was murdered by his neighbor, E. H. Hurst, a white legislator. Meanwhile, the



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workshops led by SNCC’s direct-action wing inspired sit-ins and arrests, and in early October more than 100 high school students walked out of school to protest the expulsion of their classmates for sit-in arrests. Commenting on these events, SNCC field secretary Reginald Robinson observed that voter registration was about as “direct as you can get” in Mississippi (Carson 1981, 50). Massive white resistance effectively ended SNCC’s internal debate and also brought the McComb project to a halt. After the murder of a community leader and the arrest and suspension of their children, African American leaders in McComb asked SNCC to leave, which it did. In the summer of 1964, however, it returned to see the McComb struggle through. Though SNCC’s work in McComb and Albany ran into deadly resistance, it set a pattern of community organizing that was at the heart of the group’s work over the next five or so years. SNCC’s field staff lived with local families or in “freedom houses” and did the painstaking work of building a movement through developing relationships and nurturing leadership ability in others. Organizing typically started with canvassing door-to-door to encourage people to register to vote and attend mass meetings. As soon as possible this work was bolstered by Citizenship Schools, which combined the teaching of literacy and practical skills with the discussion of big political ideas. Perhaps most important, SNCC recognized and nurtured leadership in people that the rest of the country had dismissed. Their alliance with these everyday people, especially with women, the young, the economically impoverished, and those with limited formal education, breathed new life into American democracy—challenging long-standing ideas of who and what was important. Because the white supremacist response to SNCC was vicious and there was always retaliation, SNCC’s organizing also included the fundamental work of trying to keep people alive and out of jail. SNCC’s hosts did their part too, feeding and housing young organizers while using weapons and organizing informal defense groups to protect themselves and their allies from night riders and firebombs. In the fall of 1961 Jim Forman (1928–2005), a former Chicago schoolteacher, became SNCC’s first executive director and in that role provided SNCC with essential stability. Forman oversaw and facilitated the building of an administrative structure that did tremendous work to support SNCC’s rapidly expanding projects and field staff, which in addition to Mississippi and Georgia soon included Arkansas; Alabama; Cambridge, Maryland; and Danville, Virginia. About a decade older than most of SNCC’s staff, Forman was the engine propelling SNCC’s extraordinary Atlanta office, which was responsible for fund-raising and communications and also coordinated legal work (from defending field staff to filing suits), developed a print shop and a photo department, established a Friends of SNCC network and a sophisticated northern support base, interacted with other Civil Rights organizations, and much more.

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Working with other organizations and allies, especially the Congress of Racial Equality and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in Mississippi, SNCC was successful at organizing rural Black communities, making it increasingly difficult for the country to ignore the discrimination and violence at the heart of Jim Crow. White supremacists responded to the voting rights campaign by manipulating the registration process, firing and evicting people, burning and bombing homes and churches, and beating and murdering people. White officials then pointed to the low numbers of African Americans registered to vote to insist that Blacks had no interest in politics. In response, SNCC developed increasingly creative tactics, including Freedom Days, first organized in Selma, Alabama, in 1963, and in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1964, before expanding to other areas. Whether in the punishing sun or the pouring rain, people lined up to demonstrate their desire to vote. With little chance of actually registering, much less voting, they stayed in line and refused to be intimidated by whites. These innovative tactics foreshadowed the creative, generating ethos of the Black Power Movement. Effectively excluded from the formal political process in Mississippi, SNCC and COFO began developing parallel institutions, organizing the 1963 Freedom Vote, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and the 1965 Con­ gressional Challenge. Each was designed to demonstrate that Blacks wanted to vote and participate in politics. In addition, each provided an important experiential education for people who had been excluded from the political process for almost a century. Throughout this process, SNCC field secretaries were learning from the people they were working with. One result was that in addition to helping people improve their literacy, by 1963 SNCC staff were beginning to challenge the whole idea of requiring literacy to vote. They had encountered many people who had been denied education but still had more than enough wisdom to vote for their representatives. The Mississippi Summer Project in 1964 (often known as Freedom Summer) brought hundreds of volunteers into the state, many of them privileged white college students. Their presence and the MFDP’s effort to unseat the state’s all-white Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City effectively exposed the violence at the heart of white supremacy and Black disfranchisement and introduced the nation to the extraordinary struggle to vote experienced by everyday people. And in early 1965, SNCC’s long-term organizing in Selma provided the base for SCLC’s more visible project, which was the immediate impetus for the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, SNCC’s projects in southwestern Georgia and Cambridge, Maryland, foreshadowed issues that became more prominent with the emergence of Black Power. Cambridge, where the Black minority had never been fully excluded from voting, highlighted the difficulties of addressing the structural basis for racial discrimination in housing and jobs. And in southwestern Georgia, SNCC confronted some of the challenges associated with interracial



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organizing, as integrated teams drew dangerous attention and triggered violence. Moreover, in some instances local African Americans automatically tried to accommodate white activists, acting out the deference demanded by white supremacy. Though SNCC was not acting alone, its organizing was at the heart of the movement that moved people to insist that our country eliminate the legal basis of white supremacy. And despite the significance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, SNCC’s work also clearly illustrated the limitations of the federal government and white liberals as well as the depth and persistence of structural inequality and racial double standards. The Civil Rights legislation was not an end, then, but simply provided additional tools for the continuing struggle. Following the Voting Rights Act, SNCC continued working, helping newly enfranchised African Americans to translate voting rights into political power and experimenting with strategies for tackling entrenched structure inequality. One of SNCC’s most important post–Voting Rights Act projects was organizing the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) in Lowndes County, Alabama. In Lowndes, SNCC developed a unique political education program that used workshops, mass meetings, and primers to increase general knowledge of local government and democratize political behavior. This was not just voting or even politics as usual. Rather, SNCC linked its egalitarian organizing methods with the people’s civil and human rights goals to create freedom politics, an approach that rejected traditional politics and instead emphasized acting on the community’s best interests. SNCC’s intensive grassroots organizing effort in Lowndes and successful establishment of the LCFO was at the heart of SNCC’s move toward Black Power in 1966. At a SNCC staff meeting in May 1966, the organization demonstrated its excitement over the LCFO by electing its key organizer and architect, Stokely Carmichael, as its new chairperson. SNCC also decided to use the LCFO as a model to organize independent political parties in other southern counties, promote Black consciousness, and limit fieldwork to Black organizers. The SNCC Atlanta Project drafted a position paper that called for the organization to emphasize Black consciousness and Black identity and move away from the organization’s promotion of integration and multiracialism. The Atlanta Project called for white activists to organize in white communities. While this position was initially rejected by SNCC leadership, the organization began to move in the direction of Black nationalism. When SNCC joined James Meredith’s March Against Fear in early June, it did so with these goals in mind. Along the march route, they helped register new Black voters and advocated for independent political parties. And in Greenwood, Mississippi, where Stokely Carmichael, Willie Ricks, and SNCC had learned many of the lessons that they applied in Lowndes, Carmichael publicized SNCC’s new program by shortening the phrase “Black Power for Black People” to “Black Power!” Carmichael’s use of the phrase “Black Power” energized thousands of Black people across the country. SNCC staff pursued multiple strategies for achieving

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Black Power. For example, SNCC staff organized the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union in a bid for living wages for farmworkers; established the Poor People’s Corporation and other cooperatives to provide economic opportunities; worked with Latino activists including the United Farm Workers; founded Flute Publications and worked on creative projects that, among other things, published poetry and developed film strips as organizing tools; launched a successful campaign to elect Julian Bond, the organization’s longtime director of communications, to the Georgia legislature; launched antidraft and antiwar activism around the Vietnam War and encouraged Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. to oppose the war; and initiated organizing efforts in urban, nonsouthern communities, including Washington, D.C., where the “Free DC” movement has reverberations today. Jim Forman, who was at the heart of SNCC’s growth and strength, resigned as executive secretary to head up an effort to connect SNCC to international freedom movements. Many SNCC staff shared his commitment to internationalism and traveled around the world to places including the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Vietnam, and many African countries. Though SNCC’s community organizing work slowed considerably after the Meredith March, the group continued to play an important role, becoming, for example, one of the first Civil Rights organizations to publicly condemn the Vietnam War. SNCC’s call for Black Power, opposition to the Vietnam War, and support for Palestinians (articulated in an internal document that was mistakenly distributed to the press) disturbed white liberals tremendously, leading to a steady erosion of its fund-raising base. Moreover, Carmichael and SNCC were targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), and the group’s remaining members had sharp disagreements about the role of whites in the organization and the overall movement’s aims and objectives as well as ideological differences over Marxism and Pan-Africanism. Scholars and activists disagree on when SNCC, as an organization, ceased to exist, but it became less effective in the later 1960s, and several organizations emerged from SNCC. One of the most important organizations to come from SNCC was the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), which grew out of the concerns of Black women activists within SNCC. In December 1968, Frances Beale, a communications worker in SNCC’s New York office, organized the Black Women’s Liberation Committee (BWLC). The women of the BWLC focused on the “triple oppression of Black women as Blacks, women, and as workers.” At the beginning of 1970 the group understood the need to expand its focus and membership to all Black women—single mothers, students, activists, and organizers—regardless of their membership in SNCC, which led the group to change its name to the Black Women’s Alliance (BWA). The BWA saw its role as twofold, putting forth theory and activism and emphasizing a commitment to bettering the conditions of the Black community at large and Black women specifically. Finally, at the behest of



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activist women of color who shared a commitment to antiracist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist organizing, the BWA emerged as the TWWA in mid-1970. Several organizations were inspired by SNCC’s efforts in Lowndes County, Alabama. The LCFO use of the Black panther as its logo inspired activists across the country to adopt this symbol and/or use SNCC’s organizing strategy, including members of the Revolutionary Action Movement and two Black college students from Oakland, California. Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland in October 1966. Moreover, some of the Black Power Movement’s most prolific figures and theorists were SNCC activists including Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and Kathleen Cleaver. SNCC field organizer H. Rap Brown was elected SNCC’s chairman, replacing Carmichael in 1967. Brown emerged as SNCC spokesperson and one of the primary leaders of the Black Power Movement. He also became one of the principal targets for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTELPRO and agents of repression nationally. Brown ultimately faced federal and state charges in many jurisdictions and decided to go underground in 1970. He was captured by New York police in 1971. With Brown mired with charges, Phil Hutchings was elected as SNCC chairman in 1968. Within a year of Hutchings’s election SNCC eventually went out of existence, with its members moving in a variety of ideological directions, the loss of its liberal material support, and the effects of political repression and counterinsurgency. Despite SNCC’s official demise, its influence has continued over the decades and across movements. Moreover, many of the young people who created and sustained the organization over its intense life span continue to work in the spirit of SNCC and Ella Baker. Speaking to Spelman College students in the late 1960s, Baker asserted that “In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. . . . It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system” (qtd. in Grant 1998, 227–231). At its heart, this was the radical, militant work that SNCC did, the work that led to the call for Black Power. Emilye Crosby and Hasan Kwame Jeffries See also: Black Panther Party; Brown, Hubert “H. Rap”; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Cleaver, Kathleen Neal; Congress of Racial Equality; Forman, James; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Lowndes County Freedom Organization; March Against Fear; Richardson, Gloria; Vietnam War Further Reading Baker, Ella. 1969, 1998. “The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle.” In Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, 227–231. New York: Wiley.

750 | Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Bond, Julian. 2000. “SNCC: What We Did.” Monthly Quarterly 52(5) (Octtober): 14– 24. Also available at the SNCC Legacy Project website, http://sncclegacyproject.org/we -were-sncc/what-we-did. Carmichael, Stokely [Kwame Ture], with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. 2003. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael. New York: Scribner. Carson, Clayborne. 1981. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carson, Clayborne, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, and Darlene Clark Hine. 1991. Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: Penguin. Civil Rights Movement Veterans Website. http://www.crmvet.org/. Dittmer, John. 1994. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Forman, James. 1972. The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A Personal Account. New York: Macmillan. Grant, Joanne. 1998. Ella Baker: Freedom Bound. New York: Wiley. Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, ed. 1998. A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer, eds. 1990. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam. Hogan, Wesley. 2007. Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Holsaert, Faith S., Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Wheeler Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner, eds. 2010. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. 2006. “SNCC, Black Power, and Independent Political Party Organizing in Alabama, 1964–1966.” Journal of African American History 91(2) (Spring 2006): 171–193. Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. 2009. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. New York: New York University Press. King, Mary. 1987. Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s. New York: Morrow. Levy, Peter. 2003. Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. One Person, One Vote. onevotesncc.org. Payne, Charles M. 1995. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ransby, Barbara. 2003. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Reagon, Bernice Johnson. 1978. “The Borning Struggle: The Civil Rights Movement.” Radical America 12(6): 8–25. Sellers, Cleveland. 1973. The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC. New York: Morrow. Zinn, Howard. 1964. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Boston: Beacon.

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Primary Document Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Position Paper, 1966 The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) position paper was written by SNCC members affiliated with the Atlanta Project, formed after Julian Bond was denied his elected seat in the Georgia state legislature because of his antiwar position. The Atlanta Project’s work was focused on the Vine City area of Atlanta, which was characterized by urban problems such as poverty, substandard housing, and high rates of unemployment. As one of SNCC’s first efforts to organize in an urban area, the Vine City project encountered paternalistic white liberals who sought to lead Black organizers and had little understanding of and respect for Black culture. Atlanta Project members Bill Ware and Ronald Snellings saw white liberals as an essential problem for Black control of their neighborhoods and cities. This position paper, presented by the Atlanta Project during a SNCC staff meeting, called attention to the difficulties of interracial organizing during the Black Power era. Although the position paper was not adopted as official policy, its sentiments can be found in the statements and actions of SNCC members. The Basis of Black Power The myth that the Negro is somehow incapable of liberating himself, is lazy, etc., came out of the American experience. In the books that children read, whites are always “good” (good symbols are white), blacks are “evil” or seen as savages in movies, their language is referred to as a “dialect,” and black people in this country are supposedly descended from savages. Any white person who comes into the movement has the concepts in his mind about black people, if only subconsciously. He cannot escape them because the whole society has geared his subconscious in that direction. Miss America coming from Mississippi has a chance to represent all of America, but a black person from either Mississippi or New York will never represent America. Thus the white people coming into the movement cannot relate to the black experience, cannot relate to the word “black,” cannot relate to the “nitty gritty,” cannot relate to the experience that brought such a word into existence, cannot relate to chitterlings, hog’s head cheese, pig feet, ham hocks, and cannot relate to slavery, because these things are not a part of their experience. They also cannot relate to the black religious experience,

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nor to the black church, unless, of course, this church has taken on white manifestations. White Power Negroes in this country have never been allowed to organize themselves because of white interference. As a result of this, the stereotype has been reinforced that blacks cannot organize themselves. The white psychology that blacks have to be watched, also reinforces this stereotype. Blacks, in fact, feel intimidated by the presence of whites, because of their knowledge of the power that whites have over their lives. One white person can come into a meeting of black people and change the complexion of that meeting, where a meeting unless he was an obvious Uncle Tom. People would immediately start talking about “brotherhood,” “love,” etc.; race would not be discussed. If people must express themselves freely, there has to be a climate in which they can do this. If blacks feel intimidated by whites, then they are not liable to vent the rage that they feel about whites in the presence of whites—especially not the black people whom we are trying to organize, i.e., the broad masses of black people. A climate has to be created whereby blacks can express themselves. The reasons that whites must be excluded is not that one is anti-white, but because the effects that one is trying to achieve cannot succeed because whites have an intimidating effect. Ofttimes, the intimidating effect is in direct proportion to the amount of degradation that black people have suffered at the hands of white people. Roles of Whites and Blacks It must be offered that white people who desire change in this country should go where that problem (racism) is most manifest. The problem is not in the black community. The white people should go into white communities where the whites have created power for the express purpose of denying blacks human dignity and self-determination. Whites who come into the black community with ideas of change seem to want to absolve the power structure of its responsibility for what it is doing, and saying that change can only come through black unity, which is the worst kind of paternalism. This is not to say that whites have not had an important role in the movement. In the case of Mississippi, their role was very key in that they helped give blacks the right to organize, but that role is now over, and it should be.



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People now have the right to picket, the right to give out leaflets, the right to vote, the right to demonstrate, the right to print. These things which revolve around the right to organize have been accomplished mainly because of the entrance of white people into Mississippi, in the summer of 1964. Since these goals have now been accomplished, whites’ role in the movement has now ended. What does it mean if black people, once having the right to organize, are not allowed to organize themselves? It means that blacks’ ideas about inferiority are being reinforced. Shouldn’t people be able to organize themselves? Blacks should be given this right. Further, white participation means in the eyes of the black community that whites are the “brains” behind the movement, and that blacks cannot function without whites. This only serves to perpetuate existing attitudes within the existing society, i.e., blacks are “dumb,” “unable to take care of business,” etc. Whites are “smart,” the “brains” behind the whole thing. How do blacks relate to other blacks as such? How do we react to Willie Mays as against Mickey Mantle? What is our response to Mays hitting a home run against Mantel performing the same deed? One has to come to the conclusion that it is because of black participation in baseball. Negroes still identify with the Dodgers because of Jackie Robinson’s efforts with the Dodgers. Negroes would instinctively champion all-black teams if they opposed all white or predominantly white teams. The same principle operates for the movement as it does for baseball: a mystique must be created whereby Negroes can identify with the movement. Thus an all-black project is needed in order for the people to free themselves. This has to exist from the beginning. This relates to what can be called “coalition politics.” There is no doubt in our minds that some whites are just as disgusted with this system as we are. But it is meaningless to talk about coalition if there is no one to align ourselves with, because of the lack of organization in the white communities. There can be no talk of “hooking up” unless black people organize blacks and white people organize whites. If these conditions are met, then perhaps at some later date—and if we are going in the same direction—talks about exchange of personnel, coalition, and other meaningful alliances can be discussed. In the beginning of the movement, we had fallen into a trap whereby we thought that our problems revolved around the right to eat at certain lunch counters or the right to vote, or to organize our communities. We have seen, however, that the problem is much deeper. The problem of this country, as we had seen it, concerned all blacks and all whites and therefore if decisions were left to the young people, then solutions would be arrived at. But this negates

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the history of black people and whites. We have dealt stringently with the problem of “Uncle Tom,” but we have not yet gotten around to Simon Legree. We must ask ourselves, who is the real villain—Uncle Tom or Simon Legree? Everybody knows Uncle Tom, but who knows Simon Legree? So what we have now in SNCC is a closed society, a clique. Black people cannot relate to SNCC because of its unrealistic, nonracial atmosphere; denying their experience of America as a racist society. In contrast, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Martin Luther King, Jr., has a staff that at least maintains a black facade. The front office is virtually all black, but nobody accuses SCLC of being racist. If we are to proceed toward true liberation, we must cut ourselves off from white people. We must form our own institutions, credit unions, co-ops, political parties, write our own histories. To proceed further, let us make some comparisons between the Black Movement of the early 1900s and the movement of the 1960s—i.e., compare the National Association for the advancement of Colored People with SNCC. Whites subverted the Niagara movement (the forerunner of the NAACP) which, at the outset, was an all-black movement. The name of the new organization was also very revealing, in that it presupposed blacks have to advance to the level of whites. We are now aware that the NAACP has grown reactionary, is controlled by the black power structure itself, and stands as one of the main roadblocks to black freedom. SNCC, by allowing the whites to remain in the organization, can have its efforts subverted in much the same manner, i.e., through having them play important roles such as community organizers, etc. Indigenous leadership cannot be built with whites in the positions they now hold. These facts do not mean that whites cannot help. They can participate on a voluntary basis. We can contract work out to them, but in no way can they participate on a policy-making level. Black Self-Determination The charge may be made that we are “racists,” but whites who are sensitive to our problems will realize that we must determine our own destiny. In an attempt to find a solution to our dilemma, we propose that our organization (SNCC) should be black-staffed, black-controlled, and black-financed. We do not want to fall into a similar dilemma that other civil rights organizations have fallen into. If we continue to rely upon white financial support we will find ourselves entwined in the tentacles of the white power complex that

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controls this country. It is also important that a black organization (devoid of cultism) be projected to our people so that it can be demonstrated that such organizations are viable. More and more we see black people in this country being used as a tool of the white liberal establishment. Liberal whites have not begun to address themselves to the real problem of black people in this country—witness their bewilderment, fear, and anxiety when nationalism is mentioned concerning black people. An analysis of the white liberal’s reaction to the word “nationalism” alone reveals a very meaningful attitude of whites of an ideological persuasion toward blacks in this country. It means previous solutions to black problems in this country have been made in the interests of those whites dealing with these problems and not in the best interests of black people in the country. Whites can only subvert our true search and struggles for self-determination, self-identification, and liberation in this country. Reevaluation of the white and black roles must now take place so that white no longer designate roles that black people play but rather black people define white people’s roles. Too long have we allowed white people to interpret the importance and meaning of the cultural aspects of our society. We have allowed them to tell us what was good about our Afro-American music, art, and literature. How many black critics do we have on the “jazz” scene? How can a white person who is not part of the black psyche (except in the oppressor’s role) interpret the meaning of the blues to us who are manifestations of the song themselves? It must be pointed out that on whatever level of contact blacks and whites come together, that meeting or confrontation is not on the level of the blacks but always on the level of the whites. This only means that our everyday contact with whites is a reinforcement of the myth of white supremacy. Whites are the ones who must try to raise themselves to our humanistic level. We are not, after all, the ones who are responsible for a genocidal war in Vietnam; we are not the ones who are responsible for neocolonialism in Africa and Latin America; we are not the ones who held a people in animalistic bondage over 400 years. We reject the American dream as defined by white people and must work to construct an American reality defined by Afro-Americans. White Radicals One of the criticisms of white militants and radicals is that when we view the masses of white people we view the overall reality of America, we view the racism, the bigotry, and the distortion of personality, we view man’s inhumanity to man; we view in reality 180 million racists. The sensitive white

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intellectual and radical who is fighting to bring about change is conscious of this fact, but does not have the courage to admit this. When he admits this reality, then he must also admit his involvement because he is a part of the collective white America. It is only to the extent that he recognizes this that he will be able to change this reality. Another common concern is, how does the white radical view the black community, and how does he view the poor white community, in terms of organizing? So far, we have found that most white radicals have sought to escape the horrible reality of America by going into the black community and attempting to organize black people while neglecting the organization of their own people’s racist communities. How can one clean up someone else’s yard when one’s own yard is untidy? Again we feel that SNCC and the civil rights movement in general is in many aspects similar to the anticolonial situations in the African and Asian countries. We have the whites in the movement corresponding to the white civil servants and missionaries in the colonial countries who have worked with the colonial people for a long period of time and have developed a paternalistic attitude toward them. The reality of the colonial people taking over their own lives and controlling their own destiny must be faced. Having to move aside and letting the natural process of growth and development take place must be faced. These views should not be equated with outside influence or outside agitation but should be viewed as the natural process of growth and development within a movement; so that the move by the black militants and SNCC in this direction should be viewed as a turn toward self-determination. It is very ironic and curious that aware whites in the country can champion anticolonialism in other countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but when black people move toward similar goals of self-determination in this country they are viewed as racists and anti-white by these same progressive whites. In proceeding further, it can be said that this attitude derives from the overall point of view of the white psyche as it concerns the black people. This attitude stems from the era of the slave revolts when every white man was a potential deputy or sheriff or guardian of the state. Because when black people get together among themselves to work out their problems, it becomes a threat to white people, because such meetings were potential slave revolts. It can be maintained that this attitude or way of thinking has perpetuated itself to this current period and that it is part of the psyche of white people in this country whatever their political persuasion might be. It is part of the white fear-guilt complex resulting from the slave revolts. There have been examples of whites who stated that they can deal with black fellows on an individual

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basis but become threatened or menaced by the presence of groups of blacks. It can be maintained that this attitude is held by the majority of progressive whites in this country. Black Identity A thorough re-examination must be made by black people concerning the contributions that we have made in shaping this country. If this re-examination and re-evaluation is not made, and black people are not given their proper due and respect, then the antagonisms and contradictions are going to become more and more glaring, more and more intense, until a national explosion may result. When people attempt to move from these conclusions it would be faulty reasoning to say they are ordered by racism, because, in this country and in the West, racism has functioned as a type of white nationalism when dealing with black people. We all know the habit that this has created throughout the world and particularly among nonwhite people in this country. Therefore any re-evaluation that we must make will, for the most part, deal with identification. Who are black people, what are black people, what is their relationship to America and the world? It must be repeated that the whole myth of “Negro citizenship,” perpetuated by the white elite, has confused the thinking of radical and progressive blacks and whites in this country. The broad masses of black people react to American society in the same manner as colonial peoples react to the West in Africa and Latin America, and had the same relationship—that of the colonized toward the colonizer. Source: “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Position Paper: The Basis of Black Power,” The Sixties Project, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos /SNCC_black_power.html.

Student Organization for Black Unity The Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU) was formed in March 1969 by African American students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University (North Carolina A&T), a historically Black university located in Greensboro. Composed of organized grassroots constituents interested in addressing racial inequalities in the United States, SOBU worked to elevate the self-esteem of Black

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people. SOBU was particularly constructed to challenge the forceful attempt to integrate colleges created to educate Blacks, which was one of the aftereffects of the movement to end segregation. Because preestablished Jim Crow laws prevented African Americans from attending white schools, SOBU founder Nelson Johnson and others believed that the incorporation of white students would lead to a deconstruction and deterioration of services to Black students. They were also concerned that Black administration and faculty could be reduced to hire white staff. These concerns precipitated preventative action in order to avert the overall regression of scholastic opportunities for Black students and, in turn, the adoption and acceptance of white supremacist ideas as opposed to pride in Black culture.

The Creation of SOBU Constitutional law underscored the harsh climate of race relations in the United States. The Reconstruction era birthed Jim Crow laws, which were local and state rulings that enforced racial subordination in the southern states. The local Jim Crow laws were sanctioned nationally by U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which supported the doctrine of separate but equal. Although the Plessy case advanced the idea that Blacks and whites were to be provided with equal housing, medical, education, transportation, public accommodations, employment, and personal facilities, African Americans experienced undesirable and/or deplorable conditions, and many of the same opportunities were nonexistent. In North Carolina, racial discrimination was rampant. However, citizen groups organized into the Greensboro Citizens Association and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to support the African American community. African American veterans who had returned from World War II were also involved, believing that they had an obligation to fight for human rights in the United States as they had against Nazis abroad. An important aim of these organizations was to register voters. One of the most productive voter enrollment campaigns in the city resulted from those efforts. In the first primary of 1949, two Black candidates persevered. Then in the 1951 election, Dr. William Hampton received more than 50 percent of the votes cast and became the first African American member of the city council in Greensboro; in 1953, he was reelected. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, Greensboro citizens engaged in a plethora of Civil Rights protests. On February 1, 1960, a fundamental occurrence in Greensboro’s history occurred after four African American freshman students from North Carolina A&T sat at a Woolworth’s lunch counter to force desegregation. The events were reported nationally, igniting a revolution in which Black and white students systematized frequent protests, demonstrations, and sit-ins at segregated lunch counters throughout the country. Although these



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campaigns yielded select results, Greensboro residents continued to fight against racism. Mass marches occurred in an effort to desegregate businesses. During one march, A&T students along with hundreds of other protesters flooded the business area. Led by student activist Jesse Jackson, the demonstration resulted in mass arrests and jailings, which congested the justice system. On June 7, 1963, Greensboro mayor David Scheck delivered a statement that urged businesses to desegregate. Approximately 40 percent of businesses in Greensboro, North Carolina, desegregated after that effort.

SOBU and Black Power The ensuing years of 1968 and 1969 in Greensboro revealed the burgeoning support for the principles of the Black Power Movement that were widespread throughout country. The horrifying Orangeburg Massacre that occurred in their neighboring state was an indicator of the violence and abuse occurring. The Orangeburg Massacre occurred on February 8, 1968, on the campus of South Carolina State College. It began with a peaceful protest demonstration by 200 students at All Star Bowling Lane in an attempt to desegregate the local bowling alley. The first night concluded without incident; on the second night, 15 students were arrested. Violence ensued on the third day of the demonstration after protestors created a bonfire on their campus. Police officers arrived on the college campus and fired into the crowd; 3 men were killed, and 27 students were wounded. Although 9 officers were charged, they were later acquitted. In contrast, Cleveland Sellers, a representative for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was convicted and charged with inciting riots; he served seven months in jail. SOBU evolved from a North Carolina community organization formerly known as the Greensboro Association of Poor People (GAPP). The organization was established in the summer of 1968 a few months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Shots were fired on the campus of North Carolina A&T the day after King’s murder on April 5, 1968. Police arrived on the scene and dispersed tear gas into the crowd to impede any further violence. According to its leader, Nelson Johnson, GAPP had been formed because people need power. SOBU, composed of North Carolina A&T and Bennett College students, was created in the spring of 1969 for what Nelson anticipated to be a nationwide coalition that would merge Black activists. SOBU’s originating conference coincided with a devastating occurrence in Greensboro’s racial history. On May 7, 1969, a Greensboro, North Carolina, neigh­­­borhood school, Dudley High, campaigned to repudiate the administration’s efforts to change the outcome of student elections. An African American student, Claude Barnes, had not been placed on the ballot but was voted president of the

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high school’s student council through roughly 600 handwritten nominations. Conversely, the staff attempted to abolish the results so that they could install a white student as president who received 200 conventional votes. Black students were outraged at what they considered discriminatory practices. In response, the Black students walked out of school. As an activist, Claude Barnes was connected with several organizations including Black Students for Liberation, the Youth for the Unity of a Black Society, and GAPP. He petitioned for assistance from SOBU and local college students. SOBU members gathered at Dudley to aid the high school campaigners alongside the other community activist groups. When the police were summoned to intervene by school administrators, Nelson Johnson was arrested, and a restraining order was delivered to cease and desist protest at Dudley High on May 21, 1969. During the crisis an interchange of gunfire occurred between the police, the National Guard, and snipers located on the rooftop of the university. On May 22 Willie Grimes, a student, was shot and killed. The police were accused of his murder, which they denied. The following day, the National Guard ransacked Scott Hall at North Carolina A&T.

SOBU’s Impact, Domestic and Abroad Although North Carolina was not the central hub for Black nationalism, SOBU alongside GAPP drew countless members from various states and internationally. SOBU simultaneously established anticolonial crusades and formed both an economic platform and an operational platform for recently independent African nations. SOBU also debuted a bimonthly newsletter in 1971 to maintain its connection to its constituency. The newsletter was initially named after the organization but was quickly retitled African World. It also became an important news source for Pan-Africanists and African American college students. The creator and editor of the African World newspaper was Milton Coleman. At its peak, African World was distributed to 10,000 readers. It provided insight into new developments in the African American community and featured local and national news regarding Black Power, police brutality, and activism in the penitentiaries. African World also featured in-depth reporting of anticolonialism in the southern countries of Africa including Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, and Angola. In 1972 when African Liberation Day was methodically arranged with over 50,000 supporters, SOBU was in the forefront of the reporting. Ten thousand people of African descent marched in San Francisco, California, with 30,000 in Washington, D.C., along with 10,000 from Antigua and 10,000 from Toronto, Canada. The numbers were substantially higher in African countries. Although Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah established African Liberation Day, this event marked the very first time that the event was celebrated in mass in the United States. Owusu Sadauki, formerly known as Howard Fuller, was the



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engineer of African Liberation Day. Sadauki, the director of Malcolm X University in Durham, North Carolina, was said by Ron “Slim” Washington to have worked closely with SOBU. To further promote its message, SOBU instituted Black Week as a means to broadcast African American pride as well as to expand the network of SOBU. However, SOBU replaced Coleman to allow him the space needed to accomplish his goals beyond the movement. Experienced with the newspaper process, Ron “Slim” Washington was asked to vacation from the intensely independent SOBU in Kansas in order to continue the paper in North Carolina as well as to train designated others; the appointment took one year, and Ron later returned to the grassroots campaign in Kansas. Milton Coleman, who later worked for the Washington Post, became known for reporting the “Hymietown” comment made by Jesse Jackson during the 1984 presidential election campaign. Coleman maintained that he was a journalist first and a Black second. Despite the fact that Blacks were being elected into positions of political power in the 1970s, Nelson Johnson and SOBU supported the ratification of the Black People’s Union Party of North Carolina, a Black political party concerned with the economic, political, medical, and educational matters of Black people. Povertystricken and working-class families alike were mobilized to focus on job sustainability, welfare reform, and housing issues. Distinguished as a great relationship builder, Johnson helped to bridge the gap between groups and individuals who postulated different ideologies, philosophies, and beliefs. While SOBU disagreed with Roy Wilkins, president of the NAACP, regarding his adversarial views on militant groups, Johnson and SOBU still participated in the voter registration drives that were conducted by the NAACP.

Transition of SOBU With an increasing focus toward building a youth and Pan-African student movement during 1971 and 1972, SOBU supported multiple regional conferences and connected with cities and local affiliates in places such as Houston, Texas; Kansas City, Kansas; Denver, Colorado; New Haven, Connecticut; and Omaha, Nebraska. By 1972, student organizations in North Carolina created an alliance under the umbrella of the Youth Organization for Black Unity (YOBU). The organization’s four central tenets were voter education and electoral organizing, with deliberations centered on an alternate political assembly aside from the two primary parties; intergenerational organizing; a movement to preserve historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs); and an antialcohol and antidrug operation for Black youths. YOBU was led by Sandra Neely and Ron Ivey. During this time, SOBU presented its first national assembly at which 100 young attendees gathered. A few years earlier SOBU extended an invitation for Kwame Ture, formerly

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known as Stokely Carmichael and a member of SNCC, to speak at a demonstration commemorative of the South African Sharpeville massacre. After the presentation SOBU activists met with Ture, who encouraged them to delve deeper into the Pan-African movement and to gain a class-based perspective of oppression. Shortly thereafter, SOBU’s purpose statement was modified and highlighted the global platform of colonialism and class conflict. It was then that the group changed its name from the Student Organization for Black Unity to the Youth Organization for Black Unity to unify and connect with Black youths, especially those who were financially underprivileged. YOBU initiated an operation to redeem HBCUs from being restructured and eradicated in 1973. Kimoku Feret Bey led the Washington, D.C., chapter, which worked with organizations such as the Government Employees United against Racial Discrimination. YOBU supported the work of other groups on issues related to housing, welfare, and the rights of prisoners. During the latter portion of the year, the headquarters moved from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Washington, D.C. In 1975 under the title of YOBU, the group later assisted with the development of publicity for the February First Movement, a Civil Rights organization also initiated at North Carolina A&T that was characterized by sit-ins at Woolworth in 1960. The group consisted of members from YOBU, the National Save and Change Black Schools Programs, representatives from Harvard University’s Black Student Collective, the New Jersey–based Harambee Organization, the People’s College of Tennessee, and many other student organizations. In 1973, leaders of YOBU and other Black organizations transitioned into the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL). The RWL systematically matured into one of the largest Black Marxist organizations in the United States. By 1975, YOBU had reached its end. There were several reasons for the demise. Milton Coleman and others argued that SOBU’s move to Washington, D.C., harmed the organization, as many of the group’s powerful members were now operating outside of their own communities and therefore had lost the support of their base. There was also an overall political altitude. Students who may have been attracted to SOBU and other Black Power organizations in previous years sought more conventional employment. This shift from an inclusive Black Power collective to a progressively accelerating Black middle class led to acculturation. As academic and job opportunities became available, social status and economic growth improved. Many African Americans came to believe that they no longer needed Black-led organizations. Fundamentally, SOBU was created to structure the revolutionary ideas of Black youths, and the adoption of YOBU was instituted in its stead as a means to amalgamate like-minded activists. Rooted in the Black Power Movement, both groups helped to build an operational youth-driven Pan-African movement inside the United States. Joy Liani Hallman



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See also: Jackson, Jesse L., Sr.; Johnson, Nelson; Publications; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Anderson, E. L. 2015. “Sellers, Cleveland (1944–).” Black Past, http://www.blackpast .org/aah/sellers-cleveland-1944. Boger, Rebecca. n.d. “Black Power in Greensboro.” University of North Carolina at Greensboro, http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/essayblackpower/collection/CivilRights. Erginer, Ayse. 2013. “Media and the Movement: Journalism, Civil Rights, and Black Power in the American South.” Center for the Study of the American South, http://south .unc.edu/2013/01/16/new-sohp-research-initiative-media-and-the-movement-journalism -civil-rights-and-black-power-in-the-american-south/. Ferris State University. 2017. “Jim Crow Timeline.” Jim Crow Museum, http://www .ferris.edu/jimcrow/timeline.htm. Franklin, S. M. 2014. After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movement Activism, and the Post–Civil Rights Generation. New York: NYU Press. “Lani Guinier.” 2017. History Makers, http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography /lani-guinier-40. Washington, Booker T., and Ishmael Reed. 2010. Up from Slavery. New York: Signet Classics. Washington, Ron “Slim.” 2015. “The Rise and Fall of the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL): Or as Was Said in the ‘Bronx Tale,’ There’s Nothing Worse Than Wasted Potential.” Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1a/rwl-history.pdf. Wooster, Cameron. 2016. “African American Experiences of HBCUs after Integration Period.” Trinity Banner, http://commons.trincoll.edu/edreform/2016/05/african-american -experiences-of-hbcus-after-integration-period/.

Students for a Democratic Society Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a white-led student activist organization in the United States that was best known for its opposition to the Vietnam War and its support for Civil Rights and Black Power. Led by Alan (Al) Haber, the SDS was the nation’s most iconic and influential political organization of the New Left movement during the 1960s. Refusing to focus on only one issue and subscribe to only one ideology, the organization advocated for racial equality, economic justice, and peace and fought to achieve progressive social change through participatory democracy. The organization was founded in 1959 and flourished throughout the mid to late 1960s, with membership reaching 50,000. However, by 1969 the organization had split into several factions and by the mid-1970s was defunct. The SDS originated from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the student branch of the socialist organization the League for Industrial Democracy

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(LID). The purpose of SLID was to educate college students about socialism and the need to extend democracy to every aspect of society. Additionally, SLID aimed to address societal issues such as poverty, child labor, and poor work and housing conditions. LID wanted SLID to serve primarily as the educational arm within the American Left and focus on “industrial democracy”; however, some members of SLID did not share the same vision. As time went on, many members of SLID including Al Haber and Tom Hayden became more interested in Civil Rights, equality, economic justice, and peace. They believed that SLID’s scope of advocacy was too narrow and too labor oriented, so in 1960 they separated from the group and formed the SDS. In January 1960, the SDS held its first organizational meeting on the University of Michigan campus at Ann Arbor. It was then that Haber was elected president of the organization. A few years later in June 1962, the organization held its first convention at Port Huron, Michigan, which fewer than 100 people attended. During the convention, the group adopted the organization’s official political manifesto, the “Port Huron Statement,” which was primarily drafted by Hayden, the SDS field secretary. The “Port Huron Statement” pointed out significant problems within American society and described a method for a better future. Specifically, the statement raised criticism of the racial and economic inequalities in the United States and called for “participatory democracy” in which citizens were directly involved with policy and decision making. This concept of participatory democracy became the trademark phrase for the New Left movement. During the 1962–1963 academic school year, Hayden became the organization’s president, while Paul Booth served as vice president and Jim Monsonis as national secretary. However, by the end of the academic year the SDS was under new leadership, with Todd Gitlin of Harvard University as president and Lee Webb of Boston University as national secretary. During this time, political interests and activities were mostly directed toward Civil Rights issues, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) playing a key role in inspiring the SDS. SNCC, an organization that aimed to achieve political and economic equality for Blacks through local and regional action groups, was gaining extensive media attention in the 1960s as the group organized sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and other forms of protests. Many members of the SDS including Haber and Hayden were active supporters of SNCC and traveled south to participate in SNCC sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and other activities. The SDS remained aligned with SNCC as it transformed from a Civil Rights organization to one that emphasized “Black Power.” By the mid-1960s, the SDS took an open antiwar position as the United States escalated its military intervention in Vietnam. In February and March 1965, the SDS organized marches on the Oakland Army Terminal, which operated as a central departure point for many troops headed for Southeast Asia. Additionally, SDS campus chapters all over the country began leading small demonstrations against



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the war. During this time SDS membership was relatively low until SDS members decided to demonstrate their opposition to the war on a national level. In March, the SDS called for a march on Washington to protest the Vietnam War. On April 17, 1965, over 20,000 people gathered at the capital to protest. The SDS received national attention, causing its membership to grow rapidly. Simultaneously, many members of the SDS began to turn to more anarchistinfluenced activities that aimed at the country’s countercultural community. In 1966, the first issue of The Rag was published on the campus of the University of Texas, Austin. The Rag was an underground newspaper founded by SDS members Thorne Dreyer and Carol Neiman. The paper played a key role in merging the anarchist-leaning New Lefties and Austin’s countercultural community into one major political force. The Rag was arguably one of the most important underground papers of the 1960s and the first underground newspaper in the country to successfully combine radical politics, alternative culture, and humor. Also, during the mid-1960s internal issues in the organization began to arise. Since its founding the SDS had always been under male leadership, and although the SDS membership had often split along racial, class, and ideological lines, women’s issues had not been a problem. However, this changed dramatically during the 1966 SDS national convention in Chicago when a group of women presented a paper on the position of women in the organization. The position paper mirrored the position paper that the women of SNCC had presented a few years earlier. Both papers argued that women were second-class citizens of their respectful Civil Rights organizations and that even though women members took the same risks as men, they did not have equal access to leadership positions. As part of their demands, SDS women asked for a women’s plank, and when SDS leadership refused, many SDS women parted from the organization. Frustrated with the male-dominated leadership, leftist women from the SDS, SNCC, and other activist organizations began to form feminist splinter groups that eventually contributed to the creation of the women’s liberation movement. By the late 1960s the SDS became progressively more radical, and the momentum of protests caused many SDS members to believe that a social revolution was on the horizon. This belief of a social revolution in turn caused the organization to split into several factions. During the summer of 1969, the SDS held its final national convention in Chicago, Illinois. Many factions of the organization were present in large numbers, totaling almost 2,000 members. Among all the various factions of the organization were two major groups, the Revolutionary Youth Movement and the Worker Student Alliance (WSA). The Revolutionary Youth Movement went on to become the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), commonly referred to as the Weather Underground and the Weathermen. The Weather Underground was a militant radical left-wing organization that employed extremist tactics in its activities. Two widely known members of the

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WUO were Cathy Wilkerson and David Gilbert. The organization’s purpose was to recruit white Americans in support of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army, with an overall goal to create an undercover revolutionary party that would overthrow the U.S. government. Alongside some of their Black Power allies, members of the Weather Underground sought to destroy capitalism and imperialism by bombing government buildings and liberating funds through the robbery of financial institutions. The SDS was well known for its public demonstrations. Most noted was the protest after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the antiwar protest at Columbia University. Perhaps the demonstration that received the most national attention was the protest rally that was held on October 8, 1969, in Chicago, timed to coincide with the trial of the Chicago 7. The Chicago 7 (originally the Chicago 8) began as a group of eight defendants— Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, cofounder of the BPP Bobby Seale, and former SDS president Tom Hayden—who were charged with conspiracy, inciting to riot, and other charges related to the anti–Vietnam War protests that took place a year before during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The trial began on September 24, 1969. BPP cofounder Seale was denied his constitutional right to a counsel of his choice and was unable to represent himself. Seale protested the judge’s illegal actions and was consequently accused of disrupting the court. Thereafter, the judge ordered Seale to be chained to a chair and gagged during the trial. Ultimately the judge dismissed Seale from the case, sentencing him to four years in prison for contempt of court; however, the contempt charges were overturned by a federal appeals court due to the judge’s unconstitutional actions. The Chicago 8 were reduced to the Chicago 7, and each of the seven defendants was acquitted of conspiracy; however, five of the defendants were convicted of intent to incite a riot. In December 1969, the Weathermen held one final national convention in Flint, Michigan, before completely disbanding. The SDS-WSA continued to function nationwide until 1974. After the end of the Vietnam War, most members abandoned the antiwar efforts and focused their attention on civil and labor rights. By the late 1970s, the original SDS organization and its factions were fully defunct. A few early SDS leaders went on to pursue careers as politicians including Hayden, who went on to represent Los Angeles in the California Senate as a Democrat. Others are still imprisoned along with Black Power activists after receiving longterm convictions for revolutionary activism. Catherine Jermany See also: Black Liberation Army; Communist International and Black Power; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Vietnam War



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Further Reading Albert, Judith, and Stewart Albert. 1984. The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade. Westport, CT: Praeger. Bailey, Geoff. 1983. “The Rise and Fall of SDS.” International Socialist Review (31) (September–October), http://www.isreview.org/issues/31/sds.shtml. Berger, Dan. 2007. “Reflections on SDS, Black Power, War and Racism, 40 Years Later.” The Nation, January 13, https://www.thenation.com/article/reflections-sds-black -power-war-and-racism-40-years-later/. Rodnitzky, Jerry L. 1999. Feminist Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of a Feminist Counterculture. Westport, CT: Praeger. Rudd, Mark. n.d. “The Death of SDS.” Mark Rudd website, http://www.markrudd .com/?sds-and-weather/the-death-of-sds.html.

Sunni-Ali, Fulani (1948–2016) Iyalosha Fulani Nandi Adegbalola Sunni-Ali, known as Iya Fulani, was born Cynthia Priscilla Boston on March 6, 1948, in New Rochelle, New York, to Geneva Bracey Boston and Alajo Adegbalola (formerly Leroy Bernard Boston). She attended Blessed Sacrament, a private coeducational Roman Catholic school in New Rochelle until her senior year. As a consequence of physically defending herself against her teacher’s aggression, Iya Fulani was sent to the New York Training School for Girls, a reformatory for female juvenile delinquents in Hudson, where she spent 16 months. After her release, her family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where she received her high school diploma from Mount St. Joseph Academy. Upon graduation, Iya Fulani attended and went on to complete cosmetology school. At age 19, Iya Fulani gave birth to her first child. In addition to being a new mother, she was an active member of the Boston chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) and through her work with the Blue Hill Christian Center fought for decent housing and health care for the poor. In 1968 a few months before her 20th birthday, Iya Fulani began performing as a vocalist and touring with South African performing artist Zenzile Miriam Makeba. Makeba, in exile, used her platform to speak out against apartheid and to win international support for the indigenous South African people. Working with Makeba was an opportunity of a lifetime for young Iya Fulani. Already a human rights activist, Iya Fulani was able to develop a global consciousness and hone her talent through the practice of socially conscious artistry. In 1969 Iya Fulani pledged an oath of New Afrikan citizenship, becoming one of the earliest citizens of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA), a proposed independent Black nation-state within the United

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States. The PGRNA’s mission included demanding billions of dollars in reparations from the U.S. government, holding a plebiscite through which Black people could determine their own citizenship, and winning sovereignty over five states in the Black Belt South (Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina), claimed as its national territory. Iya Fulani’s father, Alajo Adegbalola, also a New Afrikan citizen and PGRNA minister of defense, was responsible for facilitating mass training sessions on security and leadership. Through her father’s teachings, Iya Fulani developed a keen security consciousness and critical leadership practices that she would go on to employ throughout her lifetime. In the PGRNA, she served on the New African Security Force and held the positions of eastern regional minister of information, national minister of information (after the Republic of New Africa [RNA] 11), Boston Council member, and vice chair of the People’s Center Council. In March 1971 one year after the birth of their second child, Iya Fulani and fellow New Afrikan citizen Ahmed Obafemi were married by then PGRNA president Imari A. Obadele. The ceremony took place on Land Celebration Day in Jackson, Mississippi. While traveling internationally with Makeba and her husband, Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael), also a member of the BPP, Iya Fulani often found herself in meetings representing Black youths’ perspectives on the deprivation of civil and human rights in the United States, the U.S. war in Vietnam, and apartheid in South Africa. Iya Fulani served as security for Ture in the early 1970s, and they maintained a close relationship until Ture’s death in 1998. Iya Fulani sang with Makeba until 1972 and also toured with Nina Simone when not touring with Makeba. During the mid to late 1970s Iya Fulani continued to organize and travel internationally. She led delegations that met with representatives of Guyana, Jamaica, and Suriname with the purpose of identifying new paradigms for international relations among Black people in the diaspora. As national minister of information for the PGRNA Iya Fulani served as a recruiter for the nation. She along with her comrades, including her sister Dr. Qasimah P. Boston, would go door-todoor to inform people about the PGRNA. Iya Fulani was also charged with the task of corresponding with political prisoners. In August 1973 she organized and hosted the International New Afrikan Prisoner of War Solidarity Day. The event was actually a conference culminating in a series of conferences around the North American region discussing political prisoners, prisoners of war, and the nature of the war New Afrikan people were engaged in at that time. Although Black Panther and political prisoner Bilal Sunni-Ali (formerly William Johnson) was told by Yuri Kochiyama to expect correspondence from Iya Fulani, they never corresponded while he was imprisoned. When he was released Bilal met Iya Fulani and her father, Vice President Adegbalola, at a PGRNA Eastern Regional Convention. Bilal became a New Afrikan citizen shortly after and expressed his interest in building a relationship with Iya Fulani, who by that



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time was no longer married. In the spring of 1976, Iya Fulani took her shahada, an Islamic declaration of belief in the oneness of God, with Brother Ahmed Atthar in Boston, Massachusetts. On December 31 of the same year Iya Fulani and Bilal Sunni-Ali were married at the Freedom Fighters Mosque on Woodycrest Avenue in the Bronx, New York. The wedding was officiated by Imam Muhammad Haqq and the couple’s mentor, Queen Mother Audley Moore. In 1979 the Sunni-Ali family, with a newborn girl in tow, relocated to New Orleans, Louisiana, where they continued the development of their community and cultural work. Some of this work included Nisamu Sasa, a sleep-away survival summer camp that took place in New Orleans and Byrdtown, Mississippi; the New Orleans chapter of the New Afrikan Scouts youth organization; the Southern Arts Media Education Connections Association Incorporated; and Cultural Voices, an activist women’s vocal collective. Like many social and political activists of the time, Iya Fulani and her family were targeted and surveilled in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Counterintelligence Program. On October 27, 1981, Iya Fulani was arrested, along with her father, comrade Jerry Gaines, and 13 children whose ages ranged from 9 months to 15 years old. At approximately 6:00 a.m. Gaines’s Gallman, Mississippi, home was surrounded by tanks and helicopters. Military SWAT teams, police officers, and FBI agents raided the home in search of Iya Fulani and any evidence that could connect her to the October 20, 1981, robbery of a Brinks truck and the killing of two police officers and a Brinks security guard in Nyack, New York. Although the federal district court in Manhattan cleared her of any involvement in the incident, Iya Fulani was kept in state custody for noncooperation with a federal grand jury. She refused to testify or provide handwriting and hair samples and insisted on being represented by lawyer and New Afrikan citizen Chokwe Lumumba. In January 1983 Iya Fulani was issued a temporary furlough to give birth to her sixth and last child. Four months later, she was remanded back into state custody and went on to serve an additional five months in prison. Upon her release, Iya Fulani spent some time in New York until returning to New Orleans. In 1987, the Sunni-Ali family relocated to Atlanta, Georgia. In Atlanta, Iya Fulani resumed international travel and continued organizing. As the southern regional director of disarmament with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), she organized conferences and tours featuring herself and other women to examine the impact of U.S. militarism on previously colonized nations throughout the diaspora and disenfranchised communities in the United States. Through the AFSC she traveled to Algeria and organized with Casbah residents striving to rebuild their communities since their 1960s revolution. In Libya Iya Fulani participated in a broad fact-finding delegation investigating recent U.S. bombings and murders, and she also participated in the historic meeting between the AFSC and the Third World Coalition with indigenous people

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in Oaxtepec, Mexico. International work with women’s groups was a major focus for Iya Fulani. In 1980 she became a founding member of the New Afrikan Women’s Organization and founded the Afrikan Women’s Caucus, a politically diverse group of women addressing the global issue of underdevelopment in economically challenged countries and communities in the United States. Iya Fulani led the organization in sponsoring several years of International Women’s Day observances in Atlanta, which included participation and presentations by women from at least six nations around the world. As national cochair of the Venceramos Brigade from 1987 to 1991, she organized and worked on several brigades to Cuba and built a relationship with the Federacion de Mujeres Cubanas, which which she worked to mobilize women into political work and into the economy. After being initiated into the Lucumi tradition in Havana, Cuba, in 1995, Iya Fulani also organized and led cultural and spiritual tours to Cuba and later founded the Atlantabased spiritual house Ile Ajaguna. In 1989 Iya Fulani, along with Sulaiman El-Mahdi, founded What Good Is a Song, a radio program on WRFG 89.3 FM, the only independent and nonprofit radio station in the state of Georgia. Bilal Sunni-Ali joined the staff in 1991, and in 2005 station manager Ebon Dooley extended the title to Friday Night Drum. Honing their broadcast journalist skills, Iya Fulani and her husband regularly cohosted the program until the early 2000s, using it as a platform to give voice to African diasporic issues and to inspire local and global grassroots communities. Throughout this time Iya Fulani remained an active member of the National Black United Front; the National Black Anti-War, Anti-Draft Union; and the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. She consistently connected with and forged solid relationships with various active movements around the world and discussed new paradigms for peace and freedom with most of them. She traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2003, where she gave a presentation on BPP history and the history of present-day struggles to a group of college students. In 2008, Iya Fulani traveled to Palestine and Israel with the Third World Coalition as a radio-broadcast journalist and spiritual leader, focused on the human rights violations against Palestinian women and children. On June 17, 2016, Iya Fulani passed away from complications related to brain surgery. At the time of her death, she was the commanding general of the Black Legion and the International Commanding General of the Belizean post of the Black Legion. She had been holding the post of ambassador of health and wellness to Belize for the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the African Communities League since 2006 and was also the executive director of Developing International Afrikan Sustainable Productive Opportunities & Renewable Arts (DIASPORA), a nongovernmental organization in Belize that she cofounded with her husband in 2011. Iya Fulani was relentless in her pursuit to encourage and participate in the development of a better people and a better world. This commitment



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manifested in her various professions and life roles, which included cosmetologist, nursing assistant, emergency medical technician, broadcast journalist, school crossing guard, midwife, naturopathic doctor of acupuncture, substitute teacher, vocalist extraordinaire, mother, wife, grandmother, and human rights activist. Iya Fulani has been honored at largely attended home-going celebrations and memorials in Atlanta, New York, New Orleans, and Belize. Her family received proclamations from the city councils of Atlanta and New Orleans. The New Orleans City Council changed the traditional proclamation colors from red, white, and blue to purple and gold with red, black, and green writing to honor Iya Fulani’s “dedication to the upliftment of New Afrikan/Black people in New Orleans, throughout the country and world.” She is referred to as “a warrior queen,” and closing the brief description of her work and contributions is the phrase “Free the Land!” Asantewa Sunni-Ali See also: Black Panther Party; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Lumumba, Chokwe; Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry); Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa Further Reading Gaines, Rondee. 2013. “I Am a Revolutionary Black Female Nationalist: A Womanist Analysis of Fulani Sunni Ali’s Role as a New African Citizen and Minister of Information in the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa.” PhD dissertation, Georgia State University, http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_diss/44.

T Toure, Askia (1938–) Askia Toure is one of the extraordinary figures whose practice and theory are rooted in the Civil Rights/Black Power and Black Arts Movements. Toure’s activist, literary, and ideological development are directly link to major historic periods inclusive of the Harlem Renaissance, World War I and World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights/Black Power era, and the emergence of the 21st-century Black Lives Matter movement. Toure was born Rolland Snellings on October 13, 1938, in Raleigh, North Carolina, and raised in Dayton, Ohio. His change of name reflected a powerful transformative cultural, political, and ideological shift from Civil Rights that was representative of the Black Power era. Toure graduated from Dayton’s Roosevelt High School in 1956. The son of Clifford R. Snelling Sr. and Nancy Lynnette Bullock Snellings, Toure was the older of two sons who had intentions of pursuing a music career. He sang in nightclubs with a group until a tumultuous relationship with his father led to him joining the U.S. Air Force in 1956 and serving until 1959. Toure and his singing group tried to get a deal with King Records before he joined the air force, but other circumstances prevented that goal. During his offduty time while in the air force he would sing with Harold Upshaw and the Swans at local venues. Toure was also stationed with other singers such as Little Willie John as well as Robert Green from the Flamingos. While in the air force Toure began evolving as an artist, doing pen and ink and watercolors. He met a white captain who with other artists met at the captain’s home off base to discuss and display their work. It was through this art group that Toure put together a portfolio of his watercolors. Toure was also mentored by older African American soldiers during his stay in the air force who recognized his talent for writing. In protest of the racist practices and passing over of the Black mechanics and sergeants for promotions on the air force base, they solicited Toure to draft a letter to complain about their treatment to New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Eventually after the letter was sent, Toure was released early from the air force and given an honorable discharge. After returning from the air force, Toure moved to New York with his childhood friend and air force buddy Bill Day to pursue his interest as a visual artist, studying at the Art Students League of New York from 1960 to 1962. As a visual art student in New York, Toure took classes during the day and worked in factories

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in Brooklyn at nights. He attended the Fulton Art Fair, where artists would display their works and senior artists would critique them. Toure met Tom Feelings at this fair and would eventually be mentored by him. Feelings later introduced Toure to the acclaimed African American painter Jacob Lawrence. After Toure received a disappointing critique of his work that was displayed at the fair, he began working harder to improve his craft. Jacob Lawrence saw Toure’s improved work and encouraged him to continuing developing his craft. Lawrence told Toure that he “had a wonderful sense of color.” Toure began working with Tom Feelings and Elombe Brath to help illustrate the history of Samory Toure, the grandfather of the former president of Guinea, Sékou Touré. This process led Askia Toure to meet with Lewis H. Michaux of Harlem’s bookstore on 125th Street and writer and historian J. A. Rogers. Rogers gave Toure permission to use his work to do the illustrated history of Samory Toure. This project also led Askia Toure on a research agenda to go to the Schomburg Library to read all of W. E. B. Du Bois’s writings. During some of his visits to the library or at other times, Toure also would spend time in Harlem on 125th Street listening to Malcolm X speak for hours. Eventually Feelings took Toure as a visual artist to an Umbra meeting of writers. Feelings introduce Toure to Lorenzo Thomas, Calvin Hernton, Ishmael Reed, David Henderson, Tom Dent, Brenda Walcott, and Archie Shepp. Feelings mentioned to the Umbra group that Toure “writes a little.” Toure was ask to come back to an Umbra meeting and share his poetry. When Toure returned he read one of his first poems, Red Clay. The Umbra writers were impressed with Toure’s rhythms, landscape, and imagery of the South. They wanted to know if he had any more poems. Toure’s debut led him to become a member of Umbra and participate in the group’s public readings. Through Feelings, Toure and other Umbra poets got to meet Langston Hughes and share their writings with him. Hughes was very supportive of the young writers and encouraged them to contribute to an international anthology that was being edited by Rosie Poole. Umbra played a formative role in Toure’s literary development as a poet and in his radicalization to leftist politics. Umbra exposed him to many working-class activists, poets, writers, and musicians who had anticapitalist and anti-imperialist views. Toure sat in on a workshop by Harold Cruse on Marxism and Black liberation. Toure and others would meet and talk with Cruse in cafés all night. Amiri Baraka said it was in 1961 that he meet Askia Toure at the United Nations, where they gathered to protest the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of the Congo. Baraka said he did know that Toure was a poet (Harris 1999, 495). Toure was also impressed with the musicians who lived in the community and was accessible to other artists and activists. He ran into a young man who told him that he knew drummer Max Roach and asked if Toure wanted to meet him. Toure



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waved his hand in disbelief, telling the younger man that he didn’t know Roach. Toure said that the young man got on the phone and made a call: “Hey big Max, this is little Max, I want to come by with a friend?” The young man was Max Stanford who changed his name to Muhammad Ahmad, a founder of the Revo­ lutionary Action Movement (RAM). Ahmad took Toure to meet Roach and his wife Abbey Lincoln. Toure and Larry Neal would sit in on performances of Max Roach, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and other gifted musicians of that time. Toure was also a fan of rhythm and blues. He felt that the rhythm and blues artists were “poet philosophers” and were the key cultural forces in the Black freedom movement. According to Robin D. G. Kelly (2002), “For Toure, the ‘movement’ was more than sit-ins at lunch counters, voter registration campaigns, and Freedom Rides; it was about self-transformation, changing the way we think, live, love, and handle pain.” It was Toure’s spirituality that kept him grounded. During his early years in Harlem, he was a Yoruba practitioner and went by the name Olábisí. He was also a member of the Alajo Party under the leadership of Nana Oserjeman Adefunmi of the Yoruba Temple. After the bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four little girls, Toure was pictured in a Harlem protest holding up a sign that read “A little child shall lead us to death.” It was that anger that further radicalized Toure, leading him to join RAM and travel to Mississippi in 1964 and join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Toure and Muhammad Ahmad were appointed by SNCC chairman John Lewis to be field staff for the Mississippi Summer Project. Toure later worked with the SNCC Atlanta Project, where along with other members he drafted the position paper on Black Power that was published in the New York Times in 1966. The assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 brought about a functioning alliance of artists to Harlem that began to propagate Black Arts. Toure and Larry Neal were active figures in Harlem, doing the footwork of spreading the ideological grounds for the Black Arts Movement. Baraka’s summarization of the Black Arts Movement stated that “We wanted an art that was revolutionary. We wanted a Malcolm art, a by-any-means necessary poetry. A Ballot or Bullet verse. We wanted ultimately, to create a poetry, a literature, a dance, a theater, a painting, that would help bring revolution!” (Baraka n.d.). The Black Arts Movement spread throughout the country, as did the call for Black Power. The creation of the first Black studies program in 1967 developed in California on the campus of San Francisco State College. Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Askia Toure became some of the first professors in that program, where actor Danny Glover was one of their students. This was also a period of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, when they organized to defend their community against police brutality. After the arrest of Huey Newton, Toure served as a cochair to the Huey Newton Defense Committee.

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After Toure left San Francisco State and moved back to New York, he became a Sunni Muslim. He also became a member of the African People’s Party and served as the editor of its paper, Jihad, which later changed its name to Black Star. Toure moved to Philadelphia after an altercation with a faction of Sunni Muslims. He eventually moved to the South after the dissolution of the African People’s Party in the 1980s. Toure relocated to Atlanta and was one of the organizers of the Nile Valley Conference in 1986, hosting Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop. In Atlanta, Toure returned back to his Yoruba practice, affiliating himself with Dr. Wande Abimbola, a babalawo (Yoruba Ifa priest) and a leading scholar on Yoruba literature and practice. In 1996 Toure moved to Boston, where he presently resides. He remains active in mentoring young activists, working with writing collectives, publishing in anthologies, and participating on community panels and in conferences, continuing his work on Black Arts, Black Power, and Black liberation. Tony Van Der Meer See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Arts Movement; Black Studies; Revolutionary Action Movement; Sanchez, Sonia; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Ahmad, Muhammad. 2007. We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations, 1960–1975. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Baraka, Amiri. n.d. “‘A Ballot or Bullet Art’: The Legacy of Amiri Baraka.” Howl Round, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:s9Jpq8oEwREJ:howlro und.com/the-legacy-of-amiri-baraka+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us. Bracey, John H., Jr., Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst. 2014. SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Feinstein, Sascha. 2016. “Brilliant Corners.” Journal of Jazz and Literature (Summer): 50–81. Harris, William, ed. 1999. The Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones Reader. New York: Basic Books. Hill, Patricia L. 1998. Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kelly, Robin D. G. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon. Smethurst, James E. 2005. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Smith, Klytus, and Abiola Sinclair. 1995. The Harlem Cultural/Political Movements 1960–1970: From Malcolm X to “Black Is Beautiful.” New York: Gumbs and Thomas Publishers. Van Sertima, Ivan. 1992. “Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop.” Journal of African Civilizations (June 1986): 284–303.



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Towards a Black University Conference The Towards a Black University Conference (TABU) took place November 13–17, 1968, on the campus of Howard University. Over 2,000 scholars, activists, students, and Black Power advocates from across the African diaspora assembled to discuss the mechanics of creating a Black university. The historic conference was the largest gathering focused on the role of Black Power in the ivory tower. The attendees included artists such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Ossie Davis; activists such as Stokely Carmichael, Maulana Karenga, and Ivanhoe Donaldson; scholars such as James Turner, Alvin Poussaint, and Harry Edwards; and student leaders from Howard, Columbia, and American Universities.

The Black University It is difficult to pinpoint the origin of the concept for a Black university, but by the spring of 1968 the idea was taking root at several centers of Black political thought and action. In March 1968 Negro Digest released the first of three annual installments of a series on the notion of a Black university. Hoyt Fuller, managing editor for the Chicago-based publication, described the Black university as an institution designed to serve the real and total needs of the Black community. The idea for the special issue dedicated to the Black university developed from conversations Fuller had with Gerald McWhorter (now Abdul Alkalimat), a recent PhD graduate of the University of Chicago who had then become a professor at Fisk University in Nashville. The essays were written by a variety of scholars and activists. The idea had been independently germinating in centers of Black thought and action such as Durham, Chicago, Nashville, and Atlanta. The TABU conference organizers asserted that the concept emerged “out of the frustrations of Black students, educators, activists and community leaders who recognize that the present institutions of higher learning have no relevance to the total Black community and who realize the contradictions of allowing themselves to be acculturated into a society which debilitates Black people.” It was necessary for the proponents of the Black university to convene to define the structure and mechanics of that university.

Politics at Howard University A combination of variables made Howard University the perfect host site for this conference. The 1968–1969 school year opened tensely. The previous two years were filled with protests and heated confrontations between students and administrators. Although students had demonstrated since the 1880s, the infusion of Black Power resulted in bolder confrontations where students departed from the

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respectability politics that guided earlier generations. The first visible strains of Black Power appeared on campus as early as 1965 with the formation of the Black Power Committee under the advisement of Dr. Nathan Hare (1933–), but the student activists traced the origins of their ideology to 1963. A number of incidents took place between 1965 and 1967 including the disruption of the March 1967 Charter Day Address given by General Lewis Hershey, director of the Selective Service System. The Charter Day protest resulted in expulsions and other retaliatory measures against student activists. Rather than intimidating students, the response incited them. The activist group UJAMAA originated in 1967. On February 16, 1968, members of UJAMAA presented the administration with a two-page mimeographed open letter to the president outlining their demands under the masthead “The Spear and Shield.” The demands centered on student power and relevancy. They wanted all faculty reinstated who had been let go for their political views and removal of the president, the vice president, and the dean of liberal arts because they were unwilling to work toward creating a Black Howard university. They demanded a student judiciary to control, among other things, the budget and expenditure of the student activity fee. They called for an immediate codification of rules previously submitted to the Faculty Senate Steering Committee, as the conversation around a student-controlled judiciary had already been happening for years. They demanded the institution of a Black awareness research institute and the development of programs to aid the Black community in the struggle against oppression and also demanded that the university campus be made more accessible to all Black people. In addition, they sought to end the patriarchal and patronizing relationship between university employees and students. They insisted that the personnel treat students how Black people should treat Black people, with respect and courtesy. The letter was signed by Howard University Student Association (HUSA) president Ewart Brown (1946–), UJAMAA political director Anthony Gittens (1946–), editor of the Hilltop student newspaper and UJAMAA member Adrienne Manns (1947–), president of the Liberal Arts Student Council Barbara Penn (1947–), and “all other Concerned Black Students.” They gave the administration until February 29, 1968, to respond and highlighted that this date was three weeks after the Orangeburg Massacre, which took place on the campus of South Carolina State University. This letter was disseminated during a protest rally held in solidarity and support of the students at South Carolina State University. During this event, student activists forcefully removed American flags from the flagpoles in the center of the yard and in front of the Harriet Tubman Quadrangle, a women’s residence hall complex. Additionally, students tore down one part of the wrought-iron gate that had been placed in front of the Tubman Quad to prevent mixed-gender socialization. Student activists delivered one of the flags and a copy of the letter to President James Nabrit’s office. Students then took the other flag, a copy of the letter, and the



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section of the gate that was removed into the office of Frank Snowden, dean of liberal arts, while he was sitting at his desk. By March 1, 1968, Howard University’s Charter Day, the administration had still not responded to the demands of the student activists, so they disrupted the ceremonies and insisted that administration negotiate with them. Disciplinary action was taken against the students involved in both the February 16 protest and the Charter Day disruption. The judicial process at that time was heavily biased against the students. It was a forgone conclusion that any student facing a disciplinary hearing would be expelled. The hearings were scheduled for mid-March. On March 19 HUSA and UJAMAA cosponsored a protest rally in favor of the students facing disciplinary action. The rally was also convened in support of Howard becoming a Black university that would be more relevant to the Black community. The rally was held on the steps of Frederick Douglass Hall and featured speeches from several activists including members of UJAMAA and HUSA and former student activists such as JeRoyd “Jay” Greene, who had been expelled following the March 1967 Hershey protest. The list of demands circulated at the March 19 rally were based on those distributed during the February 16 protest, with additional demands including the dropping of all charges against the students who participated in the February 16 and March 1 demonstrations. Following the conclusion of the speeches, organizers led the crowd to the Mordecai Wyatt Johnson Administration Building (most commonly called the A Building) for what was supposed to be a sit-in. The plan was to stay in the building until President Nabrit or some other high-ranking university official came and met with the student leadership. More people came than the organizers expected, and within minutes the entire building was full of students camping out in all of the hallways. By the end of the business day no one had come to speak to the students, so they stayed. Eventually a janitor turned over the building keys to HUSA president Brown, and the sit-in became a takeover. For five days the students stayed in the A Building, forcing the university to set up a government-in-exile in the Medical School. The students held on to the building without weapons and prohibited entry to anyone they did not feel was aligned with their cause, including local reporters and U.S. marshals. Supporters came from all over the city and from out of town. Students from local universities as well as Columbia University came to the campus to extend their support and solidarity. Stokely Carmichael and Nathan Hare came to speak with the students. Many professors also came to the administration building to continue to teach their classes and help the students shape their thoughts and ideology. There were also workshops and cultural demonstrations designed to entertain and engage the participants in critical thought. Students used the skills attained through their varied work-study jobs to keep the administration building fully functioning. Parents set up a support table outside helping to explain the students’ demands.

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The takeover garnered national attention. As a federally chartered institution, Howard University received an appropriation from the federal government each year. The takeover drew criticism from conservative members of the U.S. Congress who threatened to reduce the appropriation if President Nabrit could not get his students under control. Members of the university’s Board of Trustees, including Percy Julian and Kenneth Clark, came to the A Building to lobby the students to end the protest. After many talks, some going into the wee hours of the morning, they came to an agreement, and student leaders decided to leave the A Building on Saturday, March 23, 1968. Over 1,500 students participated in the takeover, making it the single largest demonstration in university history. Later that spring UJAMAA—acting as a political party—sponsored a slate of candidates and swept the student elections.

Toward a Black University Q. T. Jackson, HUSA president in 1968–1969 and a graduate student from the Department of African Studies, served as one of the key organizers of the Towards a Black University Conference. It is not known exactly where the phrase and idea came from; however, some students report that the idea came during a discussion in a class taught by history professor Olive Taylor. Acklyn Lynch was a professor of political science at Howard and served as the primary faculty sponsor for the student-led conference. The conference organizers released a statement declaring that the Black university’s primary goal was to “help build a new social structure by providing its students with a viable alternative to the status quo and the freedom to create values, lifestyles, and norms which can be perpetuated.” According to them, the Black university “should not separate Black People. Its primary concern should be towards revolutionary unity and excellence in a Black society.” There was widespread support for the conference, and the UJAMAA-led student government (HUSA) easily approved the allocation of funds to underwrite the conference. Still, factions of the university community were less than supportive of the conference. A major point of dissension was the role of white people within the Black university. To this end, the Board of Trustees released a policy statement two weeks prior to the conference: “Howard University was founded primarily for the education of disadvantaged Black people and throughout its history has sought to fulfill that purpose. It still intends to carry it out. But nothing in Howard’s history or its charter will support a Black university, if by that is meant a university operated by Black people alone and serving only Black students. In fact, the first four graduates of Howard were white students and for one hundred years, the University has never discriminated against persons on account of race or color, and does not now intend to do so.” According to the board, “The University is firmly of the opinion that we are the last people in America who should espouse



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restriction on thought or speech.” Despite the statement from the board, President Nabrit released a statement five days later expressing his full support for the conference. It is unclear whether Nabrit was actually supporting the same students who had just months prior demanded his resignation or if he was employing a political maneuver to prevent another campus uprising. The debate about the role of white people in both the Black university and the Towards a Black University Conference continued to be a source of major tension. Initially the university allowed the conference widespread access to facilities across the campus. At some point, white members of the university community attempted to enter sessions and were denied. As word spread that white participants had been denied access, faculty members lobbied to restrict further use of space in the Schools of Medicine and Dentistry. Conference organizers reported additional restrictions that forced all the final sessions to be held in the gymnasium. In contrast, some observers claim that attendance toward the end of the conference was low enough that all of the participants were able to fit into the gymnasium.

Conference Program The conference began on Wednesday, November 13, with all-day registration and an opening plenary in the evening. The 1,500-seat Cramton Auditorium was packed with approximately 1,900 people from across the country. Howard alumnus of 1964 Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and Charles Hamilton, coauthors of the book Black Power, served as the keynote speakers of a session titled “The Responsibilities of the Black University to the Total Black Community.” Carmi­ chael’s talk underscored the importance of eliminating self-hatred, utilizing both entertainment and education as weapons in that fight. He urged the crowd to have an undying love for Black people and resist separation among the race, between themselves and “Negros” and “Uncle toms,” and to not think of themselves as better because they had greater access to Black Power thought and ideology. He also discussed the importance of Black nationalism and thinking of Black people as a global community. After Carmichael and Hamilton finished, William “Bill” Street moderated a panel discussion. The panelists included Black Power advocates from different educational sectors: Dr. Andrew Billingsley, vice chancellor of the Minority Program at the University of California, Berkeley; Reverend David Eaton, associate dean of community education and the Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia); Walker M. Foster, leading student activist from American University; Kenneth Haskins, principal of the Morgan Community School in Washington, D.C.; Rhody McCoy, chairman of the Oceanhill– Brownsville Community School Board; Paul Puryear, chairman of the Department

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of Political Science and director of the Center for Afro-American Studies at Fisk University; Lonnie Shabazz, student-minister of Nation of Islam Mosque #4 in Washington, D.C.; and James Turner, then a graduate student at Northwestern University. Each day of the conference was scheduled with a morning (10:00 a.m.–noon) and afternoon (2:00–4:00 p.m.) block of concurrent sessions followed by an evening (8:00–11:00 p.m.) plenary session. Each presenter was given his or her own room for the entire block instead of three of four seminar papers per session. In total, 75 papers were presented and 15 resolutions were agreed upon by the conference. Unfortunately, the resolutions have been lost. However, the official conference schedule is still extant. The topics cover every conceivable aspect of the Black university from religion to science to community involvement. The sessions were designed around themes connected to multiple facets of the Black university. HUSA president (1967–1968) and student-athlete Ewart Brown and noted sociologist Harry Edwards presented on athletics in the Black university. Donald Byrd, Ossie Davis, Ted Joans, Amiri Baraka, Teixeira Nash, Bobb Hamilton, David Driskell, Lofton Mitchell, John Oliver, Sonia Sanchez, and Max Roach discussed the Black Arts Movement and the role of artists in the Black university. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee veteran and political strategist Ivanhoe Donaldson, Keith Lowe, Nonviolent Action Group member Timothy Jenkins, Dr. Paul Puryear, Dr. Willard Johnson, and Brother Imari explored politics and the Black university as an activist-oriented institution. Dr. Andrew Billingley and Stokely Carmichael led a series of panels exploring the Black university’s responsibility to the Black community; Nigerian national Dr. P. Chike Onwauchi, professor of sociology and anthropology at Fisk University, and Marvin Holloway explored the international implications of the Black university. Ron (Maulana) Karenga, founder of the Us organization, and Baba Lumumba (Don Freeman), cofounder of Soulbook magazine, both lectured on the Black university as a revolutionary concept. During Lumumba’s presentation an incident occurred that highlighted a source of major tension between conference organizers and the school administration. LaSalle Caron, a white instructor from the Howard University Department of Romance Languages, came to Lumumba’s session after it was already in progress. By his own account, a non-Howard student who was on the platform came up to him while he was standing at the back of the room and asked him if he knew the identity of the speaker at the podium. When he responded negatively, he was asked to leave. Caron reported this incident and identified the person who asked him to leave the room to the associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts. A conflicting account circulated through administrative memos recalls that from the podium the speaker asked Caron to identify himself and, upon Caron’s refusal to do so, demanded that he leave the room. The administration believed that Caron’s dismissal



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was attributed to his race, but it could have been attributed to his lack of knowledge of the identity of the speaker. Additionally, assistant professor of government Dr. Brian Weinstein was prohibited from registering for the conference allegedly due to his race. Many proponents of the concept of a Black university were misquoted as saying that white people were not allowed, but they actually said that white participation would be no longer allowed without conditions. That is, white allies had to bring more to the table than their whiteness and goodwill. The supposed prohibition of whites led to restricted use and access to university facilities that had previously been approved midway through the conference. The educational structure of the Black university was a critical topic of discussion. Scholars and activists such as Ann Forester, Dr. Kenneth Goode, Dr. Absolum Villakazi, Dr. Jessie Taylor, Sarah Fabio, Bill Hall, Rhody McCoy, Doug Jones, Preston Wilcox, and Kenneth Haskins led panels exploring curriculum and course content, the development of a Black educational system, and academic freedom. Harold Cruse gave a presentation on the role of the Black intellectual in the Black university. Dr. Gerald McWhorter and husband-and-wife team Tony Perot and Ruth Turner discussed leadership development in the Black university. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) veteran and community organizer Jimmy Garrett explored youth impact on contemporary society, and noted English professor Dr. Andress Taylor led a discussion on faculty, administration, and student recruitment for the Black university. Science, technology, engineering, and math were also important contributions to the Black university, according to Dr. Herman Branson, Dr. Alfred Canon, Dr. Cyril, Jean Smith Glean Chase, and a presenter by the name of 2MJQ who spoke on the Black university as a home for the Black environmentalist, architect, and engineer. Walker Foster presented on religion in the Black university and the problem of respiritulization and Black people. Yale Law student Jay Greene and Howard student activist Robert Malson presented on the delineation of power, the reflection of philosophy, and democratic freedom within the structure of the Black uni­­­ versity. Economics was also a major component to the concept of the Black university. Harlan Randolph and Dr. Robert Browne facilitated conversations on financing the Black university. Former member of the Congress of Racial Equality Floyd McKissick discussed the Black university’s role in preparing the Black student for economic power, and Frank Jones explored the Black university as an agent of social and economic change. Ford Johnson argued that Black students needed to be prepared for business and commerce, while SNCC veteran and future D.C. council member Frank Smith, E. W. Steptoe, and Jessie Morris highlighted the Black university’s responsibility in developing Black and rural agricultural communities.

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To address the issue of Black students at white universities, Columbia University student activist Bill Sales and James Turner led sessions on the problems at predominately white institutions. It has been reported that Turner’s comments at the TABU conference were instrumental in Cornell University students selecting him to be the founding director of the Africana Research & Studies Center. The importance of the conference that Howard students hosted and organized cannot be understated. Along with the student strike held at San Francisco State University that birthed the nation’s first autonomous Black studies department, the conference at Howard accelerated Black campus activism nationally. The Towards a Black University Conference intensified activism at historically Black colleges and universities for the rest of the year and inspired Black campus activists to demand more relevant education and Black studies programs. Jocelyn Imani See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Student Activism; Black Studies; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture) Further Reading Biondi, Martha. 2012. The Black Revolution on Campus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bradley, Stefan M. 2009. Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Negro Digest. 1968. The Black University, March. Negro Digest. 1969. The Black University Part II, March. Negro Digest. 1970. The Black University Part III, March. Rickford, Russell. 2016. We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rogers, Ibram. 2008. “The Marginalization of the Black Campus Movement.” Journal of Social History 42(1): 175–182. Rogers, Ibram. 2012. The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972. New York: Springer. Toward a Black University Vertical File. n.d. Moorland Spingarn Research Center.

U UHURU UHURU was a Detroit-based radical group founded in the early 1960s. It was a concept, manifestation, and literal product of the Black Power Movement. It serves as a classical example of the youth-based nature of organizations and philosophies that have existed inside the Black Power Movement arguably since Black Power’s birth. This is because of its parallel historical existence in the years of the Black Power Movement (1965–1975) and its emphasis on Black identity, consciousness, self-determination, and self-defense. UHURU is characterized as an organization that successfully paired Black militancy and Black youths on a local level—factors that would become virtually necessary in the influx of Black Power organizations that would later continue to usher in the movement. The Kiswahili term uhuru means “freedom.” It was a 22-year-old Wayne State University senior named Luke Tripp who, along with his peers, chose this African word to be the name of their new alternative group in March 1963 in Detroit, Michigan. John Watson, Ken Cockrel, General Baker, and Tripp organized UHURU alongside many Wayne State University students. They would become lifetime organizers, later becoming active in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). A key emphasis is placed on this specific part of UHURU’s founders to highlight the miraculous endeavors of this lineage of youths as well as the political landscape on both a local and a federal level. In 1963 Detroit, which was the birthplace of the Nation of Islam and an active participant in the Garveyite movement dating back to the 1920s, was not for the first time being introduced to Black nationalism. Rather, organizers such as UHURU’s predecessor Reverend Albert Cleage refer to this time as the turning point in the Black Power Movement wherein Black organizers departed from the old “Black and white unite to fight” ideology and began actualizing the Black nationalist ideology. UHURU members, along with other youth activists at the time, were aiming to find an alternative to the same liberal coalitions that they felt continued to compromise Blacks and lessened the possibility of self-efficacy for the Black community. Following this lineage of activists, UHURU was viewed as an organization that posed a real threat to the already established Black leadership and their white counterparts and allies (e.g., the NAACP), as it prioritized political mobilization and questioned the current model and all of its parts/participants.

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The mission statement and overarching goal of UHURU was to provide constant pushback to the American political system. The organization and its members embraced the reality that truest freedom for Blacks in America, uhuru, could be obtained by accepting the position of opposition and that energy and sustained strength were needed to keep resisting each oppressive force encountered, an acceptance that seemed to call directly to the vigor of the youths. This exclusively Black organization stated its purpose as being “to seek the closest possible alliance of militant Black groups from the broadest possible united Black front to wage a tit-for-tat struggle against the anti-Negro machine that is America; to fight for ‘uhuru sasa’ [freedom now] . . . and to affirm the principle of self-defense in the Negro freedom struggle.” Abiding by its principle of seeking and working in a Black united front, UHURU did work with the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), another prominent militant Black group in Detroit. Other times, the organizers worked solely among themselves. The organization also had no problem challenging other Black organizations that were not contributing to their Black united front’s agenda. In addition to the fact that the group tended to stay in the business of producing symbolic means of protest and mobilization, UHURU was no less meaningful than it was controversial. Its first public act, a protest in the fall of 1963, disrupted a ceremonial rally that would lobby for the 1968 Olympic Games to be hosted in Detroit, Michigan. This rally was broadcast live all over the world, making it a perfect symbolic disruption for UHURU. The organization made itself known as well as the tone it would continue to have surrounding the exploitation of Blacks by differentiating itself from the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organizations’ Housing Committees, which were peacefully protesting through placards. UHURU remained energized and chanted loudly. NAACP and CORE denounced any relationship to the group in a statement following the demonstration, and it was at this moment that UHURU successfully enraged Detroit’s administration and the Civil Rights sector. In another demonstration, UHURU directly spoke out against a prominent Civil Rights group, Trade Union Leadership Council, showing up to its Freedom House and calling out its hosted event that included Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh, “the Man.” Interviews with some UHURU members and newspaper articles do claim that after this specific event, council members and others took UHURU members behind the Freedom House and assaulted them. Extreme resentment festered toward UHURU. Claims of being directly subversive against the advancements and aims that Black and white relations had previously achieved were among the biggest. The ages of UHURU members were a target point in the argument against them, as they were described as being uninformed and ungrateful youths. Their political orientation of “Mau Mau Maoist” too was painted as a derivative of and/or connection to the Communist Party.

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UHURU continued to be unapologetic and fervent in its aims, standing in between supportive, militant groups such as GOAL and Cleage’s organization and dissenting groups such as the city’s administration, Civil Rights organizations, and liberals. Tripp, Watson, Baker, Williams, and Gwendolyn Kemp were arrested and put on trial after they refused to publicly apologize after their outspoken endeavors. GOAL’s attorney Milton Henry represented the young group as their defense counsel until they were acquitted in May 1964 by mistrial. Luke Tripp would be detained again, briefly, for using “derogatory language” against the police force and the city’s administration. Tripp traveled with UHURU comrades and other Black radicals to meet with exile Robert Williams in Cuba in 1964. The collective traveled as a sponsored delegation by way of the Progressive Labor Party, to which UHURU and the Black radicals there made clear they were distinguished from. The meeting was to talk and plan for the possibility of forming a revolutionary nationalist network. The network identified itself as the Black Liberation Front in the United States and also the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). RAM and UHURU would come to function under the guise of a front organization, the Afro-American Student Movement (AASM). The AASM promoted RAM’s ideology and political program through a student conference on Black nationalism at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1964. UHURU members participated in a second conference titled “The National Afro-American Student Conference on Afro Youth: The Black Revolution’s Relationship to the Bandung World.” The goal of building an insurgent, nationalist movement was the highest priority. UHURU was quoted in the AASM’s newsletter, The Razor, as saying that it advocated for revolutionary nationalism. The most radicalizing event that occurred in UHURU’s path as well as that of Black organizing group in Detroit occurred in the summer of 1964. On July 5, 1964, two police officers harassed a middle-age sex worker, Cynthia Scott, and shot and killed her. Outrage climaxed in the Black community when the officers’ charges were dismissed and dropped on the grounds of self-defense. UHURU mobilized a police protest at the police headquarters on July 13. The organization also staged a large sit-in at Mayor Cavanagh’s office to demand a new and Black chief of police. Cynthia Scott became the city’s martyr, “Saint Cynthia,” and would completely reinvigorate a new wave of activism, forcing all organizations, whether liberal or militant, to restructure their political mobilization tactics and efforts. UHURU would continue radical work and, more important, would hold tightly to its core goal of working inside a Black united front, so much so that UHURU would eventually dissolve and no longer be the only umbrella its founders and members would work under. UHURU would continue its work throughout a number of organizations during the entire span of the Black Power Movement, including the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the LRBW. Nyle I. Brand

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See also: Baker, General Gordon, Jr.; Group on Advanced Leadership; Kiswahili; League of Revolutionary Black Workers; Obadele, Gaidi (Milton Henry); Revo­ lutionary Action Movement Further Reading Darden, Joe T., and Richard W. Thomas. 2013. Detroit: Race Riots, Racial Conflicts, and Efforts to Bridge the Racial Divide. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Dillard, Angela Denise. 2007. Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

United Front, The The United Front was an independent communist organization of Black youths located in South Central Los Angeles. At various times, this revolutionary group of 15 to 20 members lived as a collective in a house on 76th and San Pedro, across from Fremont High School (Stanford 2016). Members of the organization, most of whom were in their late teens and early 20s, lived, studied, and worked together to become part of the vanguard that would take state power. Their ultimate goal was to transform the capitalist government of the United States into one that operated under the principles of socialism. This highly theoretical group was founded in mid-1967 and operated for about two years. It linked Black Power and MarxismLeninism and made important contributions to the underpinnings of future Black leftist organizations. The founder of the United Front was Robaire Nyjuky, a former teacher at San Francisco State University. A supporter of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution in China, Robaire led its organizational efforts and political education classes. Second-in-command was Raymond “Masai” Hewitt, a member of the Slausons neighborhood club. Masai was known as “Bright Eyes” because of his intellectual prowess and eyeglasses. Students such as Jaheed Ashley, national guardsman John Nubi, local activist Tommy “Ndugubede” Harper, and Joseph “Yusef” Hill, a member of the Businessmen neighborhood club, also became key participants. Although the United Front was made up of predominately Black youths, it was a multiracial group that included Dianna Robertson, who was a student at Los Angeles City College of Mexican and Cuban descent, and Clotilde Blake, a Puerto Rican young lady from New York who attended California State University in Los Angeles. Young people became affiliated with the United Front for various reasons and from various backgrounds. For instance, Yusef had been politicized by his parents, who were former members of the Garvey movement in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Robertson’s father was “vocal and leftist (some say a card carrying communist) in his criticism of U.S. imperialism” (Stanford 2016). She and her



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family heard stories of daily life interpreted from a politically conscious point of view (Robertson 2016). For Yusef and Dianne, the ideas expressed by the United Front were not foreign. Other members were introduced to the ideas of combating exploitation of working-class and Third World people by the organization. As with many other Black Power organizations in South Central Los Angeles, the United Front grew out of the Watts Rebellion in 1965. Prior to the rebellion, the public persona of youths in South Central was mainly apolitical. However, after the rebellion these now emboldened young people sustained the culture of rebellion by establishing organizations to address poverty, police violence, and racism in education and government. Many of the foot soldiers who formed the basis of new political and cultural organizations were already organized into neighborhood clubs, also known as gangs. Such clubs included the Slausons, Gladiators, Pueblo Cavilors, Pueblo Condors, Outlaws and Baby Outlaws, Businessmen, Huns, Nickerson Farmers, Orientals, Baby Orientals of Imperial Courts, Compton Swamp Boys, the Hill, and the Tree Tops, among others. These clubs were largely social, although there were internal and external fist fights between members and between clubs. Few conflicts, however, were solved with guns, so murders of rival club members were rare. Members of these clubs were easy recruits for the newly created organizations because they saw the court system and prison guards as racist enemies of their communities, and therefore many directly participated in the Watts Rebellion. The United Front referred to youth activism during this period as critical practical thinking, or praxis. This awakening of working-class people’s class-conscious politics was confirmed and thus deepened in 1966, 1967, and 1968 as the thinking of these politicized Black youths evolved from racial subjectivity to objective political analysis of the government. For theoreticians in the United Front, the Watts Rebellion was considered a rational process of evolving. The year 1968 in particular vindicated Marxian theory of international proletarian revolution as Black youth revolts occurred simultaneously in 120 cities across the United States and in a global context: North Vietnamese Tet Offensive, Mexican student protests and repression in Mexico City, and the Olympics protest demonstration of Black athletes. In addition, the antiwar protests by students in Paris led to the French working classes taking to the streets in the French May–June workers’ General Strike. Although Marxist-Leninist liberation of the urban working class formed the basis of leftist ideology, the United Front emphasized Maoism because it highlighted exploitation of peasant farmers. United Front theorists were also attracted to Maoism because Malcolm X had spoken approvingly of the Chinese Revolution; W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife had an affinity for China, evidenced by their photos taken with Mao Zedong. A photograph of North Carolina National Association for the Advancement of Colored People leader Robert F. Williams, who had been

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exiled in China, was also widely distributed in the Black community. The photo featured Williams and Mao both dressed in army fatigues. Moreover, Mao had made several statements in support of the “just” struggle of Negro people in their fight against racial segregation and repression. He also denounced the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. as an act of imperialist violence. The attraction to Mao by multicultural youths in South Central Los Angeles must also be understood within the context of American culture. Many who became rebels and revolutionaries were raised along with the rest of the baby boom generation in the 1950s and early 1960s. The culture of anticommunism and Cold War propaganda was drummed into the heads of children. In grammar school, children had to participate in nuclear war bomb drills, hiding under desks with their backs to classroom windows. There was the news media propaganda agency “reporting” on Sputnik and Soviet military parades showing off nuclear bomb– carrying missiles, and Nikita Khrushchev nightly on TV news was denounced as a communist dictator. Protestant churches called him the Antichrist. Newsreels in theaters were voiced over videos of Khrushchev at the United Nations General Assembly, presenting him as a madman, as he beat his fists on delegation tables and at the podium. Then there was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 during which Soviet missiles were installed in Cuba. For youths who embraced communism, it was much easier to associate with Mao because he was a man of color and was Chinese. Although the Black United Front was independent, it was politically associated with the interracial Communist Party USA, whose local headquarters was located in a leftist bookstore in Watts at 92nd and Beach. The United Front also collaborated with other groups on significant projects. For instance, Clotilde and Jaheed joined in organizing the Western Regional Black Youth Conference in Los Angeles in 1967. Upon entering the United Front’s public spaces, separated from its family housing spaces, one was greeted by big Chinese-delivered posters with portraits of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao. The United Front likened its to the Vietcong and Chinese Liberation Army, and its members wore a uniform patterned after the army clothes of the Red Guard in China. Obviously, to join the United Front one had to be completely free from the fear of communism. The multiracial character of the United Front was rooted in Marxist ideology and the assertion that poverty in the United States is not and has not ever been restricted to African Americans. While living in New Jersey, Clotilde grew up in a middle-class neighborhood where Blacks, whites, and Latinos lived together in integrated neighborhoods. She had Black teachers and was exposed to professionals of many races. “It wasn’t until I began to work at a full-time job after high school graduation (1961) that I began to see how there was a separation of workers and housing” (Blake 2016).



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Dianne was raised in Lincoln Heights, the first suburb of Los Angeles. Her early friends were mostly Mexican families newly emigrated from Mexico, but her family had acquaintances with some Japanese, Italian, and Chinese families. The United Front believed that the “racial separation of communities evolved differently based on exploitation levels.” Moreover, the racialist category of singling oppression to just one segment of the working class was seen as a ploy by the government, its politicians, and the media to separate Black workers from white and other minority workers for ideological manipulation. Accordingly, the original rednecks were not rabid racists, as suggested in contemporary American culture, but instead were communist (red) miners in open rebellion fighting the government. They wore red bandanas. Mao’s Little Red Book formed the basis of the United Front’s ideology. The organizational name “United Front” came from Mao’s pamphlet United Front against Japan. Members were also required to read, memorize, and recite from The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, The State and Revolution by Lenin, and Mao’s four essays on philosophy: On Contradiction, On Practice, Where Do Correct Ideas Come From, and Combat Liberalism. Anti-Soviet propaganda of the Cold War was present to the extent that it was part of the Maoist doctrine of Soviet revisionism. The group was unified in its distrust of the Russian state and Stalinism, which the group also saw as imperialistic. In some cases, the new vessel of anti-Sovietism was that the Soviet Communist Party wasn’t revolutionary enough. The activities of the United Front centered on teaching, studying, and spreading the rationale for societal transformation. Members participated in weekly study groups and recruited new prospects when visiting schools, colleges, and universities and at community events. Throughout the activist community, people often visited the commune, especially to attend the political education classes. Because Fremont High School was across the street, students were frequent visitors. Wellknown activists included Students for a Democratic Society leader Tom Hayden, who visited as well. United Front members participated in the counterculture lifestyle of the 1960s. For instance, they considered monogamy as being bourgeois and demonstrated that view in their alternative lifestyle. Self-determination for African and other Third World peoples was an essential principle for the United Front. The group agreed with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s position that the African American community constituted a nation based on its shared culture, belief, history, and values. This oppressed nation deserved liberation, with land based in the five states in the Black Belt South of the United States. This position, popularly known as the Black Belt thesis, would later become associated with the Republic of New Africa. The United Front’s ideas were in direct opposition to cultural nationalists like the Us organization and the Sons of Watts, both of which they compared to the

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Kuomintang in China. The United Front opposed government agencies and the funders of Black organizations in South Central Los Angeles that had emerged after the Watts Rebellion. Promoting the idea that “one cannot defeat U.S. imperialism by collaborating with its agents,” the United Front therefore disagreed with groups such as the government-funded Young Men for Total Democracy and SelfLeadership for All Nationalities Today, both promoters of the Watts Summer Festival. They further denounced the festival and similar initiatives as government-supported “darky carnivals” and organized protests at the festival, calling on festival goers to instead return to the original rebellious spirit of the Watts Rebellion. In contrast to organizations that emphasized ancient Africa and white skin privilege, which the United Front perceived as nonconfrontational and safe career-advancing positions, the group called for the building of a militant classbased movement. Under the banner of the August 11th Movement, the United Front called on Black organizations to focus their efforts on commemorating the initial Watts Rebellion and its martyrs instead of dancing in the slave quarters at the darky carnival. The militant stance of the United Front made it unwelcome at some community events and sometimes resulted in direct public confrontations in local parks and at other events. One of the most noted confrontations between members of the United Front and those they considered collaborators with the government occurred at the Western Regional Youth Conference in Los Angeles over Thanksgiving weekend in 1967. Held in the auditorium of Jefferson High School, the conference was attended by 800 people and was made up of students, Black preachers, politicians, professors, businessmen, Democrats, and cultural nationalists. Presenters included James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the poet Amiri Baraka, and Maulana Karenga, founder and leader of the Us organization. The theme of the conference, “Liberation Will Come from a Black Thing,” was inspired by the Black Power Conference held in Newark. United Front members picketed the conference but were forced to leave by the Simbas, the security apparatus for the Us organization, as they sought to enter the conference and express their critiques of its class collaborationist character. Upon returning to its home base at the building located across the street from Fremont High School, the United Front experienced internal contradictions that emerged and engendered its end. Several attempts at reviving the United Front occurred, but none succeeded. Law enforcement came down on these infant organizations like a ton of bricks. Socialist and communist parties were hard hit and as a result were isolated and subjected to ruthless repression. Still, many of its cadres remained involved in Black Power and class-based activism. Bunchy Carter, minister of defense of the Southern California branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP), had developed a close relationship with Robaire and the United Front. Carter recruited both Yusef and Masai to serve as part of its underground activities because of the many threats



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to those operating aboveground. After Bunchy’s death in January 1969, Masai assumed the position of minister of education in the Southern California chapter. The leadership of the BPP was so impressed with Masai’s analytical skills that he was eventually appointed to the Central Committee in Oakland as the minister of education. Masai’s Maoist thrust is credited with assisting in the ideological transformation of the BPP. The United Front was an important demonstration of young activists’ attempt to connect participants on the revolutionary side of the class struggle in the Black Power era with Chicano, Asian American, and Native American Civil Rights Movements; the antiwar movement; French working-class general strikes; and Third World movements such as the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutionaries. United Front members regarded themselves as revolutionaries participating in a world revolution—what Fred Hampton called an international proletarian revolution. They demonstrated to other young people an alternative way of living and ideologically challenged nationalist-oriented Black Power organizations to consider the importance of economic class in their analysis. Joseph Johnson See also: Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Black Panther Party; Carter, Alprentice “Bunchy” Further Reading Blake, Clotilde. 2016. Communication with Joseph Johnson, September 10. Forman, James. 1972. The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Johnson, Joe, and Karin Stanford. 2016. Interview with Harry Carry, Los Angeles, December 11. Robertson, Dianna. 2016. Communication with Joseph Johnson, September 10. Stanford, Karin. 2016. Interview with Yusef Hill, Los Angeles, December 11. Tyler, Bruce. 1983. “Black Radicalism in Southern California: 1950–1982.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.

Us Organization The organization Us grew out of the ideological and practical struggles of the 1960s to become one of the major Black Power organizations and is one of the few that remains active today. From its earliest beginning to the present, Us has advocated Black liberation through cultural revolution and radical social change, defining itself as a revolutionary vanguard, a tightly organized, disciplined, and culturally grounded organization serving the people, building the movement, and waging

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righteous struggle. The name Us, which was chosen for the new organization is not an acronym. It simply means “Us, Black people, African people.” It was selected to stress focus on and commitment to Black people, to signify the communitarian and cooperative character of its thought and practice, and to indicate an oppositional stance toward “them,” the oppressors. Us was founded on September 7, 1965, by Maulana Karenga, who left the doctoral program at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) to join and help build the emerging Black Power Movement. Karenga, who also served as professor and chair of the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and executive director of the African American Cultural Center (Us), served as chair of Us for most of its more than 50 years of existence. And thus, he has been decisive in its founding and its development into a major activist organization in the Black radical tradition. Us is also the organizational context in which Karenga created and introduced Kwanzaa and the Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles). Kwanzaa, a Pan-African holiday, is a celebration of family, community, and culture observed by millions throughout the world African community and reflects both its roots in ancient African first fruit harvest celebrations and the Black freedom movement of the 1960s in its principles and concepts (Karenga 2016b). The Nguzo Saba, which are at the heart of Kwanzaa, serve as cultural grounding and value orientation for millions of African people and various organizations and institutions. These principles are umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity), and imani (faith) and call forth a communal practice of cultural grounding, community building, and liberation struggle. Through its philosophy of kawaida, leadership, and practical initiatives, Us has played a significant role in Black cultural, intellectual, and political history since the 1960s even though most of the Black Power histories do not reveal this. Indeed, Us has played a key role in every major African-centered movement since the 1960s: Black Arts, Black Power, Black studies, Black student unions, Black liberation theology, independent schools, rites of passage, Afrocentricity, ancient Egyptian studies, the Million Person Marches, and the reparations movement. Having called a group of young men and women to his apartment to found Us, Karenga laid out the fundamental tenets of his philosophy of kawaida and invited them to join him in building a vanguard Black nationalist organization dedicated to Black liberation. Heavily influenced by Malcolm X, Karenga stressed the need to continue and expand Malcolm’s legacy. Therefore, he incorporated many tenets of Malcolm’s teachings in kawaida and referenced him often, especially in the early years of the organization. An article in the New York Times on September 27, 1966, noted that “Mr. Karenga often refers to the preaching of the late Black nationalist, Malcolm X, in much the same way Malcolm X quoted the Black Muslim leader, Elijah Muhammad, years ago.” Summing up this position, Karenga states

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that “We had stood up seeing ourselves as descendants of Malcolm with an awesome obligation to wage the revolution he had conceived and called for” (Karenga 2008a, 17). Us’s philosophy of kawaida developed by Karenga is defined as “an ongoing synthesis of the best of African thought and practice in constant exchange with the world” (Karenga 2008a, 3). In this ongoing synthesis, in addition to Malcolm’s thought, kawaida also draws from and builds on concepts and ideas from several other major African continental and diasporan revolutionaries and liberation leaders and theorists including Sékou Touré, Julius Nyerere, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, and Robert Williams. In its later development with a self-conscious egalitarian emphasis, kawaida also borrows from and builds on writings of womanist liberation leaders and theorists such as Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and others. Key among these ideas that developed were nationalism, re-Africanization, cultural and political revolution, socialism, self-defense and armed struggle, Pan-Africanism, Third World unity and struggle, internationalism, egalitarian male/female relations, and liberation as an inclusive process and practice. Us advocates (members) do not distinguish between revolutionary and cultural nationalists and define themselves as both revolutionaries and cultural nationalists. Indeed, they argued, following Malcolm, that a real nationalist is by definition a revolutionary, given the context of oppression and the requirement of revolutionary struggle to end it. Also, they accepted Malcolm X’s call for a cultural revolution that would free the minds and hearts of the people and commit them to a culture of struggle for national liberation. In this regard, kawaida revolutionary cultural nationalism is defined as thought and practice rooted in three basic propositions: (1) the defining feature of a people or nation is its culture; (2) for a people to be itself and free itself, it must be self-conscious, selfdetermining and rooted in its own culture; and (3) the quality of life of a people and the success of their liberation struggle depends on their waging cultural revolution within and political revolution without, resulting in a radical restructuring of self, society and ultimately impacting the world. (Karenga 2016a, 14) Stressing service, work, institution building, organizing, and struggle, Us worked to establish and cofound the Brotherhood Crusade, a Black funding institution, and the Mafundi Institute, an institution for artistic education, collaboration, and performance; coplanned and struggled in alliance with other organizations and institutions to establish the Kedren Community Mental Health Center and the

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Watts Health Foundation; and coplanned, named, and worked to build Ujima Village, a major housing project for working-class and low-income people. Putting into practice the kawaida principle of operational unity, Us was central to building Black United Front organizations and initiatives locally and nationally. In Los Angeles, Us cofounded and played leadership roles in the Temporary Alliance of Community Organizations, which established the Community Alert Patrol to monitor and check police violence. Us was also fundamental in the development of the Operational Unity Committee in the wake of the martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr.; and the Black Congress, a broad-based activist united front that dealt with a range of social issues from police violence, union relations, voter education, and draft resistance to employment and business. Us also aided in building Black united fronts such as the Pan-African Congress in Dayton and the Black Federation in San Diego. Furthermore, Us worked in alliance with numerous groups around critical issues. It was engaged in ongoing struggles for quality education in public schools, working with parents, educators, and education advocacy groups such as the United Parents Council, and worked for welfare women and children with the Welfare Rights Organization in its formative years and with unions on various educational and organizational projects. Building on the teachings of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, Us worked to build Pan-African initiatives, sponsoring African students and exiles; engaging in cultural exchanges; sponsoring Pan-African projects for Africa, Haiti, the Garifuna of Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua; and supporting the liberation struggles of the nations and peoples of the African continent. Karenga also made numerous trips internationally, leading delegations to Africa, Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad, Canada, Mexico, China, and England to build and strengthen relationships and present kawaida views on critical issues, in lectures, meetings, and paper presentations at conferences and symposia. Stressing Third World solidarity, Karenga taught Black/brown organizing, politics, and political education at the Social Action Training Center in Los Angeles and at the Center for Social Action, University of Southern California, and established an Olmec Club in which Spanish and the history of Afro-Mexican alliances and common-ground struggles were taught. Also, Us built alliances and engaged in cooperative and supportive activities with organizations such as the Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres, the Brown Berets, the Crusade for Justice, and the United Farm Workers. Moreover, Us was one of the signatories of the Treaty of Peace, Harmony and Mutual Assistance, initiated by Alianza and signed by representatives from the African American, Mexican, and Hopi peoples. On the international level, Us supported not only African liberation struggles but also the liberation struggles of the Third World as a whole, especially the struggles of Cuba, Palestine, and Vietnam. Us held forums, classes, rallies, and demonstrations in support of these struggles and resisted the draft and what it saw as a racist and imperialist war in Vietnam.



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As a result of its revolutionary philosophy and activities, Us and Karenga were placed on various lists of surveillance and suppression by local and national police and intelligence organizations. These included projects of surveillance and suppression from local police and army intelligence agencies in proposals such as “Cable Splicer” and “Garden Plot” and especially the most damaging, the notorious Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) designed to divide, disrupt, discredit, and otherwise neutralize and destroy the Black liberation movement. Us and Karenga were placed on every government list of surveillance and suppression that every other revolutionary and radical group was placed on, including the Nation of Islam (NOI), the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Revo­ lutionary Action Movement, and others. FBI memos and reports stated that “subject [Maulana Karenga] is a key figure on both the SI [Security Index]” and the Agitator Index and that he and Us were “armed and dangerous”; that Us “plans for a revolution . . . is currently training members in revolutionary tactics and is currently storing arms”; that Us is an “organization whose aims include overthrow or destruction of the U.S. by unlawful means”; and that the FBI should “intensify” counterintelligence measures against Us, including character assassination against Karenga to destroy his reputation in the movement (FBI 1968/1973). And in another memo dated as late as January 23, 1975, the FBI claimed that it had information indicating Us involvement in activities that could involve violations of Title 18, U.S. Code Section 2383 (Rebellion and Insurrection), Section 2384 (Seditious Conspiracy), Section 2385 (Advocating Overthrow of the Government), Title 22 U.S. Code, Section 401 and 1934 (Neutrality Matters), and/or Title 18 U.S. Code, Chapter 12, Section 231 (AntiRiot Laws). Us was subject to constant harassment, imprisonment, and attacks by the FBI’s COINTELPRO such as those directed against the NOI, Black Panthers, the Republic of New Africa, SNCC, and other groups and leaders considered to be security threats. The disastrous provocation of the violent struggle between Us and the Panthers culminated in the 1969 shootout at UCLA between some Simba Wachanga (Young Lions) of Us and members of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Although it was argued for some time that Us “assassinated” the two Panthers killed in the shootout, Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt, former deputy minister of defense of the Los Angeles BPP, reaffirmed in an interview that the Panthers shot first and the Simbas responded, leading to two Panthers being killed and one Simba shot in the back. Us maintains that the trial that followed was conducted in the midst of fear and hysteria and that the Simbas could not have gotten a fair trial and were wrongly convicted as part of COINTELPRO. Others charged were forced into exile and underground.

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Actually, Us and the Panthers shared similarities, beginning with their selfdefinition as a revolutionary vanguard. In addition, they both advocated the right of self-defense against police and vigilante violence and armed resistance against oppression; anticapitalism, anticolonialism and anti-imperialism; community service programs; draft resistance; Third World alliance and common struggle; reparations; and active commitment to the people and the liberation struggle. And both were victims of FBI and police surveillance and suppression. However, they also differed. Us opposed the BPP’s bringing whites back into the Black movement when SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality, and other former integrationist organizations, as a matter of self-determination, had asked them to leave and go work in their own community. It was Us’s original and continuing position, following Malcolm X (1965a, 372), that whites should work primarily where the racists and capitalists are, that is, “on the battlelines . . . in their own home communities.” Disagreement also revolved around the indispensable role of culture and cultural revolution; race versus class; the centrality of Africa and PanAfricanism; African socialism versus Marxism; guerrilla warfare versus what Us saw as “Custer stands” by the Panthers (i.e., open engagement with a superior force); the centrality of Black studies versus class studies; and developing one’s own revolutionary theory rooted in one’s own reality versus importing slogans and theories from others. However, these were ideological differences; it was police provocation that helped turn ideological struggles into violent ones. Influenced by the writings of Malcolm X, Robert Williams. and Frantz Fanon on the right and responsibility of self-defense and armed resistance, Us organized itself as a self-defense and security unit, and the Simba Wachanga was central to this. The Simba Wachanga was a youth movement and a kind of rite of passage program for young men in high school and college. They not only trained in the martial arts, weaponry, and strategy, but also provided community service and security for various community groups, served as kasisi (priests) for advocates (members) in captivity (jail or prison), and engaged in community education, mobilization, and organization projects. Although the Simbas were men, some women of Us also trained and worked with Simba Wachanga on various security projects and later would form a women’s security component called the Matamba during the period of organizational crisis, occasioned by increased government suppression. As the men in Us were being constantly imprisoned and forced underground and in exile, a strong leadership by women emerged transforming the discourse and practice of male/female relations from male dominance toward egalitarian relationships. This transformation had been initiated by the women of Us before the crisis but was accelerated by it. A seminal article in 1966 by the Malaika, the women of Us, titled “View from the Women’s Side of the Circle” reflects this internal dialogue and transformation. Stressing the principle of ujima (collective

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work and responsibility), the women of Us insisted on and won relations of equality, mutual respect, and shared responsibility in life, love, and struggles. Karenga (2016a) builds on this dialogue in his writings in the early 1970s reaffirming the organizational commitment to these principles and their practice, especially in the essay titled “Towards a Greater Togetherness in Love and Struggle.” The Malaika not only assume leadership in administrative and organizational representation, but also built a security and self-defense unit as a counterpart to the Simba called the Matamba, named after the women warriors of Queen Nzinga Mbande of Angola. Also, the women of Us developed a kawaida womanism as a foundation and framework for expressing and asserting themselves in relations, life, and struggles (Karenga and Tembo 2012). Us stands unique as one of the few major Black Power organizations that has survived government suppression, internal disruption, political opposition, and ongoing negative propaganda and continues to be active and productive, even after the decline and collapse of the Black liberation movement. Having gone underground for a brief period using other names, Us reemerged to rebuild and expand its relationships and programs in the community as well as coalitions and alliances with other radical and progressive groups. Us continues its initiatives in education, mobilization, organization, confrontation, and transformative struggle. Its institutions and programs include the African American Cultural Center; the Limbiko Tembo School of African American Culture; Majando (rites of passage) programs; the Kawaida Institute of Pan-African Studies; the Senut Sisterhood and Senu Brotherhood Societies; the Mateka (Captives) Support Committee; the Coalition in Solidarity with Haiti; the Timbuktu Book Circle; the Black Community, Clergy and Labor Alliance; a Black United Front; and various ongoing initiatives in support of Africa and Haiti as well as other cooperative projects with various religious, labor, political, and economic organizations and institutions. And in its latest literature, Us reaffirms its commitment to its original mission of Black liberation through cultural revolution and radical and revolutionary social change and “joining other oppressed and struggling peoples in the world encompassing [the] task of opening the horizon for a new history of humankind” (Karenga 2016a, 6). Maulana Karenga See also: Black Panther Party; Cultural Nationalism; Fanon, Frantz; Karenga, Maulana; Kawaida; Kwanzaa; Malcolm X; Pratt, Geronimo ji-Jaga; Revolutionary Nationalism Further Reading FBI. 1968/1973. Maulana Karenga File, 157–7244, memos dated 2/21/68 and 1/24/73. Karenga, Maulana. 1967. The Quotable Karenga, Los Angeles: Us Organization.

800 | Us Organization Karenga, Maulana. 2007. “Us, Kawaida and the Black Liberation Movement in the 1960’s: Culture, Knowledge and Struggle.” In Engines of the Black Power Movement, edited by James L. Conyers Jr., 95–133. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Karenga, Maulana. 2008a. Kawaida and Questions of Life and Struggle. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2008b. Kwanzaa, A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2016a. Essays on Struggle: Position and Analysis. Los Angeles: Sankore Press. Karenga, Maulana. 2016b. The Message and Meaning of Kwanzaa: Bringing Good into the World. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Karenga, Tiamoyo, and Chimbuko Tembo. 2012. “Kawaida Womanism: African Ways of Being Human in the World.” Western Journal of Black Studies 36(1): 33–47. Kitwana, Bakari. 1998. “A Soldier’s Story.” The Source (February 19): 130–132. Malaika, The. 1969. “View from the Women’s Side of the Circle.” Harambee 1(1) (April 25): 4. Malcolm X. 1965a. Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove. Malcolm X. 1965b. Malcolm X Speaks, New York: Merit Publishers. Malcolm X. 1970. By Any Means Necessary. New York: Pathfinder.

V Vietnam War Black Power activists opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam from the beginning. Following World War II, the Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower administrations supported France’s attempt to retake Indochina as a means of securing French cooperation in the Cold War against communism. Attempted French reoccupation began in 1946, and by the early 1950s the United States was financing more than 80 percent of France’s related war costs. In contrast to the Cold War consensus among U.S. top-level officials, advocates of Black Power saw the Viet Minh, the lead Vietnamese liberation movement, as part of the many Third World liberation wars against European imperialism and white supremacy. In 1954, Malcolm X told an audience that the Vietnamese were one of the “darker races” in the “tidal wave” that was smashing European imperialism. Black nationalists also admired Asian revolutionary intellectuals such as Ho Chi Minh for doing the critical work of uniting Vietnam’s large peasant class and combative nationalist factions into an effective movement. In 1964, Malcolm X praised their efforts as an example of the type of nationalist movement that Blacks would have to wage for their complete liberation. He told an audience “Why some rice farmers, some rice farmers, some rice eaters ran [the United States] out of Korea. Yes, they ran him out of Korea. Rice eaters with nothing but gym shoes, and a rifle, and a bowl of rice took him and his tanks and his napalm, and all that other action he’s supposed to have and ran him across the Yalu. Why? ’Cause the day that he can win on the ground has passed. Up in French Indo-China those little peasants, rice growers, took on the might of the French army and ran all the Frenchmen . . . you remember Dien Bien Phu,” the decisive Viet Minh victory that forced France to begin withdrawal from Indochina in 1954. Using this anecdote, Malcolm X underscored Black nationalists’ arguments that the Black conditions would only be improved through a revolutionary struggle to control their communities. Following French withdrawal, the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel north with the Viet Minh, supported by the communist Chinese and the Soviet Union, governing North Vietnam. The American- and French-backed government was based in South Vietnam. Both sides agreed to elections in 1956 that would unite the country, but North Vietnamese–supported raids in South Vietnam’s countryside, the communist buildup in North Vietnam, and the terms insisted upon by South Vietnam caused the agreement to lapse. By late 1956

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U.S. Army private first class Jerome Alexander and Sp4c. George Lightfoot, Company B, 2d Battalion, 1st Infantry, 196th Light Brigade, engage in a search and destroy mission some six miles west of the city of Tay Ninh. Members of the African American community frequently critiqued U.S. involvement in the Viet­ nam War. (National Archives)

skirmishes degenerated into war, with the United States wholesale supporting the South Vietnamese military and government. In an attempt to topple South Vietnam before the United States could enter the war, the Ho Chi Minh–founded Viet Minh formed the National Liberation Front (NLF) in 1960. Made up of communists, noncommunists, and other dissenters of Western imperialism, by 1963 the NLF was militarily threatening force. In search of an effective solution, between 1961 and 1963 President John F. Kennedy increased the U.S. military presence in Vietnam from 400 “advisers” to more than 16,000 soldiers and consented to a coup of South Vietnam’s increasingly unpopular dictator, Ngo Dinh Deim. The next year, fearful that the Republicans would characterize Democrats as soft on communism to derail his bid for the presidency, President Lyndon Johnson ordered U.S. bombing of military targets in North Vietnam and committed to increasing the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam to 125,000 by the end of 1965. Johnson’s rapid escalation of a war in a nation that most Americans had never heard of was shocking to the citizenry and was therefore met by an equally rapid antiwar peace movement. Led by students, pacifists, leftists, and religious groups, the movement countered the government’s claims that securing Vietnam was critical to affirming allies and preventing the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. They also argued that the United States had no vital interests in Vietnam, and thus U.S. involvement in the war was unnecessary. The antiwar movement called on the Civil Rights Movement, a leading moral authority after forcing Congress to legislate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to condemn the war. Although a few prominent



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activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., issued personal condemnations of the war, other prominent Civil Rights leaders remained silent or tacitly endorsed the war. Veteran Black activists understood that criticism of U.S. Cold War foreign policy could lead to anticommunist persecution and compromise their fundraising. Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for instance, sheepishly explained that foreign policy was a not proper realm that the movement should critique. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the leading Black student activist organization, however, almost immediately condemned the war. In January 1965, a SNCC position paper leaked to the media criticized the U.S. government’s stated goals of fostering democracy in Vietnam as deceitful. The paper argued that the history of the government’s domestic policies and actions demonstrated that it had not fully committed to ensuring democracy for its own minorities, and therefore its stated goals to do so in Vietnam was a ruse to terminate a Vietnamese nationalist movement that would not commit to the U.S. Cold War agendas. SNCC, like other Black nationalists and organizations, was isolated financially and politically but continued to develop its critique of U.S. foreign policy as often racist and imperialistic. Robert S. Browne, a mentor to SNCC activists and a foreign aid adviser in Vietnam during the 1950s, articulated their full position in an influential 1965 critique that criticized the United States for ignoring widespread Vietnamese sentiment that a nationalist government, even if led by communists, was preferable to a puppet government backed by Westerners who had supported their colonizers. He also predicted that increasing awareness and support of African liberation efforts by African Americans would result in further opposition to U.S. policy regarding Vietnam, putting their communities and intellectuals at odds with the government. The impact of the draft on Black communities bore Browne’s analysis as prophetic. As Johnson escalated the war, the U.S. military encountered a manpower crisis and expanded the draft. In early 1966, the Department of Defense and Selective Services announced Project 100,000, which lowered the aptitude standards for military service and resulted in making hundreds of thousands of additional males eligible for military service. Black communities argued that they were being victimized by racism again because the lower standards made those Blacks who previously failed to achieve an adequate aptitude score now eligible for the draft. Many Blacks had been educated in southern Jim Crow areas or in urban underfunded, de facto segregated schools. Their resulting low educational attainment levels and racism labeled them unqualified for college and job deferments from military service. The same factor, however, now made them eligible for military service. The Johnson administration touted Project 100,000 as an antipoverty and antiriot measure that created jobs and provided skills training for a poor marginalized segment of the populace, but the numbers of Blacks and

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minorities drafted further provided evidence of racial discrimination. From 1966 to 1971, minorities were drafted at an approximately two-to-one ratio compared to whites, and although less than 13 percent of the population, Blacks composed approximately 40 percent of new enlisted men in the period. By 1968, 23 percent of U.S. combat troops in Vietnam were Black. The issue attracted particular attention in early 1967 because of the state’s persecution of heavyweight boxing champion and Nation of Islam minister Muhammad Ali, who refused induction in the draft and was subsequently convicted of evasion and stripped of the title. Ali defiantly declared that as a person of color, he would not fight for his oppressors in a war against another people of color. It would take Ali four years in the courts to overturn the conviction. In that time he became the world’s most prominent symbol of minority opposition to the war, white supremacy, and imperialism. The impact of the draft increased Black involvement in the antiwar movement and deepened Black analysis of the relationship between racism, poverty, and imperialism. In early 1968, SNCC activists led the founding of the National Anti-War and Anti-Draft Union, which distributed literature on the impact of war on Black communities and women; organized rallies in New York City and Washington, D.C.; and advised on how to evade the draft. Although the union supported the mainstream antiwar movement as significant, union leader Gwen Patton explained that antiBlack discrimination and Western imperialism were variants of white supremacy and thus issued explicit support for the NLF. This kind of sentiment was pervasive among Black nationalists and progressives. The 1967 national Black Power Conference passed several resolutions calling for evading the draft and supporting the Vietnamese. The Black Panther Party termed the Vietnamese part of the vanguard of the workers’ revolution against Western-implemented racist capitalism and volunteered to send the NLF men and military assistance. The devastating impact of the war on Black communities also motivated progressive liberals to transgress the Cold War consensus and join the antiwar movement. In April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a scathing exculpatory critique of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In addition to criticizing the government for using antipoverty funds to fight an unnecessary war, he noted that it was a psychotic symptom of white supremacy to ask Black men to fight to secure liberties in another country that they did not enjoy in their own. It was equally unreasonable to expect the Vietnamese people to trust a foreign government culpable in the massive numbers of Vietnamese deaths over the last two decades that also disregarded the Vietnamese people’s support of their own revolutionary nationalist movement. As significant, King briefly considered joining the Peace and Freedom Party’s ticket for the presidency, which was a bold plot to interject a major antiwar candidate in a field of committed cold warriors. King’s antiwar advocacy portended a merger of the various elements of the Black freedom struggle and the mainstream liberal antiwar movement. It also attracted significant attention from the state, including the executive branch and the



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Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In mid-1967, state repression led by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies had a devastating impact on Black antiwar activists. For instance, local all-white draft boards, especially in the South, were allowed to use the draft to rid their locales of Black activists. At least 16 SNCC-associated activists defied draft notices in 1968 alone, and several of them, including Cleveland Sellers, were temporarily jailed. Others, including Bob Moses and John Lewis, defied threats to end their work or be drafted. In 1967, the Georgia House of Representatives refused to seat SNCC’s Julian Bond because he refused to disavow SNCC’s antiwar stance. These machinations coincided with increased FBI Counterintelligence Program repression of the Black Power Movement in general, and by the end of 1969, with most of its nationally known activists engrossed in legal proceedings, in jail, or underground, the National Anti-War and Anti-Draft Union had all but ceased activity. Additionally, in the absence of King, who was assassinated on April 4, 1968, the vast majority of the liberal antiwar movement did not incorporate the Black movement’s critique of U.S. involvement in Vietnam as imperialism. At several antiwar and new politics conferences, liberals rejected Black and leftist positions that opposition to war must expand to condemn all U.S. support of imperialism and white settler regimes, such as Israel and South Africa, and that New Politics included rejecting liberal reformist class-based agendas devoid of race and imperialism. Jim Forman, a prominent SNCC administrator and activist, spoke for Black nationalists and progressives when he told several conference audiences that he expected the U.S. government to imminently send troops to Southern Africa to help defeat the indigenous liberation movements fighting against the white fascist governments in the region because they were U.S. Cold War allies. He also chastised the mainstream labor movement for not representing the agenda of African workers and peoples being exploiting by U.S. companies abroad. The Black radical movement, Forman declared, was ready to take up arms and aid Third World movements and saw no difference between reformist liberals and whites who were not. For the remainder of the war, the larger antiwar movement effectively tabled or outright rejected such Black radical positions, although many Black activists continued to work within the larger movement and organize locally and independently. Although isolated for the remainder of the war, the Black antiwar movement influenced the Black freedom struggle by fostering future Black critiques of U.S. foreign policy that the government and political establishment would have to consider. Black antiwar activism also produced Black activist veterans such as Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt, who contributed significantly to the movement as a member of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and Wallace Terry, who edited the book Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War; An Oral History, which contributed to ideas about experiences of Black soldiers who have fought in U.S. wars. Dexter L. Blackman

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See also: Black Panther Party; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Further Reading Browne, Robert S. 1973. “The Freedom Movement and the War in Vietnam.” In Vietnam and Black America: An Anthology of Protest and Resistance, edited by Clyde Taylor, 61–79. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Hall, Simon. 2005. Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. King, Martin Luther, Jr. 2015. “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” In The Radical King, edited by Cornel West, 201–220. Boston: Beacon. Terry, Wallace. 1984. Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. New York: Ballantine.

Primary Document Shirley Chisholm, “The Conflict in Vietnam,” 1969 In a crisp first address to Congress, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn, New York, the nation’s first Black female congressional representative, stated her opposition to funding of an antiballistic missile system at the cost of defunding Head Start. As a former teacher, Chisholm was an advocate for child care, food stamps, and the Women, Infants and Children program. She joined the chorus of African Americans individuals and organizations that openly criticized the Vietnam War and its rising expenditures for sophisticated weaponry, which cut into federal investment in social programs. Chisholm served on the Committee on Education and Labor and Veteran Affairs. As a well-known advocate of racial groups and women, Chisholm became a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus and the National Women’s Political Caucus. In 1972, she campaigned for the presidency of the United States. On the same day President Nixon announced he had decided the United States will not be safe unless we start to build a defense system against missiles, the Head Start program in the District of Columbia was cut back for lack of money. As a teacher, and as a woman, I do not think I will ever understand what kind of values can be involved in spending nine billion dollars—and more, I



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am sure—on elaborate, unnecessary, and impractical weapons when several thousand disadvantaged children in the nation’s capital get nothing. When the new administration took office, I was one of the many Americans who hoped it would mean that our country would benefit from the fresh perspectives, the new ideas, the different priorities of a leader who had no part in its mistakes of the past. Mr. Nixon had said things like this: “If our cities are to be livable for the next generation, we can delay no longer in launching new approaches to the problems that beset them and to the tensions that tear them apart.” . . . Apparently, launching those new programs can be delayed for a while, after all. It seems we have to get some missiles launched first. . . . Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird came to Capitol Hill, too. His mission was to sell the antiballistic-missile insanity to the Senate. He was asked what the new administration is doing about the war . . . Mr. Laird talked of being prepared to spend at least two more years in Vietnam. Two more years, two more years of hunger for Americans, of death for our best young men, of children here at home suffering a lifelong handicap of not having a good education when they are young. Two more years of high taxes collected to feed the cancerous growth of a Defense Department budget that now consumes two-thirds of our federal income. Two more years of too little being done to fight our greatest enemies, poverty, prejudice and neglect here in our own country. Two more years of fantastic waste in the Defense Department and of penny pinching on social programs. Our country cannot survive two more years, or four, of these kinds of policies. It must stop—this year—now. Now I am not a pacifist. I am deeply, unalterably opposed to this war in Vietnam. Apart from all the other considerations, and they are many, the main fact is that we cannot squander there the lives, the money, the energy that we need desperately here in our cities, in our schools. I wonder whether we cannot reverse our whole approach to spending. For years, we have given the military, the defense industry, a blank check. New weapons systems are dreamed up, billions are spent, and many times they are found to be impractical, inefficient, unsatisfactory, even worthless. What do we do then? We spend more money on them. But with social programs, what do we do? Take the Job Corps. Its failures have been mercilessly exposed and criticized. If it had been a military research and development project, they would have been covered up or explained away, and Congress would have been ready to pour more billions after those that had been wasted on it. . . .

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We Americans have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are the good guys, everywhere, in Vietnam, Latin America, wherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too. When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation’s slums, maintains them, and profits by them, white America would not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies of poverty and racism in our own country and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed as hypocrites in the eyes of the world when we talk about making other people free. I am deeply disappointed at the clear evidence that the number-one priority of the new administration is to buy more and more weapons of war, to return to the era of the Cold War, to ignore the war we must fight here—the war that is not optional. There is only one way, I believe, to turn these policies around. The Congress can respond to the mandate that the American people have clearly expressed. They have said, “End this war. Stop the waste. Stop the killing. Do something for our own people first.” We must find the money to “launch the new approaches,” as Mr. Nixon said. We must force the administration to rethink its distorted, unreal scale of priorities. Our children, our jobless men, our deprived, rejected, and starving fellow citizens must come first. For this reason, I intend to vote “No” on every money bill that comes to the floor of this House that provides any fund for the Department of Defense. Any bill whatsoever, until the time comes when our values and priorities have turned right side up again, until monstrous waste and the shocking profits in the defense budget are eliminated and our country starts to use its strength, its tremendous resources, for people and peace, not for profits and war. It was Calvin Coolidge I believe who made the comment that “the business of America is business.” We are now spending $80 billion a year on defense— that is two-thirds of every tax dollar. At this time, gentlemen, the business of America is war, and it is time for a change. Source: Shirley Chisholm, “The Conflict in Vietnam,” Congressional Record, 115 Congress Rec. H7765 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 7765.

W Waller, Joseph (Omali Yeshitela) (1941–) Omali Yeshitela (née Joseph Waller), a political activist and theoretician, is the founder of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and the African Socialist International (ASI) and the leader of the UHURU movement. Yeshitela has dedicated his life to liberating Africa and African people worldwide by combating the nature of colonial thinking that continues to oppress and divide African people. Pursuing the legacy of Marcus Garvey, Yeshitela emulates the vision “Africans for Africans, at home and abroad,” and in following Garvey’s footsteps developed the political theory of African internationalism. African internationalism recognizes that capitalism is a parasitic system that emerged from the enslavement and colonialization of Africans, Asians, Arabs, and indigenous people worldwide. In keeping with the traditions of Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, and Malcom X, Yeshitela continues to be on the front line of the struggle, adopting the role of the leader of the International African Revolution since 1972. Yeshitela joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. In 1966, he was jailed for leading a group of SNCC members into the St. Petersburg City Hall and tearing down a racist mural (George Snow Hill’s Picnicking at Pass-a-Grille) that had been exhibited for 30 years. The eight-footlong mural presented Black musicians with exaggerated facial features (caricatures) entertaining white picnickers, which Yeshitela deemed degrading. He was sentenced to five years in prison, although he served only two years. However, Yeshitela did not allow the confines of a prison cell to hinder or cripple his efforts in liberating and unifying Africa and Africans worldwide. In 1968 while he was in prison, he formed the Junta of Militant Organizations (JOMO), a Black Power Movement that shared goals similar to those of the Black Panther Party. JOMO protested against racial injustice, particularly that executed by the police against African people. The acronym “JOMO” derived from Jomo Kenyatta (the first president of Kenya), whom they mistakenly thought was the leader of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (aka the Mau Mau). In 1968 JOMO published the Burning Spear, a mimeographed newsletter that became the Burning Spear newspaper one year later. The newspaper and its programs function as tools to end the oppression of African people and unify them as one worldwide. It is widely considered the “voice of the international African revolution” and is the oldest Black Power newspaper that currently exists. The

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newspaper provides a voice for the most silenced, oppressed, and exploited sectors of the African world by distributing articles on the issues that affect workingclass Africans in the United States and worldwide. Yeshitela recognized that the mainstream media, which he believed was controlled by the capitalists, could not successfully and authentically represent the oppressed. The oppressed must produce and control their own media. Therefore, the African working class is provided with an uncensored and uncontrolled voice, hence a powerful instrument in the struggle for African liberation. Since 1969 JOMO made many efforts to form a revolutionary party, although these attempts were disrupted by the U.S. counterinsurgency. However, in 1972 Yeshitela founded the APSP. During the 1970s, many of the earlier Black Power activists and organizations transformed into African nationalist and Pan-African nationalist activists and organization, and the APSP also evolved in this manner. The APSP developed from the merging of JOMO and two other organizations based in Florida—the Black Rights Fighters and the Black Study Group. When the APSP was formed, its main objectives were to perpetuate the Black Power Movement, defend and stand by Africans who were imprisoned by the counterinsurgency, and cultivate relationships with Africa and Africans worldwide. The APSP is responsible for the liberation of Africa and calls on African revolutionaries to join the party. Furthermore, it operates under the political theoretical framework of African internationalism, and since its launch in 1972 it has successfully extended its membership into Europe and Africa. In May 1973, Yeshitela was arrested and reimprisoned for his previous charges on the mural he tore down in 1966. However, his reimprisonment was disputed by the APSP, which forced the government to release him within two months. It was under the leadership of Yeshitela that the APSP completed a successful campaign for the Pitts and Lee v. Florida case, in which two men (Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee) had been falsely charged with murder and sentenced to death by an all-white jury in 1963. Pitts and Lee were imprisoned for 12 years before their exoneration in 1975. Due to the success of the campaign, the APSP was asked to engage in the campaign for the freedom of Dessie Woods, a woman sentenced to 22 years in prison after shooting a white man who attempted to sexually assault her. However, when the APSP committed to engaging in the campaign for Woods, the existing committee was highly dominated by white leftist forces. The white women’s movement aimed to defend Woods based on sexual violence against all women. On the other hand, the APSP built a defense on the struggle against colonial violence inflicted on African people. The APSP developed and led the National Committee and promoted the slogan “Free Dessie Woods! Smash Colonial Violence.” This slogan was used to illustrate the colonial violence that was imposed on all African people and to shed light on the liberation struggle of all African workers in the United States.



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In 1976 the APSP formed the African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC), an organization of Euro-Americans/European people to work in solidarity with the struggle for African liberation and the unification of Africa and African people worldwide. The APSC is described as a strategic component of the African movement in eradicating the colonial unity between white people and U.S. and European imperialism. Its role involved raising resources through donor campaigns and economic development campaigns operated by the APSP. The APSC argues that it forms a revolutionary force within the white community and that its campaigns enable the Black revolution to reclaim stolen resources. On September 4, 1977, Yeshitela organized a meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, attended by several nationalist organizations. All of the participants in this discussion established the importance of and need for developing a greater level of unity between proindependence forces. Subsequently, it was decided that the African National Prison Organization (ANPO) would be the gateway to building a national liberation front. Additionally, the participants at the meeting established five principles as the basis for forming the ANPO, which were self-determination, political independence, anti-imperialism, anticolonialism, and self-defense. It was in September 1979 that the APSP formed the ANPO. In 1982, the APSP also built the ASI, an international party of African revolutionists. The ASI provides an international division of labor for African communities in which the role of the ASI is to liberate and unite Africa under a single socialist state, provide assistance and direction for the revolutionary struggles of all African people, and achieve the consolidation of African nationality for all African people who are oppressed and exploited as a result of imperialism. That same year the APSP launched the African Reparation Organization (ANRO), which held its first World Tribunal on Reparation in Brooklyn, New York. For 12 years, ANRO continuously held tribunals in the United States and in Europe in order to bring attention to the $4.1 trillion debt owed to African people for their stolen labor. Yeshitela has stated that the imperialist system cannot repay African people; rather, it can only attempt to bribe African people into accepting some form of payment to mute the growing struggle of the oppressed and colonized community. Yeshitela produced significant theoretical work on the question of parasitic capitalism. He explained that capitalism emerged from slavery and the theft of resources from oppressed people. Yeshitela’s theory shed light on African workers and their struggle against colonialism and was used to build a deeper unity and relationship with other colonized populations fighting for national liberation. In 1989 the APSP formed the People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, although it was later transformed in 1991 into the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM). Its central goal was to combat counterinsurgency against the African community in addition to supporting African people’s democratic rights. Yeshitela has stated that InPDUM aims to reverse the defeat of the Black revolution of the 1960s.

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On October 24, 1996, Black people began to rebel after 18-year-old TyRon Lewis was shot by St. Petersburg police officer James Knight, despite Lewis’s hand being in sight and raised in surrender. Furious Africans within the community took action by obtaining weapons to battle with the St. Petersburg police. On October 30, the Uhuru Movement organized a tribunal in which they found the two police officers involved guilty of the murder of Lewis. However, on November 13 the two police offers were exonerated. That day at 6:30 p.m., more than 300 troops surrounded the APSP’s Uhuru House, where more than 100 members were present at the time for a regular weekly meeting. The evening became increasingly violent when police officers obstructed the doors and fired tear gas canisters in an attempt to set the building on fire. By the end of the night, two officers were shot and 35 buildings were burned down. The first meeting of the ASI was held in 1999, the second was held in 2000, and from 2004 to 2009 meetings were held each year in different parts of Africa and Europe. Chairman Omali Yeshitela began traveling the world in order to introduce his political theory of African internationalism and organize African people around the world to help construct the ASI. In 1999, the African Socialist People’s Party held its first conference to build the ASI in London. Yeshitela previously expressed that he would not travel to Africa without having a political objective. In December 2002 he arrived in South Africa to give a keynote address at the historical Eighth Congress of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania. Here, Yeshitela spoke of having no access to “our” Africa as long as the imperialist-imposed borders continue to separate African people. He expressed that the African revolution only runs into limitation when it allows itself to be restricted by these borders. Omali Yeshitela has continued his advocacy for African people worldwide through his published work. Some of his work includes Tactics and Strategy for Black Liberation in the U.S. (1978), Izwe Lethu I Afrika (1992), and An Uneasy Equilibrium: The African Revolution versus Parasitic Capitalism (2014). Ololade Hassan See also: Pan-Africanism; UHURU Further Reading “On Building a National Prison Organization.” 1977. Freedom Archives, http://www .freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC510_scans/ANPO/510.OnBuilding AnANPO.monograph.pdf. Shujaa, Mwalimu J., and Kenya J. Shujaa. 2015. The SAGE Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Yeshitela, Omali. 2005. Omali Yeshitela Speaks. St. Petersburg, FL: Burning Spear Uhuru Publications.



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Walters, Ronald W. (1938–2010) An activist scholar, Ronald W. Walters worked to implement the philosophy and principles of the Black Power Movement. Born on July 20, 1938, to Gillmor and Claudine Maxine Fray Walters, Ronald Walters grew up in Wichita, Kansas. After graduating from high school he briefly attended Wichita State University while serving in the army reserves. While at Wichita State in 1958 as president of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Youth Council, Walters organized the first modern lunch counter sit-in. After one year at Wichita State he transferred to historically Black Fisk University, graduating cum laude in 1963. That same year he also married Patricia Turner of Columbus, Ohio, and they moved to Washington, D.C., where Walters pursued graduate studies, earning the PhD in international relations and African studies in 1971. The Black Power Movement of the 1960s sparked two separate, distinct, and contradictory tendencies. First, it stimulated the development of an array of radical, revolutionary organizations symbolized by the Black Panther Party. Second, it stimulated the development of moderate reform Black Power organizations, appealing to race consciousness, solidarity, and independent all-Black interest organizing. This reform version was symbolized by the Congressional Black Caucus. Walters, in his scholarship and activism, embodied the tensions between these two tendencies. Much of his career was spent in a valiant although largely unsuccessful effort to reconcile the two. However, for him the primacy of the reform tendency and the inevitability of its dominance in Black politics was a given, the point of departure for his work. This inevitability was to be regretted, perhaps, and to be prodded in more radical directions where possible. But the dominance of Black Power as a form of African American ethnic politics within the pluralist framework of U.S. politics was a fact of political life. Walters devoted his career to building viable Black Power institutions within the framework of the political system. This work began with Black studies, which he viewed as the first institutionalized manifestation of Black Power. Walters wrote a series of epistemological and theoretical papers in which he defined Black studies as a discipline devoted to scholarship, which would empower the Black community. After two years as founding chair of Black studies at Brandeis, he joined the political science faculty at Howard University. As department chair at Howard, he established a program in Black politics with a similar community empowerment focus. While at Howard, Walters was actively engaged as adviser and strategist for virtually every major Black political organization of the time including the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Black Political Convention, the African Liberation Support Committee, the National Black Leadership Roundtable, the Black Caucus of the Democratic National Committee, Trans-Africa, the District

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of Columbia statehood movement, and the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson. In addition, Howard worked with many state and local Black organizations committed to the principles of Black Power. After decades of work in these varied organizations, Walters came to believe that because of the enormous wealth gap between Blacks and whites—a gap rooted fundamentally in centuries of slavery and neoslavery—the Black community could not be fully empowered without a comprehensive program of reparations. Walters spent most of his career on the faculty at Howard. However, from 1996 to 2009 he was on the faculty of the University of Maryland at College Park. While at Maryland he founded and directed the African American Leadership Institute, the first university-based entity devoted exclusively to the study of Black leadership. After his retirement from Maryland in 2009, Walters was planning to return to Howard as a scholar-in-residence. He died on September 10, 2010, of complications from lung cancer. Shortly after his death, the Board of Trustees of Howard established the Ronald W. Walters Leadership and Public Policy Center. Robert C. Smith See also: African Liberation Support Committee; Black Panther Party; Black Studies; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Jackson, Jesse L., Sr.; National Black Political Assembly Further Reading McCormack, Donald. 1973. “Stokely Carmichael and Pan Africanism: Back to Black Power.” Journal of Politics 35: 386–409. Smith, Robert C. 1981. “Black Power and the Transformation from Protest to Politics.” Political Science Quarterly 96: 431–444. Smith, Robert C. 2014. What Has This Got to Do with the Liberation of Black People? The Impact of Ronald W. Walters on African American Thought and Leadership. Edited by Cedric Johnson and Robert Newby. Albany: SUNY Press. Walters, Ronald. 2003. White Nationalism, Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Walters, Ronald. 2008. The Price of Racial Reconciliation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Walters, Ronald, and Robert C. Smith. 1999. African American Leadership. Albany: SUNY Press.

Wattstax In 1973 Wattstax, a concert film, was released by Stax Records and Wolper Productions to document the Watts Summer Festival of August 20, 1972, at the



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Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Beginning in 1966, the festival was planned by a coalition of Black nationalists and other community organizers to commemorate the Watts Rebellion of 1965 at the dawning of the Black Power Movement. The concept of the annual celebration actually evolved during the riots as a strategy of community leaders to redirect Watts residents to gather in a great community carnival and end the violence. This effort was initiated not because leaders disagreed with the unrest of the protestors but instead because they wanted to protect community members from excessive violence used by law enforcement to contain the protestors. As with many other urban uprisings, the Watts Rebellion was initially ignited by community outrage over the police brutality that Black people experienced routinely in their neighborhoods. On August 11, 1965, as brothers Marquette and Ronald Frye were being arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol, a crowd of residents gathered, and eventually a violent confrontation occurred with the police. City, county, and state law enforcement as well as the National Guard were called in to control the crowd. Of the 34 people killed and thousands injured during the riots, almost all were Black, indicating that although thousands of Black protesters participated in public disturbance and property damage, the police were the primary perpetrators of violence throughout the event. The uprising lasted five days, ending after 4,000 arrests and more than $200 million in property damage. The causes and consequences of the Watts Rebellion were complex and reflected the challenges faced by Black people in their daily lives. The underlying causes included racism in politics, housing, education, employment, and law enforcement. The consequences included the tragic loss of life, the backlash of more militarized law enforcement, mass incarceration, continued economic depression, and unemployment despite government programs aimed at addressing poverty. On the other hand, Black people in Watts and around the country felt a sense of unity, racial pride, and self-determination inspired by Watts residents’ willingness to fight back. In the aftermath of the Watts Rebellion, private self-help groups attempted to revitalize neighborhoods through community empowerment programs, and new Black businesses also emerged. Many viewed the riots as a cultural and political turning point. One of the first Watts Summer Festival organizers, Maulana Karenga, promoted the riot as a moment of cultural transformation. Through festival activities he encouraged Watts community members who were radicalized by the riot to shift their focus from physical resistance to cultural revolution and community activism. The Watts Summer Festival attracted large crowds from Watts neighborhoods as well as from the Greater Los Angeles and San Diego areas. Popular soul, blues, rhythm and blues, gospel, and funk musicians performed. Vendors sold food, books, African jewelry, clothing, and art. A parade was also held featuring the year’s appointed grand marshal. Some famous grand marshals included Muhammad

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Ali, Coretta Scott King, and Betty Shabazz. Other activities included art exhibits, community discussions, custom auto shows, fashion shows, and film viewings. Children’s activities made the festival a family affair. Several government agencies displayed information about government services and jobs, viewing the festival as an opportunity to partner with the community in order to avoid further public unrest. However, some members of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) objected to the festival, fearing confrontation from the large crowd. Still, the activities proceeded as planned, and the LAPD participated in the festival and served as security. The film Wattstax, directed by Mel Stuart, shows extensive footage of the 1972 festival, which drew nearly 100,000 people. That year, the festival featured a concert with a musical lineup that included the Staples Singers, Eddie Floyd, the BarKays, Rufus Thomas, and Isaac Hayes, among many others. In order to appeal to a wide audience, admission was a dollar, making the concert accessible to poor and working-class residents. The seven-hour show was hosted by Tommy Jacquette. The concert began with Kim Weston singing “The Star Spangled Banner,” which was unenthusiastically received by a seated and distracted audience despite her soulful rendition of the anthem. However, when she sang James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (which is widely respected as the Black National Anthem), the crowd sang along with clinched fists in the air as a sign of solidarity. Jesse Jackson in his speech declared a day of self-awareness and unity and prompted the crowd to chant “I am somebody, I am Black, I am beautiful, I am proud.” Stax Records, a Black-owned recording label, was one of the sponsors of the festival, and all of the performers in the 1972 concert were artists who were signed to the Stax record label. Wattstax reflected the political, economic, and personal complexities that surfaced during the riot and the subsequent summer festivals. The film displays a collection of photos, concert footage, interviews, and live comedy clips to capture both painful and celebrated Watts memories, strengths, and hopes. Images of churches, families, children playing, and men fraternizing are spliced with photos and videos of buildings burning, beatings, and poverty-stricken streets. Clips and pictures of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, and others appear throughout the film as well. Black men and women are shown in loving relationships and engaging in conversations about solving problems of economic inequalities by creating economic opportunities. They are also shown commenting on blues music, their personal blues, frustrations with taking care of their families, and confrontations with racism. The impromptu comedy of Richard Pryor in the film exhibited rich cultural aspects of Black life. Pryor’s jokes about Black people’s pain shows the irony in Black coping strategies. His use of profanity and vulgarity exposed the profane and vulgar nature of racism and oppression. Pryor’s comedy exemplifies the



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saying “I have to laugh to keep from crying.” The comedian in Black life provides literal comic relief from the very pain being discussed. Comedy is an improvisational expression of what is being felt at the moment, like the art, music, singing, and dance shown in the film. These outward expressions are seen as healing outlets that allow Black people to celebrate in the midst of difficulty. Wattstax represented the resilience of the Watts community despite oppression and documents the cultural significance of the resistance, strength, and power that was demonstrated during the Watts Rebellion. According to several people interviewed for the film, Black people who participated in the revolt felt that the uprising was the only way that white Americans would take notice of their conditions as people living within the margins of the broader society. The rebellion gave a voice to the voiceless who were suffering oppression and racism. Because the annual Watts Summer Festival was only held through the mid-1970s, the film is an important part of history. In 1986 Wattstax was rereleased as Wattstax: The Special Edition, with additional footage and some digital remastering. The original ending to the 1972 film, which included Isaac Hayes’s performance of “Theme from Shaft” and “Souls­ ville,” was removed due to licensing rights. Thirteen years later the permissions and footage were acquired, and the stirring performances were eventually added. In addition to producing the Wattstax film, Stax Records also released an album of the festival performances by the same name. The Watts Rebellion was the most devastating the city experienced until the Los Angeles uprising of 1992 that resulted from the police beating of Rodney King. Black protests have erupted throughout American history, as seen most recently in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015. Quoting Dr. King, Rick Perlstein declares in his article “From Watts to Ferguson” that “the riot is still the ‘language of the unheard’” (Perlstein 2014, 24). While the mainstream media frequently captures the details and destruction that surround these uprisings over time, Wattstax shares the complex meanings, including the beauty, suffering, survival, and healing of the participating communities in their own language whether spoken, sung, or shouted. Joy Dominguez See also: Davis, Angela Yvonne; Karenga, Maulana; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X; Newton, Huey P. Further Reading Bruce, M. Tyler. 1990. “The Rise and Decline of the Watts Summer Festival, 1965 to 1986.” American Studies 31(2): 63–66. Murch, Donna. 2012. “The Many Meanings of Watts: Black Power, Wattstax, and the Carceral State.” OAH Magazine of History 26(1) (January): 37–40.

818 | Williams, Mabel (1931–2014) Perlstein, Rick. 2014. “From Watts to Ferguson.” In These Times 38(10): 24–29. Silvermann, Ed. 2008. “Wattstax: Music from the Wattstax Festival and Film.” Dirty Linen: Folk & World Music (134): 54–55. Stuart, Mel, Larry Shaw, Richard Pryor, Isaac Hayes, Luther Ingram, Johnnie Taylor, Jesse Jackson, and Kim Weston. 2004. Wattstax [videorecording]. Distributed by Warner Home Video. “Wattstax: Power to the People.” 2003. Wattstax, http://www.Wattstax.com/special edition.html.

Williams, Mabel (1931–2014) Perhaps Mabel Williams was best known as the wife of Robert F. Williams. However, she was a radical Black Power activist in her own right. Along with her husband, Mabel vigorously fought to achieve Civil Rights in Monroe, North Carolina. She was instrumental in the formation of a Black rifle club that was tasked with protecting the Black community from the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other white terrorist organizations. In the 1950s she helped establish The Crusader, an important Black Power newsletter that was used by freedom fighters as a selfdefense manual. In 1961 she and her family were forced into exile, first settling in Cuba and then in China and Tanzania. While abroad, the Williamses’ commitment to the Black Power Movement became evident in the organizations that emerged from their work, including the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and the Republic of New Africa (RNA). Mabel Ola Robinson was born to King David and Emma Perry Robinson on June 1, 1931, in Monroe, North Carolina. Sixteen-year-old Mabel married Robert F. Williams on June 19, 1947. The couple had two children, Robert Jr. and John Williams. It is unclear when Mabel joined the NAACP in Monroe, but by 1957 her husband was serving as president, and she was serving as secretary of the local chapter. The chapter grew, and within two years the membership increased to over 100 members (Pascoe 1999, 400). The chapter’s leadership was composed of working-class Blacks, and collectively they recruited domestic workers, the unemployed, laborers, and farmers. The NAACP fought against racism in public facilities, including the local public library, schools, and swimming pools. In these efforts, the NAACP petitioned local authorities and used nonviolent direct tactics such as sit-ins and standing in. In response to the Williamses’ efforts, the KKK organized, mounting a counterattack against the NAACP in an effort to maintain segregation and white supremacy. The local newspapers began to cover KKK gatherings as the number of participants grew from a few hundred to several thousand. At one point the Monroe



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Inquirer estimated that 7,500 Klansmen had gathered in a field to discuss dealing with the integrationists, whom they deemed communists. The KKK began a campaign to intimidate and terrorize NAACP members and the Black community. Mabel Williams regarded these actions as violent. After receiving no help from city officials, who refused to stop the KKK rallies and motorcades through the Black section of town, Mabel and her husband decided to stop the KKK themselves. She reasoned that “law and order had completely vanished,” and the Williamses sought to defend themselves (Interview with Mabel Williams 1999). Mabel helped to established the Union County Rifle Club in 1957. She explained that “We organized a rifle club. And got a charter through the American Rifle Association [NRA].  .  .  . We were all members” (Interview with Mabel Williams 1999). The club trained and taught men, women, and children to shoot. The formation of the rifle club and the growth of the NAACP chapter occurred around the same time. Although they remained two separate organizations, their membership overlapped. The rifle club, according to Robert, had over 60 members after its first year, and many of them were veterans. In 1959 Mabel, Robert and their friend Ethel Azalea Johnson established a newsletter, The Crusader, as a way to win support for the Monroe movement and to advocate the position of armed self-defense. Mabel was a major factor in the paper’s success and a decisive role in framing its content. Her analysis of nonviolent direct action was articulated in The Crusader. During the Black Power era, the paper was used as a manual by freedom fighters on armed self-defense. Mabel had her very own column, “Looking Back,” in which she articulated her criticisms about nonviolence. She did not explicitly advocate armed resistance in the same ways her male contemporaries did, especially her husband. But her writing in the late 1950s, particularly her critique of nonviolence as a philosophy and tactic, foreshadowed Black Power activists’ criticism of the ideology by over half a decade. Mabel’s commitment to armed self-defense paralleled that of her husband. Robert gained national notoriety for challenging the philosophy of nonviolence and luminaries such as Martin Luther King Jr. By 1959 Robert became well known for publicly advocating self-defense. That same year he was removed from the presidency of the Monroe NAACP chapter by the national organization for publicly saying that Blacks should meet violence with violence. News media circulated his statement, and while his position on armed self-defense earned him critics, it also won him radical militant supporters, including Mae Mallory and Malcolm X. Mabel used Robert’s growing popularity to expand Monroe’s grassroots freedom efforts. As circulation manager of The Crusader she increased the reach of the paper beyond North Carolina, where leftists, militants, and revolutionaries across the country eventually gained access to it. At its peak, distribution of the newsletter reached 40,000 copies (Tyson 1999, 290). Often traveling alone or with

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her husband, Mabel forged radical networks, or Crusader Families, to establish distribution centers for the paper and win support for the work they were doing in Monroe. As a direct result of the broad circulation of The Crusader as well as the Crusader Families, Mabel and other women in Monroe launched the Crusaders Association for Relief and Enlightenment (CARE) to provide underprivileged families with basic necessities. The writers at The Crusader urged readers to send support, and CARE packages poured in by the truckload from people of all races. Money, food, and clothes were sent to help The Crusader’s efforts. “By the end of 1960, relief packages arrived almost daily, and the women of CARE kept busy passing out clothes, shoes, and canned goods among the poor of Union County” (Tyson 1999, 203). Crusader families also became increasingly more important as hostility grew in Union County. For instance, in 1961 when Freedom Riders, including James Forman of SNCC, arrived in Monroe to demonstrate nonviolently, Mabel and Robert called members of the Crusader Family to help ensure the demonstrators’ safety. Mae Mallory, Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, and Julian Mayfield offered their support, with Mallory and Mayfield traveling south to physically help them. On August 27, 1961, the Freedom Riders held a demonstration at the courthouse in Monroe. Their presence exacerbated opposition to civil disobedience as white onlookers hurled missiles and racial slurs at the young people. The local authorities watched as whites brutally attacked the demonstrators. That evening the Black community braced itself for potential night riders, who frequently drove through the Black section of town shooting their guns. When a white couple, Charles and Mabel Stegall, drove into the Black neighborhood, they were apprehended by an armed group of Blacks. Mabel and Robert opened their home to the couple as a safe refuge. The Stegalls, however, claimed that they were kidnapped, tied up, and held against their will by the Williamses, Mae Mallory, and other activists. Charges were issued for their arrest. Fearing for their lives, Mabel and her husband and children all left Monroe. Mabel and her family went underground and settled in Cuba, under the leadership of Fidel Castro. While in exile, the couple continued to publish The Crusader, which with the help of the international Crusader Family was smuggled into the United States. They also hosted a radio show, Radio Free Dixie. Praised by Black nationalists and leftists, the broadcast featured jazz music and political commentary. In exile, the couple also hosted a number of Black American revolutionaries including Max Stanford (later known as Muhammad Ahmad), who would found RAM in 1963 and became instrumental in articulating and spreading a revolutionary nationalist ideology during the Black Power Movement. In 1966 Mabel and her family moved to China and witnessed the Chinese Cultural Revolution firsthand. Although in exile, she and Robert fully participated in the Black Power



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Movement in as many ways as they could, particularly as advisers to young revolutionaries in the United States. The Williamses left China and moved to Tanzania, a socialist African country, and while there Robert was selected as the president of the RNA. Mabel served as first lady. The Williams family returned to the United States in 1969. They always viewed the United States as their home and understood that their fight for liberation must be fought on American soil. Upon their return, they opted to live in Baldwin, Michigan. While there Mabel continued her grassroots work—mostly with senior citizens and impoverished communities. After nearly six decades of activism, Mabel William died on April 19, 2014. Jasmin A. Young See also: Boggs, James and Grace Lee; Mallory, Mae; Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley; Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa; Revolutionary Action Movement; Revolutionary Nationalism; Williams, Robert F. Further Reading Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo. 2013. “‘God Has Spared Me to Tell My Story’: Mabel Robinson Williams and the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement.” Black Scholar 43(1–2): 69–88. Interview with Mabel Williams. 1999. Interview K-0266. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), Transcript, August 20, 1999, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Pascoe, Craig S. 1999. “The Monroe Rifle Club: Finding Justice in an ‘Ungodly and Social Jungle Called Dixie.’” In Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, edited by Michael A. Bellesiles, 393–424. New York: New York University Press. Tyson, Timothy B. 1999. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Williams, Robert F. 2013. Negroes with Guns. Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Fine Books.

Williams, Robert F. (1925–1996) Robert Franklin Williams was the most vocal advocate of armed resistance in the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Because of his advocacy, Williams became a symbol of resistance after being censored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1959 and forced into exile in 1961. Williams’s political asylum in Cuba and China as well as his travels to Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) also built solidarity for the Black Power Movement and the African American freedom

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struggle internationally and awareness and sympathy for socialism and national liberation movements among Black activists in the United States.

Early Life Williams was born on February 26, 1925, in Monroe, North Carolina. Monroe, the county seat of Union County, is in south-central North Carolina. Williams moved to Detroit during the Great Depression and fought white mobs during the 1943 race riot in that city. He was drafted into the U.S. Marine Corps in 1944 and served a year and a half before returning to Monroe. Williams married Mabel Ola Robinson in 1947. Their union produced two sons, John and Robert Jr. Seeking support for his household, Williams re-enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1954, but due to his challenges of racial discrimination he was discharged as being “undesirable.” Williams returned to Monroe and would ultimately assume leadership of the town’s NAACP chapter.

National Attention Williams first received national attention as president of Monroe’s NAACP chapter in 1957. He organized the Black Guard, a paramilitary group, to protect Monroe’s Black community from white supremacist violence and harassment. Monroe was a bastion of white supremacist activity, as Black citizens faced constant intimidation from the local Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Williams also presented a critique of the point of view of philosophical nonviolence. While not condemning nonviolence, Williams challenged the notion that it was the sole strategy and tactic to be employed in the Black freedom struggle. He considered abandoning armed self-defense to weaken the potential of victory of the Civil Rights Movement and for the security of the Black community. Armed self-defense was practiced widely but covertly within the southern Black freedom movement, but Williams openly advocated armed resistance. In a published exchange with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. debating nonviolence versus armed resistance, Williams argued that The Southern brute respects only force. Non-violence is a very potent weapon when the opponent is civilized, but non-violence is no match or repellent for a sadist. . . . An open declaration of non-violence, or turn-the-other-cheekism is an invitation that the white racist brutes will certainly honour by brutal attack on cringing, submissive Negroes. It is time for the Negro in the South to reappraise his method of dealing with his ruthless oppressor. (Williams 1960) Williams’s open challenge to the nonviolence strategy as the primary vehicle of the southern Black freedom struggle was, as Black intellectual Harold Cruse



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argued, “the ideological spark that ignited a hidden potential within a newly emerging phase of the Negro movement” (Cruse 1984). Williams and the Monroe movement won friends to their cause through their newsletter, The Crusader. In 1959, Robert and Mabel Williams and fellow Monroe activist Ethel Azalea Johnson collaborated to publish the newsletter. The Crusader won support for the Monroe movement and advocated armed self-defense (Tyson 1999). Williams would garner international attention in 1958 when he championed the defense of two Black male children in the “Kissing case.” The same year 9-yearold James Thompson and 7-year-old David Simpson were convicted and sentenced to reform school until the age of 21 for molestation of an 8-year-old white girl. The molestation charges were based on the white female child kissing one of the Black male children. Williams found legal defense for the children and initiated an international campaign of support for the boys that led to North Carolina governor Luther Hodges pardoning Thompson and Simpson in their sentence without explanation or offering apology. Williams’s reputation increased due to his skillful use of media and international contacts during the case. National support for Williams increased after he was censored and stripped of his presidency of the Monroe NAACP chapter by the NAACP national leadership for his 1959 statement of “meeting violence with violence.” Williams’s statement occurred after two court decisions on the same day: the dropping of the charges of one white man for sexual assault on a Black female maid and another white man on trial for physically attacking and attempting to sexually assault a pregnant Black woman in the presence of her five children. Enraged at the judge’s decisions, Williams proclaimed that “We cannot take these people who do injustice to us to court and it becomes necessary to punish them ourselves. In the future, we will have to try and convict them on the spot” (Tyson 1999, 147–149). The national media widely circulated Williams’s statement, and in response the national NAACP leadership suspended him. On the other hand, Williams won support from militant and radical elements of the Black freedom movement and leftist circles in the United States. Concerned with Williams’s popularity, pacifists in the Black freedom struggle sent Freedom Riders to Monroe in 1961 to demonstrate that nonviolence could work there. Racist reaction to the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign mobilized white supremacists and increased violence in the city, which heightened hostility in Union County. The Black Guard was deployed to protect Monroe’s Black community in response to the white supremacist threat. That evening a white couple, attempting to drive through the predominately Black section of Monroe, was stopped and apprehended by a group of armed Blacks. Williams saved the couple from angry armed Black residents and allowed them shelter in his home until the morning. Subsequently, kidnapping charges were issued against Robert and Mabel

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Williams and his cousin and New York activist Mae Mallory. Mallory was in Monroe during those August 1961 hostilities between the Black Guard and the KKK. Williams and his family went underground and ultimately into exile in Cuba. In Cuba, Robert and Mabel Williams continued to publish The Crusader, which was smuggled back into the United States and distributed in Civil Rights, radical, and Black nationalist circles. The Cuban revolutionary government also allowed the Williams couple to broadcast a radio show, Radio Free Dixie, to the United States. Radio Free Dixie featured socially conscious soul music and jazz, movement news, and editorial comments from Robert Williams. Williams also began to identify with the growing revolutionary nationalist ideological trend in the Black freedom struggle. He agreed to be the international chairman of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) in 1964. The Williams family choose to move to communist China in 1966 during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. During his exile in China, Williams traveled to the African socialist country of Tanzania and visited countries in East African. In Tanzania, Williams accepted the offer to become the president of the Black nationalist Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA), which was formed in 1968. The PGRNA was formed in Detroit, Michigan, at a Black nationalist convention, which declared its independence from the United States and demanded five southern states (Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina) as reparations and territory to establish a sovereign nation. Robert Williams was also an internationalist. Before his exile to Cuba, Williams was a friend of the Cuban Revolution. He traveled to Cuba in 1960 and became a spokesperson for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. While living abroad, Williams also promoted the interests of the Black freedom struggle. Williams’s lobbying compelled Chinese leader Mao Zedong to make statements in solidarity with the Black freedom struggle in 1963 after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and in 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Robert and Mabel Williams returned to the United States in 1969. The Williams family resided in Michigan, where Robert fought extradition to North Carolina until 1975. Then he returned to face kidnapping charges, which were immediately dropped by state prosecutors. He continued to reside in Baldwin, Michigan, where he engaged in local activism. William died on October 15, 1996, of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Williams’s advocacy for armed resistance and critique of nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement was a seminal ideological influence on the genesis of Black Power. He also played an essential role in internationalizing the Black freedom movement before and during his exile and had an organizational impact on Black Power through his affiliation with RAM and the PGRNA. Akinyele Umoja



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See also: Cuban Revolution; Mallory, Mae; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Mao Zedong; Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa; Revolutionary Action Movement; Revolutionary Nationalism Further Reading Cruse, Harold. 1984. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership. New York: Quill. Freedom Archives. 2005. Robert and Mabel Williams: Self-Determination, Self-Defense and Self Respect. Audio book. San Francisco: AK Press. Tyson, Timothy. 1999. Radio Free Dixie: Robert Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. Williams, Robert. 1960. “Can Negroes Be Pacifists.” New Left Review 1(1) (January– February 1960), http://newleftreview.org/I/1/robert-f-williams-can-negroes-afford-to-be -pacifists.

Wright, Nathan, Jr. (1923–2005) Reverend Nathan Wright Jr. was an Episcopal minister and scholar who was an early advocate of Black Power. Wright is best known for his role as the chairman of the first National Conference on Black Power in 1967; however, he had a long career of activism. Nathan Wright Jr. was born on August 5, 1923, in Shreveport, Louisiana, and was raised in Cincinnati. He was a fourth-generation college graduate and held six degrees including a bachelor of divinity degree from the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts; a master’s degree in theology from Harvard University; and a PhD from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Wright became the center of a protest after the police harassed him while he was a student in Cincinnati in 1946 (Martin 2005). Perhaps this experience was formative and shaped his later activism. After serving in the Medical Administrative Corps during World War II, Wright organized and served as the first field representative of the New England branch of the Congress of Racial Equality. While a church social worker Wright participated in the Journey of Reconciliation, which challenged segregation laws on interstate buses in the southern United States. He was one of eight Black men, accompanied by eight whites, who rode buses through the South in April 1947 (Martin 2005). During this journey, Nathan Wright faced several altercations. One of the bus conductors in Tennessee threatened to have Wright arrested and informed him that “If we were in Alabama, we would throw you out of the window.” Still, Wright refused to move from his seat (Houser and Rustin 1947, 7–8). After the Journey of Reconciliation, Wright served as a member of the Massachusetts governor’s

826 | Wright, Nathan, Jr. (1923–2005)

Reverend Dr. Nathan Wright Jr. with his book Black Power and Urban Unrest in Orange, New Jersey, in 1967. (AP Photo)

Advisory Committee on Civil Rights, the Boston mayor’s Committee on Housing, and the executive committee of the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union. Reverend Wright was serving as the executive director of the Department of Urban Work of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark when he became involved in planning the 1967 National Black Power Conference. The four-day conference emerged from a September 1966 planning meeting headed by Harlem representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in Washington, D.C. (Woodard 1999, 85). The Continuations Committee of that conference was charged with planning the 1967 conference and was originally composed of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Jewel Mazique, Nathan Wright Jr., Maulana Karenga, Isaiah Robinson, and Omar Abu Ahmed. When Powell withdrew as convener of the conference, Wright became the chairman and suggested that the conference be held in Newark, New Jersey. Reverend Wright would also arrange for the conference to take place in the Episcopal Diocese’s Cathedral House headquarters (Mumford 2007, 111). In July 1967, Black people from across the country met in the riot-torn city of Newark to attend the first National Conference on Black Power. Between July 20 and July 23, the conference drew more than 1,000 delegates representing over 190 organizations from 39 states and Bermuda. This conference marked the beginning of the modern Black convention movement, which became a center for the



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development of Black leadership and a forum for an ideological struggle over the direction of the Black freedom struggle. Participants discussed major issues affecting African Americans; attended workshops and paper presentations on the urban crisis, social change, economic development, professionalism, Black politics, family, religion, youths, culture, nationalism, and internationalism; and developed a Black Power manifesto calling for emphasis of Black Power in political, economic, and cultural affairs (Woodard 1999, 84). As chairman of the conference, Nathan Wright had as his political goal for African Americans Black empowerment. According to Wright, Black Power meant “Black development into self-sufficiency for the good of Negroes and for the good of the whole nation. We want . . . to replace the helping hand which now aids us with our own hand—to sustain ourselves and not be a burden on all others” (Wright 1968, 62). Wright urged Black people to band together as a group to seek entry into the American mainstream and believed that Black Power did not negate the value of white friendship and cooperation (Barbour 1968, 132). In fact, Dr. Wright felt that cooperation of Blacks and whites could be one of “the most creative thrusts for the good of the nation—and individual self-interest” (Wright 1968, 43). However, not everyone agreed with Wright’s views on Black Power. Younger activists and more radical Black nationalists involved in the conference considered Wright to be a moderate Black Power advocate. Wright believed that Blacks “with some semblance of power” should band together to seek executive positions in corporations, dioceses, schools, and high-management positions in banks, stores, legal firms, and factories (Wright 1968, 43). Black Power advocates who subscribed to an anticapitalist philosophy did not agree with this concept and believed that Wright’s version of Black Power benefited the Black middle-class and did not represent ideas of Black Power among the masses. Wright stressed that while he did not support a Black revolution or militancy, he shared most of the ideology of Black Power leaders such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. Even though the definitions of Black Power were varied and still emerging at the time of the Newark conference, there was a general consensus that in order to live self-determined lives with dignity and respect, Blacks needed to have control over the political, economic, and cultural institutions that affected their communities. After the conference Wright continued his work for Black empowerment. He traveled throughout the county to lecture on Black self-determination, advocated equal treatment of African Americans in the Episcopal Church, and became the founding chairman of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at the State University of New York at Albany. Throughout his career Wright published 18 books, including Black Power and Urban Unrest in 1968. He later served on presidential task forces during the administrations of both Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Wright passed away on February 22, 2005, at the age of 81.

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Nathan Wright Jr. was a crucial figure in bridging the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Chuck Stone, a member of the Continuations Committee from Washington, D.C., described the 1967 National Black Power Conference as “a new legitimacy into the revolutionary era of Black power, giving it both definition and direction.” Wright’s role in planning the Newark conference was invaluable, as this conference helped advance a conversation on Black Power that would continue into the next decade. Kendra Boyd See also: Black Power Conferences; Brown, Hubert “H. Rap”; Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture); Karenga, Maulana Further Reading Barbour, Floyd B. 1968. The Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays. New York: Collier Books. Haines, Herbert H. 1988. Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream, 1954–1970. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Houser, George M., and Bayard Rustin. 1947. We Challenged Jim Crow! A Report on the Journey of Reconciliation, April 9–23, 1947. n.p.: Fellowship of Reconciliation– Congress of Racial Equality. Martin, Douglas. 2005. “Nathan Wright Jr., Black Power Advocate, Dies at 81.” New York Times, February 24, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/obituaries/nathan-wright -jr-black-power-advocate-dies-at-81.html. Mumford, Kevin. 2007. Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America. New York: NYU Press. Shattuck, Gardiner H., Jr. 2015. Episcopalians and Race: Civil War to Civil Rights. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Woodard, Komozi. 1999. A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wright, Nathan. 1968. Black Power and Urban Unrest. New York: Hawthorn.

About the Editors and Contributors

Editors KARIN L. STANFORD, editor, is a professor of political science and Africana studies at California State University, Northridge. Dr. Stanford specializes in African American politics, public policy, social movements and international relations. As a scholar, she has received several awards and recognition for her publications, including If We Must Die: African American Voices on War and Peace (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), which was one of the 2009 winners of Choice Magazine’s Outstanding Reference/Academic Book Award, and Beyond the Boundaries: Reverend Jesse Jackson in Foreign Affairs (SUNY Press, 1997), winner of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists Book Award. Her academic article “Keepin’ It Real in Hip Hop Politics: A Political Perspective of Tupac Shakur,” published in the Journal of Black Studies, has remained one of the most read articles since its publication in 2011. Dr. Stanford is a former Congressional Black Caucus fellow and postdoctoral scholar at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She currently serves on the board of the National Conference of Black Studies and on the advisory board of the California Black Women’s Health Project. AKINYELE UMOJA, editor, is a professor and the chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University. Professor Umoja is the author of We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance and the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York University, 2013), which was named the 2014 Anna Julia Cooper/C. L. R. James Award for the best book in Africana studies by the National Council of Black Studies. It is also the winner of the 2014 PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. He has published articles in several scholarly publications including Souls, the Journal of Black Studies, New Political Science, the International Journal of Africana Studies, the Black Scholar, and the Radical History Review. Dr. Umoja is also active in the promotion and development of the field of Black/Africana studies. He currently serves as a board member

829

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for the National Council of Black Studies and is on the editorial board of the historic journal Black Scholar. Professor Umoja is also very engaged in human rights and social justice advocacy. He received awards from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (1998) and the National Council of Black Studies (2008) for his community activism. JASMIN A. YOUNG, editor, is a historian of 20th-century African American history with specializations in women and gender. Her research interests include Black women’s intellectual history, radical politics, resistance, and Black feminism. She holds a PhD from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in history. Her passion for teaching African American history, Black women’s history, and Black feminism is exhibited both inside and outside of the classroom. She is also a historical consultant on several projects including a historically based educational game titled Tracking Ida.

Contributors SARAH ABDELAZIZ holds a master’s degree in women, gender, and sexuality studies and is currently an adjunct professor at Georgia State University and Auburn University. Abdelaziz is a dedicated community organizer and has worked toward radically reconstituting and abolishing institutions such as the carceral and police state, the privatization and exclusionary practices of the university, the demolition of communities through gentrification, and the policing of gender, sexuality, and race. She is a lifelong southerner and believes in the necessary flourishing of community power, radical culture, and alternative power in Atlanta, where she resides. JIHAD ABDULMUMIT is a community activist, motivational speaker, author, and playwright. He was a domestic political prisoner and prisoner of war, serving 23 years of his life in prison for his involvement in the Black liberation movement. Abdulmumit is the chairperson for JERICHO, a vanguard organization that supports domestic political prisoners/prisoners of war and calls for their amnesty and freedom from prison. LUTHER ADAMS is an associate professor in ethnic, gender, and labor studies. His book Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930–1970, was published by the University of North Carolina Press. His current research project, Black and Blue: End Police Brutality, is a history of African Americans’ struggles with and against police brutality. MUHAMMAD AHMAD (also known as Max Stanford) worked full-time as an organizer in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. He worked closely



About the Editors and Contributors | 831

with other significant leaders of the movement including Malcolm X, Robert F. and Mabel Williams, Amiri Baraka, Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, and James and Grace Lee Boggs. Ahmad was a cofounder and primary organizer of the Revolutionary Action Movement, a foundational organization in the Black Power Movement. A scholar activist, Dr. Ahmad received his master’s degree in political science at Atlanta University and his PhD from Union Institute. MAKUNGU M. AKINYELA is an associate professor in the African American Studies Department at Georgia State University. Dr. Akinyela is also a marriage and family therapist and a much sought after scholar/activist consultant on Black family life, which is reflected twofold in his chosen professions. He runs a private-practice family therapy center where he specializes in couple and relationship therapy. His research focuses on testimony therapy, discursive practices of family therapy, critical pedagogy, and Afrocentric critical theory. KWASI AKWAMU, a longtime student of the Black nationalist struggle in the United States, is a cofounder of the Obadele Society in Detroit, Michigan, which advances the work of Gaidi and Imari Obadele and all other Black nationalists who preceded them. Akwamu is also the publisher of the New Afrikan Voice, a quarterly nationalist newspaper. CAROLINA ALONSO-BEJARANO holds a PhD in women’s and gender studies from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and is a professor in the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, also at Rutgers. She specializes in decolonial feminisms and U.S. migration studies, with particular emphasis on settler colonialism and grassroots immigrants’ rights organizing in New Jersey. REYNALDO ANDERSON is as an associate professor of communications and chair of humanities at Harris-Stowe State University. He was recognized by Governor Jay Nixon in 2010 for his leadership in the Saint Louis community and for teaching excellence in 2016 and is a member of the executive board of the Missouri Arts Council. Anderson was a visiting lecturer in Accra, Ghana, and he is coeditor of the book Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. CURTIS AUSTIN received his PhD from Mississippi State University in 1998. In 2007 his first monograph, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party, earned critical acclaim when it received the Choice Library Journal’s Outstanding Academic Title Award. In 2008, Dr. Austin became the founding director the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Black Studies. He currently teaches African American history at the University of Oregon.

832 | About the Editors and Contributors

LINDSEY BAKER is a clarinetist, singer, and composer. She received her master of arts degree in African American studies with a concentration in Culture and Aesthetics from Georgia State University. Baker’s research interests include African American music, African American classical musicians, and women in music. She graduated magna cum laude from Columbus State University with a bachelor of music degree in performance. Baker has presented research on jazz, Motown, and Negro spirituals. Her work “Freedom in Hope” was premiered at the 2015 Society of Composers, Inc., Southeast Composers Symposium. MARQUIS E. BAKER is a second-year graduate student of Georgia State University’s African-American Studies Department. He is a recent graduate of Howard University, where he majored in Afro-American studies and minored in mathematics. As a graduate student, his research focuses on the implications of African-centered pedagogy. Upon graduation, Baker hopes to begin teaching mathematics in an institution utilizing African-centered pedagogy. Ultimately he aims to return to his hometown of Detroit to introduce a citywide curriculum that is culturally relevant to African American students. ALANA BARNES is an undergraduate student of history with a minor in African American studies at Georgia State University. She plans to go on to graduate school toward an MA in library science. Barnes spends her free time volunteering at the Atlanta Fulton Central Library and the Auburn Avenue Research Library. JESSE BENJAMIN is an associate professor of sociology, African and African diaspora studies, and the School of International Conflict Management, Develop­ ment and Peacebuilding at Kennesaw State University and is also a member of the board at the Walter Rodney Foundation. Benjamin is editor or coeditor of the journals South, ATL, and Groundings and coedited with Robin D. G. Kelley a previously unpublished Walter Rodney volume on the historiography of the Russian Revolution, expected in 2018. ROBERT A. BENNETT III is an instructor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University. He is also a faculty fellow with the African American Male Research Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin. A native of Decatur, Georgia, Bennett graduated from Morehouse College with a bachelor of arts degree in history with honors. He earned his master of arts degree and doctorate of philosophy in history from Ohio State University. RICHARD D. BENSON II is a historian specializing in education, the Black freedom movement, and transnational social movements. He completed a PhD in educational policy specializing in the history of education at the University of Illinois



About the Editors and Contributors | 833

at Urbana-Champaign. Benson is currently an assistant professor in the Education Department at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the award-winning author of Fighting for Our Place in the Sun: Malcolm X and the Radicalization of the Black Student Movement, 1960–1973 (Peter Lang, 2015). DEXTER L. BLACKMAN is a historian with research interests in African American history, 20th-century and contemporary American history, and U.S. sports history. He is an assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. KENDRA BOYD is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Her research focuses on Black business, economic development, and capitalism in the 20th-century United States. NYLE I. BRAND began her scholarly work at Howard University, where she earned two degrees, in political science and Afro-American studies, with a minor/ concentration in Kiswahili. Brand currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is obtaining her master’s degree from Georgia State University’s Department of African-American Studies. Both her research and personal passion engage with and prioritize the idea of truthful narrative storytelling/film as it pertains to Black people. TIM BROWN is a doctoral student at Georgia State University in the field of sociology with a focus on race. He has worked in higher education for over 10 years serving marginalized populations. A native of Columbia, South Carolina, Brown graduated from Georgia Tech with a bachelor of science degree in management. He also graduated from Clemson University with a master’s degree in human resource development. LEON JAMES BYNUM has held positions at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (Columbia University), the Center for Excellence (Caritas College, Hong Kong), and the Harmony Theatre Company (New York). Bynum is a graduate of Columbia University. His research has been published by the university presses of Harvard, Oxford, NYU, and University College Cork. SUNDIATA KEITA CHA-JUA teaches in the African American Studies Depart­ ment and the History Department at the University of Illinois. He is the author of many books including America’s First Black Town, Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830– 1915 (University of Illinois Press, 2000) and Sankofa: Racial Formation and Transformation; Toward a Theory of African American History (Washington State

834 | About the Editors and Contributors

University, 2000) and coedited Race Struggles (University of Illinois Press, 2009) with Theodore Koditschek and Helen Neville. Cha-Jua has also published dozens of articles in leading journals. KEFENTSE CHIKE, PhD, is adjunct professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. THANDISIZWE CHIMURENGA is an award-winning freelance journalist from Los Angeles, California. She is the author of No Doubt: The Murder(s) of Oscar Grant (2014) and Reparations . . . Not Yet: A Case for Reparations and Why We Must Wait (2015). Her writing has appeared in various sources including New America Media and the Los Angeles Watts Times, Sentinel, and Wave newspapers as well as Final Call, the Black Agenda Report, Ebony, CounterPunch, Truth-Out, and Daily Kos, among others. MARK CHRISTIAN is a full professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Lehman College and a professor in urban education and Africana studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. A senior Fulbright Scholar recipient, he has published books and articles relating to the African diaspora as it pertains to the United States and the United Kingdom. WARD CHURCHILL (Keetoowah Cherokee) served for 30 years on the leadership council of Colorado American Indian Movement. Now retired, he was a professor of American Indian studies and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado–Boulder. A prolific author, he has written more than 20 books focusing on indigenous rights, political repression, colonialism, and genocide. The most recent is Wielding Words Like Weapons: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1995–2005 (PM Press, 2017). M. KEITH CLAYBROOK JR. is an assistant professor of Africana studies at California State University, Long Beach. His research interest includes Black student activism in Los Angeles, the history of Black Los Angeles, and the history of social movements. MICHAEL L. CLEMONS, PhD, is a professor of political science and African American studies at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Race and Policy and serves as executive director of the Consortium for Research on Race, Diversity, and Policy. EVA COOKE is a recent graduate of Spelman College with a bachelor of arts degree in English. Having attended a historically Black college, she was exposed to



About the Editors and Contributors | 835

African American literature, history, and culture that sparked an interest in Africana studies that led her to Georgia State University. As a candidate for her master of arts degree in African American studies, Cooke centers her research on masculinity studies and rape culture on Black college campuses. EMILYE CROSBY is a professor of history and the co-coordinator of Africana/ Black studies at SUNY Geneseo. She is the author of A Little Taste of Free­ dom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi and the editor of Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement. JOSHUA CRUTCHFIELD holds an MA in history from Middle Tennessee State University and studies the relationship between the Black Power Movement, the Black church, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He is the cofounder of the Twitter-based digital humanities project #BlkTwitterstorians that seeks to create and connect a community of Black historians on Twitter. PERO GAGLO DAGBOVIE is a distinguished professor in the Department of History and is associate dean in the Graduate School at Michigan State University. He is the author of five books and numerous articles. Dagbovie is a lifetime member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) and a member of the ASALH Carter G. Woodson Home Committee. From 2008 until 2010, Dagbovie served as the principal investigator for the Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site and completed the historic resource study for the Woodson Home that was published as Carter G. Woodson in Wash­ ington, D.C.: The Father of Black History (History Press, 2014). JOY DOMINGUEZ is pursuing a master’s degree in African American studies at Georgia State University. She earned her MBA from Kennesaw State University and her BA in African and African American studies from the University of Michigan. Dominguez’s research interests include culturally relevant teaching and African-centered education. PAUL J. EDWARDS is a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University. He holds a PhD in American studies from Boston University. Edwards’s research has been supported by a Martin Luther King Jr. Fellowship (2012–2015), a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst research fellowship (2015–2016), and a Dissertation Fellowship at the Boston University Center for the Humanities (Spring 2017). His current work focuses on the experiences and reception of Black Americans in Germany during the interwar era (1919–1939).

836 | About the Editors and Contributors

GARRETT FELBER is an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi. He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan in American culture. Felber is the coauthor of The Portable Malcolm X Reader (Penguin Books, 2013) with Manning Marable and is the author of the forthcoming book “Those Who Know Don’t Say”: The Nation of Islam and the Politics of Black Nationalism. Felber’s research has been supported by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the African American Intellectual History Society, the New York State Archives, and the Huntington Library. Felber is the founder of Liberation Literacy, an organization dedicated to building social justice literacy and reimagining community through education and conversation inside and outside of prisons in Portland, Oregon. CHARLES EZRA FERRELL is the vice president of public programs at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. He is the founder of the museum’s groundbreaking Liberation Film Series, the Charles Hamilton Houston’s People’s Lawyers Series, and Global Historical Journeys. He is an activist, pencil portrait artist, poet, jazz photographer, and organic gardener and an alumnus of Amherst College and the University of Michigan–Dearborn, where he majored in political science, Black studies, and psychology. NICHOLAS GAFFNEY, is an assistant professor of history at Northern Virginia Community College, Alexandria, where he teaches courses in African American and American history. His research centers on the intersection of music and 20thcentury Black sociopolitical activism. JOCILYN GILBERT is a graduate student in the Department of African American Studies at Georgia State University. DERIC A. GILLIARD works in public affairs in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the author of Living in the Shadows of a Legend: Unsung Heroes and Sheroes Who Marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. DAYO F. GORE is an associate professor of ethnic studies and critical gender studies at the University of California in San Diego. GEORGE R. GREENIDGE JR. is a PhD candidate in sociology with a concentration in race and urban studies at Georgia State University. He was president of the Boston Empowerment Zone, a federally funded Department of Housing and Urban Development initiative aimed at economic investment in U.S. urban neighborhoods. Greenidge was the founder and executive director of the National Black College Alliance, a nonprofit focused on providing alumni mentors for college and high school students.



About the Editors and Contributors | 837

MARCUS GREENWOOD, aka Taye Uhuru (Tah-Yae Oo-Who-Roo), studies middle childhood education. He studied Spanish, Dominican culture, and Caribbean diseases in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, at Universidad Ibroamericana. Greenwood also studied Portuguese, Brazilian culture, and Capoeira in Florianopolis, Brazil, at Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina. He is writing his first book, titled The Afro Set Black Nationalist Party for Self-Defense. ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS is a widely published and award-winning Black feminist poet and scholar. Gumbs is the founder of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind intergalactic educational initiative and the cofounder of the Mobile Homecoming project (an experiential archive amplifying generations of Black LGBTQ brilliance). She is also the coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines and the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity. GWENDOLYN MIDLO HALL is an activist, essayist, historian of the African diaspora, and pioneer digital humanist who is best known for award-winning Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Louisiana Slave Database 1719–1820 and Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. JOY LIANI HALLMAN was awarded a doctorate of education in counseling psychology from Argosy University, Los Angeles. She earned a master’s degree in school counseling/psychology from Phillips Graduate Institute with credentials in pupil personnel services and child welfare and attendance. A graduate of Virginia State University, Hallman received a bachelor’s degree in psychology with minors in English and modern dance. She works as an adjunct professor of psychology and sociology at Argosy University in Los Angeles. OLOLADE HASSAN was born and raised in London to Nigerian parents and earned her first two degrees in the United Kingdom before pursuing a master’s degree in African American studies at Georgia State University. CYNTHIA M. HEWITT earned her PhD in sociology from Emory University and is an associate professor of sociology at Morehouse College and a member of the faculty of the Africana Studies Program and the Sustainability Minor Program. Dr. Hewitt was the founding director of the Morehouse Pan-African Global Experience study abroad program and the lead researcher for the Solar Pioneers II research project in Ghana. In these capacities, she is engaged in community needs and assets assessment for social business development, video-assisted research, and other media projects.

838 | About the Editors and Contributors

MAURICE HOBSON is an assistant professor of African American studies and a historian at Georgia State University. He engages the social sciences through a new paradigm called the Black New South that explores the experiences of Black folk in the American South, with national and international implications, since World War II. With this, he has served as an expert witness in court cases and as a voice of insight for documentaries, films, movies, public historical markers, monuments, and museum exhibitions. DAVID HORNE is a professor of Africana studies at California State University, Northridge. He is a founding member of the Pan African Education Network, South Africa; founder and international facilitator of the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus and the Pan-African Diaspora Union; and a lifetime member of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. Dr. Horne has authored Meeting Maat: A Handbook for Goal-Oriented Meetings and Gatherings and Straight to the Point: A Primer for a Logical Introduction to Critical Thinking. His upcoming book is titled 21st Century Pan-Africanism: Theory and Praxis. JOCELYN IMANI is an educator and public historian and the 2017 Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. She received her PhD with distinction in African diaspora and public history from Howard University and has taught at Howard University, Washington Adventist University, and Coppin State University. Dr. Imani hails from Nashville, Tennessee, and is a 2014 White House HBCU All-Star. ASHLEY L. JACKSON is a student at California State University, Northridge, majoring in film with an emphasis in screenwriting. Her commitment to sharing stories about social justice and activism is supported by her minors in African American studies and gender studies. JOY JAMES is the F.C. Oakley 3rd Century Professor in Humanities at Williams College. She is the editor of Imprisoned Intellectuals and the Angela Y. Davis Reader. James’s latest book is Seeking the ‘Beloved Community.’ SURESHI M. JAYAWARDENE is a PhD candidate in African American studies at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on Africana people in India and Sri Lanka. BAYYINAH S. JEFFRIES is an assistant professor at Ohio University in the Department of African American Studies. Jeffries is also the author of A Nation Can Rise No Higher Than Its Women: African American Muslim Women in the Movement for Black Self-Determination, 1950–1975 and other works.



About the Editors and Contributors | 839

HASAN KWAME JEFFRIES is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University. He is the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt and the editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement. JUDSON L. JEFFRIES is professor of African American and African studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of more than 50 journal articles and seven books, including The Portland Black Panthers: Empowering Albina and Remaking a City (2016). MAKEIVA JENKINS is a full-time graduate student at Georgia State University in the African-American Studies Department. Her research includes fatherdaughter relationships, intimate partner relationships, and educational attainment among African American women. REGINA JENNINGS has published thirty articles in peer-reviewed publications and won the Shirley Graham Du Bois Award for “Malcolm X’s Influence on the Poetry of Sonia Sanchez.” Her scholarship is widely cited and her academic text Malcolm X and the Poetics of Haki Madhubuti won the Cheikh Anta Diop International Book Award. Also a poet, she has written three poetry books. Her latest is Race, Rage, and Roses. Black Panther Poetry: From Ancestral Memory, Morphogenetic Fields to Hip Hop is her current scholarship in progress. CATHERINE JERMANY earned her bachelor’s degree in child and adolescent development and her master’s degree in counseling from California State Univer­ sity, Northridge. She works as an academic adviser within the Encounter to Excel­ lence Program at California State University, Dominguez Hills. JOSEPH JOHNSON is an independent scholar and activist. His research and activism are focused on strategies to eliminate poverty as well as on the dangers of global nuclear war. Johnson’s work is dedicated to revolutionary change. OLLIE A. JOHNSON III is chair and an associate professor of African American Black politics in the Americas, with emphasis on African American, AfroBrazilian, and Afro-Latin American politics. Johnson’s most recent book is Race, Politics, and Education in Brazil: Affirmative Action in Higher Education (2015), edited with Rosana Heringer. ROBERT LEE JOHNSON lectures on the subject of local history at colleges, universities, and museums in southern California. Johnson is a member of the History Council and a past chairman of the Projects Committee at the California

840 | About the Editors and Contributors

African American Museum. He was formerly a leading member of the Compton branch of the Black Panther Party and a founding member of the Coalition Against Police Abuse in the 1970s. Johnson is the author of the book Images of America: Compton and has written articles for newspapers and magazines. His latest book, Notable Southern Californians in Black History, was published in 2017. TEKLA ALI JOHNSON earned a PhD in history with an emphasis in African American studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Johnson has taught Africana studies at North Carolina A&T State University and at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. From 2010 to 2014 she taught Africana studies, public history, and women’s history at Salem College for Women in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her first book, Free Radical: Ernest Chambers, Black Power, and the Politics of Race (Texas Tech University Press, 2012), earned a national book award from the National Council of Black Studies in 2013 and a State Book award from Nebraska the same year. CHARLES E. JONES is a professor and the chair of Africana studies at the University of Cincinnati. Jones is an architect in the field of African American studies. He is a board member of the National Council of Black Studies, the leading professional organization for those in the field of African American studies. Jones is also the editor of the seminal work The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. KWAME OSAGYEFO KALIMARA is an activist with 50 years of Black Liberation work. Kalimara attended San Francisco State University, University of San Francisco, and the African Institute of Theology. His teaching includes OliveHarvey City College and the National Conference of Black Lawyers Community College of Law and International Diplomacy (Chicago), University of Detroit and Wayne State University Schools of Law (Detroit), Atlanta Metropolitan College, Georgia State University, and Morehouse College. He is the former National Chair & Secretary of the New Afrikan Peoples’ Organization (NAPO) and cofounder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. MAULANA KARENGA is a professor and the chair of the Department of Afri­ cana Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and executive director of the African American Cultural Center (Us). He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Paul Robeson–Zora Neale Hurston Award for Scholarship in African World Culture and the C. L. R. James Award for Outstanding Publi­ cation of Scholarly Works, both from the National Council for Black Studies. Furthermore, Karenga has published numerous scholarly articles, book chapters, and books including Essays on Struggle and Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt.



About the Editors and Contributors | 841

TIAMOYO KARENGA is a lecturer at the Kawaida Institute of Pan-African Studies, Los Angeles, in kawaida philosophy, Maat, ancient Egyptian women, and kawaida womanism. She holds a BA in Black studies and an MA in interdisciplinary studies (Black studies and anthropology) in ancient African archaeology from California State University, Long Beach. Karenga is also a board member of the African American Cultural Center (Us). TARELL C. KYLES received his master’s degree in African American studies at Georgia State University and is currently in the PhD program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in community psychology. JENNIFER LABRECQUE is a first-year graduate student in the Georgia State University African American studies master’s program. A native Georgian, she currently works in the Atlanta metro area with homeless youths. ALYSSA LOPEZ is a doctoral student in the History Department at Michigan State University, where she works under Dr. Pero G. Dagbovie. Lopez’s research focuses on early 20th-century African American cultural history. More specifically, she is interested in the ways that Harlem’s leisure spaces, such as dance halls and movie theaters, functioned within the Black community and how these particular spaces were surveilled and policed. BARRINGTON D. MARTIN II is a graduate student in Georgia State University’s African American studies program. He also attended Georgia State during his undergraduate career, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. MELANIE A. MCCOY (Zalika Ibaorimi) is a master’s student in the discipline of African American studies with a research focus on womanism, Afro futurism, and Black sexual politics. She is also a painter and member of the Malcolm X Grass­ roots Movement. KENJA MCCRAY earned her PhD from Georgia State University. She is an asso­ ciate history professor at Atlanta Metropolitan State College, where she was nominated for a teaching excellence award. She is a member of several committees and organizational boards and received the 2015 Association of Black Women Historians’ Drusilla Dunjee Houston Award, a 2016 Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society paper prize, and the Southern Foodways Alliance 2017 Edward Lee scholarship. KIM MCMILLON is a PhD candidate in world cultures and interdisciplinary humanities at the University of California in Merced.

842 | About the Editors and Contributors

WILLIAM T. MERRITT is president and CEO of the National Black United Fund, Inc. A former councilman and deputy mayor of the City of Plainfield, New Jersey, he is president emeritus of the National Association of Black Social Workers, Inc. For more than 40 years Merritt has used his professional expertise and leadership abilities in public policy, governance, youth services, and Black philanthropy to advocate for social justice and social change in the Black community. LISA R. MERRIWEATHER is an associate professor of adult education at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Her research focuses on issues of equity, social justice, and anti-Black racism within the historical discourse of adult education, informal education, and doctoral education. PETER MURIUKI MHUNZI is a federal language consultant for Kiswahili at the U.S. Department of Defense. He is a former professor of history at Pasadena City College and also taught Kiswahili at California State University, Los Angeles and Long Beach, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Mhunzi is a volunteer translator for Translators without Borders. EDWARD ONACI is an assistant professor of history at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. His research interests include the Republic of New Africa, territorial nationalism, Black Power activism and identity, and reparations. Onaci’s first book focuses on the history of the Republic of New Africa. ESTELLA OWOIMAHA-CHURCH is a Global Teacher Prize Finalist (2017) and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Task Force ambassador. She holds a MA in education in language arts and literacy from Loyola Mary­mount University and a BA in African American studies and urban education from California State University, Northridge. Owoimaha-Church teaches theater in Los Angeles, helping youths to employ performing arts as a community service tool. KERRY PIMBLOTT is an assistant professor of African American and diaspora studies and history at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. MATTHEW QUEST received his doctorate in American studies from Brown University. He has taught history and Africana studies at many colleges, most recently Georgia State University in Atlanta. Quest is known for his scholarship on C. L. R. James, the Pan-African and independent socialist historian. PATRICIA REID-MERRITT, PhD, is an author, educator, scholar, community activist, and performing artist and the distinguished professor of social work and Africana studies at Stockton University in Galloway, New Jersey. Reid-Merritt is



About the Editors and Contributors | 843

the founder and artistic/executive director of Afro-One Dance, Drama and Drum Theatre, Inc. She is the author of Sister Power; Sister Wisdom; Righteous SelfDetermination: The Black Social Work Movement in America; Race in America: How a Pseudo-Scientific Concept Shaped Human Interaction; and Tarnished Leg­ acy: A Reluctant Memoir. SHERWIN “KEITH” RICE is a historian and certified archivist at the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge. Rice is enrolled in the PhD history program at Claremont Graduate University. His field of study is American history with a concentration on the African American Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Rice is also the president of the board and curator at the Museum of Social Justice in Los Angeles. T. J. ROBINSON is a proud alumnus of California State University, Dominguez Hills, with an MA in Africana psychology. She is currently pursuing her PhD at Claremont Graduate University in the cultural studies program. Her research interests are standards of beauty and the Spirituals. Her article “The Healing Element of the Spirituals” was published in the Journal of Pan African Studies. She is an adjunct professor at several colleges and universities in the Los Angeles area and is also a certified life and spiritual coach. PAULA MARIE SENIORS is an associate professor of Africana studies at Virginia Tech and the biographer of her family legacy, Mae Mallory, and the Monroe Defense Committee. Seniors won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize, Association of Black Women Historians, for Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Culture of Uplift, Identity and Politics in Black Musical Theater. MICHAEL SIMANGA is an activist writer, scholar, educator, artist, and cultural worker. He teaches in the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University and is the author of Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People: History and Memory and other works. JAMES M. SIMMONS is a lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at California State University–Northridge. He is also an attorney practicing in the fields of criminal, civil, and human rights, representing numerous community activists, revolutionaries, and “terrorists.” He is active in community organizing in his home city of Los Angeles and has traveled to places such as Jackson, Missis­ sippi, and Namibia to help protect the human rights of oppressed people. ROBERT C. SMITH is a professor of political science at San Francisco State University. He is the author or coauthor of scores of articles and essays and 10

844 | About the Editors and Contributors

books on African American politics, including American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom, a leading textbook in Black politics. He is also the editor of What Does This Got to Do with the Liberation of Black People? The Impact of Ronald W. Walters on African American Thought and Leadership (2015). IDRISSA N. SNIDER is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she studies rhetorical criticism with a specific interest in identity, culture, and media effects. Snider earned her bachelor’s degree in broadcasting and journalism from Georgia State University and holds a master’s degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in communication management. RONALD J. STEPHENS is a professor and the former director of the African American Studies and Research Center in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue University. Along with publishing numerous articles and encyclopedia entries, he is the author of Idlewild: The Rise, Decline and Rebirth of a Unique African American Resort Town (University of Michigan Press, 2013), Idlewild: The Black Eden of Michigan (Arcadia Publishing, 2001), and African Americans of Denver (Arcadia Publishing, 2008). ALEXZANDRA STRICKLAND is a master’s student in African American studies with a concentration in community empowerment at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Spelman College. Her research focuses on the role of gangsta rap music in the expression of trauma among African American men. ASANTEWA SUNNI-ALI is the director of the Center of Pan-African Culture and an assistant professor of Pan-African studies at Kent State University. Her educational background includes a BA in Africana studies, an MA in African American studies, and a PhD in theater for youths. Dr. Sunni-Ali is the author of various publications and plays that explore her research interests: intersections of Black childhood, everyday and theatrical performance, agency, identity, and liberation. QUITO SWAN is an associate professor of African diaspora history at Howard University and the author of Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decol­ onization. His scholarly expertise includes Black internationalism, global Black Power, and Black social movements in the South Pacific and Latin America. His current book project is Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Power, Global Crossroads and Environmental Justice. He is also coeditor of Michigan State University Press’s Ruth Simms Hamilton African Diaspora Book Series.



About the Editors and Contributors | 845

RACHANICE CANDY TATE is an art historian and adjunct professor at Clark Atlanta University. Her dissertation is titled “‘Our Art Itself Was Our Activism’: Atlanta’s Neighborhood Arts Center, 1975–1990.” She is the assistant director of the Emory University Center for Creativity & Arts. CHIMBUKO TEMBO is a lecturer at the Kawaida Institute of Pan-African Studies and associate director of the African American Cultural Center (Us). She is a former lecturer in Black studies at California State University, Long Beach. JEANNE THEOHARIS is a distinguished professor of political science at Brook­ lyn College of the City University of New York and the author of numerous books and articles on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the politics of race and education, social welfare, and civil rights in post-9/11 America. Her widely acclaimed biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a 2014 NAACP Image Award and the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. LETITIA THORNTON is an educator who specializes in guiding students into cultural appreciation and self-discovery. She received a bachelor of science degree in business management with a concentration in marketing from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a master of arts degree in African American studies through Georgia State University. At Georgia State, Thornton’s studies focused on how to create culturally relevant classrooms that affirm all students. She currently serves teachers and students within the Clayton County, Georgia, public school district. CHRISTOPHER M. TINSON is an associate professor of Africana studies and history in the School of Critical Social Inquiry at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Radical Intellect: Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s. His interdisciplinary research and teaching focus on the intersections between Africana radical traditions, U.S. ethnic studies, hip-hop culture, critical media studies, incarceration, community-based education, and race and sports. W. S. TKWEME earned a PhD from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst in African American culture and history with a focus on cultural expression and radical political activity of the post–World War II era. Much of his research and teaching revolve around the Black Arts and Black Power Movements as well as soul music, jazz, and their discourses. Tkweme has a long background of hosting community radio programs (The Seeker, Afro Excursions) and public forums and celebrations committed to preservation, promotion, and advancement of the history and culture of African Americans.

846 | About the Editors and Contributors

CLAUDETTE L. TOLSON (AYODELE SHAIHI), PhD, is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Perimeter College in Clarkston, Georgia. TAKIYAH TUGGERSON graduated from the University of Florida in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in African American studies at Georgia State University. Her research interests include Black feminism, respectability politics, and African American history. WATANI TYEHIMBA is a community organizer, activist, and legal defense investigator. He has worked for the legal defense of Geronimo ji-Jaga, Mutulu Shakur, Jamil Al-Amin, and Kamau Sadiki. TONY VAN DER MEER is an activist scholar and a senior lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts–Boston. He is the coeditor of the book State of the Race: Creating Our 21st Century; Where Do We Go From Here? Foreword by Assata Shakur (Diaspora Press, 2004). DARA R. WALKER holds a PhD from the Department of History at Rutgers University. She is a scholar of urban history, the history of childhood and youth, and African American history. Walker’s current research examines the intersection between Black educational movements and Black labor radicalism of the Black Power era. RYAN WARREN is a graduate student in the African-American Studies Depart­ ment at Georgia State University. He has taught primary and secondary grades at public schools in Memphis, Tennessee, and Atlanta, Georgia, for the past four years. Warren’s interests include the experiences of African American children in public charter schools and a variety of issues surrounding the criminal justice system including the abolition of the death penalty and prisoner activism. SIMON WENDT is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. ROBERT W. WIDELL JR. is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author of Birmingham and the Long Black Freedom Struggle. Dr. Widell’s current research explores the case of Johnny “Imani” Harris, the Atmore-Holman Brothers, and the impact of mass incarceration on organizing and activism in the 1970s and 1980s. THERON WILKERSON earned his Bachelor’s degree in history from Jackson State University and his master’s degree at Georgia State University in African



About the Editors and Contributors | 847

American studies. He has published poetry in the Black Magnolias Literary Journal and the Baroda Pamphlet. Wilkerson has also written tributes to Mississippi Civil Rights veterans and leaders of historically Black colleges and universities in Mississippi and a commemorative ensemble performance for the late great Black revolutionary mayor Chokwe Lumumba. Currently, Wilkerson is working with Civil Rights veteran Doris Derby as a private research consultant in the development of an exhibit on the historic Black neighborhood district Farish Street in Jackson, Mississippi. AUBREY WILLIAMS is a graduate student in African American studies at Georgia State University. Williams holds two bachelor’s degrees: a BIS in theater performance with a minor in nonprofit management and a BA in film studies with a minor in history. SHAWN L. WILLIAMS earned bachelor of arts degrees in English and Africana studies at the University of Pittsburgh (1989). He holds a master of arts degree in reading curriculum (1991) and a doctorate of arts in humanities with a focus on English literature (2000), both earned at Clark Atlanta University. Dr. Williams has published numerous works in the field of African American studies, including “I’m a Bad Man”: African American Vernacular Culture and the Making of Muhammad Ali. AUGUSTUS WOOD is a PhD candidate in history and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His primary research interests are African American working-class struggle, social movements, and response to neoliberalism in southern urban spaces in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. KOMOZI WOODARD is a professor of history, public policy, and Africana studies at Sarah Lawrence College. He attended Princeton, Andover, Dickinson, the New School, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Woodard was managing editor of the Unity & Struggle and Black Newark newspaper and radio program in the Black Power Movement and the Main Trend journal in the Black Arts Movement and Manhattan’s Children’s Express before writing and editing A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics; The Making of the New Ark; The Black Power Movement: Amiri Baraka from Black Arts to Black Radicalism, Freedom North, Groundwork, Black Power 50; and Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. MIRIAM K. YOUNG is a graduate student in African American studies at Georgia State University.

Index

Page numbers in bold indicate main encyclopedia entries. Abyeman, Jaramogi Abebe. See Cleage, Albert, Jr. (Jaramogi Abebe Abyeman) Achebe, Chinua, 152, 456 ACM (Afro-Caribbean Movement), 148 Acoli, Sundiata (Clark Squire), liii, 113– 114, 555, 627, 630, 631, 715, 721 ACORN (Associations of Community Organizations for Reform Now), 559 Activism, 215–216 African, 491 antiracist, 404 antiwar, 748, 805 Asian American, 290, 311, 439 Black Power, lxxvi, lxxvii, 16, 77, 161, 162, 330, 393, 397, 404, 639, 656, 657, 665, 669, 741 Civil Rights, xviii, lxxviii, 396, 439, 638, 644, 739 class-based, 792 community, 1, 357, 460, 815, 830 grassroots, 200 human rights, 723 intellectual, 161 international, 530 Kanak, 150–151 labor, 172 Latino, 290, 311 lesbian, 731–733 in music, 132–133 nonviolent, xi Pan-African, 491, 729 peace, 404 political, 3, 11, 45, 96, 172, 265, 310, 347, 398, 626, 698

AAA (Afro-American Association), xvi, xix, 450–451, 654 AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), 129, 133, 269 AAL (Aborigines Advancement League), 151 AAPRP. See All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) AAS (Afro-American Society), 486–488 AASM (Afro-American Student Movement), xix, 45, 655, 672, 739 ABA (American Bar Association), 553 Ababa, Addis, 585 Abantu grammar, 437 ABB (African Blood Brotherhood), 117–118, 144, 251, 281, 377 Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem (Lew Alcindor), 101 Abernathy, James, 554 Abernathy, Ralph David, 7, 433, 508, 597 Abimbola, Wande, 776 Abolitionist movement, 107, 181, 716. See also Antislavery Aboriginal Legal Aid Center, 151 Aboriginal peoples, 151 Aboriginal Tent Assembly, 151 Aborigines Advancement League (AAL), 151 Abortion, xxxii, 272, 427 Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, 427 Abubakari, Dara Salamuga (Virginia Collins), cii, 1–5 Abu-Jamal, Mumia, 138, 264, 346, 440, 555, 627, 628, 632

849

850 | Index prison, 158, 160 radical, lxxvi, 290, 413, 470, 539 reparations, 669 social, 512, 552 student, 164, 168–169, 170, 171, 177, 180–181, 404, 407, 486, 651, 784 women’s, 289 working class, cxvi youth, 789 See also Black Prisoner Activism; Black Student Activism Activists, exiled, xiv, xviii, xxii, xlvi, liii, 635 Adams, Hank, lxiii Adefumi, Nana Oserjiman, 4, 534, 581, 585, 775 Adefunmi, Oba Efuntola Oseijeman Adelabu (Walter Eugene King), 664 Adegbolola, Alajo, lv ADNIP (African Descendants National Independence Partition Party), 534, 666 Advisory Committee on Civil Rights (Massachusetts), 826 Affirmative action programs, 555 Affro-Arts Center, 129 Africa and Comintern, 279–280 immigrants from, 664 liberation movements in, 176, 263, 312, 379, 415, 434, 464, 602, 726, 796 See also individual African countries by name African American Cultural Center, 411, 423, 799 African American Islam, 452. See also Nation of Islam (NOI) African American Leadership Institute, 814 African American Literature Book Club, 91 African American studies. See Black studies African American Teachers Association, 296, 589 African American Vernacular English, 703 African Americans

education for, cxix, 182, 418, 472, 492, 547, 562, 587–590, 696–697 as emigrants, 729 as entrepreneurs, 597 language of, 703 leadership among, cxix life-cycle ceremonies for, 411 as mayors, cxix, cxxi, 57, 213, 277, 287, 330, 332, 358, 360, 400–401, 415, 467, 470, 546 rites of passage for, 357, 411, 798, 799 African and African Descendants Conference, 556 Africana studies. See Black studies African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), 117–118, 144, 251, 281, 377 African Children’s Educational Center, 492 African Civilization Society, 599 African Communities League, 601, 770 African Community of Chicago, 166 African Descendants National Independence Partition Party (ADNIP), 534, 666 African diaspora, 6, 9, 23–25, 104, 117, 119–121, 143, 168, 203, 269, 279, 288, 342, 383, 446, 491, 492, 690, 737, 770 African diaspora studies. See Black studies African Free School program, 57, 157, 277, 288 African Freedom Day, 491 African Grand Lodge of Free Masonry, 599 African Heritage Studies Association, 183 African immigrants, 664 African independence movements. See African liberation movements African internationalism, 809 African Liberation Day, xxi, 5, 7, 8–10, 188, 228, 289, 362, 380, 473, 491, 492, 602, 695, 760–761 African Liberation Day Coordinating Committee (ALDCC), 7, 491, 696 African liberation movements, 176, 263, 312, 379, 415, 434, 464, 602, 726, 796

Index | 851 African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC), xxi, ci, 5–11, 57, 188, 277, 289, 312, 380, 473, 492, 655, 696, 813 chapters leaving, 8–9 decentralization of, 10–11 Marxist-Leninist factions in, 10 at the Sixth Pan-African Congress, 9 Statement of Purpose, 7 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, 282–283, 599 African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion) Church, 599 African movement, 104 African National Congress, 263 African National Prison Organization (ANPO), 811 African National Reparations Organization (ANRO), 669 African nationalism, xvi, xviii African Nationalist Pioneer Movement (ANPM), xvi, 652 African Organization (Suriname), 287 African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde of GuineaBissau, 8 African People’s Party (APP), 9, 380, 674, 776 African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), 809, 810 African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC), 811 African Reparation Organization (ARO), 811 African socialism, 24, 379, 414, 418, 422, 798. See also Socialism African Socialist International (ASI), 809, 811 African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA), 149, 379, 453, 657 African Solidarity Day, xxi, 379 African Union, 601 African womanism, 183. See also Womanism Afrikan Peoples Party (APP), 646, 741 Afrikan Women’s Caucus, 770 Afrikan Women’s Conference, 188

Afro American Association (AAA), 170 Afro hairstyle, 77–78, 79, 110, 263, 309, 378, 397, 452 Afro Set Black Nationalist Party for SelfDefense (Afro Set), 11–14 demise, 13–14 JFK House, 12 structure and activities, 12–13 Afro-America, current poverty issues, lxx Afroamerica, xiii Afro-American Anti-Bicentennial Committee, 376 Afro-American Association (AAA), xvi, xix, 450–451, 654 Afro-American Broadcasting Company, 579, 581 Afro-American Conference on Student Black Nationalism, 672, 739 Afro-American Liberation Army. See Black Liberation Army (BLA) Afro-American Society (AAS), 486–488 Afro-American Student Movement (AASM), xix, 45, 655, 672, 739 Afro-American Students Association, 670 Afro-American studies. See Black studies Afro-Asian Bookshop, 86, 89–90 Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference, 475 Afro-Asian Solidarity Organization, 498 Afro-Caribbean Movement (ACM), 148 Afro-Caribbean Movement of Antigua, 379 Afrocentric womanism, 183. See also Womanism Afrocentricity, 312–313, 335, 411, 452 Afro-Cuban culture, 531 Afro-One Dance, 549 AFSC (American Friends Service Committee), 769 Agyeman, Jaramogi Abebe. See Cleage, Albert B., Jr. (Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman) Ahidian, 699–700 Ahmad, Muhammad. See Stanford, Max, Jr. Ahmed, Omar Abu, 155, 826 Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 556 Aiyetoro, Adjoa, 556 Akan, 664

852 | Index Akbar, Na’im (Luther Benjamin, Jr.), 163–165 Akili, Sababa, 12 Akoto, Yaa Asantewa, 296 Akpan, Kwado, 9 Alabama Black Liberation Front (ABLF), 14–18. See also Black Liberation Front (BLF) Alajo Party, 775 Al-Amin, Jamil Abdullah. See Hubert “H. Rap” Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) Alaska Natives, 556 Al-Aziz, Muhammad Abd (Norman 3X Butler), 476 Alcindor, Lew (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), 101 Alexander, Deacon, 254, 255 Alexander, Franklin, 254, 255 Alexander, Jerome, 802 Alexander, Kendra, 254 Alexander, Margaret Walker, 403 Algeria, 105, 263–264 Algerian National Liberation Front (FALN), 334 Algerian War, 145, 146, 152, 335, 769 Ali, Bilal Sunni, 116 Ali, John, 564 Ali, Muhammad (Cassius Clay), 18–22, 100, 101, 156, 170, 224, 326, 356, 475–476, 563, 592, 804 Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres, 415, 796 Alien-self disorder, 164 Alkalimat, Abdul (Gerald McWhorter), 9, 653, 777 All-African Peoples Conferences of Independent States, 601 All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP), xxi, lxv, 9, 23–26, 227–228, 602 beginnings and background, 23 economic philosophy, 25–26 and Kwame Ture, 24 origins, 23–24 political philosophy, 25 All-African Women’s Revolutionary Union, 25–26

Allen, Ernest (Ernie Mkalimoto), xvi, 282, 376, 460, 461, 671–672 Allen, Robert L., cxvii–cxix Almeida, Juan, 46 Alpha Kappa Alpha Black sorority, 716 Alpha Kappa Alpha Educational Advancement Foundation, Inc., 552 ALSC. See African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) Alston, Dana, 552 American Bar Association (ABA), 553 American Colonization Society, 599 American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), 769 American Indian Movement (AIM), lxiii– lxiv, lxv, 136, 555 Declaration of Continuing Independence, lxvii–lxviii International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), lxvii–lxviii at Pine Ridge reservation, lxvi targeting by COINTELPRO, 299 American Indians, lxi–lxii, 223, 415, 438 current poverty issues, lxx land rights of, lxiv–lxv and Red Power, lxii–lxiv, lxix Red-Black solidarity, lxiv–lxvii and Red-Black solidarity, lxx Red-Black-Brown treaty of unity, lxii reparations for, 556 See also American Indian Movement (AIM) American League for Peace and Democracy, 344 American Student Union, 181 Amin, Idi, 729 Amini, Johari, 82 Amistad Collective, cvi Amnesty International, 631–632 Ana, Hekima, 585 Andaiye, 455 Anderson, Andrew W., Jr., 178 Anderson, Glenn M., cxiv Angelou, Maya, 82–83, 145, 345, 451, 658 Angola, xxi, 8, 23, 46, 289, 307, 379, 760, 799 Angola 3, 160–161

Index | 853 Angola (Louisiana State Penitentiary), 160, 161 ANPO (African National Prison Organization), 811 ANRO (African National Reparations Organization), 669 Anti-apartheid movement, 145, 152–153, 186, 415, 593, 602, 729. See also Apartheid Antiassimilation, 385 Anticapitalism, xvi, xxiii, 189, 200, 422, 658, 677, 798, 827. See also Capitalism Anticolonial movements, xvi–xix, xviii, xix, lxxvi, 6, 150, 186, 192, 307, 323, 499, 601, 675, 760, 798. See also Colonialism Anti-Depression Program, 668–669 Antigua, 148, 656, 657, 760 Antiguan-Caribbean Liberation Movement, 148, 657 Anti-imperialism, xvi, xviii, xxiii, 9, 188, 189, 192, 381, 408, 491, 586, 601, 658, 677, 678, 798. See also Imperialism Anti-Ku Klux Klan march, 408 Antineocolonialism, 601. See also Neocolonialism Anti-racism, 189, 586. See also Racism Antiself disorder, 164 Antislavery, 601. See also Abolitionist movement Aotearoa. See New Zealand Apartheid, 145, 277, 326–327, 555, 669, 670, 706. See also Anti-apartheid movement APP (African People’s Party), 380, 741 APSC (African People’s Solidarity Committee), 811 APSP (African People’s Socialist Party), 809, 810 Aptheker, Bettina, 301 Aquarian Bookshop, 86, 87–88 Argentina, 556 Armed resistance, xlv–xlvi armed struggle, liii–liv, 192 Black Power battles, lv–lvii different forms of, xlvii–xlviii

guerrilla warfare, lii–liii legacy of, lvii paramilitary organizations, xlvi–xlvii retaliatory violence, xlix spontaneous rebellion, l–lii women and, liv–lv See also Self-defense Armour, Norma, 213 ARO (African Reparation Organization), 811 Artistic Heritage Ensemble, 129 Aryan Brotherhood, 391 Asante, Molefi, 312–313, 411 ASCRIA (African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa), 149, 379, 453, 657 Ashley, Jaheed, 788, 790 ASI (African Socialist International), 809, 811 Asia, liberation movements in, 176. See also China; Vietnam Asian American activism, 290, 311, 439. See also Kochiyama, Yuri Asian Americans for Action (Triple A), 439, 440 Assassinations, 26–36. See also King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X Assembly of Unrepresented People, 3 Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), 129, 133, 269 Association for the Study of African American Life and History, 183 Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 183 Association of Black Anthropologists, 183 Association of Black Psychologists, 166, 183 Associations of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), 559 Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 427 Atlanta Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, 735 Atlanta Project, xviii, 775 Atlanta Student Movement, 735 Atlanta University, 384

854 | Index Atlanta University Center (AUC), 384 Attica Brothers, 440, 554 Attica Liberation Foundation (ALF), 38–39 “Attica Manifesto,” 38, 41 Attica Prison Rebellion, 36–42, 160, 390 August 11th Movement, 792 Australia, 145, 146, 151, 277, 379 Secret Intelligence Operation (ASIO), 153 Autobiography of Malcolm X, 477 Avants, Ernest, 506 Ayler, Albert, 132 Babu, Abdulrahman Mohamed, 495 Babu, Muhammad, 46 Back-to-Africa movement, 282, 699 Badillo, Herman, 40 BAEO (Black Alliance for Educational Options), 696–697 Bahamas, 148 Bahia, 149 Baker, Ella, xiv, liv, 169, 181, 464, 520, 735, 743, 749 Baker, General Gordon, Jr., lii, 43–51, 170, 200, 351, 459–460, 461, 671, 677, 785, 787 open letter to the Chrysler Corporation, 50–51 Bakewell, Danny, 412 Bakke, Allan, 555 Balagoon, Kuwasi, 116 Baldwin, James, 80 Ball, Joseph, 498 Ballard, Roy, 674 Baltimore rebellion (2015), cxiii, 817 Bambara, Toni Cade, ciii, 52–55, 451, 452, 658 Banda, Hastings K., 725 Bandler, Faith, 144 Bandung West strategy, 57 Banks, Dennis, lxiii, lxvi Banyacya, lxii Baraka, Amina (Sylvia Robinson), 57, 276, 289 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 55–75 and the Black Arts Movement, 55–56, 76, 80–81, 131–132, 147, 155,

267–269, 322, 416, 439, 471, 477, 565, 566, 567, 611, 658, 701–702, 775 and Committee for a Unified Newark, 57, 275–278, 287, 547 Congress of African People (CAP), 286–288, 290, 501, 542, 547 and the Cuban Revolution, xivvv, 306 conversation with Kalamu ya Salaam, 58–75 and cultural nationalism, 57, 309, 501 and kawaida, 416, 699 Kiswahili name, 436 influence of Malcolm X, xii–xiii, 55, 56, 80, 477 as music critic, 55, 71, 267–268 political activism, xix–xx, li, 56–57, 106, 156, 330, 331, 360, 377, 454, 548, 551, 728, 774, 792 response to police brutality, 611 shift toward Marxism-Leninism, 9, 290, 501 at TABU, 777, 782 as teacher, 57, 155 See also Black Arts Repertory Theatre/ School (BARTS) Baraka, Ras, xxiii, 57, 290, 332 Baraldini, Silvia, liii, 116, 631 Barbados, 145, 148, 150, 151, 556 Barbara A. Sizemore Middle School, 472 Barbuda, 656, 657 Barkley-Waite, Lilette Nzinga, 149 Barnes, Claude, 759–760 Barrett, Lindsay, 268 Barrow, Errol, 150 Barry, Marion, 169, 187 Bartz, Gary, 122, 130, 131, 132 Bass, Charlotta, 654 Bassett, John Hilton, 150 Bassett, Sally, 144 Batista, Fulgencio, 303–306, 530 Bayo, Alberto, 305 Bay of Pigs incident, 306, 531 Beach, Walter III, 100, 101 Beale, Frances, ci, 170, 190, 191, 649, 748 Beckford, George, 657 Belafonte, Harry, 375

Index | 855 BELCO uprisings, 145 Belize, 149, 379, 770 Bell, Derrick, Jr., 553 Bell, Herman, 138, 391, 627 Bell, Sylvester, 31 Bellaer, Sol, 151 Bellecourt, Clyde, lxiii Beloved community, xi, 514 Beloved Community Center (Greensboro), 409 Benjamin, Luther, Jr. (Luther X; Na’im Akbar), 163–165 Ben-Jochannon, Yosef, 157, 455 Bennett, Lerone, Jr., 383, 549 Bennette, Fred C., Jr., 595 Benson, Paul, lxvii BERC (Black Economic Research Center), 727 Berlin Conference, 104, 599 Bermuda, 145, 150, 154, 157, 656, 657 Bernard, Sheila C., interview with Richard Hatcher, 363–376 Bethel, Lorraine, 273, 732 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 181 Betty Shabazz International Charter School, 472 BEU (Black Economic Union), 99–102, 443 Bey, Andy, 130 Bey, Kimoku Feret, 762 Biko, Stephen Bantu, 111, 152 Billingsley, Andrew, 782 Bingham, Steve/Stephan, 389, 391 Bin Hassan, Umar, 457 Bin Wahad, Dhoruba, 138 Birmingham Campaign, cix Birmingham church bombing, xvii, 268, 315, 663, 775, 824 Birth control, ciii, 54 Bishop, Maurice, 148 Bittker, Boris I., 668 BLA. See Black Liberation Army (BLA) Black, John D. F., 197 Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North Carolina (BAAANA), 720 Black aesthetic, 76–78, 82–83, 384, 566– 567, 650. See also “Black is Beautiful” slogan

Black/Africana studies programs, xxiii. See also Black studies Black Agenda, xx, 188, 361–362 Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), 696–697 Black Alternative, 179 Black America, xix, li, liii Black and Puerto Rican Political Convention, 57 Black Armed Guard, 28 Black Artists’ Group, 133 Black Arts Festival (Cincinnati), 348 Black Arts Movement (BAM), xiii, lxxviii, 52, 78–85, 168, 171, 176, 187, 219, 266, 275, 276, 330, 340– 341, 348, 411, 415–416, 423, 551, 698–699, 703 Amiri Baraka’s involvement with, 55–56, 76, 80–81, 131–132, 147, 155, 267–269, 322, 416, 439, 471, 477, 565, 566, 567, 611, 658, 701–702, 775 Black Theater, 80–81 Emory Douglas, 322–324 Larry Neal’s involvement with, 566–567 poetry and literature, 81–83 response to police brutality, 611–612 in the San Francisco Bay Area, 80 See also Black Music; Cultural nationalism; Sanchez, Sonia; Toure, Askia (Rolland Snellings) BLACKARTSOUTH, 698 Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS), xiii, 55–56, 80, 131, 132, 269, 566–567, 703 Black Arts West, xiii, 56 Black August (film), 392 Black August resistance movement, 390–391 Black autonomy, 385 Black Belt thesis, 791 Black Beret Cadre, 150 Black bookstores, 85–93 Black Brotherhood Improvement Association, 630 Blackburn, Robert, 33 Black Caesar (film), 198 Black campus movement, 181–182. See also Black Student Activism

856 | Index Black capitalism, xix, xx, cxxi–cxxii, 125, 294, 311, 516–517, 597 Black Caucus of the Democratic National Committee, 813 Black Christmas, 397, 596 Black churches, 93–98 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, 282–283, 599 African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion) Church, 599 Church of the Black Madonna, 549 New Bethel Baptist Church (Detroit), lvi, 582, 645, 646 Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church, 663 Shrine of the Black Madonna PanAfrican Orthodox Christian Church, 91, 96, 579, 606 Yoruba Temple, 775 See also Birmingham church bombing; National Committee of Black Churchmen; Religion Black Community, 799 Black Community Defense and Development, 275 Black Congress (Los Angeles), xx, 13, 179, 187, 208, 209, 210, 211, 253, 796 Black consciousness, xxix, xxxii, xxxviii, 15, 65, 76, 78, 86, 91, 111, 122, 124, 125, 128–131, 133, 152, 158, 181, 220, 253, 268, 275, 300, 330, 335, 359, 432, 439, 457, 458, 466, 544, 692, 698, 700, 737, 747, 785, 813 Black convention movement, 155, 185, 275, 276, 826–827 Black cultural revolution, xx Black culture. See Cultural nationalism; Culture Black Deaf Advocates, Inc., 552 Black Dialogue, xx Black Disciples, 398 Black Easter, 397, 596 Black Economic Development Conference (NBECD), 339, 461, 537–541, 667 Black Economic Research Center (BERC), 727

Black Economic Union (BEU), 99–102, 443 Black empowerment, cv, 110, 111, 127, 130, 183, 187, 225, 294, 311, 312, 396, 428, 450, 471, 550, 695, 827 community, xx, cvi, 358, 605, 813, 815 cultural, 396 economic, 385, 395, 397, 596, 597 female, 81 male, 81 political, 310, 321, 362, 399, 401 self-, 695 socioeconomic, 165 Black Experience in Sound, 132 Black Expo, 396, 597 Black Federation (San Diego), 796 Black feminism, xix, xxi–xxii, cii–ciii, civ, 53–54, 168, 183, 315, 342, 343, 544 literature of, 53 theory of, 730–733 See also Combahee River Collective; Feminism; National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO); Womanism “Black Feminist Statement,” civ–cv, 270, 731 Black folklore, 567 Black freedom struggle, xiii–xiv, xix, xxiii, xlv Black Gestapo (film), 199 Black Guard, xiv, 48, 674, 740, 823 Black Guerilla Family, 390–391, 571 Black House, 80 Black Internationalism, 102–108, 677 evolution, 104–107 origins, 103–104 See also Revolutionary nationalism “Black is Beautiful” slogan, 21, 77, 79, 108–112, 220, 313. See also Black aesthetic Black Leadership Retreat, 411 Black Left, 343, 344 Black Legion, 645, 770 Black Liberation Army (BLA), xxiii, liii, liv, lxv, 112–117, 138, 153, 390, 611, 630, 641, 678, 714, 715, 718, 721 Amistad Collective, cvi heyday of, 113–114

Index | 857 ideology and consolidation, 114 Liberation of Assata, 114–115 origins, 112–113 as political prisoners and prisoners of war, 631 revitalization of the armed struggle, 115–116 role of women in, cvi Black Liberation Front (BLF), xix, 672, 739, 787. See also Alabama Black Liberation Front (ABLF) Black liberation movement, 310, 343, 359, 473, 538, 566–567, 581 Black Liberation Party (BLP), 380, 674 Black liberation theology, 284–285, 416. See also Liberation theology Black Liberators, 443 Black Lives Matter, xxiii, 139, 153, 290, 458, 544, 716, 773 Black Mafia, 33 Black Manifesto, 171, 339, 461, 488, 537–540, 663, 667–668. See also National Black Economic Development Conference and the Black Manifesto Black maroon, 148, 452–453 Black Marxism (Robinson), 117–122 influence of, 117–119 first section “The Emergence and Limitations of European Radicalism,” 119 second section “The Roots of Black Radicallism,” 119 third section, “Black Radicalism and Marxist Theory,” 119–120 Black Masks, 451 Black Men in Union, 49 Black middle class, cxvi, cxviii–cxix, 77, 312, 431, 762, 827 Black Minorities Business and Cultural Exposition, 596 Black music, 122–133, 154 Black Power activism, 132–133 Black Power axioms, 131–132 in Brazil, 149 hip-hop, 457–458 jazz, 129–131, 266 musician collectives, 133

soul, 124–128 See also Brown, James; Coltrane, John; Scott-Heron, Gil Black Muslims, 105. See also Nation of Islam (NOI) Black Nation Day, 582 Black nationalism, xviii, xix, xxi, lvi, 8, 30, 81, 117, 124, 132, 168, 180, 188, 190, 205, 271, 275, 277, 286–287, 294, 296, 308, 453, 464, 489, 500– 501, 507, 510, 515, 532, 534, 566, 585, 652, 655, 737, 787 and the Black United Front, 723 and Black women, ci–cii in education, 562 of Malcolm X, 703 See also African Liberation Support Committee; Cultural nationalism; Malcolm X Liberation University (MXLU); Nation of Islam (NOI); UHURU Black nationalists of New Libya, lv–lvi Blackness of God, 284–285 Black newspapers, 475. See also Publications Black nonprofit organizations, 552 Black “P” Stone Nation, 398 Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), 134–143 addressing police brutality, lv, 609, 610, 611 in Alabama, 217 and the Alabama Black Liberation Front, 14 in Angola prison, 161 in Australia, 151 and the Black Liberation Army concept, 112 and the Black Power movement, lxxviii, 187, 209, 601, 677 Boston Chapter, 767 Brown’s membership in, 212 Carmichael’s involvement with, 24, 227 Chicago chapter, 353–354 conflict between groups, 641, 674, 797 Davis’s membership in, 316 Detroit chapter, 49

858 | Index elders from, xxiii and Emory Douglas, 322–324 FBI notes on El Paso Black Panther Party (1968), 139–143 founding of, xvi, 80, 106, 146, 170, 300, 330, 450, 566, 570–571, 602, 708, 749 and Fred Hampton, 353 Geronimo ji-Jaga’s involvement with, 640–643 Illinois chapter, 212, 353 in India, 146 inmates as members, 38, 161 internal strife, 710–711 international branches of, 106, 146, 263–264 legal support for, 281 in London, 146–147 Los Angeles chapter of, 178, 641 and Mao’s Little Red Book, 500 New Haven Chapter, 710 New York Chapter, 710 Northern California chapter (BPPNC), 377, 654, 673 in northern urban areas, xiii Oakland chapter, 24, 106, 206, 330, 443, 602, 674 opposing the war in Vietnam, 804 police patrols, 135, 571, 611, 708, 775 political activities, 711 protesting the Mulford Act, 709 publications of, 654 RAM distancing from, 740 and reparations, 665, 667 repression of, 385 Seattle chapter of, lxiii Southern California chapter, xii, 31, 248, 250, 253 targeting by FBI and COINTELPRO, cxxi, 29, 299, 300, 323, 627–628, 714 “The Ten-Point Program,” 134–135, 262, 300, 667, 708 uniforms of, 77, 136, 146 visit to state capitol, 135–136 on the west coast, lii women’s roles in, cv, cvi, 211–212, 212, 260, 262 and Yuri Kochiyama, 440

Black People’s Union Party, 761 Black philanthropic initiatives, 549–550 Black Political Convention, 312 Black political empowerment. See Black empowerment Black Power basis of, 751–752 and Black theology, 284–285 and electoral politics, 328–332 and feminism, 424, 427, 428 and MLK Jr., 429–433 in music, 132–133 Black Power Abroad, 143–154 in Africa, 152–153 in the Americas, 147–150 in Australia, 153 and Pan-Africanism, 144–145 in the South Pacific, 150–152 violence in Mumbai and London, 145–147 Black Power Battles 41st and Central, Los Angeles, lvii Glenville, Cleveland, lv–lvi New Bethel, Detroit, lvi Black Power Conferences, 46, 155–157, 187, 330, 360, 411, 415, 423, 473, 514, 792 Bermuda Black Power Conference, 157, 726 Black Power Planning Conference, 155 Fifth Black Bower Conference, 296 First International Black Power Conference, 150 First Regional International Black Power Conference, 157 Newark Black Power Conference, 155–156 Saint Lucia Black Power Conference, 148 Third Black Power Conference, 157, 606 Black Power fist, 591 Black Power Group (St. Kitts and Nevis), 148 Black Power literature. See Poetry and literature Black Power Marxist movement, 282. See also Marxism

Index | 859 Black Power Movement, xi–xii, xiii, xiv, xxii, 813 first stage (1955-1962), lxxvi second stage (mid-1960s to early 1970s), lxxvii third stage (mid-1970s to mid-1990s), lxxvii fourth stage (mid-1990s to present), lxxvii armed resistance in, xlv–lvii and the Civil Rights Movement, lxxvi, 396, 605 educational mission of, 295–297 FBI repression of, lvii, 5 genesis of, lxxviii government response to, xxii–xxiii, 153 organizations and ideologies, xix–xxii police harassment of, xxii and the Red Power Movement, lxi–lxx and university curricula, lxxv–lxxx See also Activism Black Power Organization (Surinam), 149 Black Power Planning Conference, 155, 187 Black Power Revolution (Trinidad and Tobago), 150 Black Power Speech (Carmichael/Ture), xi, xix, lxiii, 93, 110–111, 155, 229–247, 262, 281, 299–300, 407, 507, 512–513, 609, 685, 737, 742, 747 Black Power Studies, lxxv–lxxvi, lxxxi categories of Black Power Studies literature, lxviii–lxxx different historiographic approaches, lxxvi–lxxviii Black Power (Wright), xvii Black pride, 104, 397, 432, 552, 560, 565 Kwayana’s essay on, 452–453 Black Prisoner Activism, 157–162 Black Psychology, 162–168 Bobby Wright, 166–167 Frances Cress Welsing, 165–166 Na’im Akbar, 163–165 schools of thought and critical methodologies, 162–163 Black queer studies, 183 Black Radical Congress, 669

Black radicalism, 350 Black radicalization, 106 Black Rights Fighters, 810 Black Samurai (film), 198–199 Black Scholar (journal), xxi, cxviii, 210 Black Seminoles, lxi Black speech patterns, 567 Black Student Activism, 168–175, 187, 486 and the Black Arts Movement, 171 in Black high schools, 172 and the Black studies movement, 170–171 Ten-point program and platform of the Black Student Unions, 173–175 See also Black studies; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Black Student Alliance, 176–179 for high school students, 177–178 in Los Angeles, 177–179, 254 Black student associations (BSAs), 176. See also Pan-African Students Association Black Student Collective (Harvard University), 762 Black student unions (BSUs), 176, 376, 377, 411, 437, 655–656 at San Francisco State, 56 ten–point program and platform, 173–175 See also Pan-African Student unions Black Student United Front, 172 Black Students for Liberation, 760 Black studies, cvi–cvii, 55, 168, 170–171, 180–185, 187, 411, 416, 423, 451, 453, 673, 689, 703, 775 and Black Power, 181–182 at Brandeis University, 813 disciplinary development, 182 the discipline today, 182–184 at Duke university, 487 at Kalamazoo College, 468 Kiswahili requirement, 435 at San Fernando Valley State College, 377 at San Francisco State University, 170–171, 356, 357

860 | Index scholar activist tradition, 180–181 scholarly journals, 184 at Yale University, 176 See also Black Student Activism; Institute of the Black World (IBW) Black Study Group, 810 Black Teachers Caucus, 166 Black theology, 282, 411, 444 Black Think Tank, 357 Black town building, 510, 516–517 Black underground, lv Black United Front (BUF), 185–189, 722–723, 799 Black unity, 122, 546–547 Black University Manifesto, 356 Black urban regimes (BURs), cxxii Black Vanguard, 45 Black Week, 761 Black Woman, The (Bambara), ciii, 52, 452 Black Woman’s Conferences, 700 Black Women’s Alliance/Third World Women’s Alliance (1970–1975), 189–194, 748. See also Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) Black Women’s Caucus (BWC), 649 Black Women’s Committee for the Protection of Our Children, 653, 670 Black Women’s Liberation Committee (BWLC), 190, 748 Black women’s studies, ciii, 183, 732 Black Women’s United Front (BWUF), 57, 188, 277, 289 Black Workers Congress, xx, 281 Black Workers for Justice, 346 Black World, xxi, 341–342 Black Writers Conference, 690 BLA Coordinating Committee (BLA-CC), liv, 114 Blacula (film), 198 Blake, Clotilde, 788, 790 Blake, James, 604 Bland, Sandra, 458 Blaxploitation Films, 194–199 Cotton Comes to Harlem (film), 194–195 Shaft (film), 196–197 Super Fly (film), 197–198

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (film), 195–196 BLF. See Black Liberation Front (BLF) Bloody Sunday, 394, 464 BLP. See Black Liberation Party (BLP) Blue Hill Christian Center, 767 Boggs, Grace Lee, xix, 45, 46, 88, 144, 199–202, 580, 739 targeting by COINTELPRO, 302 Boggs, James “Jimmy,” xii, xix, 45, 46, 88, 170, 199–202, 739 targeting by COINTELPRO, 302 Boldt decision, lxiii Bond, Horace Julian, 169, 202–208, 685, 805 Bond v. Floyd, 205 Boogle, Donald, 194 Bookstores, Black. see Black bookstores Booth, Paul, 764 Boricuas, 652 Boston, Qasimah P., 768 Bottom, Anthony (Jalil Abdul Muntaquin/ Montequim), 390, 391, 627, 631 Boudin, Kathy, 116 Boudreaux, Ray, 391 Bowen, Joseph, 627 Bowers, Veronza, 627 Boycotts, xiii, xlix, 168, 431, 443, 595, 721–722, 723 Boykin, Edward, 34 Boynton v. Virginia, 293 BPP. See Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self-Defense Bracey, John, xii Bradford, Percy Lee, 319 Bradley, Tom, 13, 123, 209 Bradley, William, 30 Branch, Taylor, 504 Branche, Stanley, 680 Brando, Marlon, 136, 508 Brath, Elombe, 774 Brazil, 149, 453, 532 Bremond, Bertha Caroline, 210 Bremond, Walter, 208–211, 550, 551–552 Brennan, Peg, 427 Bridgeforth, Ronald Stanley, 391 Bridgewater, Dee Dee, 130 Briggs, Cyril, 251, 278, 281, 377, 647

Index | 861 Britain, Black Power organizations in, 146–147 Britton, Barbara, 728 Broadside Press, 658 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 82, 658 Brotherhood Crusade, 209, 550, 795 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 252, 294, 604 Brothers (film), 392 Brown, Abena Joan, 81 Brown, Benjamin, 402–403 Brown, Edmund G., cxiv, 1, 215 Brown, Elaine, cv–cvi, 110, 130, 137, 211–213, 301, 611, 711 Brown, Ewart, 778, 782 Brown, Hayward, 469 Brown, Helen Nuttal, 580 Brown, Hubert “H. Rap” (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin), xii, lxii, cxv, 130, 156, 170, 214–219, 327, 331, 338, 380, 581, 593, 632, 683 and the Black Panther Party, 749 Kennedy’s defense of, 427 and the “People’s Tribunal,” 605–606 and the SNCC, 156, 170, 214, 215–216, 218, 377 targeting by COINTELPRO, 302, 627, 749 Brown, James, 77, 122, 124–125, 219–222, 508 Brown, Jerry, 213 Brown, Jim, 99–101 Brown, Kay, 82 Brown, Michael, 43, 458 Brown, Oskar, Jr., 178 Brown, Richard, 391 Brown, Stanley, 149 Brown Berets, 136, 415, 796 Browne, Robert S., xxi, 666, 803 Brown Foundation, Inc., 552 Brown v. Board of Education, 293, 341, 587, 638, 758 Brundage, Avery, 594 Bryant, Roy, xlix Bryant, Wayland “Doc,” 15, 17 Buck, Marilyn, liii, 116, 631 BUF. See Black United Front (BUF) Buffington, John, xlix

Buhle, Paul, 651 Building takeovers, 168, 487–488 Bukhari, Safiya, cvi, 632 Bullins, Ed, xiii, 56, 80, 81 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), lxv Burkina Faso, 601, 602 Burnham, Forbes, 149, 379, 380, 453– 454, 455, 691 Burnham, Louis, 345 Burns, Haywood, 553 Burroughs, Margaret, 82 Burrows, Erskine “Buck,” 150 BURs. See Black urban regimes (BURs) Bush, George W., 717 Butler, David (Dawud Hakim), 89 Butler, Dino, lxvi–lxvii Butler, John Sibley, cxxi Butler, Julio, 628 Butler, Julius, 641 Butler, Norman 3X (Muhammad Abd AlAziz), 30, 476 “Buy Black” campaigns, xvi, 156, 311 BWA (Black Women’s Alliance). See Black Women’s Alliance/Third World Women’s Alliance (1970–1975) BWC (Black Women’s Caucus), 649 BWUF (Black Women’s United Front), 57, 188, 277, 289 Byrd Amendment (1971), 8 Cabo Verde, xxi, 149, 379 Cabral, Amilcar, 153, 192, 420, 602 Cade, Helen, 52 CADRUM (Cadillac Revolutionary Union Movement), 460–461 Cairo Non-Violent Freedom Committee (CNVFC), 441 Cairo United Front (CUF), xlviii, 443–444 California Association of African American Education, 295–296 California Master Plan, 170 California State University Los Angeles, 177 California State University Northridge, 377 California v. Bakke, 384

862 | Index Calypso, 148 CAM. See Caribbean artists movement (CAM) Cambridge, Godfrey, 195 Cambridge Black Action Federation, 683 Cambridge Non-Violent Action Committee (CNAC), 679–681 Cambridge Nonviolent Action Movement, xv Campbell, A., cxvii Campbell, Ernest, 540 Campbell, Grace, 144 Canada, 144, 147–148, 379, 657, 690 Cannon, Charles, 17 Canterino, Mike, 267 Cantillo, Eulogio, 304 Cape Verde, xxi, 149, 379 Capitalism, xxii, 25, 48, 54, 99, 104, 145, 170, 189, 190, 191, 192, 310, 418, 475, 514, 557, 695, 696, 731, 766 McKissick’s support for, 515 Caplan, Nathan, cxv CARE (Crusaders Association for Relief and Enlightenment), 820 Carew, Jan, 455 Carew, Joyce Gleason, 455 Caribbean, 144, 148–149, 656, 687, 726 liberation movements in, 176 Pan-African network in, 379 Caribbean artists movement (CAM), 147 Caribbean immigrants, 664 Carlos, John, 145, 327, 590, 592, 594 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture), 223–247 as activist, xii, cxv, 611–612, 657 and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, xxi, lxv, 9 and the American Indian, lxii, lxiv and Black nationalism/Marxism, 117 and the Black Panther Party, 13, 24, 601, 747, 749 “Black Power” speech, xi, xix, lxiii, 93, 110–111, 155, 229–247, 262, 281, 299–300, 407, 507, 512–513, 609, 685, 737, 742, 747 on colonialism/racism, cxiv at the Congress of Black Writers, 147

at the Dialectics of Liberation Conference, 146 differences from McKissick, 514–515 and the founding of Black United Front, 723 at Howard University, 779, 781, 782 influence of Malcolm X on, 477 and the Lowneds County Freedom Party, 602 and Malcolm X Liberation University, 489 marginalization of women by, 542 married to Miriam Makeba, 227, 768 on the Meredith March, 502, 503, 504–505, 507–508 praising Rosa Parks, 605 and the SNCC, xviii, lxii, 24, 169, 186, 187, 205, 216, 217, 262, 338, 464, 503, 601, 673, 747 Carn, Doug, 122, 131 Carn, Jean, 122 Carnaval, 149 Caron, LaSalle, 782–783 Carr, James, 32–33 Carter, Alprentice “Bunchy,” 13, 31, 113, 137, 248–251, 254, 640–641, 792–793 Carter, Betty, 126 Carter, James Earl “Jimmy,” 4, 517 Cash, Rosalind, 199 Casteism, 146 Castille, Philando, 458 Castro, Fidel, xvii–xviii, 45, 46, 303–306, 307, 530, 531, 675 Castro, Raul, 303, 305, 530 Catlett, Elizabeth, 82 Caucus of Black Sociologists, 183 Cawley, Donald, 114 CBC (Congressional Black Caucus), 277, 330, 364, 813 CCCDC (Clay County Community Development Corporation), xlix Center for African Culture, 269 Center for Black Education (Washington, D. C.), 490, 727 Center for Social Action, 415, 796 Central Committee, 213

Index | 863 CESA. See Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA) Césaire, Aimé, 334 Césaire, Suzanne, 144 CFUN. See Committee for a United Newark (CFUN) Chad School (Newark, NJ), 490 Chagossians, 154 Challenge, 738 Chancellor, Ndugu, 436 Chaney, James, 27, 294, 402 Charleston Hospital Workers Strike, 433 Charlotte Three, 555 Chavis, Benjamin, 554, 720–721 Che Lumumba Club, 251–256 Che-Lumumba organizations, 178, 316 Chenault, Marcus Wayne, Jr., 34 Cherry, Don, 129 Chesimard, JoAnne. See Assata Shakur (JoAnne Chesimard) Chiang Kai-shek, 496, 497 Chicago Congress on Africa, 600 Chicago Eight, 206, 298 Chicago Seven, 298, 709, 766 Chief Sam Movement, 599 Children of Africa program, 489 Childress, Alice, 345 Chi-lites, 125 China, xvii, 105, 496 Cultural Revolution, 496, 498, 820, 824 W. E. B. Du Bois in, 498–499 Garvin’s experience in, 345–346 Great Leap Forward, 496, 498 Robert and Mabel Williams in, 345, 499–500, 581, 582, 789–790, 820–821, 824 See also Chinese Communist Party; Chinese Revolution; Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) Chinese Communist Party (CCP), xvii, 346, 497. See also Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) Chinese Revolution, 176, 740, 789 Chisholm, Conrad, 257, 259 Chisholm, Shirley, 256–260, 330, 371–372, 428, 542

Chrisman, Robert, 356, 655 Christian, William, 33 Christian-affiliated organizations, 95–96 Christianity, xv African approach to, 663 and Black Power, 95–97 critique of, 662 Christie, Chris, 716 Christmas, William, 32, 159, 255, 389, 629 Chronixx, 154 Chui, Mwesi, 581 Church Committee, 299, 632 Church of the Black Madonna, 549. See also Shrine of the Black Madonna Orthodox Christian Church CIBI (Council of Independent Black Institutions), 295–297 Cienfuegos, Camilo, 305 Cincinnati Riot (1829), cxi Cincinnati urban rebellions (2000s), cxii, cxiii Cinque (Donald Defreeze), 34 Circle of Afro American Unity, 12 Civil disobedience, 4, 291, 293, 394, 432, 578, 610, 678, 820, 823 Civil Liberties Act (1988), 440 Civil Rights Act (1866), cxi Civil Rights Act (1964), 15, 97, 105, 225, 226, 359, 432, 465, 546, 609, 638, 683, 687, 747, 802 Civil Rights Act (1966), 504 Civil Rights Congress, 281, 344 Civil Rights Movement, xi, xiii, xxii, lxxviii, cxix, 3, 14, 105, 106, 176, 203, 253, 286, 292, 439 armed resistance in, xlv and Black Power, 396, 605 Jesse Jackson’s involvement in, 394 in Mississippi, 519 and music, 132 and religion, 661 and Vietnam, 802–803 Civil Rights organizations, xiv, xix Clarence 13X, 31 Clark, John, 33 Clark, Judith, 116 Clark, Kenneth, cix, 780

864 | Index Clark, Mark, lvii, 31, 137, 212, 301, 354, 611, 641, 714 description of police raid resulting in death of, 613–626 Clark, Septima, 145 Clarke, Benjamin V., 513 Clarke, Carroll, 728 Clarke, Cheryl, 270, 273 Clarke, John Henrik, xviii, 87, 306, 455, 656 Clarke, Lionel, 149 Claude, Judy, 729 Clay, Cassius Marcellus, Jr. See Ali, Muhammad Clay County Community Development Corporation (CCCDC), xlix Cleage, Albert B., Jr. (Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman), xix, 88, 91, 96, 306, 349, 579, 580, 606, 663, 785 Cleage, Henry, 580 Cleage, Louis, 580 Cleaver, Eldridge, 38, 56, 80, 81, 138, 248–249, 262, 263, 264, 307, 323, 601, 710–711 Cleaver, Joju, 643 Cleaver, Kathleen Neal, cv–cvi, 137, 139, 260–265 and the Black Panther Party, 749 Cleopatra Jones (film), 199 Clergy and Labor Alliance, 799 Cleveland: NOW! 100 Cleveland Rebellions, 11 Clifford McKissick Community School (Milwaukee), 490 Clinton, Hillary, 716 Cloward, Richard Andrew, 557 Clutchette, John, 32, 159, 254–255, 388, 390, 628 CNAC (Cambridge Non-Violent Action Committee), 679–681 CNVFC (Cairo Non-Violent Freedom Committee), 441 Coalition Against Police, 209 Coalition in Solidarity with Haiti, 799 Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, 548 Cochran, Johnnie, 642 Cockrel, Kenneth, 170, 461, 785 Coe, Paul, 151

Coffy (film), 199 COFO (Council of Federated Organizations), 402, 403 Cohran, Phil, 122, 129 Cold War, lxxvi, 252, 280, 281 Coleman, Don, 729 Coleman, Milton, 760, 761 Collective Black Artists, 133 College Language Association, 183 Collins, Addie Mae, xvii Collins, Carlice, 4 Collins, James, 2 Collins, Virginia (Dara Salamuga Abubakari), cii, 1–5 Collins, Walter, 4 Colman, Ornette, 266 Colombia, 154 Colonialism, xxi, lxi, cxiv, 8, 23, 25, 106, 144, 150, 152, 170, 186, 188, 277, 300, 379, 414, 418, 434, 601, 669 in Africa, 578 Mao’s denunciation of, 499 See also Anticolonial movements; Neocolonialism Colonization, in Africa, 599 Colonization movement, 181 Color-blindness, 384 Coltrane, Alice, 132 Coltrane, John, 131, 132, 265–270, 457, 775 Coltrane Quartet, 267 Combahee Black Women’s Network Retreats, 273 Combahee River Collective (CRC), xxii, ciii, civ–cv, 54, 191, 193, 270–275, 543, 731 Combined Federal Campaign (CFC), 210, 551 Comey, James, 717 Commission for Racial Justice (United Church of Christ), 555, 720 Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, 440 Committee for a Two-Party System, 510, 518 Committee for Unified Newark (CFUN), xxix–xx, 56–57, 132, 187, 275–278, 287, 415, 547

Index | 865 Committee of Racial Equality. See Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), 204 Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, 317 Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA), 272 Communism, 277–278 Chinese (see Chinese Communist Party (CCP); Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung)) FBI targeting of, 627 See also United Front Communist International and Black Power, 278–282 Communist International (Comintern), 278–282 Communist Party of China. See Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Communist Party USA (CPUSA), 208, 251–252, 253, 255, 280–281, 299, 493–494, 499, 533, 676, 790 Davis’s affiliation with, 316–317 Garvin’s association with, 343–344 Communist Revolution (Russia), 279 Communist Workers Party (CWP), 406, 408 Community Alert Patrol, xii, 208, 796 Cone, Cecil, 285 Cone, James Hal, 96–97, 282–286, 663 Conference Committee on Black South Literature and Art, 52 Conference on Minority Public Administrators, 166 Conference on Racism and Imperialism, 9 Congo, xvii, 435, 476 Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), 277, 330, 364, 813 Congressional Challenge (1965), 746 Congress of African People (CAP), xx, xxi, xxiii, ci, 5, 9, 56, 57, 106, 150, 151, 153, 157, 187, 188, 253, 277, 286–291, 296, 309–310, 330, 331, 360–361, 473, 503, 652–653, 681 affiliates, 287 Baraka’s involvement with, 286–288, 290, 501, 542, 547

contribution to Black Power, 290–291 decline of, 289–290 Sonia Sanchez’s involvement with, 702 strategies and goals, 287–289 as UN nongovernmental association, 288 Congress of Black Writers, 147, 657 Congress of Industrial Organizations, 280, 344 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), xi, xiv, xviii, xix, xlv, li, lxiii, 95, 156, 181, 186, 209, 226, 258, 291–295, 439, 494, 520, 677, 731, 825 and the DDJ, 319–321 Emergency Relief Committee, 337–338 Floyd McKissick and, 509 Jesse Jackson’s involvement in, 394 Consciousness-raising, 85, 128–130, 132, 223, 272, 273, 568, 571, 685. See also Black consciousness Continuations Committee, 155, 415 Convention People’s Party (CPP), xvii Conway, Marshall Eddy (Eddie), 138– 139, 627, 632 Conyers, John, 331, 361, 580, 606 and reparations, 665 Cook, Ann Florence Elizabeth (Tchaiko Kwayana), 379, 449–456 Cooks, Carlos A., xvi, 652 Cools, Anne, 148 Cooper, Anna Julia, 144, 181, 553 Cooperative economics, 585 Cooperative Republic of Guyana. See Guyana CORE. See Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Cornell University, armed occupation of, 384 Cornish, Samuel, 647 Cortez, Jayne, 82, 269 Cosby, Bill, 100 Cotton Comes to Harlem (film), 194–195 Cottonmouth Moccasin Gang, 506 Council of African Affairs, 105, 144 Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), 402, 403, 722–723 Council of Independent Black Institutions (CIBI), 295–297

866 | Index Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), xxii, lxxviii, cxx– cxxi, 153, 170, 218, 297–303, 610 and Afro Set, 13–14 and the Black Panther Party, 137–138 Carmichael as target of, 228 disbanding of, 632 harassment of OPHR, 593–594 and political prisoners, 555 surveillance of radical organizations by, 611 surveillance of Us organization, 797 targeting of Assata Shakur by, 714 targeting of cultural nationalism, 311–312 targeting of Geronimo ji-Jaga by, 640 targeting of Hampton by, 353 targeting of Herman Ferguson, 630 targeting of the Black Panthers, 710 war on the Black Liberation movement, 28–29, 31, 32, 379, 630, 805 See also Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Cowell, Stanley, 130, 133 Cox, Courtland, 408, 466, 489, 727, 728 Cox, Donald, 264 Cox, Odessa, 254 Cox, Oliver Cromwell, 119–120 CPP (Convention People’s Party), xvii CRC. See Combahee River Collective (CRC) Creighton, John C., cxi Creole English, 451 Creolization, 308 Cress Theory of Color Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy), 165–166 Critical Resistance, 318 Crockett, George, lvi, 645 Cromwell, Dwight, 682 Crose, Harold, 119 Crummell, Alexander, 308 Crusade for Justice, lxiv, 415, 796 Crusader newsletter, xiv, xviii, lv, 49, 251 Crusaders Association for Relief and Enlightenment (CARE), 820 Cruse, Harold, 307, 651, 656, 658, 675, 774

Cuba, xvii–xviii, 45–46, 105, 144, 145, 146, 147, 153, 192, 263, 514, 555, 631, 671–672, 675, 716, 770, 796 economic crisis in, 532 as refuge for activists, 495 Williams in, 787 See also Cuban Revolution Cuban Missile Crisis, 531 Cuban Revolution, 145, 149, 176, 192, 303–307, 453, 499, 530, 671, 675, 740, 824 and Black Power, 306–307 Moore’s criticism of, 529, 531 CUF (Cairo United Front), xlviii, 443–444 Cuffe, Paul, 599 Cultural nationalism, xix, xx, ci, 57, 288, 307–313, 414, 420, 501, 678, 791, 795 Black, 267–268 debates, 310–311 legacies, 312–313 organizational decline, 311–312 Cultural Revolution (China), 496, 498, 820, 824 Cultural Voices, 769 Culture African, 447, 567, 599 Afro-Cuban, 531 Black, 152, 397 cultural revolution and the struggle for liberation, 418–419 See also Cultural nationalism Cummings, Marlene, 151 Cummins Engine Foundation, 550, 551 Curaçao, 149, 656 CWP (Communist Workers Party), 406, 408 Czapski, Michael, lvi, 645 Dada, Mukassa (Willie Ricks), xi, xii, 24, 155, 186, 408, 431, 507, 684–687, 737 Dagga, Mackandal, 148 Dahmer, Vernon Ferdinand, 27 Dailey, Richard J., 670 Dale, Thelma, 344, 345 Daley, Richard J., 739

Index | 867 Dalit Panthers, 146 Dalits (Untouchables), 146 Damas, Léon, 334 Dangriga Cultural Association, 150 Daniels, John, 99 Dashiki, 76, 79, 110, 309, 327, 368, 378, 397 Davis, Angela Yvonne, lxvi, lxvii, 38, 78, 110, 130–131, 159, 206, 254, 255, 281, 315–319, 389, 554, 611, 716 Kennedy’s defense of, 427 as political prisoner/exile, 628–629 targeting by COINTELPRO, 301 Davis, Frank, 315 Davis, Henrietta Vinton, 144 Davis, Jack, 151 Davis, Jimmie, 534 Davis, Judy, 500 Davis, Leon, 30 Davis, Miles, 267 Davis, Ossie, 194–195, 440 Davis, Rennie, 298 Davis, Sally, 315 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 508 Davis, Willie, 101 Dawson, William, 637 Day, Bill, 773 DCHR (Detroit Council of Human Rights), 350 DDJ. See Deacons for Defense and Justice (DDJ) Deacons for Defense and Justice (DDJ), xv, xlv, lv, lxiii, 28, 281, 319–322, 504–505, 508, 609, 676, 722 in Bogalusa, Louisiana, 320–321 in Jonesboro, Louisiana, 319–320 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, lxviii Decolonization, 145, 346, 418 Dees, Morris, 205 De La Beckwith, Byron, 469, 507 Delaney, Martin, 308 DeLeon, Frank, 389 Dellinger, David, 298 Dellums, Ron, 330–331, 361 De Mau Mau, 33 Democratic National Convention (1964), xviii, 520–522

Democratic National Convention (1968), 206 Demonstration Cities Act, 515 Dent, Leon, 443 Dent, Tom, 269 Deppe, Martin L., 597 Desegregation, xi, 759 De Souza, Karen, 455 Detroit Board of Education, 350–351 Detroit Council of Human Rights (DCHR), 350 Detroit Rebellion (1967), li–lii, cx, cxii, cxv, cxvi, cxxviii–cxxxi, 330, 459, 605 Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement, 281 Detroit Riot (1943), cxi Developing International Afrikan Sustainable Productive Opportunities & Renewable Arts (DIASPORA), 770 Development theory, 691 Devine, Annie, 520 Dewey, Thomas, 578 D’Floure, Tom, 404 Dialectics of Liberation Conference, 146 Dickson, Moses, 377 Diego Garcia, 154 Diggs, Charles, 188, 331, 360–361, 364–365 Diggs, Frank (Captain Franco), 30–31 Diop, Alioune, 656 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 378 District of Columbia Court Reform and Criminal Procedure Act (1970), cxx District of Columbia statehood movement, 814 Doar, John, 506 Dobson, Tamara, 199 Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), lii, 43, 48, 170, 459–460, 678, 740, 787 Dokpwe Work/Study Center, 699 Dominica, 148 Donaldson, Ivanhoe, 261, 366 Dooley, Ebon, 770 Douglas, Alan, 457 Douglas, Emory, 322–324 Douglas, Roosie, 147, 148

868 | Index Douglass, Dorothy, 344 Douglass, Emory, 130 Douglass, Frederick, 38 Dowdell, Glanton, 47–48 Dowell, Denzil, 323 Drake, St. Clair, 181, 656 Drama and Drum Theatre, Inc., 549 Driver, Wilsonia Benita. See Sanchez, Sonia Drum and Spear Bookstore and Press, 86, 90–91 Drumgo, Fleeta, 32, 159, 254–255, 388, 389, 390, 391, 628 DRUM II (Dodge Truck Revolutionary Union Movement), 461 Du Bois, Shirley Graham, 145, 345, 727 Du Bois, W. E. B., 38, 78, 89, 105, 119, 181, 206, 223, 335, 345, 384, 600, 647, 656, 725 in China, 498–499 Duke University protests (1969), 6, 486–488 Dumas, Henry, 131–132 Dunayevskaya, Raya, 200 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 83 Durban, Richard “Dick,” 653 Durham, Jimmie, lxviii DuSable Leadership Academy, 472 Duxiu, Chen, 497 Dylan, Bob, 125, 392 Earth Wind and Fire, 196 Easley-Cox, Barbara, 264 East, The, 277 East Cultural Organization, 132 Economic development, 565 Economic empowerment. See Black empowerment, economic Economic independence, 560, 562 Economic justice, 430, 681, 742, 763, 764 Economic Opportunity Act, 638 Economic rights, 681 Economics, cooperative, 422 Education African-centered, 472, 562 community control of, 547, 587–590 culturally relevant, 182

relevant, 418 voucher system, 696–697 Education reform, 697 Edwards, Cleveland, 32, 388 Edwards, Harry, 325–328, 591, 592–594, 782 Egbuna, Obi, 146–147, 147 Egyptian culture (ancient), 411, 423 Eighth Congress of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, 812 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 306, 801 Eldon Avenue Revolutionary Union Movement (ELRUM), 460 Electoral Politics and Black Power, 328–332, 359, 399–401. See also Black empowerment, political El-Hadi, Suliaman, 457 Ellison, Julian, 727 Ellison, L. L., 272–273 El-Mahdi, Sulaiman, 770 ELRUM (Eldon Avenue Revolutionary Union Movement), 460 Emigrationism, 599, 601 Emigrations, to Africa, 729 Engels, Friedrich, 278 Entrepreneurship, 597 Episcopal Church, 539, 539–540 General Convention Special Program (GCSP), 488–489 Episcopal Diocese of Newark, Department of Urban Work, 826 Epton, Bill, 499 Esdaile, Eustace, 148 Esser, George, 487 Ethiopia, 105, 145, 435, 601, 729 Ethiopian World Federation, 105 Eugenics, 109 Euro-Marxism, 120. See also Marxism; Marxism-Leninism Evans, Fred Ahmed, lvi Evans, Lee, 594 Evans, Mari, 82 Events, Inc., 277 Everett, Ron. See Karenga, Maulana Ever Ready Gospel Singers, 220 Evers, Charles, 404, 405, 504, 722 Evers, Medgar, xvi, 27, 402, 403, 469, 507

Index | 869 Executive Order 8802 (prohibiting racial discrimination in the defense industry), 252 Executive Order 9981 (equal treatment in the armed forces), 578 Exiled activists, xiv, xviii, xxii, xlvi, liii, 635. See also Cleaver, Eldridge; Cleaver; Kathleen; Ferguson, Herman (Paul Adams); Shakur, Assata; Simone, Nina; Williams, Mabel; Williams, Robert F. Fair Housing Act, lxix Fair Play for Cuba Committee, 306, 530, 824 Family Stone, 125 Famous Flames, 220 Fanon, Frantz, 15, 145, 151, 170, 309, 333–336, 378, 420, 798 Fard, W. D., 563 Farmer, James L., Jr., 291, 293, 294, 394 Farrakhan, Louis, 33, 40, 547, 561, 563, 564 Fatiman, Cécile, 144 FBI. See Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) FCD (Foundation for Community Development), 487–488 Featherstone, Ralph, xlix, 32, 218 February First Movement, 762 Federacion de Muheres Cubanas, 770 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), xxii, lvii, lxxviii, cxx, 153, 218, 298 and the anti-war movement, 805 and the Black Panther Party, 137 counterinsurgency campaigns, 678 and the CPUSA, 281 investigation of Malcolm X, 478–485 notes on El Paso Black Panther Party (1968), 139–143 at Pine Ridge reservation, lxvi report on Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 522–529 at the Siege of Wounded Knee, lxv surveillance of Black bookstores by, 85, 86, 90 surveillance of Black Women’s Alliance, 192

surveillance of Iya Fulani, 769 surveillance of Mae Mallory, 494 surveillance of Us, 414, 421 targeting the Black Power Movement, 626–627 targeting Stokely Carmichael, 227 targeting of communists, 627 targeting Angela Davis, 159–160 targeting of Howard Fuller, 695 targeting of Max Stanford, 738, 740 targeting Universal Negro Improvement Association, 627 war on the Black Liberation movement, 632, 714 See also Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, 151 Federation of Pan-African Educational Institutions, 490 Feelings, Tom, 454, 774 Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), 291 Feminism and Black Power, 424, 427, 428 radical, 427, 428 See also Black feminism; National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO); Womanism Feminist Party, 428 Ferdinand, Vallery III. See Ya Salaam, Kalamu (Ferdinand, Vallery III) Ferguson, Chui, 116 Ferguson, Herman, 377 Ferguson, Herman (Paul Adams), 377, 454, 581, 589, 719 as exile, 629–630 Ferguson, Iyaluua, 630, 719 Ferguson (MO) anti-police protests (2014), xxiii, cxii, cxiii, 817 FESMAN III, 415 FESPAC, 415 Feudalism, 120 Field Street University, 200 Fields, Julia, 81 15X, Thomas (Johnson), 30, 476 Fifth Black Power Conference, 296. See also Black Power Conferences

870 | Index Fifth Pan-African Congress, 23, 725 Fiji, 144 First International Black Power Conference, 150. See also Black Power Conferences First Pan-African Cultural Festival, 263 First Regional International Black Power Conference, 157. See also Black Power Conferences Fisher, Bernice, 291 Fish-ins, lxiii Fisk University, xix, 262, 315, 347, 672, 739, 777, 782, 787, 813 Fitzgerald, Romaine “Chip,” 627 Five Percenters, 31 Fletcher, Bob, 490 Flewellen, Kathy, 729 Floating Swahili Program, 492 Floyd, James “Sloppy,” 205 Floyd B. McKissick Enterprises, Inc., 512, 515–516 Flute Publications, 748 FNP. See Freedom Now Party Foerster, Werner, liii, 715, 716 Fogelson, Robert, cxv Foley, Gary, 151 Fonda, Jane, 136 Food First, 100 FOR (Fellowship of Reconciliation), 291 Ford, Gerald, 516 Ford, Mignon, 145 Ford Foundation, 384, 515, 588, 589 Foreign policy dissenters, 103 Forman, James, 336–340, 461, 488, 494, 537, 538, 539, 663, 665, 667–668, 736, 745, 748, 792, 805 Fort Laramie Treaty, lxv–lxvi Forte, Reggie, 135 Forte, Sherman, 135 Forum of Saint Vincent, 379 Forums 65, 66, and 67, 88 Foster, Marcus, 33–34 Foundation for Community Development (FCD), 487–488 Fourth World, lxviii Fox and Wolf Hunt Club, 351 Foxx, Redd, 195 Franklin, Aretha, 82, 122

Franklin, C. L., lvi, 350, 580, 582 Franklin, Joan, 581, 645 Franklin, Nyimbo, 436 Frazier, Demita, 270, 271, 731 Frazier, E. Franklin, 181, 656 Frazier, Sheila, 198 Free Africa Society, 549, 599 Free Breakfast for Children program, 136, 323, 571 Free Busing to Prisons Program, 571 Freedman’s Bureau, cxi Freedom Houses, 507 Freedom Now Party (FNP), 96, 580–581, 644, 654 Freedom of Information Act, 642 Freedom Organizing Pamphlet, 732 Freedom Rides and Riders, xiii, 225, 293, 494, 681, 685, 736, 738, 743, 764, 820, 823 Freedom Schools, 169, 507 Freedom Singers, 132 Freedom Summer, 169, 215, 216, 294, 402, 507, 520, 746 Freedom Theater, 549 Freedom Vote, 746 Freedom Ways (journal), 269 Freeman, Don (Baba Lumumba), 378, 782 Freeman, Donald, 46, 48, 170, 500, 670, 672, 738–739 Freeman, Joel, 197 Freeman, Kenneth (Mamadou Lumumba), xvi, 282, 376, 380, 454 Freeman, Morgan, 440 Free Southern Theater (FST), 698 Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), 6, 8, 192, 490–491, 696 Frente Obrero Liberashon (FOL; Party Workers’ Liberation Front), 149 Frey, John, 136 Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 45, 605 Froines, John, 298 FRUM (Ford Revolutionary Union Movement), 460 Frye, Marquette, xii, l, cxiii, 815 Frye, Rena, cxiii

Index | 871 Frye, Ronald, 815 FST (Free Southern Theater), 698 Fugitive Slave Act, 717 Fulani, Iya. See Sunni-Ali, Fulani Fuller, Chaka, lvi, 645 Fuller, Claude, 506 Fuller, Howard (Owusu Sadaukai), 6–7, 9, 487, 490–491, 492, 547, 602, 695–697, 728, 760–761 Fuller, Hoyt, 340–342, 653, 777 Fund for Representative Government, 510, 518 Gaddis, Henry “Poison,” lxiv Gaines, Joyce Ann, cxiv Galamison, Milton, 477 Gandhi, Mohandas K. “Mahatma,” 291 GAPP (Greensboro Association of Poor People), 407, 759, 760 Garaka, 360 Garment, Leonard, lxv Garrett, Jimmy, 148, 170, 408, 783 Garrett, Nathan, 487, 488, 489 Garrison, Jimmie, 267 Garvey, Amy Ashwood, 727 Garvey, Amy Jacques, 144, 145 Garvey, Marcus Mosiah, xvi, 1, 3, 44, 104–105, 223, 281, 533, 600, 601, 647 targeted by FBI, 627 Garvin, Victoria “Vicki” Ama, 343–347, 499 Gary Convention. See National Black Political Assembly (1972) Gauldin, Khatari, 390 Gaye, Marvin, 123, 198, 611 Gender issues, 53, 323, 343, 425–426, 541, 737 homophobia, 731 homosexuality, 193 lesbians, 270–274 LGBTQ, 183, 207 See also Feminism; Womanism; Women Gender oppression, xxi, 25–26 Gender theorization, 183 Geneva Accords, 801 Genocide, 152, 533, 676

Georgakas, Dan, 651 George Jackson Brigade, 390 George Washington Carver Junior High School, 178 Georgia Black Liberation Front, 15. See also Black Liberation Front (BLF) Ghana, xvii, xxi, 23, 105, 144, 145, 203, 306, 345, 451, 489, 499, 578, 601, 643, 725, 760 Gibbs, James Earl, 723 Gibbs, Phillip Lafayette, 402, 723 Gibbs/Green Tragedy, 402–406 Gibson, Kenneth, xix–xx, 57, 277, 287, 330 Gilbert, David, 116, 766 Gilbert, T. W., cxi Gillespie, Dizzy, 129, 266 Gilmore, Sam, 217 Giovanni, Nikki, ci, 82, 347–349, 611 criticism of, 348–349 education, 347–348 Gitlin, Todd, lxix, 764 Gittens, Anthony, 778 Global African Congress, 556 GOAL. See Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL) Godett, Wilson “Papa,” 149 Gomez, Michael, 308 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” lxiv Gonzalez, Alberto, 717 Goodman, Andrew P., cxv, 27, 294, 402 Gordone, Charles, 80 Gorodé, Déwé, 150–151 Government Employees United against Racial Discrimination, 762 Graham, Jere, 389 Grant, Oscar III, 43, 458 Grattan, Wilbur, 581 Gray, Freddie Carlos, Jr., 43 Gray, Jesse/Jessie, 46, 281 Gray, Victoria, 520 Great Leap Forward (China), 496, 498 Great Society Programs, 638, 650 Greek fraternities and sororities, 377 Green, James Earl, 402, 405 Green, Robert, 506 Green Power, xx, 99, 101 Greene, JeRoyd “Jay,” 779

872 | Index Greene County Freedom Organization, 217 Greenlee, Stan, 612 Greensboro Association of Poor People (GAPP), 407, 759, 760 Greensboro Massacre, 409, 759–760 Greensboro Truth and Reconcilliation Commission, 409 Gregory, Dick, 170, 178, 554 Greier, Pam, 199 Grenada, 144, 148, 288, 379, 506, 555 Griffin, John, 33 Griffin, Junius, 194 Grimes, Willie, 760 Grounding, 689–690, 693 Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), 200, 349–352, 579, 584, 644, 654, 683, 786 Groupe 1878, 150 Grubb, Enez, 681 Guardian, The, cxviii Guerrilla warfare, lii–liii Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 45, 46, 303–304, 305, 476 Guinea, 152, 601, 728 Guinea-Bissau, xxi, 146, 149, 153, 192, 227, 289, 306, 379, 602 Guinea-Conakry, 602 Gullah/Geechee heritage, 451 Gunn, Moses, 196 Guyana, 147, 148, 149, 153, 379, 380, 454, 555, 630, 656, 657, 687–688, 691–692 Tchaiko Kwayana’s association with, 453–454 Habari Press, 700 Haber, Alan (Al), 763–764 Haitian Revolution, 103, 144 Hakim, Dawud (David Butler), 89 Hakim’s Bookstore (Hakim’s House of Knowledge), 86, 89 Haley, Alex, 477 Haley, Harold, 159, 389, 629 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 477, 505, 507, 520, 521 Hamilton, Charles V., cxiv, 327, 513, 602, 781

Hamlin, Mike, 461 Hamm, Larry, li Hampton, Fred, Jr., 355 Hampton, Fred, Sr., lvii, lxiv, 31, 57, 137, 212, 300–301, 353–355, 398, 611, 641, 653, 714, 793 description of police raid resulting in death of, 613–626 targeting by COINTELPRO, 353 Hampton, William, 758 Hancock, Herbie, 129, 436 Hannett, Leo, 152 Hansberry, Lorraine, 80, 82, 127, 345 Hansberry, William Leo, 656 Harambee, 212 Harambee Christian Family Center, 437 Harambee Dancers, 52 Harambee Organization, 762 Harding, Vincent, lxviii–lxix, 88, 383, 384 Hardwick, Arthur, Jr., 259 Hardy, Mrs. Willie, 187 Hare, Julia, 357 Hare, Nathan, 155, 182, 187, 355–358, 655, 778, 779 Harlem Black Arts Repertory Theatre/ School (BARTS). See Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) Harlem Fight Back, 281 Harlem Institute of Acupuncture, 720 Harlem rebellions (1935, 1960s), cxiii Harlem Renaissance, 52, 79 Harlem Riot (1964), 281 Harlem’s Crusader Family, 494 Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU-ACT), 703 Harley, Sharon, 683 Harllel X, 14 Harper, Tommy “Ndugubede,” 716, 788 Harris, Bonita, 455 Harris, Daryl B., cxiv Harris, John, 499 Harris, Patricia Roberts, 517 Harrison, Hubert H., 647 Hart, Billy, 130 Hart, Warren, 148 Harvey, Ronald, 33 HARYOU-ACT (Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited), 703

Index | 873 Hatcher, Rachael, cxi Hatcher, Richard Gordon, cxxi, 188, 330, 331, 358–376, 548 interview with Sheila Bernard, 363–376 Hathaway, Maggie, 99 Hayden, Tom, 298, 764, 791 Hayer, Talmadge (Thomas Hagan; Mujahid Abdul Halim), 30, 476 Hayes, Isaac, 197, 375 Hayes, Robert “Seth,” 627 Haynes, Milton, 40 Haywood, Harry, xix, 278, 280, 281, 282, 377, 378, 676 Hearst, Patricia, 34 Heath, Albert Tootie, 129 Hector, Tim, 148, 657 Hedgeman, Anna Arnold, 97 Hefner, Hugh, 100 Height, Dorothy, 550 Helms, Jesse, 517 Helping Uplift Guayanese (HUG), 455 Hemphill, Julius, 129, 133 Henderson, Clarence, 169 Henderson, David, 651 Henry, Aaron, 520 Henry, Milton. See Obadele, Gaidi Henry, Richard A. See Obadele, Imari Heron, Gil-Scot, 611 Hershey, Lewis, 778 Hewitt, Raymond “Masai,” 788, 792 Hibbits, Alfred 2X, lvi Higginbotham, Leon, 264 Hill, Adelaide Cromwell, 656 Hill, Joseph “Yusef,” 788–789, 792 Hill, Robert B., cxv, 383, 657 Hill, Sylvia, 188, 727, 729 Hilliard, Asa, 155 Hilton, Freddie (Kamau Sadiki), 627 Himes, Chester, 194, 252 Hinds, Lennox, 716 Hinton, Johnson X, 475 Hip-hop music, 457–458 Hiroshima/Nagasaki World Peace Study Mission, 439 Historically black colleges and universities (HBCU), 761–762 Hobson, Julius, 46

Ho Chi Minh, 279 Hodges, Ella, 257 Hodges, Johnny, 267 Hodges, Luther, 823 Hoffman, Abbie, 298, 709 Hoffman, Julius, 710 Holder, Mac, 257, 258 Holloway, Marvin, 727 Holman, Carl, 366 Holocaust victims, 555 Homophobia, 731 Homosexuality, 193 Honduras, 149 hooks, bell, 82 Hoover, J. Edgar, lvii, cxxi, 137, 153, 298, 299, 300, 302, 611, 627, 632, 714 Hopkins, Charles “Chuck,” 487, 488 Hopkins, Donald, 170 Hopkins, Pauline E., 600 Hornaday, Ann, 196 Horne, David L., 728 Hough Rebellion (1966), 12 House, Gloria, 82, 465 House of Umoja (HOU), 376–381, 674 Caribbean, political exile, and PanAfricanism, 379–380 consolidating with other revolutionary nationalists, 380–381 origins, 376–378 philosophy, 378–379 Houser, George, 291, 293 House Un-American Activities Committee, 252 Housing discrimination, 252 Houston, Charles Hamilton, 512 Howard, Ashley, cxvi, cxvii Howard, Elbert “Big Man,” 106, 135 Howard, Oliver O., cxi Howard University, 777–780 HRUM (Health workers Revolutionary Union Movement), 460 Hudson, Winson, 520 Huey Newton Defense Committee, 775 Huggins, Ericka, cvi, 31, 137, 213 targeting by COINTELPRO, 301 Huggins, John Jerome, 13, 31, 137, 250, 254, 641 Hughes, Langston, 252, 451, 656, 774

874 | Index Hulett, John, 464, 465, 466 Hull, Gloria Akasha, 270 Human rights, 581 Human Rights Research Fund, 265 Humphrey, Hubert, 206, 592 Hunt, Robert James, Jr., 442 Hunton, Alphaeus, 105 Hurst, E. H., 744 Hutchings, Phil, 749 Hutchinson, Earl Ofari, 500 Hutchison, Coralee, 148 Hutton, Bobby, 135 Hutton, Little Bobby, 263 Hyde, Evan X, 149 IBW. See Institute of the Black World (IBW) Identity Black, 183, 335, 757 Black collective, 120 Black feminist, 544 cultural, 122 historical, 118 racial, 122 Ifa, 313, 411, 776 IFCO (Interreligious Foundation for Community Organizations), 491, 537 ILD (International Labor Defense), 533 Ilê Aiyê, 149 Ile Ajaguna, 770 Illinois Migrant Council, 442 Illinois Migrant School, 442 ‘Ilolahia, Will, 152 Immigrants African, 664 Caribbean, 664 Cuban, 532 European, 251, 279 Imperiale, Anthony, 276, 277 Imperialism, 5, 8, 25, 104, 147, 149, 150, 170, 186, 190, 191, 279, 300, 378, 426, 439, 453, 475, 514, 601, 692, 766 Mao’s denunciation of, 499 Vietnam War as, 801, 804, 805 See also anti-imperialism Independence, 552 Independent Black school movement, 411

Independent Oglala Nation, lxvii India, 146 Indian Political Revolutionary Associations, 455 Indigenous peoples, 150–151, 586 land rights of, lxiv–lxv in Mexico, 769–770 treaty rights of, lxvii–lxviii Industrial democracy, 764 Innis, John Mtembezi, 436 Innis, Roy, 294–295 InPDUM (International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement), 811 Institute of Positive Education—New Concept School, 277 Institute of the Black World (IBW), 52, 383–385 Integrationism, 546, 681 Intercollegiate Council on Human Rights, 394 Intercommunalism, 677 Interdenominational Theological Center, 384 International African Prisoner of War rally, 380 International African Prisoner of War Solidarity Day, 646 International African Revolution, 809 International African Solidarity Day, 8 International Conference on Discrimination against Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, lxviii International Front of Africans for Reparations, 556 International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), lxvii Internationalism, 581, 677 African, 809 Third World, 500 International Labor Defense (ILD), 252, 280, 533 International Malcolm X Society, 33. See also Malcolm X Society International New Afrikan Prisoner of War Solidarity Day, 768 International Olympic Committee (IOC), 593, 594 International Panther Film Festival, 265

Index | 875 International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM), 811 International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 280 International Women’s Day, 770 Interreligious Foundation for Community Organizations (IFCO), 491, 537, 550 Intersectionality, 191 IOC (International Olympic Committee), 593, 594 Islam, Khalil (Thomas 15X Johnson), 476 Islamic Republic of New Africa, 646 Israel, 146, 770 Ivey, Ron, 761–762 Jack, Homer A., 291 Jackie Robinson Foundation, Inc., 552 Jackmon, Marvin X, xiii Jackson, Angela, 653 Jackson, George Lester, 28, 32–33, 38, 39, 125, 130, 153, 159, 160, 161, 206, 254–255, 301, 317, 387–392, 628–629 events after Jackson’s death, 390–391 Jackson’s legacy, 392 writings of, 387–388 Jackson, Jesse L., Sr., 155, 362, 373, 392–399, 548, 761, 814, 816 Black Expo, 396–397 and Black Power, 398–399 family and education, 393–394 with Martin Luther King Jr., 394–396 and Operation Breadbasket, 395–397, 596, 597 Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity/People United to Serve Humanity), 396–397 political career, 397–398 Jackson, John, 670, 739 Jackson, Jonathan, 32, 159, 255, 317, 389, 629 Jackson, Maynard Holbrook, Jr., 331, 399–401 Jackson, Phyllis, 213 Jackson, Q. T., 780 Jackson, Wharlest, 30

Jackson Black United Front, 405, 723 Jackson Human Rights Coalition, 469 Jackson-Kush Plan, 470 Jackson Peace Coordinating Committee, 404 Jackson State College, 402 Jackson State Massacre, 402–406, 645–646 Jacquette, Tommy, cxiv Jagan, Cheddi, Jr., 148, 453 Jamaica, 144, 147, 148, 656, 657, 688, 689, 690 Jamaica Rifle and Pistol Club, 630 Jamal, Hakim A., xii, 13, 33 James, C. L. R, 119, 147, 150, 157, 200–201, 327, 454, 651, 657, 689, 726–727 James, Esther, 639 James, Selma, 689 Japan, 105 Japanese internment camps, 252, 279, 439, 440, 555–556 JARUM (Jefferson Avenue Revolutionary Union Movement), 460 Jasiri X, 154 Jawodimbari, Arthur, 152 Jazz Arts Society (JAS), 289 Jeffries, Judson L., lxxv Jenkins, Leroy, 130 Jericho Movement to Free Political Prisoners, 630 Jihad Productions, 277 Ji-Jaga, Ashaki, 642 Ji-Jaga, Geronimo (Elmer Pratt), lv, lvii, 250, 264, 554, 555, 630, 640–643 Ji-Jaga, Nsondi (Sandra/Saundra Pratt), lv, 642 Joans, Ted, 656 Job discrimination, 252 Johnson, Andrew, 665 Johnson, Charles F., cxi, 351 Johnson, Charles F. “Mao,” xvii, cxi, 351, 671, 677 Johnson, David, 389, 391 Johnson, Deborah (Akua Njeri), 354–355 Johnson, Ethel Azalea, xiv, xix, liv–lv, 495, 500, 670, 739, 819, 823 Johnson, J. P., 125

876 | Index Johnson, Jack, 19, 20 Johnson, John H., 340, 365 Johnson, Joseph, 178 Johnson, June, 507 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 147 Johnson, Lyndon B., lii, cxix, 431, 521, 546, 610, 638 in Vietnam, 802, 803 Johnson, Nelson, 406–409, 547, 758, 759, 761 Johnson, Syl, 125 Johnson, Thomas 15X (Khalil Islam), 30, 476 Johnson, Troy, 91 Johnson, Wallace, 725 Johnson, William (Bilal Sunni-Ali), 768– 769, 770 Johnson-Forest Tendency, 200 Joint Terrorist Task Force (JTTF; of the NYPD), 34, 114–116 JOMO (Junta of Militant Organizations), 655, 809–810 Jones, Beverly, 148 Jones, Charles, 735 Jones, Claudia, 144, 146 Jones, Elvin, 267 Jones, Etta, 126 Jones, Harllel, 12 Jones, Henry Watson, 391 Jones, James Lloyd, 506 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones) Jones, Tawala, 250 Jones Act (1917), 652 Jones-Lecointe, Althea, 147 Jordan, Vernon E., Jr., 553 Joseph, Jamal, 116, 265 Joseph, James, 208, 550 Joseph, Peniel E., lxxv–lxxvii Josie, Peter, 148 Journal of African Civilizations, 455 Journal of Black Poetry, xx Journey of Reconciliation, 293, 825 Julian, Percy, 780 July 26 Movement, xvii, 305–306, 530 Jumbe, Aboud, 728 Junta of Militant Organizations (JOMO), 655, 809–810

Kain, Gylan, 457 Kakuyan (Twymon Myers), 34 Kamarakafego, Pauulu Roosevelt Brown, 150, 151, 153, 157 Kanak activism, 150–151 Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front, 153 Kane, Ronald, 389 Karenga, Maulana Ndabezitha (Ron Everett), xii, xvi, xx, l, li, 57, 76, 82, 155, 156, 253, 309, 310, 330, 411–417, 549, 566, 581, 678, 792, 826 and the kawaida philosophy, 414, 416, 418–424 and Kiswahili, 434, 435 surveillance by FBI, 797 and Us organization, 794 See also Kwanzaa; Us organization Karenga, Tiamoyo, 421–422 Karg, Cyriel, 149 Kasaipwalova, John, 152 Katz, Maude White, 345 Kawaida Institute of Pan-African Studies, 411, 423, 799 Kawaida philosophy, xx, 5, 289, 309, 310, 312, 411, 413, 414, 415–416, 418–424, 446–447, 699, 794–795, 796 Kawaida Towers, 277, 288 Kawaida womanism, 183 Kawaidists, 5. See also Kawaida philosophy Kedren Community Mental Health Center, 795 Kelly, Joan, 608 Kemet, Baye, 144, 296 Kemp, Gwendolyn, 45, 351, 787 Kendi, Ibram, 403 Kendrick v. Walder, 444 Kennedy, Adrienne, 82 Kennedy, Florynce “Flo,” xxi, cii, 150, 157, 424–428, 716 and the NBFO, 541–545 Kennedy, Jay, 211 Kennedy, John F., 15, 305, 475, 609, 638 Kennedy, Robert F., 275, 286, 682

Index | 877 Speech on the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., 35–36 Kent State shooting, 402, 404, 723 Kent State University, 404, 727, 741 Kenya, 434–435, 725 Kenya Land and Freedom Army, 809 Kenyatta, Jomo, 725, 809 Kerner Commission (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders), cxiv, cxv, cxvi–cxvii, cxx Urban riots report, cxxv–cxxxv, 609 Keys, Brady, 100 Kgositsile, Keorapetse “Little Willie,” 457 Khaalis, Abdullah, 33 Khaalis, Amina, 33 Khaalis, Bibi (daughter), 33 Khaalis, Bibi (mother), 33 Khaalis, Daud, 33 Khaalis, Hamaas, 33 Khaalis, Khadyja, 33 Khaalis, Rahman Uddein, 33 Khrushchev, Nikita, 281, 790 Kikuyu Land and Freedom Army, xvi Killsright (Joe Stuntz), lxvi Kimbro, Warren, 31 King, Alberta Christine Williams, 34 King, C. B., 553 King, Coretta Scott, 375, 383, 477 King, Ed, 520 King, Lonnie, 203 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 428–434 in Albany, 744 assassination of, xxii, lii, cxx, 30, 48, 106, 145, 172, 209, 227, 275, 286, 294, 327, 395 and the Black aesthetic, 110 on “Black Power,” 97–98, 686 and the Black Power Movement, 429–433 at the Conference for New Politics, 554 and CORE, 293 criticism of, 651 and the Deacons for Defense and Justice, xlv praising Ghana, xvii “I Have a Dream” speech, 581 influence of, 203

Jesse Jackson working with, 394–395 legacy of, 433 and the Meredith March Against Fear, 226–227, 502, 503, 507–508 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 281 opposing the war in Vietnam, 803, 804 and the Poor People’s Campaign, 326 and reparations, 665, 666 Robert Kennedy’s speech on the assassination of, 35–36 and the SCLC, xi, 93, 292, 294, 428 on self-defense, 609 supporting OPHR, 592 targeting by FBI, 299 response to urban rebellion, l, cxvii King, Martin Luther, Sr., 34 King, Rodney, 817 King, Sidney (Eusi Kwayana), 149, 379, 380, 453–454, 657, 728 King, Walter Eugene (Oba Efuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi), 664 Kirk, Rahsaan Roland, 132 Kirkpatrick, Frederick Douglass, 504 Kiswahili language, 378–379, 434–438, 492 Abantu grammar, 437 Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, cv, 274, 730, 732 KKK. See Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Knight, Douglas, 486–487 Knight, Etheridge, 77, 651, 702 Knight, James, 812 Knights of Tabor, 377 Knox, Charles, lxiv Koama, Ohene, 455 Kochiyama, Bill, 439, 440 Kochiyama, Yuri, 438–441, 586, 768 Koen, Charles E., Jr., xlviii, 441–444, 721 Koen, Clydia Watson, 442 Konadu, Kwasi, 296 Korowa, Patricia, 151, 153 Kowalski, George, 390 Kramer, Marian, 49 Krasenes, Paul, 389 Krause, Allison, 404 KRS One Public Enemy, 139 Kujichagulia. See self-determination

878 | Index Ku Klux Klan (KKK), xiv, xv, lxiii, 27, 28, 116, 281, 282, 294, 319, 320– 321, 424, 493, 494, 499, 502, 506, 519, 609 response to NAACP activism, 818–819 See also racial terrorism Kunstler, William, 40, 716 Kuti, Fela Anikulapo, 76, 152, 220, 531–532 Kwanzaa, 309, 411, 422, 436, 444–449, 700, 794 Kwayana, Eusi (Sidney King), 149, 379, 380, 453–454, 657, 728 Kwayana, Tchaiko R. (Annie Florence Elizabeth Cook), 379, 449–456 Ladner, Dorie, 404 Ladner, Joyce, 404 Land, Harold, 131 Langa, Mondo (David Rice), 555, 627, 632 Last Poets, The, 132, 457–459 Lateef, Yusef, 266 Latin America, 284, 452 Latino activism, 290, 311 Latinos/as, 438, 588–589, 590, 748 Latin Revolutionary News Service, 652 Law Enforcement Assistance Act, 610 Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit, 610 Lawrence, Gwendolyn, 451 Lawrence, Jacob, 451, 774 Lawrence, Josh, 281 Lawson, James, 204, 442, 503 LCCMHR (Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights), 464 LCFO. See Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) LCFP. See Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP) League for Industrial Democracy (LID), 763 League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation, 578 League of Revolutionaries for a New America, 49 League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), xx, 43, 49, 170, 172, 187, 200, 339, 459–463, 654, 667, 674, 678, 740, 785

targeting by COINTELPRO, 302 League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS), 290, 311 Lecointe-Jones, 148 Lee, Bob, lxiv Lee, Carol (Safisha Madhubuti), 472 Lee, Don L. See Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee) Lee, Herbert, 744 Lee, Wilbert, 810 Lenin, Vladimir, 38, 279, 696 Lenin School, 279 Lesbian activism, 731–733 Lesbians, 270, 271–272, 273–274 Levy, Horace, 657 Levy, Peter B., lii Lewis, Dorothy, 669 Lewis, Earl, 511 Lewis, John, xviii, 169, 206, 216, 293, 294, 331, 441, 609, 805 Lewis, Roger, 197 Lewis, Rupert, 657 Lewis, Tarika, lv, 137 Lewis, TyRon, 812 LGBT rights, 207. See also Lesbian activism LGBTQ individuals, in the Black community, 183 Liang Qichao, 497 Liberation Bookstore, 86, 90 Liberation theology, 147, 171 Black, 284–285, 416 Liberation University, 384. See also Malcolm X Liberation University Liberator, The, xx Liberia, 578, 599, 725 Libya, 109, 769 LID (League for Industrial Democracy), 763 Li Dazhao, 497 Life-cycle ceremonies, 411 Lightfoot, George, 802 Ligon, Alfred, 87–88 Ligon, Bernice, 88 Limbiko Tembo School of African American Culture, 799 Lin Biao, 498 Lincoln, Abbey, 82, 122, 126, 508

Index | 879 Lincoln Detox program, 719 Lindsay, Gilbert, 209 Lindsay, John, 558 Literature and poetry. See Black Arts Movement; Poetry and literature Little, Cleavon, 195 Little, JoAnne, 10] Little, Louise, 144 Little, Russell, 33–34 Little Red Book (Mao), 500, 791 Little Rock Nine, 341 Liuzzo, Viola, 27 Lockard, M. Jay, account of school boycott and shootings at the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Center, 522–529 Locke, Dawolu Gene, 408 Lockhart, Calvin, 195 Locust, Joe, lxiv Logan, Rayford, 656 Lomax, Louis, 326, 593 Lomotey, Kofi, 296 London, 146 Black Power organizations in, 146–147 Lorde, Audre, cv, 82, 270, 273, 274, 611, 732 Los Angeles Police Department, lvii Los Angeles rebellion (1992), cxiii Lost Found Nation of Islam, 564 Louis, Joe, 19, 20 Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola), 160, 161 Louisiana State University, 4, 214 Lowery, Joseph Echols, 431 Lowndes County Black Panther Freedom Democratic Party, 21–22 Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights (LCCMHR), 464 Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), xiii, lxxviii, 15, 227, 329, 463–467, 609, 673, 684, 747 as inspiration for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, 463, 466 Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP), 24, 146, 216–217, 377, 465–466, 602, 605, 676 LRS (League of Revolutionary Struggle), 290, 311

Luciano, Felipe, 57, 275, 457 Lucumi tradition, 770 Lumumba, Baba (Don Freeman), 378, 782 Lumumba, Chokwe Antar (son), xxiii, 469 Lumumba, Chokwe (father) (Edwin Taliaferro), xxiii, lxv, 49, 332, 467–470, 645, 646, 672, 769 Lumumba, Mamadou (Ken Freeman), xvi, 282, 376, 380, 454 Lumumba, Nubia, 469 Lumumba, Patrice, xvii, 106, 145, 476, 499, 530, 774 Luther X (Na’im Akbar; Luther Benjamin, Jr.), 163–165 Lynch, Acklyn, 150, 157, 780 Lynch, Shola, 259 Lynch, Vincent, 671–672 Lynn, Conrad J., 553 Lynn, John, 389 Lynne, Gloria, 126 Machel, Samora, 6, 728 Machoro, Eloi, 153 Mackey, John, 101 Madhubuti, Haki (Don L. Lee), 81, 131, 132, 269, 277, 288, 471–473, 611, 653, 658, 728 Kiswahili name, 436 Madhubuti, Safisha (Carol Lee), 472 Mafundi Institute, 437, 795 Magee, Ruchell, 138, 159, 255, 389, 629 Main Bout, 101 Majando programs, 799 Majid, Abdul, 627 Majied, Omar, 12 Major, Harvey, lxiv Makeba, Zenzile Miriam, 76, 122, 147, 227, 767 Makonnen, T. Ras, 727 Malaika, 276 Malawi, 725 Malcolm Players, 52 Malcolm X (el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz), 473–478 as activist, 106, 110, 158, 201, 420 on armed self-defense, xvi, 206, 260

880 | Index assassination of, 28–30, 145, 440, 476, 581, 775 on Black pride, 432 on Black unity, 547 break with NOI, xv, 248, 451, 476, 563, 566 “Bullet or Ballot” speech, 580 and CAP, 288 as Civil Rights activist, 281, 294, 477 conflict with Elijah Muhammad, 20 on electoral politics, 328 FBI investigation of, 299, 478–485 on freedom, 146 in Ghana, 345 and GOAL, 350 influence of, xii, xv–xvi, xxiii, 15, 38, 134, 249, 477, 566, 579, 605, 739, 794–795, 798 meeting Sonia Sanchez, 702–703 “Message to the Grass Roots,” 201, 350, 584, 644, 683 at Michaux’s, 87 Moore’s meeting with, 531 on Muhammad Ali, 19 and the Nation of Islam, lxxvii–lxxviii, 474, 475, 561–562, 563, 639, 662 on Pan-Africanism, 223 political organizing philosophy of, 185–186 as political prisoner, 158, 626 pre-NOI, 345 speeches in Detroit and Lansing, 47 on Vietnam and Korea, 801 writings of, 653 and Yuri Kochiyama, 439 Malcolm X College, 384 Malcolm X Commemorative Committee, 630, 674 Malcolm X Foundation, xii, 13, 179 Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), xxiii, 458, 469, 646 Malcolm X Liberation University (MXLU), 6, 7, 384, 408, 485–493, 547, 602, 695–696, 728 Malcolm X Society, lxiv, 351, 581, 584, 644 Male supremacy, 343 Mali, 601

Maliki, 132 Mallory, Mae, lv, 302, 493–496, 820, 824 Malveaux, Julianne, 728 Manchester congress, 727 Mancusi, Vincent, 38 Mandela, Nelson, 729 Mandela, Winnie, 144 Manns, Adrienne, 778 Mants, Bob, 464 Manuel, George, lxviii Maoism and Maoists, 5, 106, 168, 282, 346, 498, 501, 789, 793 Māoris, 152 Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), xvii, 146, 290, 346, 496–501, 789–790, 791, 824 March, Ron, 460 March Against Fear, xlv, 93, 124–125, 225, 226, 336, 403, 466, 501–509, 737, 747–748 McKissick’s participation in, 502–504, 512–513 at University of Mississippi, 503 Marches, xiii. See also March Against Fear; March for Freedom (Detroit); March on Washington; Selma to Montgomery March March for Freedom (Detroit), 580 March on Washington, 3, 294, 499, 546, 609 Marcuse, Herbert, 315–316 Marley, Bob, 153 Maroons, 148, 452–453 Marshall, Richard, 555 Marshall, Wanda, 500 Martin, James G., 517 Martin, Trayvon Benjamin, 43, 458 Martinique, 144, 145 Martin Luther King Jr. Center, 383, 384 MARUM (Mack Avenue Revolutionary Union Movement), 460 Marvin X, 56, 80, 81 Marx, Karl, 38, 278 Marxism, 57, 118, 150, 168, 200, 251, 278–279, 408, 500, 501, 514, 675, 689, 692, 696, 748, 789, 790 Black, 188, 762 Euro-, 120 Eurocentric, 117

Index | 881 Marxism-Leninism, 5, 8, 10, 254, 278, 281, 282, 290, 380, 406, 491, 534, 677, 696, 740, 789 in China, 497 See also League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM), 290, 311, 499, 500–501 Masimimi, Ngdoni, 379, 454 Masonic lodges, 377 Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union, 826 Massey, Cal, 122, 132 Matamba, lv Mateka Support Committee, 799 Matilaba, Tarika, 110 Mau Mau (Harlem), 156, 309 Mau Mau Rebellion (Africa), xvi, 809 Mayfield, Curtis, 122, 128, 198, 220 Mayfield, Julian, 494, 820 May Fourth Movement, 497 Mays, Willie, 593 Maza, Bob, 151 Mazique, Jewel, 826 Mazrui, Ali, 691 Mboya, Tom, 451 McBride, Renisha, 43 McCain, Franklin, 169 McCall, Tom, 17 McCannon, Dindga, 82 McCarran Act, cxx McCarthy, Eugene, 206 McCarthyism, 252 McClain, James, 159, 255, 629 McClain, John, 32, 389 McClinton, Curtis, Jr., 100, 101 McCollum, Mary Salynn, 441 McCone Commission, l McCoy, Rhody, 588, 589–590 McDougall, Gay, 728, 729 McFalls, Tamiu, 254 McGee, Ruchell, 380 McGovern, George, 258 McGuinness, Bruce, 151 McKay Commission, 36 McKinley, Wilbur, 30 McKissick, Floyd Bixler, Sr., xi, xx, 93, 156, 294, 394, 502, 503, 504, 506, 509–519, 553

biography and ideology, 511–512 and CORE, 509 compared with Carmichael, 514–515 end of Soul City and death, 517 legacy of, 517–518 and the NAACP, 512 Soul City and Black town building, 516–517 transition from progressive politics to Black conservatism, 512–516 McKissick v. Carmichael, 509 McLucas, Lonnie, 31 McManus, Edward, lxvii McNair, Denise, xvii McNeil, Joseph, 169 McWhorter, Gerald (Abdul Alkalimat), 9, 653, 777 MDP (Mississippi Democratic Party), 519 Meade, Matthew, 728 Means, Russell, lxvi, lxviii, 555 Means, Ted, 555 Medgar Evers Rifle Club, 351 Melanesia, 144, 152 Melinda (film), 199 Memphis Riot (1866), cxi Meredith, James Howard, 93, 226, 466, 501, 502, 505 Meredith March. See March Against Fear campaign Merrit, Jymie, 131 Merritt, George, 46 Merritt, Thomas, 46 Merritt, William T., 552 Merritt College (Oakland), 79–80, 134, 170, 500, 570, 708 MERUM (Mound Road Revolutionary Union Movement), 461 Mexican groups, 136, 415, 796 Mexico, 769–770 Meyers, Twyman (Kakuyan Olugbala), 34, 114 MFDP. See Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) MIA (Montgomery Improvement Association), 292 Miami urban rebellions (1980, 1982, 1983, 1989), cxii, cxiii Michael, Kisha, 458

882 | Index Michaux, Lewis H., 86–87, 774 Michel, Samora, 490–491 Military draft, 803–804, 805 Miller, Alvin “Jugs,” 32, 388 Miller, Jeffrey Glenn, 404 Million Man March/Day of Absence, 411, 473, 534, 564 Mills, Billy, 209 Mills, John, 388, 390 Millsaps College, 404 Milwaukee Collegiate Academy, 697 Mims, Lloyd, 33 Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Union, 280 Mingus, Charles, 129 Minja, Laila, 643 Mississippi Democratic Party (MDP), 519 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), xviii, 225, 329, 464, 477, 519–529, 746 account of school boycott and shootings, 522–529 at the Democratic National Convention (1964), 520–522 at the National Black Political Conference (1972), 522 State Convention (1964), 520 Mississippi Freedom Labor Union, 748 Mississippi Project, 507 Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, 519 Mississippi Summer Project. See Freedom Summer Mitchell, Bobby, 100, 101 Mitchell, Charlene Alexander, lxvi, 253, 255 Mitchell, George, lxiii Mkalimoto, Ernie (Ernest Allen), 376 Monk, Thelonious, 267 Monongye, David, lxii Monroe Black Guard, lv Monroe Defense Committee, 495 Monroe Movement, lv Monroe Negroes with Guns Movement, 494 Monsonis, Jim, 764 Montequim, Jalil Abdul (Anthony Bottom), 390, 391, 627, 631

Montgomery Bus Boycott, 157, 281, 293, 430, 603, 604, 738 Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), 292, 430 Montreal, 147–148 Moody, Theodore, 33 Moore, Amzie, 743 Moore, Carlos (Charles Moore Wedderburn), 529–532 Moore, “Queen Mother” Audley, xix, lv, lvi, cii, 3, 4, 150, 151, 157, 344, 427, 469, 532–535, 581, 584, 664, 665, 668, 670, 676, 728, 739, 820 and reparations, 666 targeting by COINTELPRO, 302 Moore, Cecil B., 670 Moore, Harriet, 27 Moore, Harry T., 27 Moore, Isaac, 672 Moore, James, 657 Moore, Oneal, 27 Moore, Richard, 657 Moraga, Cherrie, cv Morehouse College, 164, 203–204, 384, 687, 400 Morgan, Charles, 505 Morgan, Lee, 131, 132 Morris, Olive, 147 Morris Brown College, 150, 384 Morrison, Toni, 451 Moses, Robert Parris “Bob,” 507, 743, 805 Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice, 213 MOVE, 628 Movement for a New Dominica, 148 Movement for Economic Justice, 559 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, civ, 53, 190 Moynihan Report, 190, 384 Mozambique, xxi, 149, 192, 289, 379, 435, 490–491, 691, 696, 760 Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), 6, 8, 192, 490–491, 696 Mtume, 129–130, 133 Muhammad, Akbar, 564 Muhammad, Clara, 561, 562, 563 Muhammad, Elijah (Elijah Poole), lxxvii, 19, 29, 33, 106, 475, 560–561, 563, 653

Index | 883 conflict with Malcolm X, 20 marginalization of women by, 542 Muhammad, Herbert, 22 Muhammad, John, 564 Muhammad, Silis, 564 Muhammad, W. D. Fard, 560–561, 563–564 Muhammad Ahmad Defense Committee, 380 Muhammad University of Islam, 562, 565 Mulford, Don, 571 Mulford Act, 135, 262, 709 Mulzac, Una, 90 Munroe, Trevor, 148 Muntaquin, Jalil Abdul (Anthony Bottom), 390, 391, 627, 631 Muranaka, Russell, 440 Murray, Pauli, 97, 145 Music. See Black Music Muslim Girls Training Schools, 562 Muslim Mosque, Inc., 106, 248, 476, 516, 563, 630 Mussolini, Benito, 105 Mutual aid societies, 377 Mutual Alliance of Peace, Harmony and Mutual Assistance, 415 MXGM. See Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) MXLU. See Malcolm X Liberation University (MXLU) Myrdal, Gunnar, 384 NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) NAARPR (National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression), lxvi, lxvii, 255, 317, 716 NABF (National Alliance of Black Feminist), 543 Nabrit, James, 778, 781 Nairobi Day School and College, 296, 384 Naisseline, Nidoish, 150 NAKO (National Association of Kawaida Organizations), 411, 418, 423 Namibia, 289

NAPO (New Afrikan People’s Organization), lxv, 312, 376, 381, 469, 555, 646 Nardal, Jane, 144 Nas, 458 Nascimento, Abdas Do, 453 Nash, Diane, 169, 735, 743 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 475 Nation, 132 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission), cxiv, cxv, cxvi–cxvii, cxx Urban riots report, cxxv–cxxxv, 609 National African American Leadership Summit, 411 National Afro-American Conference on Afro Youth, 672, 739, 787 National Afro-American Organization, 670 National Alliance Against Racism, 555 National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR), lxvi, lxvii, 255, 317, 716 National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 697 National Alliance for Radical Prison Reform, 213 National Alliance of Black Feminist (NABF), 543 National Anti-War and Anti-Draft Union, 770, 804, 805 National Association for Black School Educators, 166 National Association for Black Studies (NCBS), 416 National Association for Charter School Authorizers, 697 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), xiv, xix, 45, 105, 156, 181, 186, 203, 207, 209, 252, 281, 294, 337, 370, 430, 443, 458, 504, 509, 520, 539, 550, 592, 670, 681, 685, 697, 743, 758 addressing police brutality, 608 criticism of, 651 McKissick’s membership in, 512 renegade Monroe chapter, lxiii Rosa Parks’ membership in, 604

884 | Index National Association of Black Psychologists, 549 National Association of Black Social Workers, Inc., 549, 552 National Association of Black Students, 655 National Association of Kawaida Organizations (NAKO), 411, 418, 423 National Baptist Convention, 539 National Bar Association (NBA), 553 National Black Agenda, xx, 188, 361–362 National Black Anti-War, Anti-Draft union, 770, 804, 805 National Black Assembly, 188, 361–362 National Black Committee for the ReElection of the President, 510, 518 National Black Economic Development Conference and the Black Manifesto, 339, 461, 537–541, 667. See also Black Manifesto National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), xxii, cii–ciii, civ, 54, 271, 302, 541–545 National Black Government Conference, 584, 644 National Black Human Rights Coalition, 376, 678 National Black Independence Party, 166 National Black Independent Party, 678 National Black Leadership Roundtable, 813 National Black Political Agenda, 545, 547–548 National Black Political Assembly, 57, 277, 517, 545–548, 606 National Black Political Conference (1972), 522 National Black Political Convention, xx, xxiii, lxviii, 188, 277, 286, 289, 310, 330, 331, 360–361, 364, 369, 547, 813 National Black Political Council, 545 National Black Power Conference, 56, 325, 426, 592, 826 National Black Theatre, 151 National Black United Federation of Charities (NBUFC), 552

National Black United Front, Inc. (NBUF), xxiii, 189, 210, 227, 312, 411, 473, 549, 552, 678, 770 National Black United Front Political Action Conference of Illinois, 166 National Black United Fund, Inc., 548–553 Board of Trustees, 550–551 National Black Veterans Association, Inc., 552 National Breadbasket Clergyman’s Conference, 596 National Caucus of Black State Legislators, 548 National Central Committee, cv–cvi National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), xxiii, 469, 555, 586, 646, 665, 669 National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, 440, 770 National Committee of Black Churchmen (NCBC), 6, 93–95, 283, 490, 696 National Committee of Negro Churchmen, 283. See also National Committee of Black Churchmen (NCBC) National Committee to Defend Political Prisoners, 440, 770 National Committee to Free Political Prisoners, 720 National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL), lxvii, 469, 553–556, 555, 716 National Conference of Black Local Elected Officials, 548 National Conference of Black Political Scientists, 183 National Conference on Black Power (1967), 825 National Council for Black Studies, Inc., cvii, 183, 552 National Council for New Politics, 554 National Council of Churches, 539 Commission for Racial Justice, 720 National Council of Negro Churchmen, 93 National Council of Negro Women, 186, 550

Index | 885 National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, 666 National Football League, 101 National Football League Players Association, 101 National Hook-Up of Black Women, Inc., 552 National Housing Partnership, 516 National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), lxii–lxiii, lxix National Industrial Council, 666 Nationalism, 380–381, 546 Black, 57, 81, 117, 124, 132, 168, 180, 188, 190, 205, 271, 275, 277, 286– 287, 294, 296, 308, 351, 453, 464, 485, 489, 500–501, 507, 532, 534 Black Christian, 350 Black cultural, 267–268 Caribbean, 148 Cuban, 305 economic, 420, 442 liberational, 420 Pan-African, 187, 330, 360, 699 political, 420 Puerto Rican, 440 religious, 420 See also Cultural nationalism; Revolutionary nationalism Nationalization, 559–560 National Joint Action Committee, 379 National Liberation Front (NLF; Vietnam), 802 National Liberation Front of (South) Vietnam (NLFV), 263 National Liberty Party, 666 National Maritime Union, 280 National Memorial African Bookstore, 86, 89 National Negro Business League, 1 National Negro Congress, 344 National Negro Insurance League, 1 National Negro Labor Council (NNLC), 343, 344 National Organization for Women (NOW), xxi, 426–427, 428 National Political Assembly, 398 National Political Congress of Black Women (NPCBW), 259

National Save and Change Black Schools Program, 762 National Student Association (NSA), 407 National Task Force for COINTELPRO Litigation and Research, 630–631, 642, 678, 720 National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), 8 National Union of Freedom Fighters, 148 National Urban League, xiv, 156, 186, 294, 547, 550 National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), cii, 302, 556–560 National Welfare Rights Union (NWRU), 559–560 Nation of Gods and Earths, 31 Nation of Islam (NOI), xv, xviii, xix, xlv, lxii–lxiii, lxxvii–lxxviii, 29–30, 38, 45, 106, 151, 281, 560–565, 593, 639, 653, 662 addressing police brutality, 608 Council of Elders, 564 critique of, 677 and Louis Farrakhan, 547 Malcolm X’s break with, xv, 248, 451, 476, 563, 566 Malcolm X’s involvement with, lxxvii– lxxviii, 474, 475, 561–562, 563, 639, 662 Muhammad Ali’s membership in, 19, 20 Office of Human Development, 164 recruitment of prisoners by, 158 and reparations, 666 Native Americans. See American Indians NBA (National Bar Association), 553 NBECD. See Black Economic Development Conference (NBECD) NBFO. See National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) NBPG (Niuigini Black Power Group), 152 NBUFC (National Black United Federation of Charities), 552 NCBC (National Committee of Black Churchmen), 6, 93–95, 283, 490, 696 NCBL (National Conference of Black Lawyers), lxvii, 469, 553–556, 555, 716

886 | Index NCBS (National Association for Black Studies), 416 NCF (North Carolina Fund), 487 NCLC (Northern Christian Leadership Conference), 350 N’COBRA. See National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) Ndlela, Zolili, 379, 380, 454 Ndundu, 296 Neal, Gaston, 378 Neal, Larry (Lawrence Paul Neal), xiii, 76, 79, 268, 415, 565–568, 775 Neely, Sandra (Sandra Smith), 408, 761–762 Neg mawon, 148 Negritude, 334–335 Negro Convention Movement, 185. See also Black convention movement Negro Digest, xxi, 341 Negroes with Guns Movement, 494 Negro Fund, 550 Negro Industrial and Economic Union, 99. See also Black Economic Union (BEU) Negro Scholar journal, 356–357 Negro Women’s Action Committee, 345 Neighborhood Cultural Arts Center, 52 Nelson, David, 457 Neocolonialism, cxviii, 23, 25, 148, 152, 475, 601. See also Antineocolonialism; Colonialism New African, lxv New African independence movement, 642 New African Republic, 767 New African Security Force, 645, 768 New Afrika Books, 700 New Afrikan ideology, 380 New Afrikan Independence Movement, 380, 467, 718–719 New Afrikan National Territory, 644 New Afrikan People’s Council, 585 New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO), lxv, 312, 376, 381, 469, 555, 646 New Afrikan scouts, 769 New Afrikan Women’s Organization, 770

Newark urban rebellion (1967), li, cxii, cxx, cxxvii–cxxviii, 156, 330 Newark Young Lords, 275. See also Young Lords New Bethel Baptist Church (Detroit), lvi, 582, 645, 646 New Caledonia, 150, 153 New Communist Movement, 282 New Guard, 96 New Jewel Movement, 148, 379 New Joint African Committee (NJAC), 148 NEWKILL, 113 New Left Movement, 427, 763, 764 New Nationalism, 275, 277 New Negro Campus Movement (NNCM), 181 New Negro era, 169 New People’s Study Society, 497 NEWRUM (Detroit News workers Revolutionary Union Movement), 460 New School of Afro-American Thought, 376, 378 Newton, Huey P., xiii, xvi, 40, 57, 106, 134, 136, 138, 139, 146, 170, 212, 227, 249, 262, 300, 307, 322, 377, 450, 500, 566, 568–572, 602, 612, 708, 710 and the Black Panther Party, 749 “In Defense of Self-Defense,” 572–575 family and childhood, 568 founding the Black Panther Party, xvi, 80, 106, 146, 170, 300, 330, 450, 566, 570–571, 602, 708, 749 gang involvement, 569 self-education, 570 writings of, 568, 569–570 New World Group, 148 New York African Free Schools, 599 New Zealand, 146, 152 Nga Tamatoa, 152 Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles), 411, 421, 422, 436–437, 445–448, 699, 794 Nicaragua, 555 Nigeria, 152, 306, 345, 451, 578 Nikru Books, 86 Nile Valley Conference, 776

Index | 887 Nisamu Sasa, 769 Nita, Amador, 149 Niuigini Black Power Group (NBPG), 152 Nixon, E. D., 430, 604 Nixon, Richard Milhous, 264, 509, 516, 546, 709 Nixon administration, cxviii, cxxi, 302 NJAC (New Joint African Committee), 148 Njeri, Akua (Deborah Johnson), 354–355 NJR-32 Project Area Committee, 277 Nkrumah, Osagyefo Kwame, xvii, xxi, 23–24, 145, 150, 152, 200, 203, 223, 227, 306, 345, 451, 489, 499, 601, 602, 725, 760 NNLC (National Negro Labor Council), 344 Noel, Ken, 325 NOI. See Nation of Islam (NOI) Nolen, W. L., 32, 388 Nommo X, 12 Nomvete, D. M., 728 Non-aligned movement, 692 Nonprofit organizations, 552 No Nukes Concert, 706 Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), 215, 224–225 Nonviolent protest, cxxxiv, 291–293, 319, 321. See also Civil disobedience North Carolina Fund (NCF), 487 Northern Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC), 350 Northern Ireland, 555 Northern Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference, 200, 350, 683 Norton, Eleanor Holmes, 553 Norvell, James Aubrey, 503 NOW (National Organization for Women), xxi, 426–427, 428 NSA (National Student Association), 407 Nubi, John, 788 Nubia, 144 Nuclear-free movement, 152 Nuh (Albert Washington), 390, 631, 632 Nur, Abdul, 33 Nurridin, Jalal Mansur, 457, 458 Nutter, Michael, 703

NWRO. See National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) NWRU (National Welfare Rights Union), 559–560 Nyerere, Julius K., 422, 490, 601, 602, 690, 729 Nyjuky, Robaire, 788 Nyumba ya Ujamaa (House of Cooperative Economics), 277 Oakland Community School, cvi, 138, 606 Oakland Ensemble Theatre, 79–80 OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture), 340–341 Obadele, Gaidi (Milton Henry), xix, lvi, lxiv, 4, 48, 88, 349–350, 351, 577–584, 585, 644, 646, 668, 787 pastoral ministry, 583 Obadele, Imari A. (Richard Henry), lxiv, 4, 88, 349, 351, 420, 468, 469, 555, 578–579, 581, 584–587, 645–646, 654, 664, 668, 720, 768 as political prisoner, 585, 629–630 as political science teacher, 586 Obafemi, Ahmed, 768 Obama, Barack, 432, 717 OBP (Organization for Black Power), xii, 46 Ocean Hill-Brownsville Campaign for Community Control of Schools, 587–590, 630 Odetta, 76 Odinga, Sekou, liii, 115, 116, 138, 469, 627, 631, 632 Odlum, George, 148 Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), 442 Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE), cxxi, 517 Ofuatey-Kodjoe, Wentworth, 728 Ogunseye, Tacuma, 455 Ojays, 125 Olatunji, Babatunde, 269 Oliver, C. Herbert, 588 Olmec Club, 796 Olsen, Caroline, 627, 641 Olugbala, Naima, 296

888 | Index Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), 325, 326, 327, 590–595 Omawale, 455 OMBE (Office of Minority Business Enterprise), cxxi, 517 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, cxx, 610–611 O’Neal, John, 698 O’Neal, Pete, 264 O’Neal, Richard, 391 O’Neal, Ron, 197 O’Neal, William, 31, 300, 355 Onu, Peter, 728 Operation Breadbasket, 395–396, 397, 430–431, 595–597 Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity/People United to Serve Humanity), 396–397 Operational Unity Committee, 796 OPHR (Olympic Project for Human Rights), 325, 326, 327, 590–595 Opportunity Industrial Centers International, 550 Orangeburg Massacre, 686, 759 Organic disorder, 164 Organization for Afro-American Unity, 156, 439 Organization for Black Power (OBP), xii, 46 Organization for Black Struggle, xxiii Organization of African Unity, 7, 185, 327, 338, 491, 579, 601, 728 Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), 106, 186, 249, 440, 476, 547, 563, 566, 630 Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), 340–341, 653 Writer’s Workshop, 471 Organization of Latin American Solidarity, 514 Oswald, Russell G., 38, 39, 40, 41 Our School (NY), 490 Owen, Chandler, 647 Owens, Brigman, 100, 101 Owens, Jesse, 19, 593 Owolo, Obaba, 13 Oyewole, Abiodun, 457 Oyotunji Village, 311, 664

Pace, Judy, 195 Pacific Women’s Conference, 150–151 Paige, J.M., cxv Palestine/Palestinians, 223, 288, 555, 748, 770, 796 Palestine Liberation Organization, 5, 263 Palmer, Hazel, 520 Pamoja Writer’s Collective, 54 Pan-African Association, 600 Pan-African Conference, 600 Pan-African Congresses, 9, 144, 185, 725, 796 Pan-African Cultural Festival, 152 Pan-African Liberation Week, 150 Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church, 663. See also Shrine of the Black Madonna Orthodox Christian Church Pan-African Secretariat (PAS), xxi, 376, 379 Pan-African Student unions, 376. See also Black student unions (BSUs) Pan-African Students Association, 670. See also Black student associations (BSAs) Pan-African studies. See Black studies Pan-African unity, 415 Pan-African Work Center (Atlanta), 490 Pan-Africanism, xvi, xix, xxi, xxiii, 25, 106, 117, 153, 203, 223, 277, 288–289, 296, 330, 380–381, 418, 454, 599–603, 652, 687, 695, 737, 796, 798 and Black Power, 144–145 at Malcolm X Liberation University, 489 MOVE, 628 and scientific socialism, 726 in student organizations, 408 See also African Liberation Support Committee; All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP); Karenga, Maulana; Kwanzaa; Moore, Audley “Queen Mother”; Us organization Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), 8 Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, 379, 454

Index | 889 Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (PAPA), 122, 130, 212 Panther, Charlotte O’Neal, 264 Panther 21, 427, 630, 714, 717 Panther Liberation School, 213 Papua New Guinea, 145, 152 Paramilitary organizations, xlvi–xlvii, 249 Black Liberators, 443 Black Student Alliance (Los Angeles), 177 See also Black Guard; Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) Parker, Neville, 729 Parker, William H., 253 Parks, Gordon, Sr., 196 Parks, Raymond, 604 Parks, Rosa, 88, 157, 603–607 Parsam, Jai, 455 PAS (Pan-African Secretariat), xxi, 376, 379 Pasifika indigenous communities, 152 Patriarchy, xxi, xxii, cv, 53, 289, 300, 323, 731 Patterson, Floyd, 20–21 Patterson, Louise Thompson, 345 Patterson, William, 280, 281, 344, 593 Patton, Gwen, 804 Payne, Donald, 277 Payne, William “Che,” xlix, 32, 218 PCC (People’s Center Council), 646 PDUM (People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement), 811 Peace and Freedom Party, 137, 263, 803 Peltier, Leonard, lxvi–lxvii Penn, Barbara, 778 Peoples, John A., 402, 403, 405 People’s Center Council (PCC), 646 People’s College, 9 People’s College of Tennessee, 762 People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (PDUM), 811 People’s National Congress (PNC), 453–455 People’s Progressive Movement, 148 People’s Progressive Party, 453 People’s Republic of China. See China Peoples Republic of Congo-Brazzaville, 264

People’s Revolutionary Leadership Council (PRLC), 646 People’s Revolutionary Republic of Guinea, 23. See also Guinea “People’s Tribunal,” 605–606 Periodicals. See Publications Peru, 144, 145, 379 Pharr, Wayne, 30 Phipps, Armstead, 505 Picketing, 680 Pickett, Wilson, 220 Pine Ridge reservation, lxvi Pinell, Hugo, 389, 391 Pirenne, 120 Pitts, Freddie, 810 Pitts and Lee v. Florida, 810 Pivens, Frances Fox, 557 Plainfield, N. J. rebellion (1967), cxv, cxvi Plessey v. Ferguson, 293, 758 PLP (Progressive Labor Party), 499 Plumpp, Sterling, 653 Pluralism, xix, 513 PNC (People’s National Congress), 453–455 Poetry and literature, lxxviii–lxxx The Last Poets, 457–459 See also Black Arts Movement; Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones); Ya Salaam, Kalamu; Sanchez, Sonia; ScottHeron, Gil Poindexter, Ed, 555, 627 Poitier, Sidney, 100, 194 Police brutality, 14, 113–114, 607–626, 667, 671, 732 Black Arts response to, 611–612 description of police raid that killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, 613–626 acts of violence, 418, 458, 466, 570, 582, 709, 796 Political prisoners and exiles, xxii, lii–liii, 380, 440, 453, 469, 553, 555, 585, 626–636, 678, 714, 716, 720, 768 Angela Davis, 628–629 Black Liberation Army (BLA), 631 Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), 627–628, 634–635

890 | Index Black Power Movement prisoners, 635–636 COINTEL-Era political prisoners, 631–633 exiles, xiv, xviii, xxii, xlvi, liii, 635 MOVE, 635 New Afrikan political prisoners and prisoners of war, 629–631, 635 other Pan-African political prisoners, 635 PRGNA prisoners, 629–631 Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), 635 solitary confinement, 635–636 See also Prisoners of war (POWs) Political revolution, 418 Political School of Kawaida, 277. See also Kawaida Pollard, Cherise A., 81–82 Polynesia, 152 Polynesian Panthers, 152 Ponder, Annell, 507 Pontiac Brothers, 469 Poor People’s Campaign, 227, 326, 396, 429 Poor People’s Corporation, 748 Port Huron Statement, 764 Porter, Dorothy, 656 Poverty Rights Action Center, 557 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 155, 156, 187, 205, 330, 415, 499, 636–640, 737, 826 Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr., 636 Powell, Linda, 273 Powell v. McCormack, 205, 639 Pratt, Elmer “Geronimo” ji-Jaga, lv, lvii, 250, 264, 554, 555, 630, 640–643 Pratt, Geronimo ji-Jaga, 113, 627–628, 721, 797, 805 Pratt, Sandra/Saundra (Nsondi ji-Jaga), lv, 642 Preventive detention, cxx Price, James, 33 Primus, Aldwyn, 148 Prisoners of war (POWs), xxii, 553, 626, 629–631, 718, 720 Proctor, Audrey, 495 Professional athletics, 101

Progressive Labor Party (PLP), 499, 671, 787 Progressive Party, 578 Project 100,000, 803 Project J.I.M., 100 Project South, 458 Proletariat, 104, 120 Prosser, Gabriel, 103 Protestant Community Services, 208 Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA), xxi, xxiii, liii, lvi, 4, 218, 307, 351, 380, 440, 468–469, 555, 577, 581, 584–585, 642, 643–647, 664, 668, 719, 767–768, 824 NASF, lv, lvi as political prisoners and prisoners of war, 629–631 and reparations, 665 See also Republic of New Afrika (RNA) Pryor, Richard, 816–817 Psychology, African-centered (Black psychology), 162–168 Publications, 647–659 Black America, liii Black newspapers, 88, 209, 475, 600, 648 Black Panther newspaper, 323, 648, 654 Black Power International, 656–657 Black Power publications, 648–649 and the Black voice, 649–651 in California, 654–655 in Chicago, 653–654 The Crusader, xiv, xviii, lv, 49, 251, 651, 671, 676, 818–820, 823, 824 in Detroit, 654 in District of Columbia and the South, 655 evolution of, 657–659 Jet magazine, 44 Muhammad Speaks, 88, 475, 476, 562, 595, 612, 652, 653, 739 multiregional outlets, 652 Negro Digest, 340 Negro Worker, 280 in New York, 652–653 pre-Black Power movement, 647–648

Index | 891 The Quotable Karenga, 310 The Razor, xix, 45, 787 Soledad Brother, 38 student and student-faculty collaborations, 655–656 See also Soulbook Public Works Employment Act, cxxi Puerto Rican community, 588, 590, 652 Puerto Rican Socialist Party, lxvii Puerto Rico, 149, 191 Quasimodo, 458 Quduss, Njeri, 585 Quinn, Kate, 656 Ra, Sun, 775 Rabble-rouser thesis, cxiv, cxv Racial adjustment Action Society, 147 Racial collectivity, cxxii Racial terrorism, 464, 503, 519. See also Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Racism, xxii, cxiv, 3, 8, 145, 166, 190, 191, 203, 223, 225, 227, 280, 284, 294, 300, 393–394, 426, 428, 475, 502–503, 503, 511, 534, 537, 553, 603, 658, 804 in the air corps, 578 and American Indians, lxi–lxii and Black studies, 181 in Brazil, 453 in Cuba, 529–530, 531, 532 institutional, 438, 592 in Oakland, 570 reverse, 384 in white churches, 538–539 Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 116, 721 Rackley, Alex, 31, 710 Radical pedagogy, 691 Radio Free Dixie, xiv, 48–49, 671, 676, 824 Rahman, Ahmed, 555 Rahman, Aisha, 82 Rainbow Coalition, lxiv, 57 RAM. See Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) RAM-BLF, xix Ramp, James, 628

Ramsammy, Josh, 455 Ramsey, Dennis, 170 Randall, Dudley, 471, 658 Randolph, Asa Philip, 200, 252, 294, 578, 647 Rangel, Charles B., 553, 639 Ransby, Barbara, 544 Ransome-Kuti, Funmilayo, 145 Rashidi, Runoko, 455 Rasta, 147, 148, 689, 729 RATF. See Revolutionary Armed Task Force (RATF) Rathke, Wade, 559 Ratoon Group, 149, 455 Rawick, George, 651 Ray, James Earl, 30 RCDAS (Reparations Committee for the Descendants of American Slaves), 3, 534, 666 RCL (Revolutionary Communist League), 290 Re-Africanization, 420 Reagan, Ronald, 135, 254, 301, 327, 440 Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 744 Reagon, Cordell, 744 Reagon, Joy, 441 Rebellion, spontaneous, l–lii Red Power, lxii–lxiv, lxix Red Summer (1919), 251 Red Thread collective, 455 Redding, John, 711 Redding, Otis, 220 Reed, Adolph, Jr., cxxii Reese, Michael, 15, 17 Reggae, 145, 149 Religion African, 664 Akan, 664 Christian-affiliated organizations, 95–96 Ifa, 313, 411, 776 Rasta, 147, 148, 689, 729 Santeria, 664 Vodou/Vodun, 313, 664 Yoruba, 452, 664, 775, 776 See also Black churches; Christianity; Theology Religion and Black Power, 661–664

892 | Index Remiro, Joseph, 33–34 Rent strikes, 136, 533 Reparations, xxi, xxiii, lvi, 411, 418, 468, 469, 488, 534, 550, 555–556, 584, 663, 664–669 from white churches, 538–540 See also Moore, Audley “Queen Mother” Reparations Committee for the Descendants of American Slaves (RCDAS), 3, 534, 666 Reproductive rights, civ, 272 Republic of Ghana. See Ghana Republic of New Afrika (RNA), lxiv–lxv, cii, 5, 15, 106, 187, 218, 380, 385, 534, 555, 581, 587, 654, 791 Article Three Brief, 583 and the demand for reparations, 668–669 harassment by law enforcement, 582– 583, 585 police attack against, 582 provisional government of, 581, 584–585 See also Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA) Retaliatory violence, xlix Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), xiii, xvi, xix, xx, xxiii, li, liii–liv, 48, 112, 170, 187, 376–377, 450, 500, 534, 566–567, 610, 627, 630, 644, 670–675, 676, 719, 738–740, 775, 824 12-point program, 672–673 disbanding of, 380 as national organization, 671–674 publications of, 654–655 targeting by COINTELPRO, 299, 300 Revolutionary Armed Task Force (RATF), 115 Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), 278, 290, 501 Revolutionary Communist Party, 346 Revolutionary nationalism, xix, xx, 57, 281, 376, 378, 670, 675–679, 787, 795 different emphasis of revolutionary Black nationalists, 677–678

legacy of, 678 revolutionary nationalist organizations, 676–677 See also Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) Revolutionary Workers League (RWL), 408, 696, 762 Revolutionary Youth Movement, 765 Rey, Margo Okizawa, 270 Rhem, Mary, lxiv Rhodesia, 8 Rice, David (Mondo Langa), 555, 627, 632 Rice, Tamir, 43 Richardson, Donna, 681 Richardson, Gloria, xv, liv, 302, 477, 676, 679–684 Richardson, Judy, 223 Rickard, Karen, lxii Ricks, Willie (Mukassa Dada), xi, xii, 24, 155, 186, 408, 431, 507, 684–687, 737 RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act), 116, 721 Riddick, Ed, 596 Riffraff theory, cxiv–cxv Riley, Negail, 550 Ringgold, Faith, xxi, 82 Ritchie, Sharon Page, 270 Rites of passage, 357, 411, 798, 799 Riverside Church (New York), 539, 540, 667 RNA. See Republic of New Afrika (RNA) RNA 11, 380, 440, 468–469, 582–583, 720 Roach, Max, 774–775 Robertson, Carole, xvii Robertson, Dianna, 788–789, 791 Robeson, Eslanda, 144 Robeson, Paul, lxxvi, 105, 203, 252, 269, 344–345, 508, 652 Robideau, Bob, lxv, lxvi–lxvii Robinson, Cedric, Black Marxism, 117–122 Robinson, Clifford, 736 Robinson, Fletcher, 729 Robinson, Isaiah, 155, 826 Robinson, J. P., 131

Index | 893 Robinson, Jackie, 19, 326, 593 Robinson, JoAnn, 430 Robinson, Reginald, 745 Robinson, Ruby Doris. See SmithRobinson, Ruby Doris Robinson, Sylvia. See Baraka, Amina (Sylvia Robinson) Robinson, Tyrone, 571 Rockefeller, Nelson, 40, 41, 111, 390 Rodgers, Carolyn, 82 Rodney, Donald, 693 Rodney, Walter, 147, 153, 455, 657, 687–693, 727 Rodney Riots (Rodney Rebellion), 690 Rodriguez, Richard, 33 Roe v. Wade, 427 Rogers, J. A., 774 Rogers, Jamala, 290 Rogers, Nahaz, 46 Rokotuivuna, Amelia, 144 Romney, George, lii, 580 Roopnarine, Rupert, 455 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 252 Roseau College, 148 Rosewood massacre, 556 Ross, Allan, 356 Roundtree, Richard, 196 Rowe, Gary Thomas, 27 Rubin, Jerry, 298, 709 Rufus X, 149 Rush, Bobby, 331 Russell, Bill, 100, 101 Russia, 279. See also Soviet Union Russwurm, John, 647 Rustin, Bayard, 291, 293, 294, 477, 578 Rutherford B. Hayes Compromise (1877), 225 RWL (Revolutionary Workers League), 408, 696, 762 SACB (Subversive Activities Control Board), cxx Sadaukai, Owusu (Howard Fuller), 6–7, 9, 487, 490–491, 492, 547, 602, 695–697, 728, 760–761 Sadiki, Kamau (Freddie Hilton), 627 Saint Lucia, 148, 379 Saint Vincent, 148

Salaam, Kalamu ya (Vallery Ferdinand III), 288, 436, 698–701 background, 298 conversation with Amiri Baraka, 58–75 Free Southern Theater/ BLKARTSOUTH, 698–699 Salaam, Nia (Buelah McCoy), 701 Salaam, Tayari kwa (Cicely St. Julien), 698, 699–700 Salkey, Andrew, 147 Sams, George, 31, 710 Sana, Tamu, 585 Sanchez, Albert, 702 Sanchez, Celia, 305 Sanchez, Sonia (Wilsonia Benita Driver), ci, 81, 82, 131, 155, 170, 171, 269, 477, 611, 651, 656, 658, 701–704, 775 Sanders, Pharoah, 122, 131, 132 San Fernando Valley State College, 377 San Francisco State University (SFSU), 356, 357, 775 Black student activism at, 170–171, 182 Black student union at, 176, 182 Black studies program at, 182 Sanitation Strike, 401 Sankara, Thomas, 602 San Quentin 6, 160, 161, 391 Santa Cruz, Victoria, 144, 145 Santamaria, Haydee, 305 Santeria, 664 Saunders, Pat, 440 Savage, John, 31 Scheuer, Sandra, 404 Schroeder, William K., 404 Schuman, H., cxvii Schwerner, Michael, 27, 294, 402 Scientific socialism. See Socialism, scientific SCLC. See Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Scott, Cynthia, 351, 787 Scott Sisters, 469 Scott-Heron, Gil, 130, 132, 704–707 Scottsboro Boys, 252, 280, 315, 604 SDE (Sons and Daughters of Ethiopia), 533

894 | Index Seale, Bobby (Robert George Seale), xiii, xvi, 31, 40, 57, 106, 134, 135–136, 137, 138, 146, 170, 206, 212, 249, 262, 298, 300, 322, 323, 331, 377, 450, 477, 566, 570, 602, 612, 674, 707–713 founding of the Black Panthers, xvi, 80, 106, 146, 170, 300, 330, 450, 566, 570–571, 602, 708, 749 in jail, 709, 710 targeting by FBI and COINTELPRO, 301, 709 trial of, 766 writings of, 711–712 Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) program, 257, 453 Sears, David O., cxv Second Annual Black Arts Convention, 88 Second Black Renaissance, 55 Second Pan-African Cultural Festival, 265 Second World Black African Festival of Arts and Culture, 415, 531–532 Second World Festival of Black and African Art and Culture, 152 Secret societies, 377 SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) program, 257, 453 Segregation, 293, 393–394, 449, 463, 502, 519–520, 578, 670, 679, 681, 742 in Congress, 637–638 Selassie, Haile, 601, 729 Selective patronage, 431, 595 Selective Services, 803–804 Self-advocacy, 294 Self-defense, xi, xiv, xviii, xix, 4, 28, 48, 106, 135, 146, 260, 294, 321, 385, 415, 418, 549, 603, 609, 676, 683, 742 armed, xlvii–xlix, 200, 216, 280, 281, 282, 351, 442, 493, 499, 679, 738, 819 See also Black Panther Party for SelfDefense (BPP); Deacons for Defense and Justice (DDJ) Self-destructive disorder, 164

Self-determination, xi, xviii, xix, xxiii, 3, 81, 104, 106, 122, 133, 152, 153, 168, 181, 205, 209, 279, 282, 291, 296, 359, 378, 380, 385, 415, 418, 442, 447, 464, 469, 549, 552, 560, 562, 585, 588, 592, 643, 677, 742, 754–755, 827 in Africa, 578 and electoral politics, 328, 331 Self-empowerment, 695 Self-expression, 549 Self-knowledge, 560, 565 Self-Leadership for All Nationalities, 792 Self-love, 182 Self-pride, 565. See also Black pride Self-reliance, 677 Self-respect, xi, 415 Sellers, Cleveland, 93, 408, 489, 503, 504–505, 759, 805 Selma to Montgomery March, 3, 216, 225, 394 Seminoles, lxi Senegal, 578 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 152, 334 Senior, Clarence Henry, 495 Seniors Against a Fearful Environment, 177 Sen Katayama, 279 Senu Brotherhood Society, 799 Senut Sisterhood Society, 799 Separatism, lxii–lxiii, 205, 281, 282, 666 September 10th Movement, 47 Settler-colonialism, 379 Seven Principles (Nguzo Saba), 411, 421, 422, 436–437, 445–448, 699, 794 Seventh Pan-African Congress, 730 Sexism, xxii, cvi, 3, 97, 188, 257, 289, 300, 421, 426, 428 Sexual abuse, 533 Sexual oppression, xxi Sexual politics, cv Sexuality theorization, 183, 193 Shabazz, Betty (Betty Sanders), 4, 322, 476, 489, 581, 584, 585, 644, 668, 674 and reparations, 665 Shabazz, Jeremiah, 564 Shabazz, Nasser, 534

Index | 895 Shaft (film), 196–197 Shakur, Afeni, 137, 139, 469, 642, 714, 720, 721 Shakur, Assata (JoAnne Chesimard), xxiii, lii–liii, liv, lv, ci, 113–114, 116, 149, 153, 307, 440, 469, 554, 555, 612, 630, 631, 632, 714–718, 721 bounties and “Most Wanted,” 716 in exile, 716 Kennedy’s defense of, 427 prison break, 114–115, 631 targeting by COINTELPRO and FBI, 299, 301 Shakur, Mutulu (Jarel Wayne Williams), liii, 116, 469, 631, 632, 642, 718–721 as health care activist and institution builder, 719–720 as human rights activist, 720–721 as political prisoner, 630–631, 721 as teenage revolutionary, 719 Shakur, Tupac, 469, 703, 714, 721 Shakur, Zayd Malik, liii, 113–114, 631, 715 Shange, Ntozake, civ, 82 Sharecroppers Union, 251–252, 280, 281 Shearer, Hugh, 147 Shepp, Archie, 131, 132 Sherman, William T., 665 Sherrod, Charles, 735, 744 Shields, Rudy, 187, 405, 721–725 Shinnecock Nation, 151 Shirley, Aaron, 405 Shivji, Issa, 691 Shoats, Russell Maroon, 627, 632 Shorter, Jim, 100, 101 Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore and Cultural Center, 86, 91 Shrine of the Black Madonna Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church, 91, 96, 549, 579, 606, 663 Shujaa, Mwalimu, 296 Shuttlesworth, Fred I., 96 Si-Asar, Rehket, 296 SICA (Southern Illinois Cooperative Association), 442–443 Sickle-cell anemia, 205 Siege of Wounded Knee, lxv–lxvii, lxix

Silliphant, Stirling, 197 Simba Wachanga Youth Movement, 411, 417, 423, 797, 798 Simmons, Barbara, 81 Simmons, Charles, 45, 671, 677 Simone, Nina, 76–77, 82, 122, 123, 125– 128, 508, 768 Simpson, David, 823 Sims, Charles, 320, 505 Sioux governing councils, lxvii Sioux Sovereignty Hearing, lxvi Sister Clara Muhammad Schools, 562 Sisters Against South African Apartheid, 346 Sisters in Consciousness, 52 Sit-ins, xiii, 45, 168, 169, 203–204, 215, 292, 441, 558, 735, 742, 745, 762, 813 in Catholic churches, 663 6PAC. See Sixth Pan-African Congress (6PAC) Sixth Pan-African Congress (6PAC), 9–10, 150, 151, 152, 153, 166, 188, 454, 495, 532, 534, 725–730 accomplishments of, 728–729 Sixth Region (diaspora) initiatives, 415 Skenadore, Rod, lxiv Skinner, William, 468 Slave trade, 556, 599–603, 669 Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, 252 SLID (Student League for Industrial Democracy), 763 Sloan-Hunter, Margaret, xxii, 541, 542 Small Business Acministration (SBA), cxxi Smethurst, James, 79, 450 Smith, Barbara, cv, 270, 271, 273, 274, 730–733 Smith, Beverly, 270, 731 Smith, Billy, 169 Smith, Ernest, 580 Smith, John, li Smith, Mark, 408 Smith, Paul Chaat, lxix Smith, Sandra Neely, 408 Smith, Tommie, 145, 325, 327, 590, 592, 594 Smith Act, 253

896 | Index Smith-Robinson, Ruby Doris, lxiv, 261, 733–738 SNCC. See Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) SNCC Freedom Singers, 132 Snellings, Rolland (Askia Toure), xiii, 81, 128, 131, 155, 773–776, 775 Snowden, Frank, 779 SOBU. See Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU) Social Action Training Center, 415, 796 Socialism (Socialist Party), 106, 189–190, 251, 279, 380–381, 671, 677, 686, 691, 692, 731, 763, 788 African, 24, 379, 414, 418, 422, 798 in Cuba, 303–304 in Ghana, 345 in Guyana, 688 international, 499 scientific, 23, 24, 25–26, 290, 726 in Tanzania, 495 See also Combahee River Collective Social justice, xxx, liii, 136, 171, 223, 357, 368, 369, 441, 495, 537, 557, 688 Social Welfare Planning Council, 2 Solanas, Valerie, 427 Soledad Brothers, 32, 159, 161, 254–255, 317, 388–389, 390, 628–629 Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, 317, 388 Solomon Islands, 150 Somalia, 730 Sons and Daughters of Ethiopia (SDE), 533 Sons of Watts, 791 Sope, Barak, 153 Sostre, Martin Ramirez, 89–90 Soulbook, xiii, xvi, xix, xx, 282, 376, 377, 378, 380, 451, 654, 671 “Soul City,” xx Soul City Company, 516 Soul City Project, 510–511, 516–517 Soul of Hough Revolutionary Black Arts Theatre, 13 Soul Students Advisory Committee (SSAC), 708 South Africa, xxi, 192, 326–327, 379, 454, 555, 760, 767, 770

South America, 149, 453 South East London Parents Organization, 147 Southern Africa Support Project, 729 Southern Arts Media Education Connections Association Incorporated, 769 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), xi, xiv, 3, 156, 186, 209, 216, 226, 253, 261, 292, 294, 681 addressing police brutality, 608 goals of, 744 Jesse Jackson’s involvement in, 394 and MLK Jr., 428 See also Operation Breadbasket Southern Collective of African American Writers, 52 Southern Conference Educational Fund, 2, 17, 96 Southern Conference for Human Welfare, 2 Southern Illinois Cooperative Association (SICA), 442–443 Southern Negro Youth Congress, 181, 315 Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), 202, 205–206 South Pacific, 150–152, 154. See also Australia; Melanesia; New Zealand; Papua New Guinea; Polynesia; Tahiti Southwest African People’s Organization, 263 Soviet Union, 279, 531–532 Soyinka, Wole, 147, 152, 451 Spain, John Larry (“Johnny”), 160, 389, 391 Spear and Shield Collective, 646 Spelman College, 268, 269, 384 Spirit House, 155, 157, 275 Spirit House Movers and Players, 276 Spock, Benjamin, 554 Spofford, Tom, 404 Spontaneous rebellion, l–lii Sports sociology, 325 Springer, Kimberly, 190 Squire, Clark (Sundiata Acoli), liii, 113– 114, 555, 627, 630, 631, 715, 721 Stalin, Joseph, 279, 696, 791 Stalinism, 791

Index | 897 Standing Rock Reservation, lxvii Stanford, Maxwell, Jr. (Muhammad Ahmad), 9, 46, 48, 170, 200, 300, 377, 380, 440, 500, 534, 581, 627, 655, 671–672, 673, 676, 738–741, 774–775 Stanford, Maxwell, Sr., 738 Staples, Robert, civ Stark, Geri, 727 Steel Pulse, 153, 392 Stegall, Charles, 494–495, 820, 823 Stegall, Mabel, 494–495, 820, 823 Steptoe, E. W., 520 Sterilization, forced, 272 Stevens, Thaddeus, 665 Stewart, James, 268 St. Jacques, Raymond, 194 St. Julien, Cicely (Tayari kwa Salaam), 698, 699–700 St. Kitts and Nevis, 148 Stokes, Carl, cxix, cxxi, 100, 101, 329, 330, 360 Stone, Chuck, 155, 828 Stone, Ruthie, 495 Stop the Draft, 137 Street, William “Bill,” 781 Strickland, William, 383 Strikes, 38, 48, 51, 158, 161, 168, 178, 215, 304, 356, 400, 401, 433, 460, 538, 588, 589, 501, 591, 637, 678, 789, 793 hunger, 39, 159, 261, 391 student, 32, 710, 784 wildcat, lii, 48, 50, 51, 453, 460 Strong, Barrett, 125 Stroud, Andrew, 128 Stuart, Mel, 816 Stubblefield, John, 269 Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), 763 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 741–757 and student activism, 181, 486 addressing police brutality, 608, 610 and American Indians, lxii, lxiii and armed resistance, xlv, xlix Atlanta office, 745 Atlanta Project, xviii, 775

beginning of, 169, 742 and the Black Alternative, 179 and the Black Congress, 209, 253 and the Black Manifesto, 537–540, 667 and the Black Panthers, 134, 227 and the Black Power Movement, xi, 15, 601 and Bloody Sunday, 394 Julian Bond’s role in, 202, 204 H. Rap Brown’s association with, 156, 170, 214, 215–216, 218, 377 and the Cambridge Non-Violent Action Committee, 679 Carmichael/Ture’s association with, xviii, lxii, 24, 169, 186, 187, 205, 216, 217, 262, 338, 464, 503, 601, 673, 747–748 Kathleen Cleaver’s association with, 260 conference on Black liberation, 262 Charles Koen’s association with, 443 and the Civil Rights Movement, 742–743 community organizing, 744–747 Davis’s membership in, 316 decline of, lxix, 5 elders from, xxiii Forman’s involvement with, 336–337 and the Freedom Riders, 743–744 influence on Charles Koen, 441–442 John Lewis in charge of, 293, 294, 775 in Lowndes County, 464–465, 466 Malcolm X and, 477 Mama Dara’s work with, 3 and the March Against Fear, 226, 503 opposing the war in Vietnam, 803–804 organizations emerging from, 748–749 political activism, 225, 226, 227, 275, 329, 494, 520, 743–747 position paper (1966), 751–757 pro-determination trend in, xviii, xix, 186, 205, 677, 748 response to terrorism, 28 Ricks’ involvement in, 684 Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson’s participation in, 733–737 and the SDS, 764–765 SNCC Freedom Singers, 132

898 | Index targeting by COINTELPRO, 299, 627, 748 and voter registration campaigns, 743–744, 746 women in, 189–190 See also Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO); Lowndes County Freedom Party Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU), 5, 406, 407–408, 489–490, 492, 547, 655, 696, 757–763 and Black Power, 759–760 impact of, 760–761 transition to YOBU, 761–762 Student organizations Black, 176 Black student associations (BSAs), 176 Marxist, 408 Pan-African, 408 See also Afro-American Student Movement (AASM); Black Student Alliance; Black Student Unions; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Student Revolutionary Directorate, 305 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 137, 205, 299, 763–767, 791 Stuntz, Joe (Killsright), lxvi Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB), cxx Sugar Hill (film), 199 Sugrue, Thomas J., cxv Suitable Home Law, 534 Sullivan, Leon, 395, 431, 550, 595 Summit Conference of Negro Religious Leaders, 97 Sumner, Francis, 162 Sundiata, Ibidun, 586 Sundiata, Mtayari Shabaka, 115 Sunni-Ali, Bilal (William Johnson), 768–769, 770 Sunni-Ali, Fulani, lv, 767–771 Sun Yat Sen University, 279 Sun Yat-sen, 497 Super Fly (film), 197–198 Suriname, 149, 287, 452 Sutherland, Efua, 145 Sutherland, William, 726, 727

Swan, Quito, 656 Sweet, Ossian, 43 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (film), 195–196 Sykes, Bobbi, 151 Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), 33–34, 385 TABU. See Towards a Black University Conference (TABU) Tahiti, 150 Taifa, Nkechi, 469, 646 Tajiri, Rea, 440 Talamantez, Luis, 389, 391 Talliaferro, Edwin. See Lumumba, Chokwe (father) Tanganyika, 725. See also Tanzania Tanzania, 146, 152, 153, 188, 434–435, 436, 454, 490, 495, 534, 601, 602, 643, 689, 690–691, 728, 729, 730. See also Sixth Pan-African Congress (6PAC) Tanzanian Consultative Committee, 6 Tapscott, Horace, 122, 130, 212 Tasibur, Abdul, 33 Tasmania, 144 Tate, Willie, 389, 391 Tawes, J. Millard, 682 Taylor, Cecil, 266 Taylor, Harold, 391 Teatro y Danzas Negras del Perú, 145 Teen Post, 249 Teer, Barbara Ann, 81 Tembo, Chimbuko, 421–422 Temporary Alliance of Community Organizations, 796 Temptations, 457 T.E.N., 453 Territorial separatism, xix, xxi Terry, Wallace, 805 Theater of the Black Experience, 52 Thelwell, E. Michael, 148, 223–224 Theology Black, 282, 411, 444 Black liberation, 284–285, 416 liberation, 147, 171 womanist, 285 See also Christianity; Religion

Index | 899 Thiele, Bob, 130 Third Black Power Conference, 157, 606 Third World alliances, 415 Third World Coalition, 769, 770 Third World internationalism, 500 Third World Liberation Front, 384 Third World Press, 436, 471, 658 Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), xxii, ci, 189–190, 302, 649, 748–749. See also Black Women’s Alliance/ Third World Women’s Alliance (1970-1975) Third World Workers Coalition, 272 13X, Clarence, 31 Thom, Mel, lxiii Thomas, Benjamin, 30 Thomas, CY, 455 Thomas, Ernest “Chilly Willy,” 46, 319, 504, 505 Thomas, Gary, 159, 389 Thomas, Leon, 130, 132 Thomas 15X (Johnson), 30, 476 Thompson, Allen, 403 Thompson, Dudley, 150 Thompson, Henry, 404 Thompson, James, 823 Thompson, Ron Stacker, 79–80 Thornell, Jack, 503 Thornton, Clifford, 130 Tidyman, Ernest, 197 Tijerina, Reies Lopea, lxii Till, Emmett Louis, xlix, 44, 281, 738 Tillman, Johnnie, 559 Timbuktu Book Circle, 799 Tjibaou, Jean-Marie, 153 Tolliver, Charles, 133 Tomlinson, T. M., cxv Torres, Francisco “Cisco,” 391 Tosh, Peter, 148 Tougaloo College, 403 Touré, Anmed Sékou, 23–24, 76, 223, 227, 419–420, 601, 728 Toure, Askia (Rolland Snellings), xiii, 81, 128, 131, 155, 773–776, 775 Towards a Black University Conference (TABU), 777–784 concept of a Black university, 777 conference program, 781–784

organization and support for, 780–781 politics at Howard University, 777–780 Toyama, Tim, 440 Trans-Africa, 729, 813 Treaty of Peace, Harmony and Mutual Assistance, 796 Tribe Called Quest, 458 Trinidad, 144, 146, 147, 224, 379 Trinidad and Tobago, 150, 656 Trinta di Mei, 149 Triple A (Asian Americans for Action), 439, 440 Triple Jeopardy, 192 Tripp, Luke, 45, 351, 461, 671, 677, 785, 787 Trotsky, Leon, 279 Truly, Harry, 177 Truman, Harry S., 578, 801 Truth and reconciliation process, 721 T’Shaka, Oba, 728 Tubman, Harriet, liv, 144, 271 Ture, Kwame. See Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture) Turner, Bernice, 17 Turner, James, 727 Turner, Nat, 103 Turner, Richard Brent, 564 Tuskegee Airmen, 577 26th of July Movement, xvii, 305–306, 530 Tyner, McCoy, 132, 267 UAEW (Universal Association of Ethiopian Women), 3, 151, 533–534 UAW (United Auto Workers), 459–460, 604 UBAD (United Black Association for Development), 149 UBAFU, 150 UFL (United Front Liberators), xlviii Uganda, 434–435, 729, 730 UGMAA (Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension), 130, 133, 269 UHURU, xix, 45, 170, 351, 459, 671–672, 677, 785–788 goals of, 786 Uhuru Day, li Uhuru House, 812

900 | Index Uhuru Sasa, 151 UJAMAA, 778, 779, 780 Ujamaa, 379, 422, 490, 691 Ujima, 421, 798–799 Ujima Village, 796 Umbra, 774 Umoja, 377 Umoja, Akinyele, xlix, 321, 405, 722 Umoja, Shango, 380, 454 Umoja Student Center, 670 Underground Musicians Association, 130, 133 Underground Railroad, 113, 377, 549 UNIA. See Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Union County Rifle Club, 819 Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA), 130, 133, 269 Union Theological Seminary, 171, 285 United Aboriginal Women’s Council, 151 United Aid to Ethiopians, 105 United Auto Workers (UAW), 459–460, 604 United Black Association for Development (UBAD), 149 United Black Socialist Party, 148 United Black Voters of Illinois, 444 United Brothers, 56, 275 United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 555, 716 United Community of Construction Workers, 653 United Community of the Bahamas, 148 United Farm Workers, 415, 748, 796 United Federation of Teachers, 590 United Front, The, 788–793 United Front Cairo, Illinois, 187 United Front Liberators (UFL), xlviii United Nations, lxviii Commission on Human Rights, lxviii, 555 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 586 Economic and Social Council, lxviii General Assembly Resolution 1514, 154, and 2625, 586 Special Committee on Human Rights, lxviii

Sub-Committee on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Apartheid, and Colonialism, lxviii Working Group on Indigenous Populations, lxviii World Conference Against Racism, 556 United Negro Fund, 550 United Office and Professional Workers of America (UOPWA), 344 United Parcel Revolutionary Union Movement (UPRUM), 460 United Parents Council, 179 United Sisters, 157 United States, African Solidarity Day Network, 379–380 United States Urban Growth and New Communities Act, 515 United Teachers Federation (UTF), 588–589, 590 United Way of America, Inc., 210, 551 United Women’s Committee to Save the Ingram Family, 344 Unity Democratic Club, 257 Universal Association of Ethiopian Women (UAEW), 3, 151, 533–534 Universal Colored People’s Association, 147 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), xvi, 44, 105, 117, 144, 308, 533, 550, 601, 770 University of California, Berkeley, 170 University of Mississippi, 503 University of Papua New Guinea, 152 University of Southern California, Center for Social Action, 415 University of the Toilers of the East, 279 Untouchables, 146 UOPWA (United Office and Professional Workers of America), 344 Upper Volta, 601 UPRUM, 460 Urban League, 504 Urban rebellions (revolts, riots), xxii, cix–cxii, 186, 329–330, 673 in Cleveland, 11 in the era of Black Power, cxii–cxvii government response to, cxix–cxxii guerrilla warfare, 500

Index | 901 Kerner Commission report, cxxv– cxxxv, 609 in response to police violence, 609 seminal analyses of, cxvii–cxix Urban renewal, cxxi, 644 Urban Renewal Redevelopment Program (Detroit), 351 Us organization, xii, xvi, li, lv, 13, 31, 57, 76, 106, 156, 178, 187, 209, 253, 309, 310, 312, 377, 411, 413, 416– 417, 418, 423, 437, 446, 450, 549, 566, 654, 678, 791, 792, 793–800 conflict with BPP, 250, 414, 641, 797 surveillance by FBI, 414, 421, 797 U.S. Riot Commission Report, cxxv– cxxxv, 609. See also Kerner Commission (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders) UTF (United Teachers Federation), 588–589, 590 Uwezo, Robert, 377 Van Lierop, Robert, 6 Van Peebles, Melvin, 195–196 Van Sertima, Ivan, 455 Vanuatu, 153 Vaughn, Edward, 48, 86, 88–89 Ven DeBurg, William, 312 Venceremos Brigade, 4, 770 Venezuela, 149 Vesey, Denmark, 103 Vice Lords, 398 Viera, Rafael, lvi Vietnam, 263–264, 279, 740, 796 Vietnam War, 801–808 “The Conflict in Vietnam” (Shirley Chisholm, 1969), 806–808 Muhammad Ali’s objection to, 19, 21 protests, xxii, 3, 5, 43, 101, 105, 145, 205, 227, 302, 323, 430, 433, 440, 476, 509, 639, 650, 673, 709, 714, 748, 763, 764–765, 766, 796, 801, 803–805 veterans of, 15 Vigilante committees, 508, 709 Vinson, Eddie “Cleanhead,” 266 Violence armed struggle, liii–liv

guerrilla warfare, lii–liii lynchings, xv, 27, 44, 223, 227, 251, 252, 280, 284, 336, 358, 449, 464, 533, 709, 738 racist, 714 rape, ciii, cxi, 127, 251, 464, 533, 556, 604 retaliatory, xlix state-sanctioned, 650 White, 605, 709 against women, 273, 604, 731, 810 See also Assassinations; Black Power Battles Vodou/Vodun, 313, 664 Voter education, 275 Voter Education Project, 206 Voter registration campaigns, 169, 214, 226, 294, 328, 338, 394, 464, 466, 506–507, 515, 520, 533, 604, 670, 722, 736, 743–744, 746, 758, 761 See also March Against Fear Voting rights, xi, 681 Voting Rights Act (1965), 329, 330, 359, 432, 465, 546, 638, 683, 687, 747 Voting Rights Act (1966), 225, 226 Voting Rights Act (1999), 105 Waa, Yaa Asante, 144 Wade, Earl, 444 Walden, A. T., 204 Wali, Mensah, 132 Walimu Development Institute, 296 Walk to Freedom (Detroit), 580 Walker, David, 26 Walker, Denis, 151 Walker, Kath, 145, 151 Walker, Lucius, 537, 539, 550 Walkouts, xxii, 168 Wallace, Henry, 578 Wallace, Herman, 161, 627 Wallace, Michelle, xxi, civ Waller, Joseph (Omali Yeshitela), 809–812 Walter Rodney Symposiums, 693 Walters, Patricia Turner, 813 Walters, Ronald W., 813–814 Walton, Hanes, 103 Ward, Val Gray, 81

902 | Index Warden, Donald, xvi, 170, 450, 654 Ware, Bill, 205 Ware, George, 261 Warner, Frank, 533 War on Drugs, 546 War on Poverty, 209, 249, 431, 442, 537, 546, 638, 650 Warrior, Clyde, lxii–lxiii Warrior, Robert Allen, lxix Warshafsky, Ted, 206 Warsoff, Louis, 257 Washington, Albert (Nuh), 390, 631, 632 Washington, Ron “Slim,” 761 Watkins, Mel, 356–357 Watkins, Nayo, 82 Watson, John, 45, 351, 461, 785, 787 Watson, Lauren, lxiv Watts Health Foundation, 796 Watts Labor Community Action Committee, 208 Watts Rebellion, xii, xxii, l–li, lxxviii, cx, cxiii–cxvi, cxvii, 186, 208, 253, 330, 609, 789, 815 Watts Summer Festival, 792, 814–817 Wattstax (concert film), 814–818 Wayne State University, 170, 785 Weather Underground Organization (WUO), 116, 390, 765–766 Webb, Lee, 764 Webb, Robert, 32 Wedderburn, Charles Moore (Carlos Moore), 529–532 Weiner, Lee, 298 Weinstein, Brian, 783 Welfare rights movement, 556–560 Wells, Ida B., 144, 181 Welsing, Frances Cress, 165–166 Wesley, Cynthia, xvii West, Kanye, 458 Western Regional Youth Conference, 339, 792 West Indies, 147–148 Weston, Randy, 122, 129, 133 West Point boycott, 723 Weusi, Jitu, 132, 277, 296, 454 Whatnauts, 125 Whitaker, Bobbie, 444 White, Ben Chester, 506

White, Dinez, 682 White, Walter, 105, 252 White backlash, 97, 588, 590 White chauvinism, 280. See also Racism White power, liii, lv, 88, 94, 110, 145, 158, 223, 610, 686, 722, 744, 752, 754 White radicals, xxxvii, 651, 755–757. See also Weather Underground Organization (WUO) White supremacists, xiv–xv, xlix, 115–116, 187, 521, 534 White supremacy, xxi, lxi, lxii, 53, 54, 96, 104, 105, 122, 157, 165, 261, 284, 294, 300, 302, 428, 464, 465, 514, 519–520, 549, 553, 591, 638, 645, 658, 661, 745–746, 801, 804, 823 in white churches, 538–539 White terrorism, 679. See also Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Whitfield, Norman, 125 Whitman, Christine Todd, 717 Whitman, Unison, 148 Whitmore, Kenny Zulu, 627 Wilcox, Preston, 729 Wiley, George, 557, 558–559 Wilkerson, Cathy, 766 Wilkerson, Robert King, 161 Wilkie, Bruce, lxiii Wilkins, Roger, cxix Wilkins, Roy, 294, 370, 504–505, 630, 639, 803 Wilkinson, Gerald, lxix Williams, Buster, 129 Williams, Dolores S., 97, 285 Williams, Eric, 148 Williams, Evelyn, 715–716 Williams, Henry Sylvester, 600, 725 Williams, Hosea, 216, 432, 505 Williams, Jarel. See Shakur, Mutulu (Jarel Williams) Williams, John, 45, 351, 461, 677 Williams, Mabel, xiv, xviii, lv, 46, 281, 345, 494, 671, 739, 818–821 in China, 345, 500, 820–821 in Cuba, 306, 307, 820 in the NAACP, 818 publications of, 819–820 in Tanzania, 821

Index | 903 Williams, Melvin “X” Bishop, 32 Williams, Robert F., xii, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xlv–xlvi, l, lv, lxiii, lxxvi, 15, 28, 46, 48, 200, 260, 281, 306, 345, 493, 494, 534, 584–585, 604, 644, 651, 671–672, 676, 739, 787, 798, 821–825 on armed struggle, liii in China, 345, 499–500, 581, 582, 789–790, 821, 824 in Cuba, 306, 307, 821, 824 early life, 822 in exile, 676 and the NAACP, 821, 822, 823 national attention, 822–823 Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA), 824 in Tanzania, 821, 824 targeting by COINTELPRO, 302 Williams, Ronnie, 17 Williams, Sherley, 82 Williams, Sidney, 100, 101 Willie Grimes Educational Center, 489 Willis, Raymond, 581 “Wilmington 10,” 380, 554, 555, 630, 721 Wilmore, Gayraud, 663 Wilson, Billy, xlix Wilson, Joe Lee, 130 Wilson, Lionel, 213 Wilson, Mary Jane, lxiii Wilson, Nancy, 126, 375 Wilson, Woodrow, 251 Windom, Alice, 345 Wirtz, W. Willard, cxviii Wise, Stanley, 504 Wjote Jats, xlviii Womanism, 414, 419, 544, 795 African, 183 Afrocentric, 183 kawaida, 421–422, 799 See also Feminism Women Aboriginal, 151 and armed resistance, liv–lv black feminists, cii–ciii, civ, 168, 315, 342, 343

in the Black Panther Party, 137, 146, 151, 260, 262 in the Black Power movement, ci–cvii, 737 and Black Power text, ciii–cv and Black studies, 183 and the Civil Rights Movement, 679, 683 on college campuses, cvi–cvii in Committee for Unified Newark, 276 conference in Fiji, 150–151 in the Congress of African People, 289 and the cult of true womanhood, 192 and female empowerment, 81–82 fighting stereotyping, 543 incarceration of, 188 in leadership roles, 188 leadership roles of, cv–cvii marginalization of, 542 in the Nation of Islam, 564 oppression of, 190 as prison activists, 161 publications by, 648–649 in Puerto Rico, 191 reproductive issues, 272 and Sanchez’s vision of freedom, 703 of Us organization, 798–799 violence against, 273, 604, 731, 810 as writers, 81–82 See also Combahee River Collective; Womanism Women Against Terror, 455 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 3, 211 Women’s liberation movement, 428, 765. See also Feminism Women’s movements, 152 Women’s Political Action Committee, 430 Woodard, Komozi, li, 155, 156, 286, 415 Woodfox, Albert, 161, 627 Woods, Dessie, 810 Woodson, Carter G., 89, 109, 183, 384 Wooten, Chuck, 461 Wooten, John, 100, 101 Worker Student Alliance (WSA), 765 Workers Viewpoint Organization, 408 Working class activism, cxvi–cxvii, 120

904 | Index Working People’s Alliance, 455, 688, 691 Working People’s Vanguard Party, 455 Workman, Reggie, 267 World Community of Al-Islam in the West, 164, 564 World Tribunal on Reparation, 811 Worobec, Richard, lvi, 645 Worthy, William, 580 Wounded Knee massacre, lxv–lxvii, lxix Wright, Bobby Eugene, 166–167 Wright, Bruce, 553 Wright, Doris, xxii Wright, Nathan, Jr., 155, 825–828 Wright, Richard, xvii, lxxvi, 117, 119, 252, 508, 737 WSA (Worker Student Alliance), 765 X, Harllel, 14 X, Jasiri, 154 X, Luther (Na’im Akbar; Luther Benjamin, Jr.), 163–165 X, Malcolm. See Malcolm X X, Marvin, 56, 80, 81 X, Nommo, 12 X, Rufus, 149 Ya Salaam, Kalamu. See Salaam, Kalamu ya (Vallery Ferdinand III) Yamasees, lxi Yates, Frederick, 350 Yeiwéné, Yeiwéné, 153 YES (Youth Educational Services), 407 Yeshitela, Omali (Waller, Joseph), 809–812 Yette, Samuel F., cxvii–cxviii

YOBU (Youth Organization for Black Unity), 408, 492, 696, 761–762 Yoruba, 664 Yoruba Temple, 775 Yorubas of Oyotunjhi Village, 309 Young, Coleman, 331 Young, Izama Carriere, 1 Young, John V., 390, 391 Young, Whitney, 294, 504–505, 547 Young, William Arthur, 1 Young African Warriors club, 489 Young Democrats National Convention, 394 Young Lions, 277 Young Lions of Us, 417, 797 Young Lords, 38, 57, 136, 149, 275, 440, 630 Young Lords Party, 652, 719 Young Men for Total Democracy, 792 Young Women’s Christian Association, 144 Young Writer’s Workshop, 341 Youth Educational Services (YES), 407 Youth for the Unity of Black Society, 407, 760 Youth Organization for Black Unity (YOBU), 408, 492, 696, 761–762 Youth Voter Crusader Corps, 3 Zaire, 152 Zanzibar, 725, 730. See also Tanzania Zhou Enlai, 571 Zimbabwe, xxi, 153, 289, 379, 631, 760 Zimbabwe African National Union, 8 Zimbabwe African People’s Union, 8 Zoot Suit Riot, 252 Zuber, Peter, 494