Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity

295 Pages·2005·9.86 MB·English

by  Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar

Black Power
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Black Power
Radical Politics and
African American Identity
Updated Edition
Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar
With a New Preface
Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2004, 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2019
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ogbar, Jeffrey Ogbonna Green, author.
Title: Black power : radical politics and African American identity / Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar.
With a new preface.
Description: Updated edition. | Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018046308 | ISBN 9781421429762 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781421429779 (electronic) | ISBN 1421429764 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 1421429772 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: African Americans— Politics and government—20th  century. | African
Americans— Civil rights— History—20th  century. | Civil rights movements— United
States— History—20th  century. | African Americans— Race identity. | Black power—
United States— History—20th  century. | Black nationalism— United States— History—
20th  century. | Radicalism— United States— History—20th  century. | Nation of Islam
(Chicago, Ill.)— History. | Black Panther Party— History.
Classification: LCC E185.615 .O34 2018 | DDC 323.1196/073—d c23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2018046308
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please
contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected].
Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials,
including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer
waste, whenever possible.
Contents
Preface to the Updated Edition vii
Preface to the First Edition xiii
INTRODUCTION F or the People and of the People: Black Nationalism,
Identity, and Popular Culture 1
CHAPTER 1 An Organization of the Living: The Nation of Islam and
Black Popular Culture 11
CHAPTER 2 “There Go My People”: The Civil Rights Movement,
Black Nationalism, and Black Power 37
CHAPTER 3 A Party for the People: The Black Freedom Movement
and the Rise of the Black Panther Party 69
CHAPTER 4 Swimming with the Masses: The Black Panthers,
Lumpenism, and Revolutionary Culture 93
CHAPTER 5 “Move Over or We’ll Move Over on You”: Black Power
and the Decline of the Civil Rights Movement 123
CHAPTER 6 Rainbow Radicalism: The Rise of Radical Ethnic
Nationalism 159
CONCLUSION Power and the People 191
EPILOGUE Black Nationalism after Jim Crow 199
Notes 207
Essay on Sources 241
Index 261
Illustrations follow page 92
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Preface to the Updated Edition
History is never settled. It is, any historian will explain, a contested space
of memory, constructed stories, and revived narratives to be interpreted,
debated, and often distilled by professionals who engage with, research,
and interrogate evidence. Historical research—a nd its final products, like
books and articles—is also in constant tension with its own moment in
time. Historians are products of their historical context, drawn to certain
topics because of a range of cont emporary events, popul ar interest, and
their own subjectivities. Fin ally, history is in constant dialogue with itself.
Historians utilize the expertise of o thers to frame narratives, build upon
them, or disrupt them. When I began writing Black Power: Radical Politics
and African American Identity, I was deeply engaged and aware of all of t hese
factors. My work, I determined, would sim ult an eously build on the work
of other historians and fundamentally disrupt the master narrative inter-
pretation of the Black Power movement. Since the book’s release in 2004,
scores of books, journal articles, and dissertations and master’s t heses have
utilized Black Power in their interpretation of an increasingly wide, nearly
panoptic view of Black Power’s legacy. It has been exciting to see the expan-
sion of the field and the establishment of a new master narrative in which
Black Power was more than a historical moment of cathartic yet pol itic ally
inconsequential expression that left no real institutional legacy. Now his-
torians argue that the legacy of Black Power is ubiquitous and substantive
in such ways that its normalization has been both its biggest achievement
and the reason that so many overlooked its imprint for so long.
This study initially grew from my dissertation, which itself was spawned
from my own personal relationship with the legacies of Black Power in my
coming of age in the 1980s. Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, I had
hip-h op as the sonic background to my life. By the time I was in college
(1987–1991), the m usic took a sharp shift into politics that amplified black
viii Preface to the Updated Edition
nationalist sentiments and black radical politics and provided the widest,
most popul ar platform for millions to actually listen to subversive black
politics. When Chuck D of Public Enemy name-c hecked Black Panthers Bob-
by Seale, Huey Newton, and JoAnne Chesimard (Assata Shakur), as well as
Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, and sampled Malcolm X’s speech-
es, I was bearing witness—as w ere millions of o thers who listened to and
purchased t hese songs—to the enduring legacy of Black Power. Many other
rap artists, from X-C lan and Tupac to Ice Cube and Paris, referenced iconic
Black Power– era figures. But beyond these references in hip- hop, the cul-
tural and po liti cal moment for young African Americans was similarly
shifting toward a favorable, even romantic, perspective on the Black
Power era. Most of us were born during that period, too young to signifi-
cantly appreciate its fundamental contours yet old enough to remember
its hallmarks— Afros, dashikis, clenched fists, and the Panthers. They all
seemed to have disa ppeared from the scene. In reali ty, however, Black Power
was everywhere.
In my jun ior year at Moreh ouse College, I was part of a core group of
a dozen students who led a protest and attempted takeover of the admin-
istration’s school assembly known as Crown Forum. Among our many
demands was an African American studies program. It was, we argued,
common at predominantly white schools. We should have it too. In fact,
most major white universities had black student unions, black cultur-
al centers, and black studies programs, with majors and minors. When
many black college students graduated and established themselves in
their professions, thousands each year would join black professional
associations like the National Society of Black Engineers, the Nation-
al Association of Black Social Workers, the National Association of Black
Journalists, or dozens of others. Annually, these groups meet at massive
conferences and influence research and policies; they provide scholarships,
internships, and development opportunities for African Americans across
generations. All of t hese groups with black in their name w ere formed
during the Black Power era. They w ere the institutional legacies so com-
mon that they were taken to be natu ral ele ments of the social, cultural,
and po liti cal arenas of black Amer i ca, not forged from the resistive pol-
itics of Black Power.
Still, the most visi ble influence of Black Power remained in entertain-
ment, in the mass consumption of images that, though derived from the
less subversive and radical permutations of the movement, w ere nonethe-
less consequences of it. The Black Arts movement, according to Larry Neal,
one of the more visi b le poets of the era, was the “aesthetic and spiritual
Preface to the Updated Edition ix
sister” of Black Power.* Indeed, the cultural thrust of Black Power affected
how I was entertained and matured intellectually. From m usic and its
fashion, through the language and sensibilities of quotidian forms of res is-
tance to racist indignities, I was always swimming in the legacies of Black
Power. I had friends with names that didn’t circulate in my parents’ gen-
eration or in any prior African American generation. Although t hese names
were alien to my working-c lass neighborhoods in Los Angeles, by the time I
made it to college and gradua te school, I had met multiple Fanons, K enyas,
Imanis, Nias, Jamals, Maliks, and Kenyattas. I was nearly a Toussaint. The
imprint of Black Power was everywhere, yet, surprisingly, it was widely be-
lieved to have been an ephemeral pol itic al expression and a passing cultural
phenomenon. And, despite the ubiquity of Black Power’s legacy, the schol-
arship on it was thin. When I searched for a historical monograph on the
Black Panther Party in college, I was surprised that none existed. T here
was no historical monograph on the Black Power movement e ither. Even
though historians are notorious for writing well- crafted histories of ob-
scure places, organ izations, and people— including textile workers in one
New England town or farmers in one corner of the South—I recall how
mesmerized people were that t here was no general historical monograph
on an organ ization as significant as the Black Panther Party, even at the
start of the twenty- first century.
The absence of scholarship on the Black Panther Party, in part ic u lar,
opened the organ ization up to a host of ahistorical interpretations from
laypeople and scholars alike. People were victims of what I call “drive-by
history.” They knew of the Panthers, but not from any scholarship specifi-
cally devoted to the Party. Instead, they came to know it from passing ref-
erences to its militarism, violent rhet oric, machismo posturing, sexism, or
childishly romantic notions of revolution. In the 1990s, as hip-h op offered
honorific nods to Black Power and the Panthers, a generation of gradua te stu-
dents began taking an interest in the organi zation and its legacy. Charles E.
Jones’s edited book, The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered] (1998), assembled
an outstanding collection of work on the Panthers, including work from
some of t hose gradua te students. I was always disappointed not to be in-
cluded among them. Published a year a fter I completed my dissertation,
this import ant book cracked open scholarship on the Black Panther Party in
very import ant ways by exploring class, gender, and ideological shifts with
sophistication. I wanted to add to that narrative.
* Kalamu ya Salaam, “The Black Arts Movement (BAM),” African American Lit er a ture
Book Club, https:// aalbc . com / authors / article . php ? id​=2​087 (accessed August 12, 2018).