Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level

253 Pages·2010·2.837 MB·English

by  Peniel E. Joseph (eds.)

Neighborhood Rebels
CONTEMPORARY BLACK HISTORY
Manning Marable (Columbia University) and
Peniel Joseph (Tufts University)
Series Editors
This series features cutting-edge scholarship in Contemporary Black History, underlin-
ing the importance of the study of history as a form of public advocacy and political
activism. It focuses on postwar African American history, from 1945 to the early 1990s,
but it also includes international black history, bringing in high-quality interdisciplinary
scholarship from around the globe. It is the series editors’ firm belief that outstanding
critical research can also be accessible and well written. To this end, books in the series
incorporate different methodologies that lend themselves to narrative richness, such
as oral history and ethnography, and combined disciplines such as African American
Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Ethnic and Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies,
Anthropology, and Criminal Justice.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan:
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Edited by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, and Nigel C. Gibson
Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: “Another Side of the Story”
By Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang
Africana Cultures and Policy Studies: Scholarship and the Transformation of Public Policy
Edited by Zachery Williams
Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton
By Duchess Harris
Mau Mau in Harlem?: The U.S. and the Liberation of Kenya
By Gerald Horne
Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization
By Quito Swan
Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level
Edited by Peniel E. Joseph
Black Power Principals
By Matthew Whitaker (forthcoming)
Neighborhood Rebels
Black Power at the Local Level
Edited by
Peniel E. Joseph
NEIGHBORHOOD REBELS
Copyright © Peniel E. Joseph, 2010.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-62076-6
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the
world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above compa-
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
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ISBN 978-0-230-62077-3 ISBN 978-0-230-10230-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230102309
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Neighborhood rebels : Black power at the local level / edited by
Peniel E. Joseph.
p. cm.—(Contemporary Black history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Black power—United States—History. 2. African American political
activists—History. 3. Political participation—United States—History.
4. Community power—United States—History. 5. Neighborhood—
United States—History. 6. City and town life—United States—History.
7. African Americans—Politics and government. 8. African Americans—
Civil rights—History. 9. United States—Race relations. 10. United
States—History, Local. I. Joseph, Peniel E.
E185.615.N36 2010
323.1196(cid:2)073—dc22 2009024203
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: January 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction Community Organizing, Grassroots Politics, and
Neighborhood Rebels: Local Struggles for
Black Power in America 1
Peniel E. Joseph
1 Malcolm X’s Harlem and Early Black Power Activism 21
Peniel E. Joseph
2 “ Get Up Off of Your Knees!”: Competing Visions of Black
Empowerment in Milwaukee during the Early Civil Rights Era 45
Patrick D. Jones
3 B lack Power on the Ground: Continuity and Rupture in St. Louis
Clarence Lang 67
4 A Campus Where Black Power Won: Merritt College and
the Hidden History of Oakland’s Black Panther Party 91
Donna Murch
5 “W-A-L-K-O-U-T!”: High School Students and
the Development of Black Power in L.A. 107
Jeanne Theoharis
6 “We Were Going to Fight Fire with Fire”: Black Power in the South 131
Simon Wendt
7 E mpowerment, Consciousness, Defense: The Diverse Meanings
of the Black Power Movement in Louisville, Kentucky 149
Tracy E. K’Meyer
8 The Black Arts Movement in Atlanta 173
James Smethurst
9 M ilitant Katrina: Looking Back at Black Power 191
Kent B. Germany
vi CONTENTS
10 T he Pursuit of Audacious Power: Rebel Reformers and
Neighborhood Politics in Baltimore, 1966–1968 215
Rhonda Y. Williams
Notes on Contributors 243
Index 245
Introduction
Community Organizing,
Grassroots Politics, and
Neighborhood Rebels: Local
Struggles for Black Power
in America
Peniel E. Joseph
The period in American and world history popularly known as the Black
Power Movement (1954–1975) is undergoing extensive historical reassess-
ment and reevaluation. A new subfield of scholarship, what I have called “Black
Power Studies,” has produced a series of books, anthologies, articles, essays, and
conferences that are actively rewriting postwar American history. These new
histories build on groundbreaking scholarly works that, although not exclu-
sively focused on Black Power, thoughtfully examine the era within the broader
sweep of American and world history. Perhaps the most striking aspect of these
recent works is their efforts to challenge the master narrative of the civil rights
era, which portrays Black Power as that movement’s evil twin. In that master
narrative, Black Power is the figurative and literal embodiment of black rage,
anger, and disappointment with the ineffective and glacial pace of civil rights.
Black Power enters the historical stage in the bitter aftermath of the civil rights
era’s heroic period, between 1954 and 1965, when the possibilities of racial justice
seemed unlimited. Similarly, contemporary historical and popular understand-
ing of the civil rights era places stirring oratory and dazzling iconography at
the core of a narrative that neatly explains the rise and fall of the movement for
nonviolent social justice. Martin Luther King, Jr., John and Robert F. Kennedy,
and Lyndon Johnson represent the stars of this story while Rosa Parks, Fannie
Lou Hamer, John Lewis, and Wyatt Walker appear in pivotal supporting roles.
Thousands of black sharecroppers, trade unionists, school teachers, students,
and ordinary citizens remain largely seen only as extras in the era’s unfolding
drama. Black radicalism remains largely absent from this narrative, with the
2 PENIEL E. JOSEPH
lone exception of Malcolm X who appears in the early 1960s as an angry coun-
terpoint to King’s vision of a beloved community and as a portent of the coming
racial storm embodied by Black Power.
In the mid-1 960s, Black Power seemingly burst onto the American scene,
scandalizing national politics, triggering a white backlash, dooming interra-
cial cooperation, and pushing impressionable members of the New Left into an
unabated orgy of domestic violence in the name of revolution. Black Power is
most often seen as triggering the demise of the civil rights era, dooming more
promising and effective movements for social justice, and abandoning grassroots
community organizing in favor of jaw-d ropping polemics, galloping sexism, and
crude appeals to urban violence and mayhem.
Major new historical scholarship has methodically challenged this view, plac-
ing a daunting amount of carefully sifted archival evidence above the autobiog-
raphies, memoirs, journalistic accounts, and first- person recollections that have
dominated interpretations of the era. The most ambitious of these new works
have argued that civil rights and Black Power, far from being mutually exclu-
sive, paralleled and intersected with one another. Both movements grew out of
the ferment of social and political upheaval of the Great Depression and World
War II. Despite tortured debates over strategies and tactics, participants in one
camp often shifted to the other, and certain groups and activists favored both
approaches simultaneously.1
Chronologically, these works expand the movement’s time frame, locating
its immediate origins in the 1950s when Malcolm X first entered Harlem as a
young local organizer. Placing early Black Power activism alongside the civil
rights struggles’ high watermark significantly transforms understanding of each
period. Monumental histories and commemorations of the civil rights period
between the May 17, 1954 Brown Supreme Court decision and the August 6, 1965
passage of the Voting Rights Act have successfully enshrined this epic as the
movement’s heroic period, a time of Kings and Kennedys when the forces of good
battled evil in an age of Camelot. In these accounts, Emmett Till’s 1955 lynching,
Martin Luther King’s role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rosa Parks’s iconic
refusal to give up her seat on the bus, and the 1957 Little Rock school desegre-
gation crisis represent the era’s first half. The latter half is most often reflected
by the wave of sit-i ns across the South in 1960, the rioting at the University of
Mississippi two years later, 1963’s tumultuous violence (Birmingham, Medgar
Evers, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, and the JFK assassination)
and redemption (the March on Washington), and the passage of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act and Blood Sunday in Selma.
But there is something that is sanitized in these exploits, even as they seem-
ingly acknowledge the era’s violence, suffering, and assassinations. All of these
events take place exclusively in the South, ignoring the civil rights era’s regional
diversity and denying the very existence of Black Power radicalism. Civil rights’
global reverberations also take a back seat, despite the movement’s important role
in shaping American state craft at the height of the cold war. Between 1954 and
1965, Malcolm X led a Black Power movement that exhibited local muscle in New
York City and regional strength in parts of the country and grew to national and
INTRODUCTION 3
international heights. Early Black Power activists touted racial and cultural pride,
pushed the politics of self-d etermination through bruising and provocative pro-
tests, and connected America’s domestic movement for racial justice with antico-
lonial struggles in the third world in defiance of cold war restrictions on drawing
such parallels. In their audacious quest for social, political, and economic power,
these activists were both deeply inspired by the courage of civil rights activists
who risked life and limb in pursuit of democracy and profoundly disappointed in
what they believed to be a naive faith in America’s capacity for justice. Skeptical of
the nation’s willingness to extend citizenship to blacks and cynical about notions
of redemptive suffering, Black Power activists looked to the third world for a
way forward at home. The 1955 Afro-A sian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia,
Ghanaian Independence in 1957, and the 1959 Cuban Revolution emboldened
African American militants and strengthened their belief that revolutionary rip-
ples in far-o ff places might resoundingly impact domestic antiracist efforts.
Closer home, Malcolm X’s 1957 efforts to prevent a riot in the aftermath of a
Nation of Islam (NOI) member’s brutal beating made him and the NOI activists
folk heroes in Harlem. After only three years in Harlem, Malcolm X had made
remarkable political strides that included significantly boosting the attendance
and financial strength of the Muslim Mosque No. 7 located on West 116th Street;
cultivating a working relationship with James Hicks, managing editor of the New
York Amsterdam News; and crafting political alliances with a host of local activists
and politicians. Two years later, Malcolm X’s stature took on national proportions
after the broadcast of “The Hate That Hate Produced,” a five-p art documentary
that propelled Malcolm and the NOI to sudden fame. Malcolm’s growing iconog-
raphy during the first half of the 1960s makes him the one Black Power leader
whose exploits are discussed during the civil rights era’s highpoint.
However, more often than not, Malcolm is pitted as King’s foil, a brilliant if
misguided foe whose dire predictions of race war represented the pent-u p frus-
trations of the nation’s seething black masses. This top- down perspective plucks
Malcolm out of the historical context that shaped him and turns him into a mes-
sianic figure with little or no grassroots relationship to the black community.
Such a perspective ignores the rich activist intellectual, labor, religious, and polit-
ical organizing traditions and communities that shaped Malcolm. Many of these
forces came out to protest the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime
minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, although Malcolm was forced by
the NOI to stay on the sidelines. The 1961 UN demonstration featured dozens of
activists, including Maya Angelou and LeRoi Jones, who found a political men-
tor in Malcolm. By that year, a number of early local Black Power groups, such
as the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) out of Ohio and Detroit’s Group
on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), had formed. In June 1963, the same year as
the March on Washington, 125,000 supporters marched in Detroit’s “Walk for
Freedom” in a pro-B irmingham sympathy demonstration keynoted by Martin
Luther King and partially organized by Malcolm’s allies, most notably the fiery
reverend Albert Cleage, who shared the dais with King. That November, Malcolm
delivered one of his most important speeches, “Message to the Grassroots,” dur-
ing a conference in Detroit where black militants from across the country sought