Title: A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics
Author: Komozi Woodard
Year of Publication: 2005
Thesis:
“While Clayborne Carson and some other historians have claimed that black nationalism was the cause of the early demise of the Black Revolt, this book argues that the politics of black cultural nationalism and the dynamics of the Modern Black Convention Movement were fundamental to the endurance of the Black Revolt from the 1960s into the 1970s.” (loc 332)
“By 1974, Baraka’s faction of the Congress of African People moved to the Left, repudiating black nationalism and embracing a revolutionary Third World Marxism.” (loc 343)
1. African Americans are an oppressed nationality subjugated by racial oppression in the United States. Black nationality consciousness took form in the context of slavery, racial oppression, and group conflict in America” (loc 348)
2. “…the chief sources of contemporary black nationality formation are urban.” (loc 353)
a. This is owed to ghettoization of African American communities (loc 361)
3. Many members of the Black intelligentsia, rather than assimilate, embraced Black nationalism, especially when found they had to give up their Black identities in order to do so. (loc 386)
4. Urban renewal, in addition to bureaucratization, contributed to the spread of Black nationalism” (loc 392)
5. “By setting in motion these grassroots communities and a radical black intelligentsia at the same time, the 1960s witness an unprecedented fusion between the nationalism of the grass roots and the nationalism of the emerging college-educated elite. Since a number of these college students grew up in the black ghettos, that fusion prepared the conditions for the development of a grassroots intelligentsia.” (loc 392)
6. “Group trauma can and does form group identity.” (loc 397)
Strategies:
- Align with other groups on an international front (colonialism, neo-colonialism, internal colonization)
- Elect representatives
- “Develop parallel Black institutions” in response to urban crises (loc 415)
Five phases in development of Black nationality:
- Slavery
- Free blacks in the urban north/Haitian Revolution
- Oppression after failure of Reconstruction
- Great Migration
- Second ghetto (created in migrations from 1940s-1970s)
“Voting black Republicans in the South were necessary to secure national power for the party; without their votes the Republicans would have won the war only to lose the White House and the Congress. Thus, the Reconstruction aim of bringing the South back into the Union pivoted on black participation in the national political community.” (loc 665)
“Finally, the most fundamental reason that the absolute colonization plans were rejected is that black labor was the foundation of the Southern economy. Slavery was not only a system of racial domination; it was an economic mode of production. In reconstructing the war-torn Southern economy, the situation of black labor was critical. Fantastic, racist schemes of building that regional economy without African Americans simply courted catastrophe.” (loc 665)
20th-Century Black Nationality (loc 740)
- Class formation
- Urbanization
- Ghetto formation
- Anticolonial action (loc 745)
- Du Bois – Souls of Black Folk - Black culture can be traced through folk songs/fomented a sense of nationality around African heritage (loc 757)
- *Look up Hubert H. Harrison – socialism & Black nationalism (Loc 768)
Time: 1960s-1970s
Geography: Newark, NJ, but also national and international in scope
Organization:
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Rise
1. Groundwork: The Impact of Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Robert F. Williams, and Malcom X on Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement
2. Black Fire: Imamu Amiri Baraka and the Newark Uprising
3. The Ballot or the Bullet? The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in Newark
4. The Modernization of Cultural Nationalism: The Black and Puerto Rican Convention and the Election of Newark’s First Black Mayor
Part II. Zenith and Decline
5. It’s Nation Time: Building a National Black Political Community
6. Hard Facts: Kawaida Towers and the Dilemma of Cultural Nationalism in Black America
Conclusion: Winter in America
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
Congress of African People (CAP) – hosts Black Power conferences in Atlanta * Note to self to look up records of these conferences – HUGELY diverse list of attendees (see loc 293)
African Liberation Support Committee – (ALSC) – creates agenda & submits to both parties in congress (304)
National Black Assembly
Black Women’s United Front
Black Revolt
Civil Rights Revolution
Second ghetto
Black Freedom Struggle: “is a protracted collective effort to abolish racial oppression and to advance black equality. The black freedom movement is heterogeneous by nature.” (loc 421)
“…the entirety of African American efforts to knock down the barriers to black equality in the U.S. and to overcome the obstacles of social, cultural, and economic development of peoples of African descent.” (loc 427)
Nationalism: “an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of autonomy and individuality for a social group, some of whose members conceive it to constitute an actual or potential nation.” (loc 432) Borrowing from Anthony Smith, to determine the strength of such a heterogeneous movement, people studying these movements need to figure out “the extent and intensity of their activities; the complexity of their organizations; the extent to which their ideology is diffused to the group and the number of their adherents; the unity and dedication of the hard core of the membership; the clarity and articulation of their goals; the importance of nationalist issues to both members and their groups… and, the consistency and duration of the movement as a whole.” (loc 451)
“Hence, Smith concludes that strong nationalist movements develop four essential components: a dedicated hard core imbued with new nationalist values and tastes; an array of institutions and organizations; a set of clearly articulated myths and rituals, distinguishing its nationalism from other ideologies, and a fairly broad diffusion in the cities.” (loc 457)
Themes:
“First, if sociologists predicted that African American urbanization would lead to assimilation, then why was there such a phenomenal spread of black nationalism in the 1960s?” (loc 308)
“Second, … what role did black cultural nationalism play in the black freedom movement of the 1960s: did it accelerate or retard the process of black nationality formation? And how so?” (loc 308-315)
“What are the dynamics between black nationalists and black Marxists?
“And finally, what is the relationship between black people and America? Are African Americans an ethnic group along the same lines as Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, and German Americans, destined to be assimilated into American society? Or do they constitute an oppressed nationality locked out of White America, fundamentally in conflict with the established social, economic, and political order of the United States?” (loc321-326)
Herrenvolk democracy
Critiques: Too heavily centered in urban life? I wonder too, how this might connect with Benedict Anderson – can you have a nation without a press? If so, can you create one?
Quotes:
“Thus, one of Baraka’s most important creative achievements is his ‘artistic reordering’ of the African American odyssey in search of identity, purpose, and direction.’ (loc 114)
“…the most important dimension of Baraka’s avocation is his role in developing the politics of black cultural nationalism.’ (loc 114)
“The Modern Black Convension Movement hastened black nationality formation by helping to create a black national political community. While black elected officials on the local, state, and national levels developed structures like the Congressional Black Caucus to enhance their political positions, black grassroots organizations rallied their forces to define their own agenda.” (loc 288)
Notes:
This introduction offers a clear rationale as far as Woodard’s questions, answers, and rationale. He includes well-defined sociological sections on nationalism, which contributes to clear explanations of how Baraka, et. al. fit into this spectrum.
This introduction helps put into perspective the debate over the Civil Rights Movement, the “Long” Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Freedom Struggle. The latter allows students of Black history to look at acts of resistance as contributing to a whole (at least according to Woodard’s definition) rather than be forced to consider it an “antecedent.” Connects to the idea of Harding’s “river of resistance.”
Under thesis, point 5, I am drawing a few connections and achieving more clarity in areas that were once slightly blurry. For example, I will have to check this, but I am pretty sure in Lisa Corrigan’s Prison Power, she discusses the rhetoric of prison intellectuals, which connects to this idea of grassroots intelligentsia (although her work emphasizes development from within the prison vs. elsewhere). Also, I believe this connects to Richard Wright’s argument in Black Power that Nkrumah’s ability to succeed lay in his unification of classes. In that case, it does speak to how a critical mass of people remains critical in a large-scale revolution.
Note – title comes from Martin Delaney, but excellent section on historical Black people speaking on Black nationhood.
Black participation in terms of assimilation seems to happen only when they can be useful to a party cause—their voting power, when absolutely necessary; their free labor always necessary in some form or another.
Things to study: The long history of Black conventions
Supplemental videos/interviews:
https://www.democracynow.org/2014/1/10/amiri_baraka_1934_2014_poet_playwright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY_2rHIt-cI