Biondi, Martha. The Black Revolution on Campus. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012.

Title: The Black Revolution on Campus

Author: Martha Biondi

Year of Publication: 2014

Thesis:
Black students in the Black Freedom Struggle created more change than all other student movements. Biondi shows how Black student protests contributed to desegregation of faculty and students, fomented African American/Black Studies programs, and encouraged other groups to protest as well. Biondi widens the aperture of the Black Power Movement to demonstrate the gravity of its influence in academia and its strong legacy. It is also an endorsement for the further need for Black Studies programs.

Time: 1960s-1970s

Geography:
U.S. Colleges, with attetnion to SF State, NY, Illinois, HBCUs

Organization:
Introduction. The Black Revolution on Campus
1 - Moving Toward Blackness: The Rise of Black Power on Campus
2 - A Revolution Is Beginning: The Strike at San Francisco State
3 - A Turbulent Era of Transition: Black Students and a New Chicago
4 - Brooklyn College Belongs to Us: The Transformation of Higher Education in New York City
5 - Toward a Black University: Radicalism, Repression, and Reform at Historically Black Colleges
6 - The Counterrevolution on Campus: Why was Black Studies So Controversial?
7- The Black Revolution Off-Campus
8 - What Happened to Black Studies?
Conclusion. Reflections on the Movement and Its Legacy
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgmenets
Photo Credits
Index
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
Notes:
Book interview here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?326474-8/martha-biondi-the-black-revolution-campus

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

Title: Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

Author: Ira Berlin

Year of Publication: 1998

Thesis:
In Many Thousands Gone, Berlin charts the ascent of chattel slavery and the greater loss of freedom as slavery lay the groundwork for Africans to become African Americans. In large part, this book is further development of Berlin’s article, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American History” (1980). While the book is mainly a synthesis of work done in response to that germinal article, his early periodization is guided by his 1996 article entitled “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of the African-American Society in Mainland North America.” In 1980, Berlin’s “Time and Space” article broke new ground for scholars of slavery, arguing that for too long scholars had concentrated on southern plantation slavery as representative of American slavery broadly. Instead, he claimed, that when, where, and how were key elements of inquiry. Subsequently, scholars investigate how different times, different commodities, and different locales influenced the development of slavery. Two decades later, Berlin returned to synthesize the work that had been done, dividing the chronology into three distinct periods: the “charter generation,” the “plantation generation,” and the “revolutionary generation.” In the charter generation, Berlin fashions the cosmopolitan “African Creole“ as a class of Africans who, for a brief period in the 17th century, able to use their skill in language and business in order to conduct trade (often in enslaved Africans). The rise of major plantation commodities (sugar, rice, cotton) eroded the “African creole” and contributed to the uneven development of slave societies based on plantation labor and divisions within slave populations (African/American born, free/slave, urban/rural etc.)

Time:
Three generations: Charter Generation (17th century), Planter Generation (early-mid 18th century), Revolutionary Generation (late 18th century)

Geography: Four Regions: New England, Chesapeake, Carolina Low Country, Lower Mississippi Valley

Organization:
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:

A good question that arises from this, is when and how did arguments about the differences between these two types of societies arise? How would one remove only the economic dependence on enslaved people without considering the social and cultural function of slavery? In essence, this is hinting at the major differences between chattel slavery and other forms of human labor bondage. Even though Phillips’ chapter on “The Early Exploitation of Guinea” is reprehensible in its ignorance, he is correct in noting that scholars need to understand African societies much better in order to understand American slavery.

While Berlin argues there is no fluid evolution from a society with slaves to a slave society (this is his concept of contingency and pushes back on Marxist frameworks), this is an area I would like to revisit more carefully when I have a chance to read this again. For example, to what extent does the degree of autonomy influence the classification of society with slaves or a slave society? 

I need to read on the provisioning trade, as I’m curious how these would have functioned in or outside of plantation regime.

Quotes:

Race as a historical construction
"Perhaps this is because the theory is not quite right. Race is not simply a social construction; it is a particular kind of social construction—a historical construction." (1)

Oppression, resistance, negotiation
"All of which is to say that slavery, though imposed and maintained by violence, was a negotiated relationship." (2)

Slavery making race and class
"The stench from slavery’s moral rot cannot mask the design of American captivity: the extraction of labor that allowed a small group of men to dominate all. In short, if slavery made race, its larger purpose was to make class, and the fact that the two were made simultaneously by the same process has mystified both.” (5)

Notes:
As I read Berlin, I couldn’t help but reflect on U.B. Phillips’ American Negro Slavery. Phillips would have loved to take up the idea that there are slave societies and societies with slaves. Though he would likely have argued Africans represented the true slave societies. In contrast, he posited that slavery was not only unprofitable but an imposition on southern planters. As he analyzes slavery as a labor system, he is singularly focused on the control of labor as he mentions in his title, but Philliips clearly considers slavery a matter of noblesse oblige. 

Berger, Dan. Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. Justice, Power, and Politics. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Title: Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era

Author: Dan Berger

Year of Publication: 2014

Thesis:

Dan Berger argues that one can neither adequately study the Civil Rights Movement, nor the Black Power Movement (he puts these into the envelope of the "Black Freedom Struggle") without looking at the centrality of prison organizing. Organizing inside and outside of prisons and jails has been a key feature of the Black Freedom Struggle. His tellin begins in 1955 as NOI recruited from the prisons and King, et. al successfully transcended the shame of arrest and imprisonment and turned it into a site of community building. Berger focuses much of his attention on George Jackson, who correctly identified the prison system as designed to incapacitate the Black community. Jackson and others critiqued not only the conditions of the prisons but also a "rights-based" system from which prisoners were completely ostracized.

- Prison is hidden & most violent form of state power, organized primarily by race, then other categories

- Side argument is that 'rioting' is a form of seeking visibility

- Prison organizing was fluid with the CRM and black power movements.

- Focus on movement vs. stasis - how did people organize themselves given these constraints

Time: 1955-1980

Geography: U.S.

Organization:
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction- Folsom Manifesto as a model document (& prisoner strike) - actually began in San Quentin
Chapter 1 - The Jailhouse in Freedom Land
Chapter 2 - America Means Prison
- BP movement / Jail as a splace of freedom (reminds me of Anne Moody)
Chapter 3 - George Jackson and the Black Condition Made Visible- Prison organizing
Chapter 4 - The Pedagogy of the Prison"incapacitation"/hard labor vs. "rehabilitation." This is is where Jackson's profound and prophetic critique of prisons comes through; he correctly identifies them as places to incapacitate people whose work is no longer valued.
Chapter 5 - Slavery and Race-Making on Trial
Chapter 6 - Prison Nation- Print culture as an attempt to organize
- 4-6 GJ influence on later organizing
Epilogue - Choosing Freedom- Monopoly on violence also carried out through wars on drugs, poverty, etc. Super interesting.
- Technologies of control have made rebellions even more rare
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Type:
Methods: Uses oral histories and voices from Black prisoners, which brings into sharp relief Black agency and resistance that blurred the concrete boundaries of the prisons.
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
Freedom with violence
- The apparent paradox (similar in Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom)
"Freedom, as an idea and as a practice, has been an enduring paradox ofthe United Stales from its origins to the present. Freedom and the various principles it is said to encompass have been encoded into the national origin story of the United States through genocide and enslavement. Violence does not just undermine the goal of American freedom; it is one of its central tenets. As a result, violence and freedom have together constituted the American experience." (268)

Freedom through violence
- The state uses violence by freedom fighters to legitimate freedom with violence.
"Practitioners of freedom through violence have described their efforts as attempting to interrupt the greater violence of state-enforced invisibility and abuse. As an insurgent philosophy, such violence has always paled in compari son to that ofthe state. The ability ofthe oppressed to exact the kind ofretrib utive violence such a freedom dream mandates has been limited to small-scale expressions. Its violence has always been more performative, rhetorical, and even philosophical than it has been physical." (271)

Freedom from violence
A humanistic approach/affirmation of life. See Assata Shakur's poem "Affirmation" (272)

Themes:
Critiques: While this study does offer a gendered critique, the sources centered in male prisons lends a sharper focus to the actions of male prisoners.
Questions:
Quotes:

• The American Paradox

  1. "I am interested in what imprisoned intellectuals might teach us about the great American paradox—the coexistence of the mutually exclusive categories of freedom and racism, democracy and confinement—while recognizing the limitations placed on them by their environment." (xiv)

• Rights-based frameworks

  1. "While prisoners were a central element of the civil rights and Black Power movements, their organizing was less a claim to expand rights than it was a critique of rights-based frameworks." (3)

  2. "...racism itself as the structural reproduction of rightlessness." (7)

• International movement

  1. "Around the world, prison organizing spoke a shared language of humanity and socialism rooted ln an antiracist critique of colonialism." (3)

• 13th Amendment

  1. "The abolition of chattel bondage was the birth of prison bondage: passed in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as punishment for a crime."[11] The amendment provided the legal rationale establishing the prison and the wider criminal justice system as institutions central to sustain ing racial oppression." (5)

• Resistance to create visibility

  1. "Riots, writing, and collective rituals were the building blocks of prison radicalism, and they were orchestrated to make the prison and especially its captives visible to people around the world." (6)

• Resistance

  1. "Indeed, the history of black radicalism can be thought of as a long opposition to confinement." (6)

• Prison as site of resistance pedagogy

  1. "More notable was the way in which black activists turned prisons into, as a common refrain of the lime put it, schools of liberation: training grounds and battlegrounds in larger struggles against racism in the form of state violence." (7)

• Prisonhood and nationalism

  1. "...prisoners spoke of captivity as itself constituting nationality." (9)

• Gender & masculinity

  1. "The passionate declarations of masculinity that accompanied such uprisings gave the false impression that men were more resistant than women." (10)

• Prison as dynamic, not static

  1. "These connections were both tangible and idealized, lived and imagined. Rather than yield to the prison’s attempt to impose stasis, radical prisoners emphasized movement and migration." (11)

• Revolutionary violence

  1. “The ability of the oppressed to exact the kind of retributive violence such a freedom dream mandates has been limited to small-scale expressions. Its violence has always been more performative, rhetorical, and even philosophical than it has been physical.” (271)

Notes:

Bell, Joyce Marie. The Black Power Movement and American Social Work. New York; Chichester, England: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Title: The Black Power Movement and American Social Work

Author: Joyce Bell

Year of Publication: 2014

Thesis:
-Argues that the BPM had a great deal to do with increasing opportunities for Black people to enter professions, though by following two groups of Black social workers, she found that a class system quickly developed where Black professionals felt comfortable talking down to poor Black people. In essence, her large point is that NASBW is an example of how Black Power was able to enter institutions/work independently with black-run institutions (an understudied topic). Major results of BP: creation of professional associations “with a commitment to race politics” & changed social norms/how to deal with racism in the workplace. (174-5) “white resistance to relinquishing privilege—coupled with Black Power’s emphasis on repre- sentation and identity—in many ways paved the path to multiculturalism. “(175) BP benefits the Black middle class, but it signifies a “changing of the guard” rather than real structural change with respect to poor Black folk. Hegemony has a huge role in this study; it also harkens back to Robert Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America.
Time: 60s-80s
Geography: U.S.
Organization:
Foreword by Jeffrey Ogbar
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 - Introduction: Race, Resistance, and the Civil Sphere
- Walker, whom she quotes on political, cultural, and organizational institutionalization, shows how movements attempt to get subsumed into mainstream
- exit or voice idea (leave or stay & try to be heard)
- Ogbar’s introduction goes back to Malcom X as the beginning of the Black Power Movement
- Key: black self-determination / integration not a “panacea”
- Black assertiveness not met with submissiveness but resentment.
- This books explores independent and within institution actions
Chapter 2 - Re-envisioning Black Power
Chapter 3 - Black Power Professionals
Chapter 4 - "A Nice Social Tea Party": The Rocky Relationship Between Social Work and Black Liberation
- Northern & southern struggles totally different - south still on integration (87)
Chapter 5 - "We Stand Before You, Not as a Separatist Body": The Techni-Culture Movement to Gain Voice in the National Federation of Settlements
Chapter 6 - "We'll Build Our Own Thing": The Exit Stratey of the National Association of Black Social Workers
Chapter 7 - Exit and Voice in Intra-Organizational Social Movements
Chapter 8 - Conclusion: Institutionalizing Black Power
Appendix 1: Methods
Appendix 2: Founding Dates of Black Professional Associations
Notes
References
Index
Type: Social History
Methods: Theory Guided Process Tracing (TGPT) (Essentially transparently revealing method to participants).
Sources: Social work archives, personal papers, oral histories
Historiography: 
Keywords: “Intra-organizational social movements’
Themes: 
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
Ogbar: “It was a merging of two seemingly irreconcilable beliefs—black nationalism and racial integration—that forged a new politics which permeated black America. Moreover, despite what historians and others have argued, it was Black Power, not the dream of a racially integrated America, that ultimately became a dominant expression among African Americans.” (xii)

“I argue, first of all, that bringing movements into organizations is a very movement-like process. I also find that Black Power was the central motivation and political lens for the creation of new racial practice within organizations in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Finally, I argue that the development of black professional associational life is a central outcome of the Black Power movement that has had long-lasting and broad implications in the professions.” (21)

Notes: 

Bates, Beth Tompkins. Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Title: Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945

Author: Beth Tompkins Bates

Year of Publication: 2001

Thesis:

• Argues that early Civil Rights leaders, especially A. Phillip Randolph, contributed to the Modern Civil Rights Movement in reciprocal ways, but particularly showing how it was possible to build a base of Civil Rights activism from union activism. Randolph, she argues, was part of a younger vanguard of porters who called out the problems with respectability politics and sought to push for full citizenship, which included both economic and civic power. This book explains how patronage worked and why Black people would be averse to unionizing; then the shift to where they might be more interested.

Time: 1925-1945

Geography: U.S.

Organization:
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 - No More Servants in the House: Pullman Porters Strive For Full-Fledged Citizenship
- Strong presence as homeowners but slipped in prestige as factory jobs and firemen etc. appealed more to Black people (avoiding servility)
- Meatpacking, for example allowed for advancement (to butcher) & paid more
- DuBois voices the call for gaining manhood/dropping servility
- 1919 - Black men fight back in 26 cities
- **Randolph was not actually a porter - he was editor of the Messenger, and they asked him to organize the national union.
- 1st chapter is essentially a biography of Randolph
- Pullman patronizes one of the Chicago Defender society writers (45)
- Pastor of a chapel most influential, though.
- Contributions do amount to benefits in the community
- Explores the complicated relationship w/Carey (pastor) & union organizing - as business appealed Black people to get their support, they manipulated unions to foment racism/division. Very insidious plan.
- Company actually kept people on after they used them for strike busting. Wow. Curious about this.
- This chapter helps put into perspective the tipping culture in the U.S.
- Even the Chicago Defender ignored the BSCP for 2yrs - one wonders was it as simple as they didn’t want to draw attention to it? (54)
- See p.59 - Important to think about Black/white solidarity in union actions.
- Racial solidarity moves from moderate to aggressive political tactic & makes it more possible to align over class within black community (61)
2 - The Politics of Paternalism and Patronage in Black Chicago
3 - Biting the Hand that Feeds Us: Teh BSCP Battles Pullman
- CHICAGO CLUBWOMEN lead the charge
- Ida B. Wells Barnett very influential in helping BSCP
- Alpha Suffrage Club - Black women’s suffrage org. 
- “Manhood” again also applying to women - see p.73
- Pullman buys a controlling interest in the “The Whip” & then changes rhetoric to attack BSCP
- Pullman company allegedly paid out Chicago Defender, who later has to support BSCP due to declining subscription
- The contract symbolizes “autonomy over day-to-day organization of work” quoted from Foner - (90)
Paternalism, 1925-1927
4 - Launching a Social Movement, 1928-1930
- Strike attempt got strong in-union votes but not from the community. Randolph called it off. This highlights how the BSCP could not work as independently as white unions did (or appeared to).
5 - Forging Alliances: New-Crowd Protest Networks, 1930-1935
- New-Crowd protest networks - making demands vs. working within structures
- Black Worker (successor to the Messenger - it’s the paper that BSCP used)
6 - New-Crowd Networks and the Course of Protest Politics, 1935-1940
7 - We are Americans, Too: The March on Washington Movement, 1941-1943
8 - Protest Politics Comes of Age
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Type:
Methods: Chronological
Sources: Archival papers in numerous locations, NAACP papers, personal papers, various secondary sources.
Historiography: Major intervention: Shows how BSCP works to get Black public opinion to change from patronage to collective action.
Keywords: manhood rights
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions: This makes me think I should look up comparative studies that have been done on different types of Black unionizing (ex: farming unions)
Quotes:
“The bscp used the company union to raise questions related not just to porters and maids but the status and place of all African Americans. Slavery was not a metaphor for black Americans as it was for white Americans; it did not represent a condition or experience for black Americans; it was the state of having one’s humanity reduced to what value it could command as a piece of real estate. Freedom, on the other hand, was employed and thought of metaphorically by black Americans, for it represented a state of possibilities, contingencies on a continuum that spread outward from slavery. Claiming manhood rights was to step out of the servant stereotype that cloaked the humanity of Black Americans” (91) 

Notes:

Factoids: Lincoln’s death made it possible to make Pullman’s prototype get contracts. Tipping is another thing that comes up - ppl made $ that way, but b/c they weren’t paid that much. It made the servitude that much more bitter. This era also convinced Black people that unionizing could be profitable.

Austin, Curtis J. Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party. Fayettville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006. (Copy)

Book Review:

Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party is a tour de force with a title that invites the casual browser to make assumptions about it. In particular, people who studied the watered-down, paragraph-long, high-school version of the Black Panther Party (BPP) will recall a familiar photo of black men in formation sporting leather jackets, black burets, and toting formidable weaponry standing proud and ready for trouble. However, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense considered itself a revolutionary group with a ten-point program developed from its true grassroots backgrounds, a solid understanding of the needs of the communities it served, and a willingness to act. Central to that commitment was the presence of guns; however, as the author explains, guns were useful in attracting attention and recruits, but also the attention of Hoover’s COINTELPRO, which devoted most of its energies to destroying the BPP.  In explaining his thesis, then, the author shows that explanations for the making of the BPP are not one-sided. In fact, it was not the violence of the BPP, but the violence of inadequate living conditions, oppression, and police brutality that provided a solid foundation from which the organization was born. (xxii)

In the initial chapters, the author expertly traces the historical roots of the Black Panther Party in the frustration of black communities around the country, illustrating how the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power movement evolved in direct and overlapping conversation with one another. Indeed, it was “civil wrongs” that provided the necessary fuel for both to work together. The author embeds several conflicts early on that presage the organization’s demise, such as the adoption of violent rhetoric and the police and FBI’s response to it, a problematic hierarchical leadership structure, the fundamental and unresolved differences between Newton and Cleaver, and finally the infighting that was emblematic of that split. The author emphasizes that it was not a geographical “east/west split,” but a wedge between Cleaver who controlled the New York faction from Algeria and Newton who held sway over the rest of the many chapters. (241) The author punctuates the middle of the book with the high-profile murder of Fred Hampton, the imprisonment of Huey Newton and the campaign to free him, and a careful explication of the southern and eastern chapters that formed key parts of the organization as a whole.

            All works aspire to perfection, yet no scholarship is without its flaws. Up Against the Wall is no exception. On page 97, a minor typo does not take away from the author’s correct assessment that “Despite having access to their own media outlet and commanding a nationwide appeal, the BBP [sic] was powerless in its ability to persuade most black men and women to pick up the gun.” Media coverage of the BPP, however, emphasized guns and favored badass men, as opposed to the many women who formed the rank and file and who kept the organization going. It is fitting that the author cites Eldridge Cleaver’s ability to explain dialectical materialism (241) to an audience of laypersons. Dialectics, distilled to thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, appears not only to be the guiding thesis of the “making and unmaking” of the BPP, but Dr. Austin shares Cleaver’s facility to weave an incredibly complicated set of narratives together into a readable, cohesive whole. The only place where the narrative frays mildly is in the latter chapters. The discussion with the informant BJ, for example, needs to employ the techniques from the previous chapters by more slowly parsing some of the language and allowing the context to reveal itself within the structure of the narrative—a difficult task even for a master oral historian. Finally, while the author shows an organizational chart of the BPP leadership structure, the term “democratic centralism” needs more development; otherwise, it has no useful differentiation from an autocracy. Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power only makes the leadership structure seem less flexible.

Lest the reader misunderstand these minor critiques as a comment on the whole, Up Against the Wall is the work of a master revisionist—clear in its logic and order, detail, and narrative quality. Even the most mundane facts are placed in such a way that it is a book that, once picked up, is impossible to put down. Dr. Curtis J. Austin’s work should be a fixture in Black Studies programs, African American History courses, and any courses on protest movements. It is a historical work that would do well in an interdisciplinary context, such as political science or women’s studies.

Perhaps a feat more remarkable than the prose is evidence that the author won a tussle with his editor. It includes a bibliographic essay and a personal account of his own journey as a scholar. Historiographies often form the bulk of a thesis, and authors begrudgingly jettison them first. Regardless, editors typically locate these sorts of works in the front, where Dr. Austin favors a timeline and a chapter that embeds the BPP within the movement around it. This decision shows a commitment to the subjects of the history as the agents of their own destinies, rather than what other authors thought about them. For a book that reads from front to back with examples of this intentionality, look no further.

Anderson, Carol. Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Title: Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955

Author: Carol Anderson

Year of Publication: 2003

Thesis:

The fight for civil rights often hides the fact that the fight was also for human rights. Anderson uses the story of the intent to get two key documents (An Appeal to the World and We Charge Genocide) to a world audience to underscore this reality. She shows how Du Bois championed the more direct appeal and Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter White collaborated to remove their power of oversight and downplayed the condition of Black people at crucial moments.

Time: 1944-1955

Geography: U.S. / International stage (U.N.)

Organization:

Introduction: The Struggle for Black Equality
1 - Beyond Civil Rights: The NAACP, the United Nations, and Redefining the Struggle for Black Equality
2 - The Struggle for Human Rights: African Americans Petition the United Nations
3 - Things Fall Apart
4 - Bleached Souls and Red Negroes
5 - The Mirage of Victory

Type: Political history

Methods:

Sources:

NAACP archives, FBI files, personal papers, speeches, dissertations, gov't publications and presidential records. 

Historiography: Dudziak

Keywords:

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

Notes:

My draft reflection during coursework (spring, 2019)*

Carol Anderson documents how from the Roosevelt years through the Eisenhower administration (1944-1955), a series of internecine battles within the Democratic Party and African American activist groups within a milieu of Cold War politics, eroded the “prize” of human rights. As these groups, along with delegates from other countries, negotiated over a draft of a Declaration of Human Rights, it became quickly evident that the State Department would avoid at all costs confrontations with powerful Southern Democrats through the successive administrations. Complications abounded as the NAACP sought to distance itself from the Black Left to avoid the stigma of Communism, which contributed to a rift within the organization itself, with Walter White and Eleanor Roosevelt eager to promote the accomplishments of Black folk on one side, and W.E.B. Du Bois eager to expose the difficulties Black people faced. This, Du Bois believed, would pressure the U.S. to change its policies toward Black people overall. What remains is the eleven-year saga of the recession of human rights into a more modest request for civil rights.

Submitted for coursework in June, 2019

Anderson, Carol. Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War and Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.

McDuffie, Erik S. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.

Although much has been published since Kevin Gaines’ state-of-the field essay on African American History, he provides a useful division of major chapters in the overall conceptualization of the field. Gaines describes three major themes that correspond roughly to historical developments: slavery, segregation, and the Long Civil Rights Movement. The three books I review in this essay fit into the latter category. Before considering them, however, it may be useful to briefly take up Gaines’ outline of the problems and possibilities in the extension of this period, as each of these works influence and are influenced by the question of the Long Civil Rights Movement.

According to Gaines, the Long Civil Rights Movement championed by Jacquelyn Hall rejects the Brown v. Board notion that the Movement is somehow a spontaneous battle over whether African Americans could sit at the front of a bus or go to school with white children.[1] Scholars generally accept this premise, but researchers such as Lang and Cha-Jua wonder how far back we can bring the Civil Rights Movement until it begins to lose its relevance and analytical value.[2] Gaines echoes Hall, noting that most scholarship within this vein looks at the period between the New Deal and the Cold War.[3] Scholars worry that extending the period would bury the ill effects of major historical shifts, such as the Cold War, on the Civil Rights Movement. Despite these concerns, I agree with Hall, Cha-Jua, and Lang that this problematic theorizing of the “Black Freedom Struggle” has widened the scope of inquiry on all fronts, including I would add, into the two other major periods Gaines mentions (slavery and segregation). Another development related to the conjoining of Black Power Studies and the Civil Rights Movement is a stronger emphasis on transnational studies, which add a greater degree of flexibility and insight for works that link the Cold War and African American History.[4]

Having established the distinction between the “short” and Long Civil Rights Movements, it is fitting to note that few scholars within this selection firmly embrace this dichotomy. Mary Dudziak’s Cold War and Civil Rights, for example, gently pushes on the Civil Rights struggle, situating itself within the Cold War and ending conservatively in the Vietnam War. Concluding that a long and hard-fought series of battles fought over the image of U.S. race relations eventually buried Civil Rights discourse from international scrutiny, Dudziak’s scholarship arguably falls precisely into the category of declension narratives that Long Civil Rights Movement proponents have so sharply criticized.[5] Creatively titled chapters such as “Telling Stories about Race and Democracy” and “Holding the Line in Little Rock” barely conceal periods that coincide with U.S. presidential terms from Truman through Johnson.

Despite Dudziak’s relatively conformist timeline, her rigorous transnational lens proves offers unparalleled insight into the Black Freedom Struggle. Using diplomatic communications and local and international newspapers, she shows how racist attacks often derailed the State Department’s attempts to control a narrative of redemption. As it attempted to silence prominent Black voices such as Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and W.E.B. DuBois, an international audience watched with disdain. Perhaps the most poignant illustration of a failure to influence public attitudes would be the August 28, 1963 March on Washington used by the State Department as an example of a functioning democracy. The September bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church took the wind of out of those sails. Less well known was the support pouring out for the March in sectors around the world; James Baldwin organized a letter-writing campaign among intellectuals in France as a sign of support.[6]

In conversation with proponents of the Long Civil Rights Movement, Dudziak demonstrates how Truman’s executive orders and actions to desegregate the military, along with successful attempts to cast the U.S. South as the progenitor of racism, were likely the most powerful reasons for the shift in international opinion. The U.S. Government, formerly seen as antagonistic to Civil Rights, was now seen, despite any issues, as an ally of Civil Rights. The Department of Justice’s amicus briefing in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) is another example of ways the U.S. Government was able to provoke a shift in international public opinion. Sadly, many of these actions were cosmetic. In a disappointing chapter on the Little Rock Nine, Dudziak showed how the nuances of desegregation policy, namely in the pupil reassignment laws, was lost on an international audience, even though these laws generated significant controversy in the U.S.[7]

While other scholars similarly locate the Civil Rights struggle within a Cold War context, not all retain an exclusive focus on Civil Rights. Carol Anderson broadly titles her work Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. However, it is in essence, an institutional history of internecine struggles within the NAACP and its overlapping conflict with the State Department. She also traces the power of Southern Democrats to water down legislation. Anderson does not restrict herself to a single argument. Instead she develops a number of points that converge into the argument that an NAACP compromised by its proximity to Black and white leadership with ulterior motives and a Congress and presidency comprised by Southern Dixiecrats led to a compromised United Nations Declaration of Human Rights—strong in rhetoric and absent of enforcement powers.

Anderson, however, does not simply craft a declension narrative ending with a watered-down version of the UN Declaration of Human Rights—in lionizing W.E.B. Dubois and villainizing Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter White, she illustrates the complicated ways in which African Americans attempted to reform U.S. domestic policy against not-so-subtle opposition from within, whether white or Black. Roosevelt not only occupied a position on the Board of the NAACP, but she also served as Chair of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and “worked to ensure that neither individuals nor nongovernmental organizations would have any authority to petition the UN for redress of human rights violation.”[8] Walter White, who saw Roosevelt as an ally, gained fame as an undercover, passing white person, which led to information on multiple lynching cases. Anderson excoriated him in his later career, however, for writing flowery articles on the state of race relations, alienating DuBois, cozying up to Roosevelt, being wholly unprepared for diplomatic relations, for leaving his wife and marrying a white woman, and even promoting skin-whitening cream for passing as white.[9]

Anderson depicts Truman and Eisenhower as far weaker and more reluctant than Dudziak, showing how Congress had the votes to pass the Bricker Amendment, which would have ground to a halt the President’s ability to conduct international affairs. This is likely the issue on which governmental support for the Declaration of Human Rights was hollowed out to the satisfaction of Southern Democrats and the fertile ground on which Anderson called the “politics of symbolic equality—executive orders issued with little or no funding…powerless commissions created to once again study ‘the Negro problem’…and directives issues from on high with no enforcement mechanism and no serious repercussions for noncompliance.”[10] Anderson offers not consolation that the opportunities of World War II can be retrieved, but that we should be wary of the past in order to make the next opportunity—a  “Third Reconstruction”—one that will live up to its promises.[11]

The Cold War narratives of Dudziak and Anderson were transnational in scope and stretched the existing contours of the Long Civil Rights Movement within institutional frameworks of diplomacy. Newer scholarship has been more intentional in developing intersectional narratives within this movement. One book that does so beautifully is Erik S. McDuffie’s Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (2011). In six chapters, McDuffie develops the argument that “the Communist Left served as a principal site and viable alternative for black women radicals to agitate for black freedom and black women’s dignity outside of women’s clubs, the church, and civil rights and black nationalist groups.”[12] In doing so, McDuffie identifies middle-class and working class Black women who experienced the “triple oppression” of being Black, female, and oppressed along class lines as constituting, in Claudia Jones’ words, “the vanguard for transformative change.”[13] Crafting the narrative from the early 1900s and ending in the 70s, McDuffie boldly ruptures the temporal boundaries of an inscribed master narrative and even stresses the fabric of the most devoted students of the Long Civil Rights Movement. He fixes his gaze at women who achieved national prominence, such as Claudia Jones and Angela Davis, as carefully as he does the lives of revolutionary women who didn’t have such a large public persona.

Indeed, Black women held meetings in their homes, making use of the domains in which they thought they would be least likely to attract attention. Neither were they shy about communicating with leaders in the Communist Party to voice their dissent when issues affecting Black women inevitably surfaced. They held no such belief that “adherence to middle-class respectability could protect black working-class women,” which moved them further left as women’s groups tended to shift to the right.[14]

McDuffie not only develops the suffering Black women experienced, but his extensive personal interviews and research reveal how many Black left feminists traveled to the Soviet Union to receive training; their memoirs and published work reveal real changes that brought back transferrable organizing skills that helped inform generations of Black women activists.

McDuffie addresses directly the critics of the Long Civil Rights movement, distinguishing his work as one that does not lay a thick veneer of continuity over the entire Black Freedom Struggle but instead “highlights both the breaks and the continuities in the black freedom movement and black women’s struggles before and after the red scare by examining the personal and political costs of anti-Communism on black left feminists.”[15] He details how the McCarthy era truly destroyed the organization of Black left feminists, but in so doing primed the seeds for future actions. The ruptures he describes that were created in the McCarthy era did not completely stamp out Black left feminism, and his culminating chapter warmly regards Angela Davis crediting Charlene Mitchell, a Black left activist, with Ms. Davis’s introduction to Communism.

Three landmark books dot the landscape of a much larger terrain of the Long Civil Rights Movement, and in so doing they highlight the challenges of such a broad timeline and scope of action. Eric McDuffie’s work most clearly deals with the question of how to manage a long timeline by emphasizing the continuities and discontinuities in a study that looks at generations of women activists by decades within an intersectional framework. It is now up to scholars to retread the Long Civil Rights Movements with more appropriate tools for our times—how do we look at the role of Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter White, and W.E.B. Dubois within a gendered framework? What happens when we include people who contributed to the Black Freedom Struggle who often go unrecognized? McDuffie offers another methodological key—focusing on both those who are recognized along with those who appear to have had more ancillary roles.

As Eric Foner and associated contributors develop a newer historiography of African American History, undoubtedly it will include an analysis that pays closer attention to race, class, and gender, along with the latest rumblings from scholars on the Long Civil Rights Movement. Certainly the constant tension the field is under will continue to create new possibilities for insight.

[1] “That narrative chronicles a “short” civil rights movement beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and concluding with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

Gaines, Kevin. “African American History.” In American History Now, edited by Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011, 411.

[2] Gaines devotes two paragraphs to these major schools. Jacquelyn Hall’s article strongly critiques what she interprets as a conservative and parochial intellectual hegemony that flattens the Civil Rights Movement (and the backlash to it) into a regionally and temporally specific inquiry. Hall sees this leaving out a number of important developments, including a bridge between civil rights and workers’ right struggles, women activists, national versus Southern-only struggles, ways the CRM was used in the 70s to push social change, and the conservative turn beginning with the Reagan years as having strong antecedents. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1241. Cha-Jua and Lang’s incisive and important response thoroughly addresses a much narrower range of concerns, focusing on the blurring of dichotomies between North and South (Jeanne Theoharris), a blurring of the distinction between the Black Power Movement and Civil Rights Movements (Tim Tyson and Peniel Joseph), and looks at localized vs. national movements. In using “vampire” as metaphor, Cha-Jua and Lang emphasize the undead and wandering nature (versus blood-sucking) of the Black Freedom Struggle. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” The Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (2007): 265. Germane to the discussion of McDuffie is also Eric Arneson’s brief article critiquing scholars’ insistence of overstating the importance of the link between Black-left and union movements, taking the argument to reduction ad absurdum by questioning whether we shouldn’t begin with “recently enslaved Africans’ uprisings on board slave ships during the Middle Passage?” In doing so, Arneson invokes Vincent Harding, who does exactly that. Interestingly, none of the three scholars in this selection use Harding’s There is a River (1981) as a theoretical basis for arguing the Long Civil Rights Movement. Only one mention to Harding is found on page 157 in Dudziak, and it is for a different book and different premise. Eric Arneson, “Reconsidering the ‘Long Civil Rights Movement,’” Historically Speaking 10, no. 2 (2009): 32.

[3] Scholars similarly concern themselves with the extent of overlap between the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movements and, by extension, the latter’s periodization, as well.

[4] Transnational lenses are not particularly novel in slavery studies, as evidenced by works such as Eric Williams Slavery and Capitalism (1944), but they seem to gain more traction in the 1960s.

[5] Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” 1255, 1258; Cha-Jua and Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” 270, 272, 276.

[6] Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War and Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 190.

[7] Dudziak, 150.

[8] Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 133.

[9] Anderson, 125, 127, 149, 152, 157, 158.

[10] Anderson, 3.

[11] Anderson, 276.

[12] Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011): 3.

[13] McDuffie, 8.

[14] McDuffie, 51.

[15] McDuffie, 22.

Allen, Robert L. Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History. Anchor Books. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969.

Title: Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History

Author: Robert L. Allen

Year of Publication: 1990 [1969]

Thesis: Black people are a colonized people within the U.S.; Anger 

Time: 1930s-1960s

Geography: U.S. and some 

Organization:

Introduction:

- Rebellion or revolution? - this question faces the resistance

- "domestic colonialism" is what is happening - not a "race problem." - Race problem is assimilationist / domestic colonialism addresses the institutions that are structured to keep oppressed people oppressed.

- If no right of revolution, then you really don't have anything

- Larger contradictions = greater possibility for violence.

- Harold Cruse talked about domestic colonialism

- Malcom X saw the connection - the fight as international (didn't the CRM folks, too?)

Uses Ghana as example of neocolonialism - bloodless coup & also outside control of cocoa exports by controlling prices

Gov't & corporate entities co-opt black power by making black power & black capitalism synonymous

II - The Social Context of Black Power

- Ford Foundation & Black Power - attempt to infiltrate

- John Lewis - speech censored (24)

- MFDP loses because national democratic party sides with the racist Mississippi party

- Urban rebellions happen against people who Black people perceive are ripping them off (28)

- Robert Williams scares folks because armed Blacks meant no more monopoly on violence

- Williams saves a white couple & then gets accused of kidnapping. Flees

- Malcom X - Black Nationalism & self-determination come together (32)

- Malcom also links capitalism & racism together (32)

- & neocolonialism - he offers some form of socialism as a way out of this.

- Malcom suspects "other people" as Muslims apparently had limitations (39 - also see: http://www.ep.tc/realist/73/index.html)

- Ho Chi Minh visits U.S. and critiques racism against Black people

- Wow - Eisenhower - statement on p44 on reality of getting stuff from Vietnam

- Carmichael "torn between reformism and revolution" (46)

- White corporate America courts black elite to calm down the situation.

- Carmichael's definition of Black Power: "the coming together of black people to elect representatives and to force those representatives to speak to their needs." (50)

- Blacks should recognize themselves as an ethnic group - p.50 - said by MANY authors - see this page.

- Discusses the impossibility of investing in the Black community as a solution (52)

- CORE splits over separation or integration as a goal.

 - White establishment responds not to "Black Power" slogan but to continuing conditions of impoverishment (70)

- Ford Foundation acts as an experimental vanguard for later government intervention

- Bundy's "double assertion" (p78) of seemingly contradictory policies - see article: "The End of either/Or"

- Rustin's objection to Black militantism

- Bourgeois vs. poor African Americans - CORE & BPP highlight this split in the Black Power Movement (though doesn't the BPP also eventually come into the fold?)

- Even Black Power folks saw this as reform vs. redesign. Therefore search for a remedy. (p.50-ish)

- BP as a political definition

--Segregated schools in Harlem fight.

- ***BP Party demands actually is an attempt to spell out the meaning of Black Power

III - Black Nationalism

- Discusses the ideas of integration or separation. Emigration takes the stage in the early part of this chapter

- DuBois' limitation is his affinity for Marxism (preventing him from going full Black nationalist)

- Washington's alignment with powerful whites prevented his doing the same

- DuBois and Washington come out of the exodus based on lynching and disfranchisement; Garvey comes from the 1915-1919 out migration (100)

- WOW! Free Huey campaign influenced by lawyer on Scottsboro case

- Describes M/C Blacks as only turning to Black nationalism after their integrationist dreams have been shunned by white society (119-120)

- p125 is incredible - essentially that it makes sense that we look at cultural & religious movements as hopeful because there is no possibility of a revolution (when it happened, it was the 1930s and labor quickly got brought into supporting white supremacy

- Urban rebellion recuperates Black nationalism from the fantasy of cultural/religious ideas

IV - Black Power and Bourgeois Black Nationalism

- Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) brokers peace & foments self government

V. Corporate Imperialism vs. Black Liberation

VI. Black Radicals: Rhetoric and Reality

VII. Conclusion: Toward a Transitional Program

- DuBois - notes that economic incentives in a racial framework contribute to the persistence of racism. (275)

- Again DuBois - argues not for separatism, but for democracy within economic relations (275)

- Black people then needed their own capital (independent of white sources) (277)

- Points out DuBois doesn't get through the issue of how to capitalize such a venture (278)

- Harold Cruse joins this idea later, prescribing Black intellectuals/middle-class would play a role in this (Harlem) (278)

- Allen - major problem is corporate capitalism - what was necessary didn't exist then & doesn't exist now, though it doesn't mean Black people shouldn't strive for this (278)

- Allen points out BPP program as one good example (278)

- Issues with creating allies - even "white collar" jobs facing automation, so difficult to organize (282) & broad international wealth gap (283)

Bibliography

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

Colonialism

"direct and over-all subordinatio of one people, nation, or country to another with state power in the hands of the dominating power.

Black Power

- Carmichael's definition of Black Power: "the coming together of black people to elect representatives and to force those representatives to speak to their needs." (50)

Themes:

This work is aligned with Anibal Quijano & Grosfoguel on coloniality of power (which he defines as neoliberalism

Critiques:

Questions:

Would very poor people in the U.S. be described as colonized as well?

Would Robert Allen agree with the shift from BPP to shift into political system?

Would David Walker be a millenarian movement?

Who gets looted when looting happens? (see quote p134)

Why would it be so important for urban rebellions to be made to seem illogical? (then you don't have to listen to anyone or concede anything - not the need and not any people-generated solution)

Quotes:

"If, however, blacks started arming, even if only for purposes of self-defense, then this was another matter altogether. For an unjust social system can exist only by maintaining a monopoly on available force." (28)

"The fact that most of SNCC's staff come out of such a background makes it easier to comprehend and account for the ideological waverings were reflective of the insecurity and equivocation of the black middle class, which SNCC in a sense represented." (47)

“Reforms are ends in themselves when implemented by the poewr structure, but whne implemented by the ordinary working people of the black community, through an independent black political party, reforms can become one means to the creation of a revolutionary society. The critical qustion is who, or more specifically, what class controls the making of reforms, and for what purpose? (88)

"Pan-Africanism was anti-colonial, anti-imperialist in conception and purpose, and no mere cultural movement. DuBois and the African George Padmore are the acknowledged fathers of African nationalism, and DuBois could hardly be that without having been, in some measure, himself a black nationalist." (98)

"Does black nationalism exist only at certain historical junctures, or is it always there like the subterranean stresses which precede and earthquake?" (115)

"In addition to its historical origins, this white hostility also grows out of one of the hard facts of American economic life--that there is insufficient productive space in the American economy for twenty million black people. This is one reason why white workers today are among the worst bigots and racists. They know that their jobs, and consequently their economic security, are directly threatened by integration efforts. On the other hand, black workers cannot help but become increasingly conscious of the fact that the American economy is structured to preclude their full participation." (115)

Religious mysticism as natural outcome of inability to have a full-scale revolution, but also its importance in terms of "laying the basis"

"In this light the religious mysticism of the Black Mus­ lims and the fantastic dreams of other traditional black nationalists now become understandable. The Muslims prophesied the coming of an Apocalypse in which the white man would be destroyed and die black man en­ throned as ruler of the world. Other nationalists long for a return “home” to Africa, or hope fervently that America will see fit to grant black people a separate territory within the United States. The Western mind would label all of this as clearly irrational. But this obscures the contention that these nationalist sects are the prototypes which are laying the basis for a genuinely revolutionary movement." (125)

"There was no formal organization to the looting. It was a spontaneous outbreak. Black people were simply doing what they knew had to be done. Although there was no organization, the looting was not without logic. White-owned stores, the most visible mechanism of black exploitation, were the main targets of looters and arsonists. There were no attacks on "'soul brother" businesses. However, many of these would later be demolished by police and National Guardsmen." (134)

On what won't work:

"Black people cannot afford the social injustices of capitalism. They cannot afford a system which creates privileged classes within an already super exploited and underprivileged community. They cannot afford a system which organizes community resources and then distributes the resulting wealth in a hierarachical fashion, with those who need least getting most. Neither can black people afford some half-hearted compromise which would make the black community in general, and its educated classes in particular, subservient to the expansionist needs of corporate capitalism. Of course, capital must be accumulated to make possible the economic development of the black community, but this must be done in a way that precludes the enrichment of one class at the expense of those below it." (275)

On areas of class difference in Black communities:

"Of course, the party should seek also to encompass, in­ sofar as this is possible, the entire black population. Black intellectuals and members of the black middle class should be encouraged to participate—as individuals. However, because of the inherent ambivalence of these classes, they must not be allowed, as classes, to assume leadership of the party. As classes, intellectuals and petty bourgeois blacks are as likely to be reactionary as they are to be rev­olutionary, and for this reason they must always be some­ what suspect." (279)

On the need for white people to grow and change:

"Black liberation, however, will not come about solely through the activities of black people. Black America cannot be genuinely liberated until white America is transformed into a humanistic society free of exploitation and class division. The black and white worlds, although separate and distinct, are too closely intertwined—geo­ graphically, politically, and economically—for the social maladies of one not to affect the other. Both must change if either is to progress to new and liberating social forms. " (281)

Issues with separatism:

"But neither should black people deceive themselves into thinking that sim­ ple separation from oppressive white society will solve the problem. Blacks and whites here have lived in separate worlds for four centuries, but this was hardly an economic or political boon to black people. In the quest for black liberation, white society cannot be ignored or cast aside with a sigh of relief. It must be changed. Otherwise, the racism and exploitative social relations which characterize that society will defeat even the best efforts of black free­ dom fighters. This is one of the clearest lessons of the black experience in America." (281)

What white radicals can do:

"White radicals, too, are helpful, despite their small numbers, because they are what might be termed a “leading minority”: they are capable of initiating skirmishes, which then mobilize thou­ sands of non-radical whites. Witness the antiwar move­ ment, which started with a handful and grew to include hundreds of thousands." (282)

Notes:

Alkebulan, Paul. Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.

Title: Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party

Author: Paul Alkebulan

Year of Publication: 2007

Thesis:

Alkebulan's argument is tied into his periodization of the BPP into three major eras: 1966-1971, characterized by revolutionary violence; 1971-1974, in which community action (survival programs) is a response to both the violence meted out by the FBI and local police. 1974-1982, in which he chronicles the ideological split between Cleaver (East Coast, more internationally-based faction) and Newton (centered in the West Coast). The former embraced revolutionary violence while the latter sought to parlay gains into reform. While state violence resulted in jailings and assassinations, women were able to influence the party and gain positions of leadership. 

Time: 1966-1982

Geography: U.S. 

Organization:

1. Change in BPP Ideology - influence in various public spheres.
2. How and why community programs work.
3. Exploration of regional offices - CA, PNW, MW, South, Algiers, East Coast - focuses on development from local to international
4. Revolutionary violence & COINTELPRO. The double-edged sword of violence
5. Women’s roles
6. BP decline & legacy

Intro:

- Goals:
- appeal
- Goals of the group
- Achievements
- Obstacles
- Legacy

BPP periodization: 3 eras

1. 1966-1971

- promoted political autonomy
- Started community programs
- “Intercommunalism” - essentially like black world nationalism/marxism together
- Community service begins in 1969
- Community control of police & social services
- Free breakfast
- Liberation schools
- Free medical clinics
- *1967 - COINTELPRO begins
- Huey - jailed in 1967-1970 - shifts to community organizing
- party fractions

2. Survival programs - 1971-1974

- Oakland becomes central fight for political power - Elaine Brown & Bobby Seale lose bids for election.
- Simultaneously, Newton w/drugs and retribution within membership

3. 1974-1982

- 1977 - Newton tried for murder of prostitute / assassination attempt on witness.
- 1982 - newspaper closes.

Prologue:

- Epigraph - military power only way to represent power as a Black person. - Newton
- Battle for CR tied up in cold-war politics - don’t critique system too hard.
- Breakthroughs in BvBoard, CR act etc. didn’t result in improvement for many - especially urban A.
- DuBois - 2 camps - political/social integration & separatists (Garvey, for example / Sierra Leone)
- DuBois - also partially segregated economy etc. - self-sufficiency
- Malcom X - internal political economy develops DuBois
- Seale & Newton form BPP to stop police brutality, but also 10-pt program
- Shows how demands changed over time (especially in 1972)
- 1967 - Mulford Act (storming the Sacramento building)
- 1967 - police stop & police death - Free Huey campaign begins

- SNCC way more famous at the time (HR Brown & Carmichael)

CHAPTER 1 - The Heirs of Malcom

- Idea of dual identity or separate colony
- Self-help the only option for Blacks as integration fought by whites.
- Influences of Malcom
- #1 - Use of arms, but unclear as to self defense or larger political strategy
- #2 - “Renewal through struggle” Fanon has influence here

- **See Earl Ofari - concerned with economic and civil issues vs. fearless, organized underclass (ofari doesn’t see them as loyal) - redemption through revolutionary action is something both Fanon & Panthers see as a possibility (14)

- Panthers - see internal colony & national liberation struggle
- Paradox: reformist demands with guns (15)

- #3 - ALLIANCES WITH OTHER GROUPS
- Works with Young Lords, Young Patriots, etc.
- Develops into class struggle
- House/field a myth, but useful analogy
- BPP begins to include middle-upper-class Blacks in struggle (1971 - 18)
- Long time developing skill to work with other groups
- Disagreement over fascism & armed struggle -21
- *Look up RPCC (Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention)
- Revolutionary vs. reactionary intercommunalism (23)
- Urban rebellion not the beginning of revolution, as some though it might be -24
- Ultimately the 10-pt program is what attracted folks -26
- Brief Williams story (helps white family not get killed then charged with abduction - goes to Cuba)

Chapter 2 - Survival Pending Revolution

- BPP calculates they won't win an armed rebellion b/c all Black people would not fight/support it
- Suggests that survival programs arise as a need to deal with a PR problem - also come with purging members who aren't following a strict conduct code.
- FBI concerned about breakfast program "spreading hate" 32
- Police actually attacks caches of food
- Liberation schools - did these come out of the Southern schools?
- initially for ideology & AA hist, but then they realized they could leverage its academic potential (takes two years) (34)
- Medical training (basic) but also sickle cell anemia testing
- Political education was complicated as students had varying degrees of preparedness.
- Newton, Seale, Hilliard are the political bureau (40)

Community Action Programs
- "ensure the party's survival through a broad base of community support" (41)
- Argument: getting donations helped but didn't address root problem of production of goods (43)
- Strong critique of the program for not being either revolutionary or reformist & pointing out "easy" adjustments that could have been made (not seeing how this works out myself). (45)

CHAPTER 3 - Regional Development of the Black Panther Party
- Indicts agent provocateurs for convincing BPP members to commit crimes, resulting in arrests (this seems a little blamey - didn't Black people get arrested for nothing anyway?)
- Rank & file used welfare but had to go to the central org. to get permission - goal was not to use any gov't support, but sometimes ended up doing so to support budget. Otherwise newspaper sales & student financial aid.
- People's Party II in Houston - police snipe & kill Carl Hampton, then rioting, then reforms.
- Lots of police infiltration & entrapment, but at least one court case won on not having a jury of peers.
- Calls people's courts useless & police retribution obvious - 54
- Calls charges avoidable - 54
- Midwest Chapters - Hampton, B. Brown, B. Rush
- rainbow coalition (working w/young lords, etc.)
- BPP warns SDS & etc. that their actions are increasing police brutality - 55
- **leaders prefer organized crime to organized BP (any oppositional organizing)
- Assassination of Fred Hampton (short) - 56
- Detroit siege - 58 (Few members)
- Washington - Aaron Dixon - had to cool down on paramilitary in public
- Bunchy Carter - SoCal
- Police attack, public helps make sure folks get out safely
- Reference to BPP-US issue
- San Quentin - Jackson & Davis story
- Prisoners - divided by BPP into regular & political - not all prisoners had same ideas. NOI appealed to convicts, so did BPP (see San Quentin organized by Jackson).
- Political prisoner vs. Prisoner of war designation important
- NY / Eastern Chapters angered about having to sell papers & not able to organize the way they wanted (this happens after arrests force some underground & others to jail while West coast folks come out to lead).
- Murder trial with Bobby Seale (who left)
- Robert F. Williams - goes to Cuba & produces Radio Free Dixie and newspaper Crusadr (1961-ish)
- Cubans don't push Black power politics & force Black folk to keep it on the DL while they are there (they don't want their own racial uprising to happen).

CHAPTER 4 - Enemies of the People

- 1971 - the Split
- BPP now a reform party vs. revolutionary violence
- Assata shakur offers critiques - afraid of Newton & critical of suspensions of NY 21
- COINTELPRO fosters feud with US & BPP
- See footnote #40 - 7,402 informants developed between 1967-1972
- Rank & file - they do the work, therefore important to understand their motivations - 87

CHAPTER 5 - Women and the Black Panther Party

- Women's role increasing as part of survival program initiatives and jailed or disgraced male leadership
- Contrasts early Panther philosophy that emphasized protection of women and concurrently stepping back from leadership.
- Gender seen as complementary, not equal. (101)
- This way of thinking turns out to be impractical and problematic, which BPP finds out through experience (103)
- Erica Huggins noted as an influential first chapter leader in 1969 (105)
- Women in the BPP leverage their experience in jail as reasoning for expanded leadership (105)
- Birth control/contraceptives a sticky issue (considered important to raise children), along with "sequential polygamy" (114)

Type:

Methods: Chronological

Sources:

Dissertations, Government documents, artiles, newspaper and magazines, speeches, letters, autobiographies, political advertising, secondary literature on the BP movement. Interviews (Lu Hudson, Doug Miranda, Eugene Williams, Joe Robertson, Carol Rucker, Tarika Lewis, Belva Butcher, Kiilu Nyasha). Offers bibliographic essay at the end.

Historiography:
Keywords: Community action, women in the BPP, 

Themes: women, community action

Critiques:

Questions:

Alkebulan heavily attributes the decline of the party to the factionalism in leadership, but I also wonder if more attention had been placed on the FBI's role in exterminating BPP leadership/exacerbating tensions itself would his interpretation also change? We should further explore how women were able to acquire such a central role in both shifting internal politics and improving the outward image, yet what the demise of the BPP says about the portrayal of masculinity and the ability to fundraise and sustain a movement only when women recede to the background.

Quotes:

Notes: Does not include corporal punishment for discipline issues (48)

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010.

Title: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colordlindness

Author: Michelle Alexander

Year of Publication: 2012

Thesis:

Charts the changes, not in substance, but in rhetoric, that have contributed to the continuance of racialized slavery under a different name: mass incarceration. Race-neutral language hides the inequities in our criminal justice system and the emergence/continuance of a racial caste system in the U.S. Advocates moving to a humanistic model - end war on drugs - move to public health model; legalize drugs; eliminate stigma. Requires a society wide social movement.

Time: Slavery to present (especially histories of the erosion of various amendments).

Geography: U.S.

Organization:

Intro
About the Author
Foreword by Cornel West
Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction

- Describes Dr. Alexander's development from legal concentration on civil rights and moving to criminal justice, alongside an awakening about the true system (of Jim Crow) at work. Notes the impact of the manufactured drug war. 

1 The Rebirth of Caste
- CRM, Reagan's drug war
2 The Lockdown
- Erosion of amendments (4,14,15)
3 The Color of Justice
- Building racial disparities in policing, etc.
4 The Cruel Hand
- Post-prison issues - loss of employment, housing, benefits, any potential for survival for people labeled "felon."
5 The New Jim Crow
- Connects myth of the "absentee Black father" to mass incarceration.
6 The Fire This Time
- Call for grassroots movement (see in thesis)
Notes
Index

Type: Legal/Social

Methods:

Sources:

Court cases, newspapers, government publications (especially on drugs and crime), Human Rights Watch publications, secondary works in sociology, criminology, psychology, and history (books and articles), independent reports (Pew, American Bar Association, ACLU, etc.), 

Historiography:

Keywords: mass incarceration, Jim Crow

Themes:

Mass incarceration, asset forfeiture (doesn't require culpability), SC requires admission of racism (stats not admissable), "recidivism" (thinking about this - reconsider the barriers to survival/success outside)

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

The politics of responsibility:
“The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.” (215)

The purpose/nature of criminal justice:
“The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.” (188)

How we define "racism":
“When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners--and wished them well--nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation... Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.” (183)

The meaning of Blackness (now tied to criminality, not slavery):
“Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.” (197)

On the fallacy of a "post-racial" framework:
“Black success stories lend credence to the notion that anyone, no matter how poor or how black you may be, can make it to the top, if only you try hard enough. These stories “prove” that race is no longer relevant. Whereas black success stories undermined the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate.” (248)

On the meaning of King's statement, re: color:
“Martin Luther King Jr. called for us to be lovestruck with each other, not colorblind toward each other. To be lovestruck is to care, to have deep compassion, and to be concerned for each and every individual, including the poor and vulnerable.” (x - from Cornel West's foreword)

On the Politics of Respectability:
“Parents and schoolteachers counsel black children that, if they ever hope to escape this system and avoid prison time, they must be on their best behavior, raise their arms and spread their legs for the police without complaint, stay in failing schools, pull up their pants, and refuse all forms of illegal work and moneymaking activity, even if jobs in the legal economy are impossible to find. Girls are told not to have children until they are married to a "good" black man who can help provide for a family with a legal job. They are told to wait and wait for Mr. Right even if that means, in a jobless ghetto, never having children at all.” (215)

Notes:
"In my experience, people who have been incarcerated rarely have difficulty identifying the parallels between these systems of social control." (4) - This reminds me of a statement one of my mentors made long ago - something like, 'It's not those in control who will liberate anyone; rather, they will be liberated by those dispossessed.' It extends further to the idea that somehow in the Marxist sense, the dispossessed only have a mere notion of how they are being oppressed. This I'm curious about.

When I first read this book, I read it from "cover to cover," so to speak, leading up to and as I was on my way to an interview with my advisor, Dr. Leslie Alexander in Columbus, Ohio. I had read one of her books, and in an effort to make sure I was not totally unaware of what was going in the world, finished it just as I pulled up to our meeting. This has nothing to do with studying for comps, but I do remember posting quotes from it on Facebook and getting into at least one argument with an acquaintance of mine about it. 

Talk at UO - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH0EcN-Sln0

Something I missed before was how the "southern strategy" was responsible for pushing poor whites to the Republican party. Democrats go further right to recapture folks based on incarceration.

Drug war declared prior to the advent of crack cocaine, etc. (as in, nobody thought it was an issue). Interestingly, Iran-Contra/flooding of predominantly Black neighborhoods happens during Reagan's presidency.

Placement of prisons in largely white, rural areas creates economic dependency & ideology that reinforces these biases.

See review by Terrence Tucker for a decent chapter summary; review by David Stein for critiques on looking more broadly at labor history & connection between movements and incarceration. Most thorough attention seems to come from Frank Butler.

It seems like the association of criminality with blackness would have started even before the Civil War. Something I need to look more closely at.

Hine, Darlene Clark. “A Black Studies Manifesto: Characteristics of a Black Studies Mind.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 11–15.

In her 2014 article in The Black Scholar, Darlene Clark Hine establishes Black Studies as a discipline distinct in method. Hine wrote her article in apparent response to Naomi Schaefer Riley’s specious attack on Black Studies as a field. Riley’s dismissal of the field was based on her selection of a few dissertations as representative of the field and her interpretation of them based on their abstracts (i.e. she did not read the dissertations and rather proudly asserted it was not her job to do so). Rather than engage Schaefer’s Chronicle of Higher Education article point-by-point (as many of the commenters did quite well, exposing the article for its vapidness), Hine identified five critical aspects of what she termed, “The Black Studies Mind.” They are intersectionality (“race, class, gender, sexuality, and location (geographic, regions, nation, space”)) nonlinear thinking (not expecting linear progression, and sometimes significant retrogression), diasporic perspectives and comparative analysis (freedom struggles everywhere), oppression and resistance (the value of incremental progress and veiled forms of resistance), and solidarity (not succumbing to the encouragement to engage in fights over territory and scarce resources), all with an emphasis on the changing needs of students.

See:

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-most-persuasive-case-for-eliminating-black-studies-just-read-the-dissertations/46346

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/black-studies-part-2-a-response-to-critics/46401