[A shorter version of this story appeared in The Post and Courier on Sunday, September 16, 2012.]
BY ADAM PARKER
BY ADAM PARKER
The popular view of the Civil
Rights Movement holds that it began, more or less, in 1954, when Brown v. Board
outlawed segregation, and that it ended, more or less, in 1965, as the
enfranchisement campaigns in the south were winding down and the separatist
Black Power movement was gaining strength.
This common view suggests that
Black Power, with its militant rhetoric, racial animosity and emphasis on
self-sufficiency and black pride, harmed the cause of civil rights and ushered
in the era of urban violence.
But scholars today are
debunking this conception of history, arguing that Black Power did not spring
forth from the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s but, rather, served as
the foundation for a century’s worth of political and social agitation.
It was less an ideological
disruption than it was an energizing force undergirding what we might broadly
call the black freedom movement. It was not a radical anomaly that upset the
apple cart. Rather, it was the so-called civil rights movement, with its
philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience, that emerged mid-century as the
most pragmatic way (at the time) to win support from the American public and
affect systemic change, says Robert Chase, public historian at the College of
Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.
Because of its historical sweep
and continued relevance, Black Power in all its dimensions and expressions is
the topic of a two-day conference organized by the Avery Research Center, which
begins Friday. The conference is drawing historians from universities far and
wide who will discuss issues such as education, grassroots activism, black
nationalism, mass incarceration, public policy, the Orangeburg Massacre and its
legacy, pan-Africanism, film representations of Black Power, and the global
reach of the movement’s tenets and concepts.
The goal is to reframe Black
Power and demonstrate its sweeping reach, according to Chase, co-organizer of
the conference. For a direct line can be drawn between Booker T. Washington, who
advocated self-sufficiency and economic empowerment, and President Barack
Obama, who personifies the achievement of blacks in the U.S.
Early origins
When Stokely Carmichael, sick
and tired of being jailed repeatedly on trumped up charges, cried “Black
Power!” during the 1966 Meredith March, he was not signaling a strategic
departure; he was announcing a return to the fundamental ideas that had
energized the freedom movement since Reconstruction.
Indeed, he was hardly the first
to utter that phrase. Adam Clayton Powell, who represented Harlem in the U.S.
House, used it a month before the march in a speech at Howard University, and
referred to a version of Black Power in earlier writings. North Carolina NAACP
leader Robert Williams used the phrase during the 1950s. Novelist Richard
Wright published a book in 1954 titled “Black Power,” referring to Africa’s
anti-colonial efforts.
The 1950s saw the rise of the
Nation of Islam, a separatist movement informed by the teachings of Marcus
Garvey that beseeched blacks to wake up and unshackle themselves from the
influence and corruption of the “white devils.”
What Garvey, Powell, Malcolm X,
Carmichael and Obama each have said, in their own way, is: “We have to have a
political voice of our own” — disenfranchised black people certainly, but also
others with no one who genuinely represents their interests in the halls of
power, Chase said.
“So what we want the conference
to do is broaden the periodization of Black Power and rescue it from
negativity.”
There will be a lot to talk
about, said Avery Director Patricia Williams Lessane, and the public is invited
to attend the sessions.
Lessane, who grew up in Chicago
in the 1970s, was always interested in Black Power, she said. She had posters
with fists raised to the sky hanging in her room; she was a James Brown fan;
she was a believer in the phrase “Black is beautiful.” And she has been
fascinated by how Black Power had extended key ideas to non-blacks, widening
political discourse and helping to forge a more inclusive society.
Misunderstood
In the last four decades, Black
Power concepts have influenced American culture and politics in profound ways.
African Americans have made huge strides in business, entertainment, sports and
other fields. At the same time, some of the advances of the freedom movement
have been turned back, Chase and other scholars argue. The so-called war on
drugs has decimated poor urban centers and caused incarceration rates in the
U.S. to skyrocket. For every 1,000 blacks, 22 are in prison, most for
non-violent crimes, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. This compares to
a little under four whites per 1,000.
In her 2010 book, “The New Jim
Crow,” Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration statistics are
evidence of a form of “racialized social control” that has resulted in a caste
system in which blacks and other minorities fall victim to legalized
discrimination. They lose the right to vote, access to healthcare and many
employment opportunities.
Marian Wright Edelman,
president of the Children’s Defense Fund, took aim at the “cradle-to-prison
pipeline” in a 2010 speech at a church summit in Columbia. More money is spent
on incarceration than on education, she said, and too many nonviolent offenders
are caught in a criminal justice system that cripples their chances for
rehabilitation and a normal life.
“The clock has been turned back
on racial progress in America, and no one seems to notice,” Edelman said.
Chase, whose forthcoming book,
“Civil Rights on the Cell Block,” considers this problem, is keen to explore
the issue during the conference. A panel Friday afternoon is entitled “Black
Power, Mass Incarceration, and Confronting the ‘New Jim Crow.’” On Saturday
morning, a panel called “Criminalizing Race: Police Power and Black Power” will
be convened.
These are not the only efforts
during the conference to apply Black Power ideas to current events and
concerns. Views on the transnational applications of Black Power and its
influence on the arts also are on the agenda. And scholars are scheduled to
discuss the latest historiography which is not only broadening the understanding
of the movement but revealing its far-reaching impact.
“Black Power remains the most
misunderstood social movement of the postwar era,” writes Peniel E. Joseph in
the introduction to his 2010 book “Dark Days, Bright Nights.” “It was demonized
as the civil rights movement’s ‘evil twin’ and stereotyped as a politics of
rage practiced by gun-toting Black Panthers. Because of this, the movement’s
supple intellectual provocations, pragmatic local character, and domestic- and
foreign-policy critiques remain on the fringes of America’s memory of the
1960s.”
It found its most nuanced
expression at the neighborhood level, Joseph writes, where revolutionary
rhetoric blended with political pragmatism. Malcolm X is a prime example.
In Nation of Islam mosques and
in the streets of black neighborhoods, Malcolm X usually glorified Elijah
Muhammad, vilified the white oppressors and admonished complacent blacks to
stand up and claim what was rightfully theirs.
But merely parroting the party
line was impossible for Malcolm; he was too smart for that. Questions and
doubts began to seep into his thinking, and by the early 1960s, he was eager to
engage with other civil rights activists and struggled to reconcile
(unsuccessfully) his loyalty to the Nation with his interest in authentic Islam
and pragmatic political solutions, according to Manning Marable’s new
biography, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.”
Freedom = power
The fullest iteration of the
Black Power movement, which reached maturity in the late 1960s, had Southern
origins, noted Chase. Carmichael’s 1965-66 campaign for political
enfranchisement in Mississippi and Alabama led to the formation of the Lowndes
County Freedom Organization, which would become the Black Panther Party, as
well as the reinvigoration of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
The logic was simple: For
blacks to share power, they had to form black-led organizations that could
challenge white hegemony.
This idea appealed to Deborah
Wright, reference archivist at the Avery, and her colleague, curator Curtis
Franks.
Wright was born in York, S.C.,
in 1950 and grew up in Brooklyn. By the time she was a teenager, she was
attending anti-war rallies and civil rights protests. Black nationalism and its
message of self-determination captured her imagination. She read Elijah
Muhammad’s “Message to the Black Man.” She read about Garvey and considered the
leftist literature on socialism and capitalism.
While certain
anti-discriminatory laws has been introduced by the late 1960s, economic and
political injustice remained, and Booker T. Washington’s ideas of
self-sufficiency and racial consolidation were starting to make sense again,
she said.
Franks grew up the son of
tenant farmers in eastern North Carolina. He said he knew Black Power had the
potential to influence society when Dixiecrats such as Strom Thurmond and
Mendel Rivers bristled at the threat they perceived.
The difference between the
rural South and urban North could not have been more stark, he said. In the
South, blacks were poor but not always entirely dispossessed. Many owned a
little land, or knew others who did, and therefore enjoyed a degree of
autonomy. Up north, blacks were relegated to ghettos and forced to pay the
landlord rent. They were denied access to bank loans and quality education. No wonder
the fiery rhetoric of Malcolm X had such appeal.
Orangeburg
On Friday afternoon, the film
“Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre of 1968” will be screened — and
introduced by one of the filmmakers, Judy Richardson, a former activist in the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
It will be followed by a
plenary session featuring Cleveland Sellers, Herman Blake, Millicent Brown,
James Campbell and Osei Chandler.
Saturday morning, discussions
of Orangeburg continue with a roundtable that includes Richardson, Sellers,
Jack Shuler (author of the recently published book on Orangeburg called “Blood
and Bone”) and Jack Bass (co-author with Jack Nelson of the definitive account
of the S.C. State College shootings in February 1968).
It’s essential for conferences
like this one to raise the subject of the 1968 campus shootings, Chase said.
Other events such as the Newark and Detroit riots of 1967, and the
assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968, obscured the Orangeburg
event, which few people outside South Carolina know about.
“The Orangeburg story has been
lost,” Chase said, determined to correct the oversight.
Reach Adam
Parker at 937-5902. Follow him at www.facebook.com/aparkerwriter.
