Lecture 19 Notes

Black Power

A Cultural Definition

• Playwrights, novelists, songwriters, and artists all had their chance to forward a personalized vision of the militant protest sentiment.  In doing so, they used cultural forms as weapons in the struggle for liberation and provided a much-needed structural underpinning for the movement’s more widely trumpeted political and economic tendencies.
• The black power movement, as one historian has noted, was not exclusively cultural, but it was essentially cultural.
• One of the criticisms most frequently lobbied against the Civil Rights movement is that it evolved to the point where white participation was undesirable.  Many of the veterans of the violent encounters in the South became frustrated over America’s seeming concern when young white students were harmed and not so much concerned when blacks were harmed or killed.
• Black power was a revolt in and of culture that manifested itself in a variety of forms and intensities.  In the course of this revolt, the existence of a semi-permeable wall separating Euro- and Afro-American cultural expression was revealed.
• It was this long-standing and determined independent black cultural base that provided whatever cohesion the movement eventually managed to develop.  And it is precisely why, when the political and economic efforts faded from view, the Black Power movement continued.  It became part of the culture and consciousness.
• Black Power is best understood as a broad, adaptive, cultural term serving to connect and illuminate the differing ideological orientations of the movement’s supporters.  If we look at in that way, the movement isn’t as it appears to be:  a seemingly uncoordinated, rambling set of policy agendas which resulted in miniscule gains for black people.
• If we look at it from the perspective of culture, we can notice the language, folk culture, religion, and the literary and performing arts served to spread the militants’ philosophy much farther than did political leaflets.  They made what was ostensibly a political movement an important part of American culture.

Media Coverage

• National Review:  Confiscatory socialism, revolutionary in its essence, these "upstart preachers of black racism” were said to be blackmailing the country with threats of violence.
• Newsweek:  Under a a photo of a band of black marchers carrying a poster emblazoned with a snarling panther an the words, "Move on Over or We’ll Move on Over You."
• Bayard Rustin noted that all revolutionary social movements experienced peaks of activity and valleys of confusion.  He said, "we are in the valleys of confusion."
• Bobby Seale (co-founder of the Black Panthers):  "A lot of people ain’t going to know what’s happening.  But the brothers on the block, who the man’s been calling thugs and hoodlums for four hundred years are goin’ to say, 'Them some out of sight thugs an hoodlums up there!'  The brothers on the block going to say, 'Who is these thugs and hoodlums?  Well, they’ve been calling us niggers, thugs, and hoodlums for four hundred years, that ain’t going to hurt me.  I’m going to check out what these brothers is doing."
• Floyd McKissick of CORE complained that reporters were focusing too narrowly on the bravado and ignoring the larger issues:  "All you can see, all you can hear are two words:  black power.  You would like us to stand in the streets and change black power for your amusement."  The punishment for sounding rational and forwarding and in-depth critique of the black condition all too often was a total black out of news coverage.
• Very little attention was given to making the precise nature of the militants' grievances clear or evaluating the specific programs they developed.
• Since the initial expression of black power sentiment received immediate but shallow disjointed coverage from major news sources, popular understanding of the movement was distorted.  Black Power was trivialized.
• Its diversity of expression was interpreted as chaos and disorganization amidst a flurry of eager reporters.
• Two key assumptions that led the press’ analysis:  that the best, and perhaps only, way to conceptualize the movement is to treat it as part of a violent era’s radicalized politics; and that as an aberrant, directionless expression of rage, Black Power was incapable of making last contributions to black life.
• A more correct evaluation of the situation would be that when the long hot summers of urban rioting cooled and the media lost interest in the militants political sloganeering, they declared the movement dead through their silence.
• I do not deny that political speeches were an important ingredient to the black power movement.  I'm just emphasizing that it wasn’t only about politics or political speeches.

Other Reactions

• Social scientists studied the movement largely by taking polls.  Unfortunately, in their haste to give an academic face to the movement, many provided insufficient analysis.  Most did not link it to any historical context.  Instead of illuminating the psychological and sociological factors, which spurred the new militant persuasion, survey results often revealed only the approximate number of followers a particular movement leader could count on at a particular time.  A simple head count was not sufficient to really look into the meaning of black power.
• Many whites thought the apocalypse was at hand.  They saw black power as an attempt to overrun American society.
• Blacks wanted to communicate more than just the negative definition of black power.  The ostensibly revolutionary rhetoric forwarded by Black Power advocates was designed to rouse the slumbering black masses -- not to promote riots.  Stokely Carmichael said that the first priority was to "wake up" the people, to alert them to the danger they found themselves in.  Once aroused, he believed, the long-suffering masses might choose to engage in violent acts, but only in self-defense.  They had to develop the ability and will to retaliate to brutal attacks.  This would result in mutual armed defense, something like the Russians and Americans in the 80s.
• Blacks pointed out that they had been the victims of violence, not the promoters.  They had not lynched, murdered their children, bombed white churches, or manipulated the nation’s laws to maintain racial hegemony.  Whites, in their view, had no right to label them racists.

Three Views of Collective Behavior

• Assimilationists view the collective expression of grievances as a short-term strategy for ultimate integration into the mainstream.  Not deeply concerned with altering the basic values of society or initiating fundamental institutional changes, the assimillationist merely hopes, through collective action, to win greater participation in existing social institutions.
• Pluralists view society as being composed of various ethnic and interest groups, all of whom are competing with one another for goods and services.  This is fine as long as equal opportunities, privileges, and respect are accorded to all groups.  An amicable coexistence of diverse groups would, unlike assimilation, allow each subculture to remain relatively intact.  Granted equal access to power and continually strengthened and renews through their unique cultural roots, the groups would form a multicultural society in which each component supported and enriched all others.
• Nationalists, as  skeptics, are suspicious of claims that radically divergent groups can live together in peace on a long basis.  Eventually, they believe, one component of the social matrix comes to dominate and oppress the others, eradicating important subgroups mores in the process.  The result is assimilation by fiat and should be avoided.  To avert this end, nationalists seek to strengthen in-group values while holding those promoted by the larger society at arm’s length.  Withdrawing from the body politics as much as practicable, they hope to win and maintain sociocultural autonomy.
• In sum, advocates of all three ideological camps seek the good life, which includes the exercise of choice and power.

One Voice:  Gil Scott-Heron

• b. 1 April 1949, Chicago, Illinois, USA.  Raised in Jackson, Tennessee, by his grandmother, Scott-Heron moved to New York at the age of 13 and had published two novels (The Vulture and The Nigger Factory) plus a book of poems by the time he was 12.  His estranged father played football for Glasgow Celtic.
• Gil met musician Brian Jackson when both were students at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, and in 1972 they formed the Midnight Band to play their original blend of jazz, soul and prototype rap music.
• Small Talk At 125th And Lenox was mostly an album of poems (from his book of the same name), but later albums showed Scott-Heron developing into a skilled songwriter whose work was soon covered by other artists:  for example, his song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" was later recorded by Patti Labelle, and his "Home Is Where The Hatred Is" was covered by Esther Phillips.