The recent explosion in US scholarship on the Black Power Movement provides the context for this close reading and textual analysis of Peniel Joseph’s latest book, Dark Days, Bright Nights: from Black Power to Barack Obama. Taking into account the context of the book’s appearance and the critical public debate surrounding it, this article unpacks Joseph’s discussion of Black Power, paying particular attention to his rendering of ‘self-determination’ and other key political ideologies. It asks what is at stake for Black radical memory when knowledge production on the Black Power Movement is governed by the dictates of the American marketplace and, more specifically, the publishing industry. In addition, it briefly reconnoitres the ways that Black radical (collective) memory can serve as a counterbalance to the erasures of marketplace history, and keep us attentive to the contemporary pertinence and unfinished business of the past. The article closes by highlighting some alternative routes taken by scholars concerned with the future of Black Power Studies.
Throughout this text I use the term ‘Africana Studies’ to refer to the discipline/field that is referred to by a host of titles, including Black Studies, African-American Studies, African Diaspora Studies and Africology.
2.
JosephP. (ed.), ‘Black power studies’, The Black Scholar (Vol. 31, nos 3–4, 2001); FranklinV. P. (ed.), ‘New black power studies: national, international and transnational perspectives’, The Journal of African American History (Vol. 92, no. 4, Fall 2007); JosephP. (ed.), ‘New Black Power history’, Souls: a critical journal of Black politics, culture and society (Vol. 9, no. 4, 2007); GuertyP. M. (ed.), ‘Black Power’, The Organization of American Historians Magazine of History (Vol. 22, no. 3, July2008).
3.
JosephP., ‘Black liberation without apology: reconceptualizing the Black Power movement’, The Black Scholar (Vol. 31, nos 3–4, 2007), pp. 2–19.
4.
JosephP. (ed.), The Black Power Movement: rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power era (New York, Routledge, 2006).
5.
JosephP., Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: a narrative history of Black Power in America (New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2006).
6.
C-Span BookTV ‘After Words with Peniel Joseph’ (11January2010), available at: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/291151-1 (accessed 19 July 2012); C-Span BookTV ‘Waiting til the midnight hour’ (27September2007), available at: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/201302-1 (accessed 19 July 2012); Joseph appeared on PBS ‘The Tavis Smiley Show’ on 15August2006.
7.
HallS., ‘Book review: Dark Days, Bright Nights: from Black Power to Barack Obama by Peniel Joseph’, Journal of American History (Vol. 97, no. 3, June2010), pp. 861–2.
8.
JosephP., Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour, op. cit, xvii; JosephP., ‘Foreword: reinterpreting the Black Power Movement’, OAH Magazine of History (July2008), p. 5; JosephP., Dark Days, Bright Nights: from Black Power to Barack Obama (New York, Basic Civitas Books, 2010), pp. 12–13.
9.
JosephP., The Black Power Movement, op. cit., p. 4; TysonT., ‘Robert F. Williams, “Black Power,” and the roots of the African American freedom struggle’, Journal of American History (Vol. 85, no. 2, 1998), pp. 540–70; TysonT., Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the roots of black power (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
10.
Joseph, The Black Power Movement, op. cit., p. 8.
11.
ScotD., Refashioning Futures: criticism after postcoloniality (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 7.
12.
HanchardM., ‘Black memory versus state memory: notes toward a method’, Small Axe: a Caribbean journal of criticism 26 (Vol. 12, no. 2, June2008), pp. 45–62. For more on critical exchange as a driving force in Africana Studies see: HallP., In the Vineyard: working in African American Studies (Knoxville, University of Tennessee, 1999); StewartJ., ‘Reaching for higher ground: toward an understanding of Black/Africana studies’, The Afrocentric Scholar (Vol. 1, no. 1, 1992), pp. 1–63.
13.
It should be noted that Jared Ball was an early frontrunner as the US Green Party’s 2008 presidential nominee. Ball eventually agreed to support Cynthia McKinney as the Party’s presidential candidate. More to the point, if a solid historical narrative is to be told about Black Power’s lingering influence on the 2008 presidential election, it cannot be told without discussing the Green Party and McKinney’s ten point platform, which was modelled after the Black Panther Party, and included calls for freedom, reparations, an end to police brutality, an end to the drug war and the release of all political prisoners.
PerkinsM., Autobiography as Activism: three Black women of the sixties (Jackson, University Press of Missouri, 2001), pp. xiii–xiv.
21.
Seth Rosenfeld’s Subversives: the FBI’s war on student radicals, and Reagan’s rise to power is a good example of just how contentious this history can be. It characterises Richard Aoki, the longtime Asian American activist and early member of the Black Panther Party as an FBI agent. The accusation, which was based on blacked-out FBI documents and an alleged corroboration by former FBI agent Burney Threadgill, created uproar among Aoki’s longtime allies and set off a firestorm of debate among activists and historians of the 1960s that has yet to be extinguished. RosenfeldS., Subversives: the FBI’s war on student radicals, and Reagan’s rise to power (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), pp. 418–46.
22.
TrouillotM., op. cit., p. 146.
23.
‘Publishing scorecards: election victory gives rise to Obama titles’, Book Publishing Report (Vol. 33, no. 12, December2008), p. 1.
24.
MarylesD., ‘Bestsellers ’08: it’s hard to get on the charts; it’s even harder to get traction’, Publishers Weekly (Vol. 256, no. 2, 12January2009).
25.
JonesR., What’s Wrong with Obamamania? Black America, Black leadership and the death of political imagination (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2008). In the spirit of full disclosure, I also campaigned for Barack Obama in California and Massachusetts. However, I never operated under the illusion that Obama represented a ‘culmination’ or ‘extension’ of Black Power’s radicalism or self-determination or racial empowerment, or the inevitable fulfilment of American democratic possibility or the ultimate goals of Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, this is where Joseph and I part ways.
The only chapter that was probably not written during the election was the third chapter on Stokely Carmichael, entitled ‘Stokely Carmichael and America in the 1960s’. It is an expanded version of an article with a slightly different title that the author published in Souls in 2007. See JosephP., ‘Revolution in Babylon: Stokely Carmichael and the American 1960s’, Souls: a critical journal of Black politics, culture and society (Vol. 9, no. 4, 2007), pp. 281–301.
28.
HendersonS., ‘Saturation: progress report on a theory of Black poetry’, Black World (Vol. 24, 1975), pp. 4–17.
29.
Joseph, Dark Days, Bright Nights, op. cit., pp. 48 and 39. For other uses of the phrase ‘community organizer’ see: pp. 38, 164, 172, 174 (three times), 183, 195, 207, 212, 215, 225. For other uses of the phrase ‘political maverick’ see: pp. 75, 97, 143. For ‘audacious’ and ‘audacity’, as in The Audacity of Hope, see: pp. 33, 49, 91, 116, 117, 205.
30.
Cha-JuaS. K.LangC., ‘The “long movement” as vampire’, The Journal of African American History (Vol. 92, no. 2, 2007), p. 273.
31.
Joseph, Dark Days, Bright Nights, op. cit., p. 102.
32.
MuhammadElijah, ‘What the Black Muslims believe. What the Black Muslims want’, Negro Digest (November1963), p. 5.
33.
Joseph, Dark Days, Bright Nights, op. cit., p. 102.
34.
BreitmanG. (ed.), Malcolm X Speaks: selected speeches and statements (New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1965), p. 197.
35.
Ibid, p. 199. For further discussion of Malcolm X’s emergent critique of capitalism see: SalesW.Jr., From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the organization of Afro-American unity (Boston, South End Press, 1994), pp. 85–7; BreitmanG., Last Year of Malcolm X: the evolution of a revolutionary (New York, Pathfinder Press, 1967), pp. 35–50; BarnesJ., ‘Revolution, internationalism, and socialism: the last year of Malcolm X’, New International: A Magazine of Marxist Politics and Theory14 (2008), pp. 74–82; MarableM., Malcolm X: a life of reinvention (New York, Viking, 2011), pp. 336–7.
36.
For a discussion of King, capitalism and the search for a radical alternative, see: BranchT., At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King years, 1965–1968 (New York, Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2006), pp. 555–6; ConeJ., Martin & Malcolm & America: a dream or a nightmare (Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 2004), pp. 280–7. Also see his Riverside Church speech, ‘A time to break silence’, in WashingtonJ. (ed.), I Have A Dream: writings and speeches that changed the world (San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1992), pp. 135–52. This speech was also republished in Freedomways, an important, and explicitly left, Black journal.
37.
CarmichaelS., ‘The pitfalls of liberalism’, in CarmichaelS., Stokely Speaks: from Black Power to pan-Africanism (Chicago, Lawrence Hill Books, 2007), pp. 165–74.
38.
JeffriesH. K., Bloody Lowndes: civil rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black belt (New York, New York University Press, 2009); CarmichaelS.HamiltonC., Black Power: the politics of liberation in America (New York, Random House, 1967); AllenR., Black Awakening in Capitalist America: an analytic history (New York, Anchor Press, 1969).
39.
Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, op. cit., p. 116.
40.
Carmichael originally made this statement at the 17 February 1968 Free Huey Rally/Birthday Benefit in Oakland, California. This quote can be clearly heard on both the audio recording and video footage of the event. However, this portion of the speech is significantly reworked into an analysis of race and class in Stokely Speaks. The revision reveals a person whose ideas are rapidly changing and evolving. Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, op. cit., pp. xxi, 121. Also see CarsonC., In Struggle: SNCC and the Black awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 282.
41.
DixonB., ‘Dr. Peniel Joseph: peoples historian or establishment courtier’, op. cit.; MonteiroA., ‘Black Power, Barack Obama and Peniel E. Joseph’s defense of American democracy’, op. cit.; ‘Defining Black Power’, op. cit.
42.
MonteiroA., ‘Black Power, Barack Obama and Peniel E. Joseph’s defense of American democracy’, op. cit.
43.
DixonB., ‘Dr. Peniel Joseph: peoples historian or establishment courtier’, op. cit.
44.
There is a rich body of scholarship on the notion of ‘radical democracy’ that is usually traced back to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Both authors were advocates of a post-Marxist theory that built upon the work of Gramsci. However, Joseph does not engage this literature at all. See: LaclauE.MouffeC., Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: towards a radical democratic politics (New York, Verso, 2001), p. 178.
45.
MonteiroA., op. cit.
46.
CruseH., Rebellion or Revolution? (New York, William Morrow and Company, 1968), p. 101.
47.
Here I draw from the work of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, in which he writes, ‘In contradistinction to Marx’s and Engels’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term “racial capitalism” to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure as a historical agency.’ RobinsonC., Black Marxism: the making of the Black radical tradition (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. xii–xiii, 2.
48.
BreitmanGeorge (ed.), Malcolm X Speaks, op. cit., p. 50.
49.
JosephP., Dark Days, Bright Nights, op. cit., p. 205.
50.
Ibid., p. 209.
51.
Ibid., p. 213.
52.
Ibid., p. 216.
53.
Malcolm X once argued, ‘It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can’t have capitalism without racism.’ BreitmanGeorge (ed.), Malcolm X Speaks, op. cit., p. 69.
54.
JosephP., Dark Days, Bright Nights, op. cit., p. 38.
55.
Ibid., p. 201.
56.
Ibid., p. 205.
57.
Ibid., p. 210.
58.
On PBS NewsHour, host Ray Suarez queried the author about where Obama fits in what he described as the ‘age-old debate’ over ‘whether Black Americans ask for their freedom, or whether they seize it and make it theirs’. Joseph replied, ‘I think he has a foot in both camps … being a junior senator from Illinois and saying you’re going to throw your hat in the ring and aggressively pursue the presidency is rooted in that other, really much more ambitious self-determination camp …’. Then on NPR Joseph stated, ‘Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael would have been impressed by Obama’s self-determination …’. ‘From “dark days” to “bright nights”: reexamining the civil rights era’, PBS NewsHour (18January2010), available at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/social_issues/jan-june10/mlk_01-18.html (accessed 20 July 2010); ‘Are we overlooking the Black Power behind Obama’, NPR All Things Considered (17January2010), available at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122569310 (accessed 20 July 2012).
59.
The ‘Basic Unity Program’ of Malcolm X’s Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU) provides a good example of how the notion of self-determination was used by Black Power activists. Under the heading ‘Self-determination’, the document reads: ‘We assert that we Afro-Americans have the right to direct and control our lives, our history, and our future rather than to have our destinies determined by American racists …’. The emphasis is placed on ‘Afro-Americans’ as a collective. See: ClarkS. (ed.), February 1965: the final speeches (Vancouver, Pathfinder Press, 1992).
60.
ShelbyT., We Who Are Dark: the philosophical foundations of Black solidarity (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 250.
61.
Ibid., p. 249.
62.
In his discussion of Black Power and Obama, Joseph misses the opportunity to explore a more challenging point raised by Michael Dawson in his latest book, Not In Our Lifetimes. The political scientist argues that a ‘new Black nationalism’ emerged among Black supporters of Obama. However, the key is that he roots this nationalism in Black supporters of Obama, and not the president, as Joseph does with his discussion of self-determination. DawsonM., Not In Our Lifetimes: the future of Black politics (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 70.
63.
Devon Fergus has argued that liberalism had a dramatic cooling effect on the Black Power Movement, essentially repositioning activists from radicals to liberal reformers. And though he uses Black Power and Black nationalism interchangeably throughout the text, he opens by explicitly making the point that Malcolm X ‘shared concerns about liberalism’s entente with Black Power … [H]e understood its effects … [and] warned contemporary black nationalists of the permuting powers of liberalism.’ My point is that, while Fergus has pushed scholars to rethink Black Power’s relationship to liberalism, he simultaneously positions Malcolm X as someone that stood outside, and critical, of this liberal trajectory. And in this regard, he and Joseph offer two completely different readings of one of Black Power’s most important figures. FergusD., Liberalism, Black Power and the Makings of American Politics, 1965–1980 (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2009), p. 1.
64.
HallJ. C., Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American culture and the American sixties (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 8.
65.
JosephP., ‘Reinterpreting the Black Power movement’, OAH Magazine of History (Vol. 22, no. 3, 2008), p. 4.
66.
For a discussion of the Black radical imagination see: KelleyR. D. G., Freedom Dreams: the Black radical imagination (Boston, Beacon Press, 2002). For a discussion of Black collective memory see: HanchardM., op. cit., pp. 45–62.
67.
I am using ‘activism’ here to refer only to radical and progressive forms of political activity. Nevertheless, I remain conscious of the fact that activism spans the political spectrum; meaning conservative Black activists also exist, though they are not considered in this paper.
68.
HanchardM., op. cit., p. 52.
69.
PooleR., ‘Memory, history and the claims of the past’, Memory Studies (Vol.1, no. 2, 2008), p. 160.
70.
DawsonM., Not In Our Lifetimes, op. cit., p. 67.
71.
JamesJ., Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s political prisoners write on life, liberation and rebellion (Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); MeyerM., Let Freedom Ring: a collection of documents from the movements to free US political prisoners (Oakland, PM Press, 2008).
‘Wanted By the FBI – act of terrorism-domestic terrorism; unlawful flight to avoid confinement-murder: Joanne Deborah Chesimard’, available at: http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/dt/joanne-deborah-chesimard/ (accessed 23 July 2012); AlexanderL. M.AustinC. J. ‘Africana studies and oral history: a critical assessment’, in DavidsonJ. R. (ed.), African American Studies (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 171–93; Matt Meyer, op. cit., pp. 726–38.
74.
ShakurA., Assata: an autobiography (Chicago, Lawrence Hill Books, 1987); DavisA.Angela Davis: an autobiography (New York, International Publishers, 1989); BrownE., A Taste of Power: a Black woman’s story (New York, Anchor Books, 1992).
75.
JamesJ., Shadowboxing: representations of Black feminist politics (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); PerkinsM., op. cit.; RickfordR., Betty Shabazz: surviving Malcolm X: a journey of strength from wife to widow to heroine (Naperville, Sourcebooks Inc, 2003); GoreD.TheoharisJ.WoodardK. (eds), Want To Start A Revolution? Radical women in the Black freedom struggle (New York, New York University Press, 2009); GreeneC., Our Separate Ways: women and the black freedom movement in Durham, North Carolina (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2005); WilliamsR. Y., The Politics of Public Housing: Black women’s struggles against urban inequality (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004); SpringerK., Living for the Revolution: Black feminist organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, Duke University Press, 2005); HolsaertF.NoonanM.RichardsonJ.., Hands on the Freedom Plow: personal accounts by women in SNCC (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2012).
76.
Also see: TrewW., Black For A Cause, Not Just Because: the case of the Oval 4 and the Black Power Movement in 1970s Britain (Derwent, Derwent Press, 2010); BuhleP., Tim Hector: a Caribbean radical’s story (Jackson, University of Mississippi, 2006); LewisR. C., Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought (Detroit, Wayne State, 1998).
77.
ChurchillW.WallJ. V., Agents of Repression: the FBI’s secret wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Cambridge, South End Press, 2002); ChurchillW.Vander WallJ., The COINTELPRO Papers: documents from the FBI’s secret wars against dissent in the United States (Cambridge, South End Press, 2002); O’ReillyK., Racial Matters: the FBI’s secret file on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York, Free Press, 1992); CarsonC., Malcolm X: the FBI file (New York, Carroll and Graf, 1992).
