A Special Issue of The Black Scholar
In the past 15 years, a careful but primarily historical re-evaluation of the Black Power movement in the United States has emerged. We have seen a proliferation of anthologies, case studies, and essays devoted to outlining its major trends and themes, with an emphasis on marking both its continuities and discontinuities with the Civil Rights Movement. Such scholarship joins recent work on earlier legacies of black radicalism, stretching back to the beginning of the 20th century and highlighting the relationship of African American activists to the labor movement, socialism and communism, feminisms, and anti-colonial struggles worldwide. This work has helped transform the conventional and flawed narrative that depicts the trajectory of black struggle following the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 as one of decline and outright failure. Indeed, the increasing frequency of riots, the armed nationalist militancy of groups like the Revolutionary Action Movement and the Black Panthers, and the seemingly separatist turn of organizations like SNCC were interpreted as forms of radicalism incompatible with mainstream paths to racial and social justice. These new studies have forced us to account for the multiple and often divergent ways in which calls for Black Power qua self-determination and autonomy were taken up in specific contexts and conjunctures, spanning the terrains of education, community control, urban housing, guerilla warfare, entrepreneurial endeavors, and more.
