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Are We Overlooking The Black Power Behind Obama?

A year ago this week, Barack Obama stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to take the presidential oath of office.

That moment was described throughout the media as the climax of a journey that began 46 years earlier, at the other end of the National Mall, when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

But Peniel Joseph, a historian at Tufts University, says not enough attention has been paid to the other main line of succession in African-American leadership — the one that leads from Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and the black power movement.

"The connection between black power and Barack Obama doesn't fit a neat and simplistic national narrative about the success and evolution of the civil rights struggle," Joseph tells NPR's Guy Raz.

In his latest book, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, Joseph argues that the black nationalists have been too easily dismissed as a formative force.

"Black power is usually characterized as a movement of gun-toting militants who practice politics without portfolio," he says, "and drag down a more promising movement for social justice, the civil rights movement."

That image, Joseph says, forced President Obama to distance himself from those roots.

"The president and the popular media don't often look at the quieter side of black power, the pragmatic side," he says, pointing out that Malcolm X and Carmichael both started their public careers as community organizers — a path that Obama took 30 years later.

"Malcolm X is the quintessential, self-made African-American political activist," Joseph says.

Enlarge Courtesy Basic Books

"The president and the popular media don't often look at the quieter side of black power," author Peniel Joseph says.

After a troubled childhood and his father's death at the hands of a lynch mob, Malcolm X spent six years in prison. He emerged in 1952 as a member of the Nation of Islam and quickly grew into a national spokesman for the more militant wing of the civil rights movement.

Malcolm X was gunned down in 1965, a few years after leaving the Nation of Islam. A year later, Stokely Carmichael coined the term "black power," and the group of activists he created was rechristened the Black Panthers.

So how would those two leaders have viewed the country's first African-American president?

"They would have looked at this as a mixed blessing," Joseph says. "On the one hand, Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael would have been impressed by Obama's self-determination. … At the same time, both would have criticized the president for a reluctance to talk about racial matters and for a reluctance to really use the presidency as a bully pulpit" to address specific African-American issues.

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Reimagining The Black Power Movement

In an era before multiculturalism and diversity, the Black Power movement introduced a new political landscape that permanently altered black identity. The politics of Black Power scandalized race relations in the United States and transformed American democracy. The daring and provocative rhetoric of activists like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael unleashed passionate debates and sparked enduring controversy over the very meaning of black identity, American citizenship, and the prospect of a social, political, and cultural revolution. Malcolm and Carmichael questioned the legitimacy of democratic institutions whose doors were closed off to African Americans. In their lifetimes, both turned to community organizing as a vehicle for empowering black people—Malcolm on some of New York City’s toughest street corners and Carmichael in America’s Southern black-belt region. As their notoriety grew, both men publicly criticized presidential leadership in regard to domestic race relations, blasted America’s participation in Vietnam, and linked struggles against Jim Crow in the United States with anticolonial movements that were raging throughout the world. In doing so, both of these Black Power icons helped to expand the boundaries of American democracy. Black Power activists, no less than their more celebrated civil rights counterparts, contributed to postwar America’s transformed landscape. In order to understand the American journey from Black Power to Barack Obama’s election as the nation’s first black president, we must cast a spotlight on the movement’s at-times star-crossed relationship with democratic institutions. Although Obama’s election has sparked widespread nostalgia about America’s civil rights years, it has offered scant analysis of this watershed historical moment’s relationship to Black Power.

But today many still wonder: What exactly was Black Power? At its peak during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black Power touched every aspect of African American life in the United States. A wide range of the citizenship advocated a political program rooted in Black Power ideology, such as Black sharecroppers in Lowndes County, Alabama; urban militants in Harlem, New York; trade unionists in Detroit; Black Panthers in Oakland, California; and welfare and tenants’ rights activists in Baltimore. A broad range of students, intellectuals, poets, artists, and politicians followed suit, turning the term “Black Power” into a generational touchstone that evoked hope and anger, despair and determination. But, in time, this aspect of Black Power was forgotten.

Now, Black Power is most often remembered as the civil rights era’s ruthless twin. In most historical accounts of the 1960s, the civil rights movement represents the collective black consciousness of the postwar era. In these accounts, Black Power is then relegated as its evil doppelganger, having engaged in thoughtless acts of violence and rampaging sexism, and provoking a white backlash before it was finally brought to an end by its own self- destructive rage. The movement therefore emerges as the destructive coda of a hopeful era, a fever-dream filled with violent images and excessive rhetoric that ultimately undermined Martin Luther King Jr.’s prophetic vision of interracial democracy.

Black Power represents the manifestation of the brute force and physical rage of the African American underclass. Because it is seen as being devoid of intellectual power, uncomfortable with nuanced debate, and wracked by miseries both seen and unseen, the movement’s legacy is considered inconsequential at best and mindlessly destructive at its worst. Yet for a movement that is now reviled, Black Power’s impact spanned America’s local, regional, and national borders and beyond. It galvanized political activists in the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and much of the world. Regardless of this influence, much of Black Power’s history remains obscure and undocumented. Skewed memory too often serves as a substitute for actual history. Historians have only recently begun the long overdue process of rescuing the Black Power era, separating history from myth, fact from fiction. Black Power’s origins and geography, activists and ideology, as well as its relationship to the civil rights movement remain pivotal to understanding postwar America. Black Power activists not only operated in the civil rights movement’s long shadow, they at times also participated simultaneously in both arenas. In fact, America’s Black Power years (1954–1975) paralleled the golden age of modern civil rights activism, a period that witnessed the rise of iconic political leaders; triggered enduring debates over race, violence, war, and democracy; featured the publication of seminal intellectual works; and propelled the evolution of radical social movements that took place against a backdrop of epic historic events. Indeed, black militancy and moderation often fed one another, producing a combative ongoing dialogue between the two that provoked inspiration and anxiety as it also inspired both begrudging admiration as well as mutual recriminations.

Black Power offered a fresh approach to struggles for racial justice. It redefined national racial politics even as local activists used it as a template for regional struggles. These efforts spanned Northern metropolises, Midwestern cities, Southern towns, hamlets out West, to California’s eclectic political landscape. The movement’s scope broadly impacted world affairs, and Black Power activists found inspiration in Cuba, hope in Africa, support in Europe, and the promise of redemption in the larger Third World. Moreover, the movement’s call for social justice and robust self- determination appealed to a wide variety of multiracial and multiethnic groups, who patterned their own militancy after Black Power’s rhetorical and aesthetic flourishes. Black Power’s influence traversed oceans to impact struggles for racial justice and national liberation around the world.

Rethinking the contours of the Black Power era requires expanding the narrative of civil rights struggles in postwar American history. Conventional histories of the era concentrate on the years 1954 to 1965. These are the years that are bookended by the 1954 Brown Supreme Court decision and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and they are seen as encompassing the whole—rather than part—of a messy and complicated history. This perspective, one that is now enshrined as public memory of the era, envisions these years as the movement’s heroic period. For instance, it is during this period that cultural memory locates courageous civil rights workers who risked beatings, incarceration, and their lives to register blacks to vote. The truth is that both civil rights and Black Power contain a larger historical trajectory and a richer cast of characters than previously assumed. In order to understand the complexity of this historical progression, we must revisit that journey and cast of players.

Both civil rights and Black Power have immediate roots in the Great Depression and the Second World War. If World War II signaled the defeat of fascism and the decline of European colonial empires as it also extended new freedoms to far corners of the globe, it also imbued black U.S. veterans and ordinary citizens with a sense of hard-fought political entitlement. Black Americans were among the fiercest partisans in the efforts to harness the political energies unleashed during wartime so as to secure new rights at home as well as abroad.

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