Narratives of Citizenship and Race since Emancipation

Historical Content Information

The Black Power era of the 1960's and 70's had its inspiration in the rise of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, whose ideology bred many of the movement's most immediate leaders. Malcolm X's speeches are certainly the wellspring from which writer Amiri Baraka derived his motivation for the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and from which Stokely Carmichael developed a new direction for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

In this unit, really a course of study, the largest umbrella covering each individual domain is the task of understanding the more personal writing coming out of the ideas, and most importantly the methods of the period, in all the myriad forms and styles its individual people created them.

In keeping with the theme of "the personal is political," this unit is focused upon three specific domains of interest: political and ideological writing by leading political personalities, poetic writing by multiple competing poetic personalities, and political and organizational manifestos, developed out of a group process. The period seemed to be tumultuous, even chaotic, but out of its leaders came a distinct and original fusion of voices unified by their common experience of injustice at the hands of the American government, most directly by the police. Furthermore, they were unified by their demand for justice under the anthem "Black Power!"

According to Stokely Carmichael in "What We Want", "the concept of 'black power' is not a recent or isolated phenomenon: it has grown out of the ferment of agitation and activity by different people and organizations from many black communities over the years." (Marable & Mullings, p.421) If Stokely Carmichael had the respect to credit his forebears, Cynthia Griggs Fleming in "Black Women and Black Power" is more willing to give a lot of the credit to Carmichael himself. In a seminal moment during June 1966, she relates in the book Sisters in the Struggle "'This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested. I ain't going to jail no more...What we gonna start saying now,' he cried, 'is black power'. The crowd roared back, 'BLACK POWER.'" (Collier-Thomas & Franklin, p.198) Carmichael elaborated in his own writings that it was a call for black people "to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations, and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject the racist institutions and values of this society." (Toure & Hamilton, p.44)

Collaborating through their willingness to borrow from Malcolm X his belief that justice must come "by any means necessary," Elaine Brown, Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, David Hilliard, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Assata Shakur made up the tight band of most vocal leaders in the Black Panthers. On the Black Arts side of the movement, Maya Angelou (to some extent), Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), the elder stateswoman Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Mari Evans, Sonia Sanchez, and even some poetic work by Alice Walker, among others, contributed to a renaissance of writing during the period that continues to this day unabated. Four national organizations called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers commandeered the political scene. While maintaining separate identities, these individuals and organizations functioned by definition as a whole entity, coalescing into the Black Power Movement.

One of the challenges in writing about the Black Power era is that the movement was small enough that virtually every participant can be known, and yet large enough that a list takes up too much space. Suffice it to say, the historical background for this unit will be limited to a few specific anecdotes that make teaching high school students to write well about the experiences of a few others, as well as about their own experiences. If there is an activist component to this course of study it is in how we deal with issues of oppression and how we can learn to address them positively.

If the movement had its roots in the words of men like Stokely Carmichael and poet Amiri Baraka, it inspired many women to action as well. Women in the movement were poets as well as activists; many are remembered now more by their verse than their lives of resistance, so this unit is all about understanding the time period and context of their work in the Black Power era. In Kathleen Neal Cleaver's recollections from October 16, 1998, "someone would ask, 'What is the role of women in the Black Panther Party?' I disliked that question. I'd give a short answer: It's the same as men." (Zinn, p.477 top) Author Cynthia Griggs goes on to examine the subtleties of the question's implications for a larger vision of feminism: "The assumption held that being a part of a revolutionary movement was in conflict with what the questioner had been socialized to believe was appropriate conduct for a woman." (ibid, p.477) This concept of equal roles appears most dramatically in two poems of the period by Nikki Giovanni. One, called "The True Import of the Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro", where she asks of the reader "Nigger / Can you kill / Can you kill" (Clarke, p.60) suggests that all get on the movement's side, and a second, "Woman Poem", where she says

    Its [sic] having a job
    They won't let you work
    Or no work at all
    Castrating me
    Yes, it happens to women too.
    (Clarke, p.54)
  

Both men and women are today reevaluating the actual power dynamics of the movement on a personal level. In Sisters in the Struggle, author Cynthia Griggs summarizes her research by saying that she "was particularly frustrated by the males refusal to respect her ideas." (Griggs, p.208) At one point a woman speaker was trying to voice her opinions at a BPP meeting and was shouted down with cries of "Castrator!" (ibid, p.208)

Based upon Kathleen Cleaver's experience, it may come as no surprise that in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, much of the gender bias against women was equally represented. Specifically, Mumia Abu Jamal, made famous by his own role during the Black Power era and afterwards, said quite frankly "No women helped found the Philadelphia branch [of the Black Panthers] and none held office." (quoted in Countryman, p.258) Author and historian Matthew J. Countryman, whose recent book Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia indicates "in recent years, there has been a great deal of scholarly attention paid to gender practices and the role of women in the Black Power movement" articulates how "all the trends discussed in the literature on the gender politics of Black Power were evident in the Philadelphia movement." (ibid, p.258-9) Contraindicatively, it can also be said that gender politics appeared in much of the poetry of the time as well, even if in surprisingly positive ways, as evidenced by poet Amiri Baraka in "Beautiful Black Women":

    Help us. women. Where
    are you, women, where, and who, and where, and who, and will you help
    us, will you open your bodysouls, will you lift me up mother, will you
    let me help you, daughter, wife/lover, will you
    (Randall, p.214)
  

There was a "fear of contributing to the oppression of the black male" by women at the time, according to Angela Davis in "I Am a Revolutionary Black Woman." "As black women," she said "we must liberate ourselves and provide the impetus for the liberation of black men from this whole network of lies around the oppression of black women, which serve only to divide us, thus impeding the advance of our entire liberation struggle" (Marable & Mullings, p.462) She continues to be a leader in the ever-evolving movement toward justice, and I will hearken back to her example as one of the main "sheroes" of the time, because she continues to write, teach, and act to this day. Without her prose and speeches as a guide, both men and women's writing stemming from this time period would not have been as informed as it was. In many ways, leaders of the black power movement comprised an intellectual group of activists, a true writers community. For instance, in a poem by Sonia Sanchez called "life poem"

    Shall I die . . .
    A sweet/death
    A sweet/blk/death . . . . . . . .
    . . . . move in to
    killing hood. for
    my people.
    for my beautiful/
    blk/
    people.
  

Much of the language of the Black Power era did not come from scholarly work, and even less so from the Christian church and preaching tradition. Its poetry and the rhetoric of its leaders often used slang, and when written down in poetry by Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez in particular, used abbreviations, lack of capitals, and slang to signify its identification with the movement and the times. According to an iconic poem by Carolyn Rodgers, "Now Ain't That Love?"

    me. i am a bitch. hot. . .
    now I know that this
    whole scene is not
    cool, but it's real!
    so a-live-dig it! sometimes we be so close
    i can cop his pulse
    and think it's my heart that i
    hear
    in my ears. Uh. Now ain't that love?
    (Randall, p.260)
  

or "badman of the guestprofessor", by Ishmael Reed

    & by d way did you hear abt grammar?
    cut to ribbons in a photo finish by
    stevie wonder, a blindboy who dances
    on a heel. he just came out of d slang
    & broke it down before millions.
    it was bloody murder
    (Randall, 286)
  

Reinventing the ways we use language is nothing new to the art of poetry, or even to philosophical writing, but in this period new uses of language ran rampant, so much so that it became revolutionary.

In SNCC, Stokely Carmichael was one of these verbal, political, and revolutionary forces with which to be reckoned. His position was towards engaging all areas of society, shown through his own definition in "What We Want" (1966): "Where negroes lack a majority, black power means proper representation and sharing of control." (Marable & Mullings, p.421) If there is anything my students can learn most directly from SNCC it is in the element of open rebellion in their "Position Paper on Black Power". In it, he says "the whole myth of 'negro citizenship,' perpetuated by the white elite, has confused the thinking of radical and progressive blacks and whites in this country. The broad masses of black people react to American society as . . . that of the colonized toward the colonizer." (ibid, p.429) In fact, according to William L. Van Deburg in New Day in Babylon, "the movement was fueled by a psychological antidote to despair that spread a positive, empowering sense of pride throughout black America . . . and served to ease feelings of discouragement and personal failure." (Van Deburg, p.51) My own community in West Philadelphia has suffered so much despair and loss that we are in need of great healing.

In Philadelphia specifically, the need for empowerment translated into training under an organization led by Charyn Sutton and Fred Meely called the Philadelphia Freedom Organization (PFO). Sutton, a powerful Black Nationalist organizer who began as "a high school Ghandhian" (Countryman, p.210) interested in peaceful resistance, to "one believing in the necessity of revolutionary change." (ibid, p.213-14) According to Countryman, SNCC's enduring impact was upon the ability of local movements to enable power bases within the Philadelphia political process. Thanks to training by SNCC, young African Americans would later assume the very positions of power by which they had been oppressed. Since the departure of Police Chief and then Mayor Frank L. Rizzo, in my opinion a major reason for black people's anger here against the police, and an inspiration for the hostile mentality of many white and now even black policemen, women like Marian Tasco and Roxanne Jones have achieved higher offices. Rizzo is such a big topic in Philadelphia he deserves his own unit, let alone the many books featuring him as the protagonist, or in the eyes of Black Power leaders, the antagonist. During one campaign appearance of the time, Rizzo was quoted as saying "I'm going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot!" (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,915671,00.html

Artists and writers were quick to jump into the fray with the police as well. In one poem by James Emanuel called "Panther Man" he raises the call to action directly:

    Hey, Mister Panther!
    Get up
    And fight that cracker-back,
    Back m gainst the wall
    Of YOUR room
    Where YOU sleep
    With YOUR dreams
    And take down his goddam name
    Take down his goddam number
    Give him a motel napkin
    To hold the blood
    Where YOUR bullet
    Grabbed m,"
    (Randall, p.192)
  

Furthermore, writer Amiri Baraka, who may have been the impetus for the Black Arts Movement's name, wrote just as vehemently

    We are black magicians
    Black arts we make
    In black labs of the heart . . .
    Poems are bullshit unless they are
    teeth . . .
  

and he goes on to write

    We want poems like fists
    We want poems
    Like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
    Or dagger poems in the slimy bellies . . .
    We want a black poem. And a
    Black World.
    Let the world be a Black Poem
    And let All Black People Speak This Poem
    Silently
    Or Loud
    (Neal, p.31-2)
  

Baraka's demand gave James Brown the opportunity to add his famous anthemic cry to the period, "Sing it loud / I'm black and I'm proud!", which continues to be an inspirational song to this day.

While SNCC advocated separation from white support, the Black Panther Party, "a grassroots organization founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, grew from the needs of local African American and poor communities." (Huggins & LeBlanc-Ernest, p.161) According to the maxims of the leaders themselves in their "Ten Point Platform", they wanted (#10) "land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace" (Marable & Mullings, p.447) among nine other equally honorable requests. Of their leaders, female standouts included the subsequently imprisoned Assata Shakur (no relation to Tupac). According to Joy James in Framing the Panther, "Only Assata Shakur stands alone as an iconic figure" (Gore, Theoharis & Woodard, p. 140). Every other major woman figure was associated with a male partner, among them Angela Davis (George Jackson), Elaine Brown (Huey Newton), and Kathleen Cleaver (Eldridge). While Angela Davis was acquitted of her crime, Shakur was convicted in 1973 of shooting a police officer; after escaping from prison she hides in Cuba to this day, despite elaborate efforts to have her extradited or even kidnapped back to the US for trial (in particular by former Governor of New Jersey Christine Todd Whitman). In James's account, she is "not only a rebel but also a militarist" (James, p.145) and even an unrepentant revolutionary due to her connection with the underground Black Liberation Army (BLA). Nonetheless, she is a fascinating character, and merited an autobiography where she shares how despite interrogation and torture by the police, after having been shot, medical staff "gave me the poetry of our people, the tradition of our women, the relationship of human beings to nature and the search of human beings for freedom, for justice, for a world that isn't a brutal world." (Shakur, p. 242-3 in Gore, Theoharis, & Woodard, p.147) Shakur played a part in the imagination of woman poets during the Black Power era, and continues to be a feature of women's scholarship today. While the current era is intrigued by the charge that she was a government operative, there seems no substantive evidence to support this claim.

Many conspiracies abound surrounding the movement, even suggestions that one of the shooters at Malcolm X's assassination was an FBI agent. In "black power poem, by Ishmael Reed, he alludes to the ghosts of the past and a subtle aura of mystery around the arts of the period:

a spectre is haunting America – the spectre of hoodooism all the powes of older America have entered into a holy alli ance to exorcise this spectre . . . (Randall, p.288)

Following on Shakur, Angela Davis, another outspoken supporter of Black Power in America and throughout the world, had also been a prisoner. However, in addition to Shakur, "Angela Davis' relationship with prison theorist George Jackson . . . serves as markers promoting the image of black female militants as sexual and political associates, as beautiful consorts rather than political comrades. The American public as spectator would recognize in these personal if not political lives familiar heterosexual dramas of desire, betrayal, abandonment, and battery." (James in Gore, Theoharis, & Woodard, p. 140-1) In Angela Davis's own words, of which she had plenty of remarkable writing, she defended some women and spoke to the growing movement towards a feminist agenda. In one statement on behalf of Joanne Little (a victim of rape and a cause célèbre in the largely white women's movement as well), she expressed how "The oppression of women is a vital and integral component of a larger network of oppression . . . It is in the interest of the ruling class to cultivate the patriarchal domination of women." (Collier-Thomas & Franklin, p.274) In actuality, Davis's analysis of the Joanne Little case began with a philosophical statement that served as a foundation for the Black Power movement theory: "If justice is to prevail, there must be a struggle." (ibid., p.274) This reminds me of Frederick Douglass's famous aphorism, "There will be no progress without struggle" (paraphrased by Jonathan Holloway, in class discussion 7/2012).

The problem of male/female relationships in the Black Power movement directly concerned Angela Davis in her effort to speak for a new vision of womanhood, while at the same time, work in groups that included vulnerable male allies. "All the myths about black women surfaced", she said. "(We) were too domineering; we were trying to control everything . . . By playing such a leadership role in the organization, some of them insisted, we were aiding and abetting the enemy" (Davis in Collier-Thomas & Franklin, p.208). In her description of Davis's challenges, I can't ignore how Davis appears in personal accounts by others, as well as in video. Her hunger strike while imprisoned for murder (of which she was later acquitted) caused her to appear physically drained but remarkably committed to social justice. Her celebrity status as one of America's ten most wanted criminals, and her dramatic appearance (not the least of which her iconic natural hairdo) further helped her to promote the cause. According to Maya Angelou, who visited her in jail under the cover of being a legal advisor, asked what it was like in prison, she said plainly, "Girl, the joint is the joint" (Elliot, p.196-7). Prison is a reality all too well known in my own community of West Philadelphia, signifying the entire experience of bondage that African Americans have lived in perpetuity, as second class citizens in the United States of America. In the words of critic and poet Larry Neal, "It is this natural reaction to an alien sensibility that informs the cultural attitudes of the Black Arts and the Black Power movement. It is a profound ethical sense that makes a Black artist question a society in which art is one thing and the actions of men another. The Black Arts Movement believes that your ethics and your aesthetics are one. That the contradictions between ethics and aesthetics in western society is symptomatic of a dying culture." (Neal, p.30-1) For Neal and others, the personal becomes the political. There is no separation: they are one and the same.

Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown were yet two more activists in the struggle who as parents experienced firsthand the challenges of negotiating their personal lives during the struggle to change the world. While both have extensive stories to tell, these stories are best explored by students through the process of reading the memoirs they wrote, as with most of the historical record. Unfortunately, students will most likely find that Browne and Cleaver's experiences are of being discriminated against by men in and outside of the movement's organizations, despite their untiring service. In chapter nineteen of Howard Zinn's tome "A People's History of the United States", Cleaver relates that "When women suffered hostility, abuse, neglect, and assault-this was not something arising from the policies or structure of the Black Panther Party, something absent from the world - that's what's going on in the world." (Zinn, p.480)

Nonetheless, Cleaver and Brown have written quite eloquently about how there were opportunities for women to speak their minds. Brown, who became leader of the BPP at one point, said she thought it was important "to place the women who fought oppression as Black Panthers within the longer tradition of freedom fighters like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells-Barnett, who took an entirely oppressive situation and insisted that their race, their gender, and their humanity be respected at the same time." I am reminded of one small story of how eighteen year-old Ruby Doris Smith was helping other young people to "sit in" at a hospital in Atlanta that had separate entrances and services for black and white patients. Senior mover and shaker Julian Bond witnessed how when she entered the whites only area (to the shock and then anger of whites within) they were told by the white receptionist on duty that they were not welcome at that entrance and that they were "not sick anyway". The angry treatment led most students to step back and retreat, however Ruby Doris Smith walked forward to the receptionist's desk, "looked her in the eye, bent over and vomited all over the desk, straightened up and demanded to know, 'is that sick enough for you?'" (Collier-Thomas & Franklin, p.202) I believe it took a tremendous amount of courage to transform the disgust Ruby Doris Smith must have felt towards the receptionist and her racism into such a physical response; I believe young people today must transform their own emotional responses to life into direct action as well. Often young people have experienced a similar offense as she, but I also believe they will find their own unique challenges, whatever they are, and can learn from the examples of these great leaders to empower themselves to improve the world, because the personal is political. What they learn to do today will be written down and told to their descendents, just as I have told these stories to you.

I am reminded of the lyrical poem by Naomi Madgett, "Midway", as an example of how far black women, and black people in general, have come, yet also how far they have to go. It is not time to give up.

    I've come this far to freedom and I won't turn back.
    I'm climbing to the highway from my old dirt track.
    I'm coming and I'm going
    And I'm stretching and I'm growing
    And I'll reap what I've been sowing or my skin's not black . . .
    (Randall, p.197)