The Black Power Movement and American Social Work by Joyce M. Bell

Author:Joyce M. Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

In the archived papers of the National Federation of Settlements, I found an undated document with no author attributed to it. It looks like a flyer or a leaflet someone would have handed out to people at a meeting. Across the top, in all caps, it shouts, “BULLETIN: THE FACT IS THAT NFS MUST CHANGE! THE RUMOR IS THAT THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF NFS WILL TENDER HER RESIGNATION IN BEHALF OF THE NEW DIRECTIONS CONCEPT!!”58 The author goes further: “And that she will encourage all the little old white ladies to resign from the board; that the Board will reflect the 80% Techni-Culture constituency of NFS; that the Executive Director’s ties with the 40’s and 50’s concept of NFS rendered her impotent to deal with the institutional racism of the 60’s; that we went through the 60’s with an all-white staff; that we entered the 60’s in a financial crises and the outlook for the 70’s is dim; that the fact is if NFS continues with white domination it will limit our opportunity for securing needed outside resources.”59

From where I sit, as a twenty-first century researcher, I am most struck by the frank way in which they talked about the racial issues at hand, and by the “directness” of all of the organizing that was going on within the NFS. Their style clearly reflects a black professional ethic of “telling it like it is,” as shaped and culled by the National Association of Black Social Workers and other emergent black professional associations during the 1960s and 1970s. But more than that, it opens a window into the uneasy transition to a different way of “doing race” in America—post-civil rights, but not quite.

Black social workers were demanding things like greater representation within their professional structures and calling for things like community control in black neighborhoods, but they were also demanding their right to speak out and make claims about the racial inequality they witnessed and experienced in their professional lives. This was met with some defensiveness among the white establishment against whom their challenges were being leveled. This interaction is central to the tumult of changing racial relationships and rules in the Black Power era, which Robert Smith refers to as an “intervening period” between the civil rights and post-civil rights eras.

Central to the context, of course, is the Black Power movement. The Techni-Culture Movement drew on Black Power frames, ideals, and identities in their activism. However, the specific power frame they used was translated into a simpler call for more black representation, which was further transformed into a relatively disingenuous call for multicultural representation. In the end, they certainly accomplished their goal of minority representation in the NFS. There was a black executive director, a black president, and a 62 percent representation of people of color on the board. And that was it. The “representation” frame didn’t stretch much further. In other words, once representation was achieved, the movement was over. But it wasn’t enough. These were symbolic victories, the

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