The Nashville Way by Benjamin Houston Jane Dailey

Author:Benjamin Houston, Jane Dailey [Benjamin Houston, Jane Dailey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Politics, Civil Rights, History, Americas, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780820343280
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2012-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Black Power/White Power

Militancy in Late 1960s Nashville

During an early evening in April 1967, as Jefferson Street seethed with unrest, milling groups of African American students watched and occasionally joined in as some of their peers hurled contempt at helmeted riot squads. As police lights cast ominous flickering colors over the scene, a middle-aged African American leader pleaded for calm over a borrowed bullhorn, even as a female student tried to wrest the microphone away from him. Off to one side, a police captain contented himself with an ice cream cone as he watched the adults and students arguing vehemently with each other. In one exchange, an elated black student gloated that “we are going to take over North Nashville!” The bravado prompted an older black citizen to retort, “what the hell will you do with it?”1 Even as a new rhetoric was in the air, capturing imaginations across Nashville and indeed the nation, Black Power remained both evocative and elusive, resonating differently among diverse individuals and encompassing many gradations of belief about how to translate an ideal into reality.2

The above scene, and this chapter more generally, nominally centers on Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael’s visit to the city in April 1967. This emphasis on an outsider suggests that, although a small cadre of Nashville students advocated this new militancy, the charismatic leadership of key Black Power figures trickled down only slowly to influence the grassroots. Most immediately, the Carmichael episode represented a broader-scale version of police repression that had constituted the daily reality for black Nashvillians for decades. But the conflicts generated by Carmichael’s visit and the police response resonated in different ways for local activists, local politicos, white liberals, black students at predominantly white universities and those on black campuses, and black Nashvillians in general—each in their own way trying to move forward in a society only marginally desegregated. As the widening gaps between militant voices of both races washed away common ground for more moderate voices and past versions of interracial cooperation, social and political fragmentation in Nashville was becoming even more pronounced.

So if on an immediate level the story of Black Power’s impact on Nashville is rather muted, the wider context is far more revealing. Black Power was another articulation of blacks attempting to break from the racial past, this time by rejecting the experience of integration itself. In openly advocating social and political distance from whites, and turning it into an affirmation of black identity and independence, African Americans asserted themselves as independent from whites and the slanted racial etiquette that the movement had struggled to update. Despite different rhetoric, Black Power values, which in Nashville were nurtured especially in local black universities, meant to rally against the segregated system just as in 1960. This time, however, black elites were not won over by the spirit of the youngsters, as generational outlooks between African Americans were now in open and direct conflict. And Black Power rebelliousness was judged by whites on white terms only and dealt with, in the name of community integrity and safety, in the same way.

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