A Nation of Outsiders by Hale Grace Elizabeth;

Author:Hale, Grace Elizabeth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Black Power and White Romanticism

“Black Power for Black People,” SNCC staff ers began to declare out in the field as they tried to not only register voters but also win real political power for African Americans in the Alabama Black Belt in 1965 and 1966. “What do we want? Black Power! Black Power!” SNCC president Stokely Carmichael and young marchers chanted in June 1966 on their way across Mississippi. “We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community,” Huey Newton and Bobby Seale wrote in October 1966 in “What We Want, What We Believe,” the ten-point program and plan that helped launch the Black Panther Party. “We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.” In the mid-sixties, similar calls for black self-determination rang out across the nation, from the small towns and rural crossroads of the southern Black Belt to the urban ghettos of the Rust Belt. Part strategy, part rallying cry, and part symbol, Black Power emerged as the civil rights era’s flowering of the old separatist traditions of black nationalism. It drew upon the post–World War II activism of black veterans, the speeches and writings of recently assassinated Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, and the southern tradition of self-defense made visible in the work of North Carolina NAACP leader Robert F. Williams and the Louisiana-centered Deacons of Defense. It grew out of the civil rights organizing experience in Albany, Green-wood, and Selma and in Philadelphia, Oakland, and Detroit. It responded to the racism of white conservatives and the racism of white liberals. It provided an answer to the failure of “democratic” politics to represent all American citizens and the failures of what passed as “American culture” to offer nonracist images of black Americans. It joined the struggles of African Americans to the ongoing liberation movements of people of African descent around the globe, in Algeria and South Africa, for example, and in newly independent nations like Ghana.7

Black Power meant African American self-determination and separatism. But black self-determination meant more than political representation. It meant cultural representation. It meant not having to play either the old Uncle or Auntie role demanded by the segregationists or the new civil rights saint required by the liberals. It meant psychological freedom. Black Power just might provide an antidote to white middle-class romanticism. And white romanticism, in turn, played an essential role in producing the media attention that fed back into and shaped this particular moment in the history of black nationalism. African American activists wanted to put black “authenticity” to work to liberate African Americans. In part, they succeeded, but African Americans’ own embrace of the romance of the outsider did not escape the cultural codes of minstrelsy and worked, in turn, to generate new forms of white romanticism. SNCC’s attempt to free itself from white romanticism and the Black Panther Party’s emergence as the new “darling” of white radicals illustrated the limits of a New Left coalition dependent in part on the romance of the outsider.

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