Crucibles of Black Empowerment by Jeffrey Helgeson

Author:Jeffrey Helgeson [Helgeson, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 20th Century, State & Local, Midwest (IA; IL; IN; KS; MI; MN; MO; ND; NE; OH; SD; WI), Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9780226130729
Google: fYdFAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-04-24T02:43:14+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Sources of Black Nationalism from the 1950s to the 1970s

Black nationalism “springs from direct experience.”1 In this phrase the renowned black Chicago novelist and essayist Leon Forrest captured the nature of the diverse sources of black nationalism that gave Chicago’s Black Power era its complexity. Looking back on his youth on the South Side in the 1940s and 1950s, Forrest remembered that he and his fellow black Chicagoans increasingly turned to black nationalist politics because “the city wasn’t opening up fast enough.”2 As Forrest saw it, the rise of black nationalist politics had become part of the long-term process of creating a black political culture in a struggle to open up the city. Black Chicagoans, Forrest insisted, did not see themselves or their “ethos” as fully formed—there was no static racial identity or unchanging nationalist or integrationist political culture. Rather, black Chicagoans lived in the tensions between the desire for full access to the opportunities of the city as individuals and the fundamentally nationalist impulse to fight for the interests of the race. “We were a people in process, even in metamorphosis,” Forrest believed, and full development as individuals and as a community “depended upon the achievement of an open society . . . where our larger ambitions and dreams of freedom could flourish.” But this drive for desegregation coexisted with a “will to separateness” because black Chicagoans repeatedly saw the deep flaws in the structures of the city, especially machine-dominated politics and an economy in which the jobs that previous generations had used to rise were disappearing.3

Chicago’s newly energized black nationalism in the 1960s sprang from a new and diverse cohort of progressive local activists who began to gain traction in their effort to focus blame for the limited opportunities in black communities on structural racism, and on the city’s political machine in particular. These new activists and the institutions they used in creative ways made possible an extraordinary and broadly shared black nationalist response to direct experience of segregation, discrimination, and diminishing opportunity for working-class black residents. Because the experiences of such challenges were far from monolithic, they did not produce a unitary movement for black power. Instead, people from diverse ideological, political, and social backgrounds created dynamic collaborations. And those collaborations created a political culture in which movements for self-help and black empowerment were never wholly divorced from a pragmatic willingness to work across ideological and racial lines and to continue to make demands on the state in the cause of racial advancement.

Forrest knew firsthand of the flexibility and often unanticipated alliances that made it possible to strive as an individual and push for racial progress in 1960s Chicago. During the late twentieth century he became one of the most respected voices in modern literature, but in the 1960s the as-yet-undiscovered novelist was making ends meet by working as a bartender and reporter for a selection of neighborhood newspapers. In 1969, while editing the newsletter of The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), a grassroots community group, Forrest connected

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