Transition 115 by IU Press Journals

Author:IU Press Journals [Journals, IU Press]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Art & Architecture, General Art, Popular Culture, Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism
ISBN: 9780253018564
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2015-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

Mr. Carmichael. Oil painting. 36 × 48 in. ©2014 Angelo Hopson.

When we think about Black Power, Black Power predates the Meredith March in 1966. Thinking about Black Power in the 1950s, it’s certainly Malcolm X, it’s certainly what’s going on in Chicago and New York and Oakland and Los Angeles, all these different grassroots movements. What’s especially interesting is that Black Power activists and civil rights activists sometimes straddle both camps. People join multiple organizations. You can think about civil rights and Black Power as two different branches on the same historical family tree. So they are actually two separate social movements, but they intertwine, and they converge with each other, especially by the late 1960s, because Black Power becomes the dominant face and paradigm for black politics. So even if you’re a black conservative by the late 1960s, you’ve having to respond to Black Power and black radicalism in a way that you didn’t have to just ten years before.

Williams: John Hope Franklin and Abraham Eisenstadt write in the opening to their edition of the American History Series that every generation writes its own history, for it tends to see the past in the foreshortened perspective of its own experience. Why this book? Why now? What can Stokely Carmichael tell us about the contemporary moment in which we live? And did that factor into why you wanted to reclaim a historical Carmichael at this moment? How much did that factor into the timing of this book and all the things that are going on politically in the nation now?

When we think about the civil rights movement now, we tend to sanitize the era. We have a Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and a holiday. But people don’t want to talk about the violence, the racial oppression, the white supremacy, and the economic inequality that pervaded the era and the fact that most Americans were against civil rights.

Joseph: Well, as an historian, I don’t try to write things from a presentist perspective, which is what John Hope Franklin warns against there. But I think that certainly all the fiftieth anniversaries that have passed and are coming—of the March on Washington, Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act—have made us all think about this period more. One of the reasons why I believe it is very important to recover the historical Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture is that, when we think about the civil rights movement now, we tend to sanitize the era. We have a Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and a holiday. We know that Congressman John Lewis was formerly chairman of SNCC, and he obviously is an iconic figure. But people don’t want to talk about the violence, the racial oppression, the white supremacy, and the economic inequality that pervaded the era and the fact that most Americans were against civil rights. They were against human rights. They were against voting rights. And I think Stokely’s life reminds us of that in a way that is very difficult to dismiss, because he’s such a compelling, world-historic figure.

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