US, however, did not take a purely cultural approach. Karenga’s highest-profile convert, LeRoi Jones (b. 1934), the former Beat poet and playwright and the founder in 1965 of the influential Black Arts Movement, raised the organization’s recognition dramatically and helped spread its message nationally and internationally. Karenga renamed Jones Imamu Amiri Baraka, and Baraka established his own headquarters in Newark, New Jersey. The organization engaged in interventions within the political system (Baraka campaigned tirelessly and effectively for the election of Kenneth Gibson as Newark’s first black mayor) and boasted its own paramilitary unit, the Simba Washiku (“Young Lions”). Together, Karenga and Baraka also mounted a campaign through the arts and philosophy both to redress the psychological and cultural effects of slavery and Jim Crow segregation and to underscore the weaknesses they perceived in the Marxist-Leninist approach of the Black Panthers.
But the Black Panthers scoffed at what they saw as the cultural nationalists’ romantic, idealized vision of Africa and black nationalism. Huey Newton famously accused US and Karenga of purveying “‘pork chop’ nationalism,” sneering that only bourgeois black people could afford to indulge in the wearing of dashikis and taking Swahili classes—frivolous luxuries in times that, the BPP said, called for armed self-defense and materialist analysis of the causes of black oppression and poverty.12
To some in a younger generation, the emergence of multiple and even contradictory models of black militancy was colorful, exhilarating, and inspiring. And in the heady years of revolution that defined the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. King, the fine points of ideology that distinguished the Panthers from US were often lost on the casual observer. Besides, for many people who would never join either faction, the groups’ militant stances against entrenched white racism and for radical social and economic change were what galvanized support and enthusiasm, rather than their various “Ten Point Programs” (the Panthers’), or “Nguzo Saba” or “Seven Principles” (Karenga’s). To some extent, this was “revolution as theatre,” as theatrical critic Robert Brustein called it, or “radical chic,” as the novelist Tom Wolfe derisively labeled it.
In August 1968, R & B legend James Brown (1933–2006) released the song “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” which captured that spirit of assertion and change, becoming an instant, massive hit and the highlight of Brown’s concerts, evolving into a call-and-response between him and his audience. It is quite telling that followers of both the Panthers and US found common ground through the song—and through the Afro hairstyle—suggesting the strong black nationalist foundations that both groups shared, despite their divergent views of the compatibility of capitalism with fundamental black progress.
A new aesthetic, the idea that “black is beautiful,” began to permeate the American cultural mainstream through art, music, and fashion. Because of the nature of the marketplace, radical chic quickly became co-opted by advertisers and manufacturers, both black and white, eager to cash in on a new trend. “The most visible signifier of soul was undoubtedly the Afro,” said historian Robin Kelley. “What passed as ‘authentic’ ghetto culture was as much a product of market forces and the commercial appropriation of urban styles as experience and individual creativity.”13
James Brown and the Famous Flames, circa 1964. Photograph. Michael Ochs Archives, Getty Images. Brown appeared at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre.
Perhaps the most lasting impact of the black culture wars of the late ’60s between the Panthers and the cultural nationalists was not mass membership for either group (the actual number of card-carrying members was quite small, in fact), but an acceptance of a radicalized political-cultural identity and the general embrace of and pride in black history and the arts and culture among the working classes and the educated middle classes. The important black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier (1894–1962) had lambasted an absence of this pride among the latter group in his classic critique, The Black Bourgeoisie, in 1957. But by the late ’60s and early ’70s, even middle-class black people were sporting modified Afros, peppering their discourse with words like brother and sister, and demonstrating a fluency in and comfort with all sorts of manifestations of black culture that previous generations might have not been as willing to declare, at least publicly. Even Berry Gordy’s Motown was releasing more radical and politically conscious music, such as Marvin Gaye’s (1939–1984) astonishingly popular and brilliant album, What’s Going On? A cultural revolution, if not a violent political upheaval as Huey Newton and Bobby Seale envisioned when they started the Panthers, was most certainly going on, and black culture and thought were driving it.
When Don Cornelius (1936–2012) started the television program Soul Train in 1971, he introduced black culture to a mainstream national audience on a scale like never before. Viewers at home were entranced by the music and dances, the dancers’ clothing and hairstyles, and even the house-made advertising for sponsors such as Johnson Products, an African American beauty company famous for hair products like Afro Sheen, the product of choice for those sporting Afros. By the mid-1970s, the show had entered some 100 markets. The DJ and drummer for the band the Roots, Questlove, born Ahmir Thompson in 1971, essentially grew up with the show, and he said that it had a dramatic impact on him as well as on the African American community as a whole. “The fact that the U.S. really got its first vicarious look at our culture [on Soul Train] was amazing,” he said. “But the true stroke of genius, in my opinion, was how Don managed to show us how important we were, which was not an easy task.”14
Soul Train was part of the changing landscape of American culture. Black people were not only seen on Soul Train; while they were not exactly the norm on TV, black actors and actresses had become highly visible. The fervent rise of radical black politics, in an example of unintended consequences, was pushing mainstream media to expand its appeal to a broader and more diverse audience. And those signs of cultural integration also fostered the image of a corporate structure that was sensitive, flexible, and responsive. Some members of the radical left would point to these developments in retrospect as elements of the co-opting of their movement for fundamental, dramatic, revolutionary change.
Cultural integration was happening in Hollywood as well, at least for a spell. In 1971, the filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles (b. 1932) made Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song for a half-million dollars. Black audiences, hungry for images of an African American “sticking it to the man,” turned out in droves, and it grossed $10 million, a phenomenal ratio of cost to profit. Huey Newton called it “the first truly revolutionary Black film.”15 Out of Sweetback’s success a new genre, aimed at a previously untapped audience, was born: “blaxploitation.” The NAACP and similar groups chastised the filmmakers for trafficking in racial stereotypes. The NAACP, however, didn’t speak for the nation’s taste in popular culture, and blaxploitation thrived.
All black art forms grew in popularity and significance. They have continued to grow throughout this historical period, to the extent that cultural forms such as rap and hip-hop, with their strong black-culture bases, have become the cultural expressions of choice for the last 30 years for America’s youth culture, whether black or white, Asian or Latino. With their increased visibility and acceptance in almost all aspects of the culture industry—with the important exception of ownership of the means of production, as the Panthers, quoting Marx, liked to say—African Americans in the crucial years of transition following Dr. King’s assassination and the end of the civil rights movement were “making black culture the template for the nation’s cultural identity.”16
THIS TREND WAS NOT LIMITED TO THE POPULAR DOMAIN. AS WE HAVE SEEN, ONE OF THE MOST DRAMATIC, AND PERHAPS IRONIC, aspects of the transition period following the collapse of the civil rights movement after Dr. King’s death and the rise and fall of radical black politics—a fall abetted by the repressive tactics of the FBI, it must be said—was the curious manner in which black history and culture entered the broader American cul
tural mainstream. And nowhere has this proven to be more important than in the academy, with the field of African American studies. Black studies departments were created in universities across the country starting in 1968, attesting to the growing belief that African American history and culture deserved recognition and respect, but most immediately as a response to student demands and political pressure.
But as black culture, both high and low, transformed the public culture of the United States, repressive forces were at work. By the winter of 1968, the FBI’s infamous director, J. Edgar Hoover, had declared the Black Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and systematically set out to destroy them through a secret program of intelligence gathering, propaganda, and disinformation tactics: COINTELPRO. This program went straight for the broader black radical political movement’s Achilles’ heel: the ideological disputes between its different organizations. And in January 1969, the simmering rivalry between the Panthers and US, until then essentially a war of words, took a violent turn.
When members of both groups attended a meeting to decide on the direction of UCLA’s new Afro-American Studies Program, a shoot-out ensued that left two Panthers dead and sent several members of US to jail or into exile. The politics within black culture—and it is a tradition of internecine wars of words—turned suddenly and utterly deadly, in a way that Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany or W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington never could have imagined. In their day, anti-black racists killed black people; black people did not kill each other, at least not over political differences. Nor had race-based name-calling—the “outing” of an opponent as an “Uncle Tom” or a supposed “race traitor”—ever become as viciously expressed in public, in the mainstream media, at any point in African American history as it did in this garrulous interregnum between the demise of the civil rights movement and the creation of its next manifestation, which in retrospect seems to have been primarily electoral.
THE DECADE FOLLOWING MALCOLM X’S DEATH WAS A PERIOD OF NOISY AND RHETORICALLY VIOLENT TRANSITION between two large and not easily defined sets of forces. On the one hand, the clearly articulated and popularly supported agendas of the civil rights movement, which through its various and sometimes competing faces nevertheless pursued a set of related strategies designed to dismantle the Jim Crow past, proved to be devastatingly effective in realizing its goals. On the other hand, perhaps because it was difficult to imagine that the legislative agenda set in motion by Charles Hamilton Houston ever would be as fully realized as it was by 1965, no one organization seemed to have articulated an analysis that foresaw the period after civil rights—the period in which economic relations would prove to be more obviously determining factors in the condition and treatment, the fate and fortunes, of the larger black community than solely race-based forms of oppression, such as the status of black people before the law.
To be sure, economic relationships had been fundamental to the condition of black people since slavery, which itself is a racialized economic relationship par excellence. But color prejudice, xenophobia, and other manifestations of anti-black racism, as we have seen throughout this book, had functioned to convince many activists that the problems afflicting the African American community historically were rooted in ethnic tension or racial prejudice rather than in structural, economic relationships. But once de jure segregation had been effectively dismantled through the battle plan designed by Charles Hamilton Houston and engineered by Thurgood Marshall, the status of the larger segment of black people in America had not been magically transformed. In fact, to some observers who had naïvely expected that the accumulated problems of American race relations would be solved through these legal procedures, it seemed that social conditions for the lower classes on the economic ladder had somehow become worse since the movement ended. In other words, the movement won its stated goals, but then had to stop and ask itself, Now what?
While the Panthers had sought to provide one answer to this question, and the various black cultural nationalist groups another, it is important to remember that these debates unfolded at the level of the radical elite. Average African Americans did not flock to join either the Black Panther Party or SNCC or US. Rather, black people—enabled by the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—began to register and vote, and they did so overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party, especially after Lyndon Johnson’s trouncing of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Johnson’s unprecedented success in marshaling civil rights legislation through the Congress and his appointment of many black people to prominent positions in government, especially Thurgood Marshall’s elevation as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, surely enabled him to shore up the “black vote.”
In retrospect, perhaps the most telling legacy of the radical political battles in the waning years of the ’60s would be in the subsequent involvement of an extraordinary number of black women and men in electoral politics, including many figures who had been actively involved in both civil rights and the more radical groups that sought to discredit the tactics of the civil rights movement, including three of Dr. King’s lieutenants, Jesse Jackson, Sr. (b. 1941), who would mount the first plausible black presidential bid in 1984, following the symbolic candidacy of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005) from New York in 1972; Andrew Young (b. 1932), who in 1972 would become, along with Barbara Jordan (1936–1996), the first black congressional representative elected from the South since 1898, and then in 1977 the first black U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Congressman John Lewis from Atlanta, elected in 1987. Also making their way into electoral politics were Marion Barry (b. 1936), elected twice as the mayor of the District of Columbia, first in 1979 and then again in 1995; Eleanor Holmes Norton (b. 1937), elected in 1991 as a nonvoting delegate from the nation’s capital as well; and the former Black Panther Bobby Rush (b. 1946), elected to Congress in 1993 to represent his district in Chicago.
And, in a classically American phenomenon, several leaders of the radical groups from the ’60s would, over the following decades, be named to tenured professorships at prominent universities, including US organizers Maulana Karenga and Amiri Baraka and the former Panthers Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis (b. 1944), perhaps the principal icon of “the Revolution” in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and Julian Bond (b. 1940), who served 20 years in both chambers of the Georgia Legislature before becoming chairman of the board of the NAACP and a professor at various universities. Bob Moses (b. 1935), the brilliant and charismatic head of SNCC and the architect (with Ella Baker) of its grassroots Freedom Summers and massive southern voter registration drives, would attempt to reform the educational opportunities afforded poor black youth through his boldly innovative Algebra Project. In other words, many of the younger activists from both left-wing and centrist black political organizations in the ’60s would over the next several decades turn to electoral politics and the academy in a continuing attempt to effect the social change not completed by the passage of civil rights laws.
But what of the simultaneous collapse of opportunity for such a wide swath of the lower working classes? This paradox prevails in the black community today and is a source of challenge and discord. Despite troubling evidence of destructive conflict within the radical movement at the time, a younger generation of African Americans saw a wealth of new avenues open to them, an unprecedented number of opportunities created by affirmative action programs. For example, the class of 1966 at Yale University graduated only six black students. Three years later, in 1969—the same year that the violent conflagration between the Panthers and US erupted on the campus of UCLA—96 African Americans entered the university as first-year students. Among them were Ben Carson (b. 1951), today the chief of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins University; Kurt Schmoke (b. 1949), elected the first black mayor of Baltimore in 1987; Sheila Jackson Lee (b. 1950), serving in Congress from Texas’s 18th Congressional District since 1995; and Anthony Davis (b. 1951)
, the opera and jazz composer and professor, as well as a legion of doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, and venture capitalists.
Yale and its sister research universities were ahead of the curve, but the effort to diversify institutions of higher education and workplaces soon became a national phenomenon, suggesting that the integration of elite American educational and political and financial institutions at their highest levels became the principal form that the politics of integration assumed after the end of the civil rights movement. By 1972, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) would develop guidelines for affirmative action that promised talented individuals a chance to make their mark on our world and become part of the emerging black middle class. Many of the students taking part in this wave of integration came from working-class families, and an education at an elite, historically white institution was their first step up the socio-economic ladder.
Although gaining access to elite schools was a groundbreaking achievement, these pioneers often saw themselves as continuing the civil rights revolution, albeit in a different form. They refused to be obsequious or overly grateful for the opportunity they had earned, and black students felt entitled to demand the respect that had been denied their elders for far too long. At Yale, for example, a massive strike shut down the school in mid-April 1970, a protest organized in solidarity with the Black Panther trial taking place in New Haven at the time. It was a thrilling moment, even though Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster—the master-mind behind the school’s early diversity initiative—would subsequently lose his job when he expressed doubt that a black revolutionary could get a fair trial in America.
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