IN TRIBUTE TO AND APPRECIATION OF AN INTELLECTUAL GIANT AND A WORLD CLASS SCHOLAR, THEORIST, AND ACTIVIST DR. CEDRIC ROBINSON (1940-2016)

https://www.cwmorse.org/capitalism-marxism-and-the-black-radical-tradition-an-interview-with-cedric-robinson/

December 14, 2009

CAPITALISM, MARXISM AND THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: An Interview with CEDRIC ROBINSON

 

 

DR. CEDRIC J. ROBINSON,  1940-2016

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH VOL.2, ISSUE #1

DEC/2009-FEB/2010

It is the task of the radical critic to illuminate what is repressed and excluded by the basic mechanisms of a given social order. It is the task of the politically engaged radical critic to side with the excluded and repressed: to develop insights gained in confrontation with injustice, to nourish cultures of resistance, and to help define the means with which society can be rendered adequate to the full breadth of human potentialities.

Cedric Robinson has embraced these tasks. His work explores the relationship between our social order and its negations, particularly Marxism and the Black Radical Tradition. He has examined this relationship in historical, political, and philosophical terms with an orientation that is as comprehensive as it is anti-authoritarian.

I interviewed Robinson by e-mail in January 1999. ~ Chuck Morse

C. MORSE: In the conclusion of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition you write that "the evolution of Black radicalism has occurred while it has not been conscious of itself as a tradition." Your writings (especially Black Marxism and Black Movements in America) are attempts to introduce a level of self-consciousness to this tradition. Why is this important now and what do you hope this can offer to the development of Black radicalism and radical movements generally?

C. ROBINSON: My work is in a sense notational - reinscribing historical experience - for a political objective. Present generations must know, at the very least, what has been known in order to achieve greater clarification and effectiveness. Just as Thucydides believed that historical consciousness of a people in crisis provided the possibility of more virtuous action, more informed and rational choices, so do I.

At the time I was writing Black Marxism and Black Mass Movements I felt strongly that Black nationalism as it was beings pursued by spokespersons like Stokely Carmichael and Louis Farrakhan was a failed enterprise. As a peevish and perverse inversion of the political culture and racialism which had been used to justify the worst excesses of the exploitation and oppression of Black people, it served as a fictive radicalism, a surrogate mirage of the Black struggle. So both of these works, politically, were written to address the miscomprehensions and conceits of Black nationalism in historical terms: to examine how our ancestors responded to the seductions of this construction of the struggle and their visions of the future social order.

Black Marxism is not a chronological narrative of Black radicalism but a dialectical analysis of the development of racial capitalism, Marxism, and Black opposition. What is it about the Black Radical Tradition that requires this method of analysis?

There are several rationales for the employment of dialectical analysis to the Radical Tradition: they relate to the subject matter, to the audience, and to the method itself.

The Tradition's first stage of development is oppositional, i.e. the negation (resistance) of the negation (slavery); the response to the attempted cultural alienation and the effected physical, geographical and social alienation of slavery.

But slavery itself must be understood in a new way by readers familiar with the melodramatic and Eurocentric narrative of slavery as the capture, impressment, and exploitation of primitive peoples. I attempted to intrude upon the familiar construction of slavery as a superior culture overtaking an inferior culture. This narrative is hegemonic and must be ruptured.

In order to present this to the readers it is important to recognize the cultural history of the enslaved, but this is not easily done. The Black Radical Tradition is not a biological reflex, but a reconstitution of historical, cultural, and moral materials, a transcendence which both transfers and edits earlier knowledges and understandings among the several African peoples enslaved.

The dialectical method is well suited to these tasks.

In Black Marxism you point to a distinctively ‘African consciousness’ that informed the commitments, insights, and politics of Black radicals. What is this consciousness and what is its importance for Black radical politics?

I believe that the historical struggles in Africa and the New World culled some of the best virtues of their native cultures. One such virtue was democracy, the commitment to a social order in which no voice was greater than another (I wrote about some of the precedents for this regime in The Terms of Order).

This alternative to hierarchy also produced a critique of political order; and during the anti-slavery struggles, it achieved a rather sophisticated critique of the rule of law. And the core and tributaries of this moral philosophy were what Greek classicists term the transmutation of the soul. So, from the center of a world view in which the reiteration of names (an African convention in which the name of a recently deceased loved one is given to the next child born) reflected the conservatism and responsibilities of a community, the resolve to value our historical and immediate interdependence substantiates democracy.

This heritage gave Black Radicals many things. For example, it gave them an ability to retain the value of life, a fact that had many consequences, such as presenting restraints on the use of violence as a political instrument.

C.L.R. James

In analyzing the contributions made by W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright to the Black Radical Tradition you highlight DuBois’s emphasis on the peasants’ revolutionary role, James’s critique of the Leninist party model, and Wright’s emphasis on the cultural dimensions of revolutionary politics. These observations have been constitutive of the anarchist tradition and, to a lesser degree, libertarian socialism. Do they create a unique common ground upon which Black radicals and anti-authoritarians from other backgrounds can meet?

What these anti-authoritarian traditions have in common is that they confront and show the necessity of avoiding certain conceits which follow from the general theory of revolution in Marxism.

One conceit is class; another is determinancy; and another is the stage-construction of history. As Amilcar Cabral argued thirty years ago, class is not a world-historical phenomena enveloping the histories of all peoples; and culture and consciousness are as powerful in determining choice and behavior as the material reproduction of a society. Finally, the discrete stages of history which Marx borrowed from the Scottish Enlightenment of the 17th century hardly corresponds with any human history, even European’s.

However, I do not believe that it is necessary for a convergence of these traditions to take place. They are all assaults on the same social and political authority. We should remember, for example, that the Russian Revolution - despite its reconstruction as a consequence of the Leninist party - was the result of many different revolutions (revolutions for which Lenin or Trotsky had no responsibility or theoretical understanding). The Tsarist regime did not collapse under the weight of a single force.

Black and other radicals originate and articulate distinct histories which converge and diverge depending on historical circumstance: this was James's conception of the confluences of the Haitian slaves and the French peasantry, etc.; a historical correspondence which was broken by the time Frantz Fanon wrote of French colonialism, French workers, and the colonized subject. These histories of radicalism are neither determined nor dictated by the world-system, merely given local impulse.

Marx believed that a communist society could only emerge from the European working class. Black radicals and others excluded from world-historical significance by Marx confronted this claim and produced important insights into the nature of capitalist development and revolutionary agency. Are these insights developed by Black radicals distinct from those generated by similar confrontations among other peoples?

What is similar is the historical tendency to succumb to the seductions of nationalism on the premise that Marxism is essentially Eurocentric. It is as a response to the denial of historical agency within Marx that many non-western radicals have often thrown themselves into nationalist projects. (Although many recent movements, such as the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, are no longer concerned or consumed by that problem.)

But confrontations with Marx’s historical vision are also shaped by the social context in which they unfold. The Black Radical Tradition emerged in the belly of the beast, in a setting where physical and cultural problems were very immediate and the surveillance of Black radicals was omnipresent. Black radicals thus took slave society, colonial, and post-colonial society at its word and attempted to subvert in on this basis. Whereas Chinese Marxists, for example, saw capitalism and the West as an invasive force coming from without. The Chinese revolutionaries never conceded to the West its self-definition, and thus had a different relationship to Marx's historical vision.

The relationship between the West and Africa, mediated by the development of capitalism, is central to your discussion of Black radical politics. However, at a time when capitalist firms are increasingly globalized and various non-western economies are major factors of the world economy, the ‘West’ plays a more ambiguous role as a center of capitalism. How does this change the character of Black radical politics?

Changes in capitalism have produced changes in Black Radical politics and they also provide new opportunities. For instance, racial capitalism in England and the US exposes the instability of race categories. In England, where South Asians are Black as well as Africans and West Indians, this creates an opportunity for political alliances which were never anticipated by capitalism.

However, Marx and later Marxists were enthralled with the notion that capital would organize the world into a single order and then the proletariat would inherit that ordered world. I have never conceded the notion that the West has ordered the world in a rational whole: no coherent order, no singular whole, has ever been forged under the authority of capital and the unifying language of world systems theory simply does not capture the chaos of capitalism.

For the purposes of liberation, it is not necessary for Black radicalism to shadow or reiterate the world-system. There will be no proletarian armageddon with capitalism. Centralism is anathema to revolutionary change for the courage, resolve, and intelligence necessary to defeat oppression issues from different historical and cultural sites.

I believe it is necessary for the Black Radical Tradition to remain focused upon the cultural legacies that have provided for its strengths. The Tradition is most powerful when it draws on its own historical experiences while resisting the simplifications of Black nationalism. This protocol allows for the emergence and recognition of other radical traditions, drawing their own power from alternative historical experiences.

In Black Marxism you argue that racism is integral to the development of capitalism. However, given the emergence of various Asian economies (including ‘socialist’ China), it appears that capitalism has taken on a much more multi-cultural character. Has the relationship between race and capitalism changed in fundamental ways and, if so, what does this imply for a radical, anti-racist politics?

When we inspect the expansions of capital in Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. we discover racial protocols. These are encrusted from much earlier histories (for example, a thousand years of slavery in Korea).

What is important to remember is that capital never develops according to pure market exigencies or rational calculus. Whatever the organization of capitalism may be and whoever constitutes its particular agencies, capitalism has a specific culture. As Aristotle first revealed, capital accumulation is essentially irrational. And as was the case in his time, race, ethnicity, and gender were powerful procedures for the conduct of accumulation and value appropriation.

You describe a dialectic between Black radicalism and the larger social order in which Black radicalism gradually evolves, understanding itself more deeply and articulating a more incisive, revolutionary critique. However, revolutionary, anti-capitalist commitments are far less prevalent in Black politics and theory today than a decade or two ago. What does this indicate about the evolution of the Tradition as a whole?

I do not believe that the Black Radical Tradition is at a low point. For example, there are vanguard movements in the Tradition: think of the reception of Nelson Mandela in the US after his release from prison. He became a marker for the advance of the Black Radical Tradition as a whole in the minds of many Black Americans. On the other hand, local conditions in places like the US have not produced such world historical individuals in recent times.

But the world is dynamic, constantly changing, constantly creating new possibilities (see, for instance, how far revolutionary agendas were pursued by youth gangs in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in the post-Civil Rights era). All over the US, Black Radicalism is manifesting itself in urban churches, in theory (i.e. doctrine) and practice (i.e. volunteerism). What will be the next phase, when the rule of law becomes transparently farcical, the Christian right achieves its fascist perfection, and the State acquires a predominantly carceral posture towards the majority of Blacks, Latinos, etc.?

The conflicted relationship between intellectuals and popular movements is an important theme in your work. Does the emergence of high-profile Black Studies departments (at Harvard, example) and the popularity of writers such as Cornell West, bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates Jr., etc. mark a new stage in the relationship between Black intellectuals and movements?

Hegemonic control of Black Studies is as important to capital as any other field of knowledge production. The selective breeding of Black intellectuals in this country is even older than the appearance of the philanthropic Black colleges of the late 19th century; and the necessity of dominating Black knowledge production finds a template in the Gunnar Myrdahl enterprise in the years of World War II.

However, Black Studies is revolutionary in its political and historical origins and intellectual impulses. To paraphrase C.L.R. James, who insisted that Black Studies was the study of Western Civilization, Black Studies is a critique of Western Civilization. This is all too apparent in one of the first articulations of radicalism by David Walker in 1829. Modern slavery, Walker demonstrated, was not like Ancient Mediterranean slavery; modern Christianity could not oblige a Just God; education had to have a revolutionary emancipation as its central virtue, etc. So at those sites of its inception, Black Studies was seen as preparatory to re-articulating justice and the Good.

The Tradition is by now well prepared to defend itself against attempts to colonize it: after all Black revolutionists were working with George Washington Carver at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee preserve. Imagine the contradictions!

As a new and controversial development in the analysis of ethnicity, what role do you think ‘Whiteness Studies’ can play in fighting white supremacy and what are its limitations?

Whiteness Studies deconstruct and decenter whiteness, showing that it is an artifice, that it has a history and one that does not go back very far. The best of the work (like George Lipsitz's The Possessive Investment in Whiteness) is an extension of radical Black Studies.

Although it is currently in fairly progressive hands, problems could emerge. For example, it could be used to challenge the very existence of Black Studies. It could lend itself to arguments such as: "we’ve gone too far: we’ve had Black Studies, now we have White Studies, what we need to do is prosecute a universal American identity". Or, in the same vein: "if you can’t give us resources for White Studies then the you shouldn’t provide resources for Black Studies." These are possibilities.

The American University integrates people into the capitalist social order and is also the primary setting in which radical social criticism is (currently) developed. How has academia helped or hindered your work as radical social critic?

The academy is indifferent if not hostile to Black Studies. Since WWII the University has become very dependent upon state support and Black Studies has remained outside the pale of this support. For example, the most well funded research on Black youth are essentially police studies. Racism simply remains a powerful break on Black Studies and research in the academy.

The hostility and indifference to Black Studies makes collaborative work very difficult. So, too often, serious work is done in the singularity of private labor. This has presented difficulties for me and many others working in the field. This obstacle frustrates not only individual efforts but also the development of Black Studies as such.

Given the distinctions you have made between Marxism and the Black Radical Tradition, how do you define your own political commitments?

What name do you give to the nature of the Universe? There are some realms in which names, nomination, is premature. My only loyalties are to the morally just world; and my happiest and most stunning opportunity for raising hell with corruption and deceit are with other Black people. I suppose that makes me a part, an expression, of Black Radicalism.

Please tell me about your forthcoming book, The Anthropology of Marxism: A Study of Western Socialism?

This work attempts to extricate the history and origins of socialism in the West from Marxism. This requires moving beyond the chronological constraints imposed by Marx (socialism can only follow capitalism, etc.) and suggesting a more open epistemology of socialism. In a sense I revisit familiar sites (Hegel, Kant, Engels, etc.) only to mark forgotten and suppressed work (e.g. Hegel's study of British political economy) in order to proceed to the unexpected richness of the history of socialist visions and pursuits.

Please tell me about future projects you have planned.

My next project concerns the American racial imagination formed from and cast through American films. This is another attempt to get at the social imagination, particularly how it relates to the changing construction of Blackness.

As someone fascinated with culture and its potentialities, interrogating film is another means of determining how popular cultures contest with mass cultures; the latter being stories about the world and human experience which are manufactured for the masses by elites. Aristotle once wrote that the many are wiser than the few. In the best sense of this observation, the conflict between social history and popular cultures, on the one hand, and induced memories of the past on the other may be the most important site of analysis in a civilization whose technicians can now design virtual reality. Under these changed circumstances it becomes even more imperative that we can distinguish authentic (historical) radicalism from imagined radicalism.

**Cedric Robinson - Interviewed by Chuck Morse for Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Vol.3, No.1, Spring 1999**

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK16BExR1KU

 

Radical Thought: Cedric J. Robinson

University of California Television (UCTV)

IMPORTANT NEW BOOK:

Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America
by Joy-Ann Reid
Mariner Books, 2024

[Publication date:  February 6, 2024]

“Medgar Evers deserves a place alongside Malcolm X and Dr. King in our historical memory. Evers, with Myrlie as his partner in activism and in life, was doing civil rights work in the single most hostile and dangerous environment in America.”—from Medgar and Myrlie

By MSNBC's Joy-Ann Reid, a triumphant work of biography that repositions slain Civil Rights pioneer Medgar Evers at the heart of America's struggle for freedom, and celebrates Myrlie Evers's extraordinary activism after her husband's assassination in the driveway of their Mississippi home.

"I love this book. The empathic, brilliant, and wise Joy Reid has brought us the poignant, fascinating inside story of Medgar and Myrlie Evers, transformational leaders who confronted pure evil and risked their lives to ensure that all American children might grow up in a United States that was more just. As Reid shows us, that painful task is now more urgent than ever.” — Michael Beschloss

Myrlie Louise Beasley met Medgar Evers on her first day of college. They fell in love at first sight, married just one year later, and Myrlie left school to focus on their growing family.

Medgar became the field secretary for the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, charged with beating back the most intractable and violent resistance to black voting rights in the country. Myrlie served as Medgar’s secretary and confidant, working hand in hand with him as they struggled against public accommodations and school segregation, lynching, violence, and sheer despair within their state’s “black belt.” They fought to desegregate the intractable University of Mississippi, organized picket lines and boycotts, despite repeated terroristic threats, including the 1962 firebombing of their home, where they lived with their three young children.

On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers became the highest profile victim of Klan-related assassination of a black civil rights leader at that time; gunned down in the couple’s driveway in Jackson. In the wake of his tragic death, Myrlie carried on their civil rights legacy; writing a book about Medgar’s fight, trying to win a congressional seat, and becoming a leader of the NAACP in her own right.

In this groundbreaking and thrilling account of two heroes of the civil rights movement, Joy-Ann Reid uses Medgar and Myrlie’s relationship as a lens through which to explore the on-the-ground work that went into winning basic rights for Black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today.

The Fundamental Crisis and Foundational Contradiction Facing the United States During the Upcoming Presidential Election Year of 2024: Fascism guided, informed, and enabled by the Doctrines and Practices of White Supremacy and Global Capitalism--PART 15

 "What's Past is Prologue..."

https://www.cnn.com/.../black-history-month.../index.html

Black History Month exposes the fallacy of White 'discomfort'
by Peniel E. Joseph
February 2, 2022
CNN

Peniel E. Joseph - Kelvin Ma/Tufts University/Kelvin Ma/Tufts University

This year, Black History Month commemorations will unfold alongside efforts in numerous states to ban the teaching of its content. Efforts that purport to bar the teaching of "Critical Race Theory" have evolved into a full-scale assault, with Republican lawmakers unleashing attacks on Black History under the guise of protecting White children from "discomfort.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who seems intent on riding anti-CRT sentiment all the way to the White House, has made national headlines by backing a bill that would prevent any content that would make students or state employees feel "guilt" about their individual identities. Meanwhile, Virginia -- home of the capital of the Confederate States of America -- also banned CRT.

And now, Glenn Youngkin, Virginia's first Republican governor in a decade (whose victory was largely orchestrated by his savvy participation in race-fueled culture wars), has now created a tip line for parents who object to the content being taught in public schools. Unsurprisingly, the line has already been flooded by memes using sarcasm to state the obvious -- this isn't about preventing teachers from making kids feel uncomfortable. This is about avoiding discussions of racism -- and by extension, Black history -- altogether.

Republican lawmakers in multiple states and counties have effectively set out to cancel histories that White parents may find uncomfortable and in the process are seeking to cancel Black History Month and discussion of other uncomfortable histories, including the Holocaust and murderous campaigns unleashed against indigenous peoples as a result of settler colonialism.

RELATED:  The real reason some people are so afraid of ‘Maus'

Black history offers the nation an unvarnished origin story -- one that transcends the mythology of America's founding and conveys the lived realities of native peoples and Black Americans and their centrality to the United States we live in today.

Sharing these stories with school children in an age-appropriate manner is not something we should fear. But the erroneous narrative that teaching Black history provokes anxiety, discomfort, guilt or anger for White children has insidious roots. Let us not forget that the classrooms of White children have been a battleground before, and that the cry of parental rights and choice were the order of the day back then as well.

Today's children should have the chance to know and relate to the Black school children, mostly young girls, who braved White mobs during the 1950s and 1960s -- and experienced their own anxiety, fear and trauma. That history deserves to be reckoned with by new generations of school children, irrespective of the manufactured concerns of Republican Party officials or White parents.

CNN reporter asks GOP politician about statements on critical race theory. Hear his response

Efforts to cancel Black history because it's too uncomfortable also reflect mainstream media narratives centering the anger and indignation of White parents regarding the teaching of Black history in public education. This has largely erased the perspective of Black parents. As one Black mother of three from Charlottesville, Virginia, told the Washington Post, "They say, 'Our children are too young to hear about racism.' Who is 'our' children? I don't remember a day of my life when I wasn't taught about racism, or learning about it through just existing. Our children, meaning Black children, have had to be taught different ways to stay safe to maneuver through the world.”

This effort to block the teaching of histories that make White parents and children uncomfortable is the logical outcome of the manufactured controversy over Critical Race Theory, a theoretical concept taught in law schools that researches the persistence of structural racism in the law and legal policies. In essence, these latest efforts by Virginia and Florida -- not to mention those enacted by Mississippi and Tennessee show that what's afoot here is adult politics, not kids' educations.

As Tennessee Rep. Antonio Parkinson, a Democrat from Memphis and chair of the General Assembly's Black Caucus told the Associated Press, "Anything that tells the truth about our history, for whatever reason, their fragility comes into play and it is exposed.”

VIDEO: Hannah-Jones: Anti-CRT backlash designed to stoke white resentment 01:37

Tellingly, the sweeping new legislation introduced under the auspices of anti-CRT rhetoric and amplified by GOP politicians seeking to cancel Black History nationally, will do more than make it harder to teach about racial slavery, Jim Crow segregation, lynching and structural racism.

It will also deny students an opportunity to analyze and interrogate recent events, such as the 2017 violence in Charlottesville and the January 6 Capitol insurrection -- two events to which race was pivotal. Such censorship impoverishes our nation, dishonors the countless numbers of White, Black and multiracial activists who have struggled (and still struggle) to achieve equal citizenship and dignity for all people. To engage this debate on the GOP's terms sets us on a precarious road of having politicians decide what narratives are legitimate and which are considered unacceptable.

Black History Month has roots in "Negro History Week" created by Carter G. Woodson in 1926. The Harvard-educated Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of Afro American Life and History) in 1915 as a way to educate not only Black Americans, but the entire nation about the central role African Americans had played in the development of the United States, from slavery to freedom.

For centuries, we have imbibed Big Lies about the origins of American wealth, technological innovation, military strength and moral and political aspirations. By erasing the centrality of Black people -- their labor and intellectual genius in the face of state-sanctioned efforts to exploit them and deny their full citizenship -- we managed to create a national consensus around a story of American exceptionalism, one repeated by politicians and schoolchildren, preachers and professors, business leaders and diplomats for much of our history.

That false consensus is what lawmakers seek to preserve in their concerted efforts to suppress Black history in the classroom. What we are now witnessing is the latest White backlash against efforts to reimagine American democracy from the bottom up.

Black History Month is a rich opportunity to resist the small-minded thinking that rationalizes how children cannot -- or should not -- understand the United States as a nation whose history holds both pride and shame. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded the nation, in his last speech, America's greatness remains rooted in the "right to protest for right!" This year, as we celebrate Black History Month, this truth is worth remembering now more than ever. 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in ethics and political values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. He is the author of "Stokely: A Life" and "The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr." The views expressed here are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.”

Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the Brilliant Pioneering Scholar, Historian, Public Intellectual, and Educator Who Founded Black History Month in the United States

https://www.history.com/.../the-man-behind-black-history…

The Man Behind Black History Month

Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) dedicated his life to educating African Americans about the achievements and contributions of their ancestors.

by Sarah Pruitt
February 2, 2017

History.com

PHOTO: Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson (1875-1950)
Library of Congress

In 1915, Carter G. Woodson traveled to Chicago from his home in Washington, D.C. to take part in a national celebration of the 50th anniversary of emancipation. He had earned his bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Chicago, and still had many friends there. As he joined the thousands of Black Americans overflowing from the Coliseum, which housed exhibits highlighting African American achievements since the abolition of slavery, Woodson was inspired to do more in the spirit of celebrating Black history and heritage. Before he left Chicago, he helped found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). A year later, Woodson singlehandedly launched the Journal of Negro History, in which he and other researchers brought attention to the achievements of Black Americans.

Born in 1875 in New Canton, Virginia, Woodson had worked as a sharecropper, miner and various other jobs during his childhood to help support his large family. Though he entered high school late, he made up for lost time, graduating in less than two years. After attending Berea College in Kentucky, Woodson worked in the Philippines as an education superintendent for the U.S. government. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Chicago before entering Harvard. In 1912, three years before founding the ASNLH, he became only the second African American (after W.E.B. Du Bois) to earn a doctorate from that institution.

Like Du Bois, Woodson believed that young African Americans in the early 20th century were not being taught enough of their own heritage, and the achievements of their ancestors. To get his message out, Woodson first turned to his fraternity, Omega Psi Phi, which created Negro History and Literature Week in 1924. But Woodson wanted a wider celebration, and he decided the ASNLH should take on the task itself.

In February 1926, Woodson sent out a press release announcing the first Negro History Week. He chose February because the month contained the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, two prominent men whose historic achievements African Americans already celebrated. (Lincoln’s birthday was February 12; Douglass, who was formerly enslaved, hadn’t known his actual birthday, but had marked the occasion on February 14.)

As schools and other organizations across the country quickly embraced Woodson’s initiative, he and his colleagues struggled to meet the demand for course materials and other resources. The ASNLH formed branches all over the country, though its national headquarters remained centered in Woodson’s row house on Ninth Street in Washington D.C. The house was also home base for the Associated Publishers Press, which Woodson had founded in 1921.

PHOTO: Carter G. Woodson, circa 1910.

The author of more than 20 books, including A Century of Negro Migration (1918), The History of the Negro Church (1921), The Negro in Our History (1922) and his most celebrated text, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), Woodson also worked in education, as principal for the Armstrong Manual Training School in Washington, D.C., and dean at Howard University and the West Virginia Collegiate Institute.

Clearly, Woodson never viewed the study of Black history as something that could be confined to a week. As early as the 1940s, efforts began to expand the week of public celebration of African American heritage and achievements into a longer event. This shift had already begun in some locations by 1950, when Woodson died suddenly of a heart attack at home in Washington.


With the rise of the civil rights and Black Power movements in the 1960s, young African Americans on college campuses were becoming increasingly conscious of the historic dimension of their experience. Younger members of the ASNLH (which later became the Association for the Study of African American History) urged the organization to change with the times, including the official shift to a month-long celebration of Black history. In 1976, on the 50th anniversary of the first Negro History Week, the Association officially made the shift to Black History Month.


Since then, every U.S. president has issued a proclamation honoring the spirit of Black History Month. Gerald Ford began the tradition in 1976, saying the celebration enabled people to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” Ronald Reagan’s first Black History Month proclamation stated that “understanding the history of Black Americans is a key to understanding the strength of our nation.”

In 2016, Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, made his last proclamation in honor of Woodson’s initiative, now recognized as one of the nation’s oldest organized celebrations of history. “As we mark the 40th year of National African American History Month, let us reflect on the sacrifices and contributions made by generations of African Americans, and let us resolve to continue our march toward a day when every person knows the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 

Sarah Pruitt is a writer and editor based in seacoast New Hampshire. She has been a frequent contributor to History.com since 2005, and is the author of Breaking History: Vanished! (Lyons Press, 2017), which chronicles some of history's most famous disappearances. 

 

Carter G. Woodson, the "Father of Black history." Image: Library of Congress

The Ultimate Meaning of the King Alfred Plan: John A. Williams, White Supremacy, the American Novel, and the Role of Literature as Historical Critique and Social Analysis

https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/how-a-fictional-racist-plot-made-the-headlines-and-revealed-an-american-truth

Second Read

How a Fictional Racist Plot Made the Headlines and Revealed an American Truth

by Merve Emre
December 31, 2017
The NewYorker

For the late writer John A. Williams, the fictitious documents of the King Alfred Plan, from his novel “The Man Who Cried I Am,” weren’t fake news but a conduit to a deeper truth. Photograph by Anthony Barboza / Getty

In 1968, the African-American novelist John A. Williams published his third novel, “The Man Who Cried I Am,” a bitter, beautiful, and feverish depiction of the failed promises of the civil-rights era. The novel, which was a best-seller and went through six printings, narrates the lives of two writers, one of whom, Max Reddick, is a journalist whose career path resembled Williams’s own. Like Max, who had served in the Army during the Second World War, Williams had enlisted in the Navy, where he was almost killed—not by the enemy but by a gang of white American sailors. Both men later worked as beat reporters for New York magazines. Their shared suspicion of the subtle, yet omnipresent, racism of the white creative class and the black integrationists who mimicked its liberal politics led both of them abroad—first to Europe, then to Africa at the height of the Black Power movement.

The novel’s other central character, Harry Ames, is a celebrated black American writer of social-protest fiction who so closely resembled Richard Wright that the lawyers at Little, Brown expressed some concern that the author’s estate would sue. And yet there are elements of Williams’s own story in Harry’s, too. Like Harry, Williams had been nominated for a prestigious writing prize—the American Academy in Rome’s Rome Prize Fellowship—only to have it withdrawn without explanation. As Williams recalled, he had lost the fellowship after a racially charged interview with the academy’s director, an incident that seemed proof to him that most of the “good, white moderate people of the North and South” were privately “anti-Negro,” for to be so publically was “no longer fashionable.” “The vast silence—the awful, condoning silence that surrounded the affair fits a groove worn,” he reflected. “The rejection confirms my suspicions, not ever really dead and makes my ‘paranoia’ real and therefore not ‘paranoia’ at all,” he wrote in an article in Nugget. “That is the sad thing, for I always work to lose it.”

“The Man Who Cried I Am” is a novel about the kind of paranoia that proves to be entirely justified, a theme that culminates in its penultimate chapter, in which Harry, living in self-imposed exile in Paris, dies under suspicious circumstances. Before his death, we learn, he had recently discovered a briefcase containing “the King Alfred Plan”: a series of leaked documents outlining the measures that the U.S. government would adopt if the racial unrest and discord of the mid-nineteen-sixties turned into civil war—an “Emergency” that would involve “all 22 million members of the Minority.” “The Minority has adopted an almost military posture to gain its objectives, which are not clear to most Americans,” the plan read. “It is expected, therefore, that, when those objectives are denied the Minority, racial war must be considered inevitable.” The plan, which was named after the first Anglo-Saxon king of England, detailed how the government would “terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole American society, and indeed, the Free World.”

In the first draft of the novel, Williams unveiled the King Alfred Plan in what his editor, Harry Sions, described as a “James Bondish note” that Harry Ames had written to Max, and which Sions deemed “not quite convincing.” “The reader must feel that it damn well could be true and indeed well may come true,” Sions added, encouraging Williams to revise the end of the novel to resemble “one of a number of contingency plans which I’m sure our government must have in certain events, and which would be put in motion under specific circumstances, like an overall war.” In response to Sion’s notes, Williams designed six pages to imitate classified government documents, which included a memo from the National Security Council rationalizing the plan, a crude map from the Department of the Interior highlighting the regions where the “Minority” would be detained, and a bullet-pointed timetable from the Secretary of Defense outlining how the “Minority” would be subject to “vaporization techniques” or deported to Africa. In the novel’s final chapter, Max reads the plan over the telephone to a black nationalist named Minister Q (a stand-in for Malcom X), urging him to revolt against the state. Max’s discovery, Williams writes in the final pages of the novel, gave “form and face and projection” to American racism. His worst suspicions were finally confirmed.

Jacksonville, Ferguson, Beavercreek, Waller County, Baltimore, and Staten Island are not named on the maps or timetables of Williams’s pages—but the themes of “The Man Who Cried I Am,” today a largely forgotten novel, continue to resound. There is something contemporary, too, in the way that Williams’s fictional King Alfred Plan took hold of the public imagination upon its publication, in 1967. That year, there were uprisings in Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Newark, Milwaukee, and Tampa, in which black men and women were assaulted by the police. The federal government was known to be surveilling black leaders, and, according to Williams, many activists were already convinced that the F.B.I., C.I.A., and local law-enforcement agencies were conspiring to neutralize the Black Panther Party and other radical organizations. As Williams’s agent, Carl D. Brandt, observed, the plan, when combined with the novel’s fictional but accurate portraits of Wright, Williams, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, as well as its faithful reporting on the Kennedy White House’s half-hearted desegregation initiatives and the rise of the Black Power movement, appeared “entirely credible in the light of current events as well as within the terms of necessity for the plot of the novel.”

IMAGE:  The fictional King Alfred Plan outlined the measures that the U.S. government would adopt if the racial unrest and discord of the mid-nineteen-sixties turned into civil war. Courtesy of the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, University of Rochester River Campus Libraries

Williams, who had worked for a time in P.R., had an innate sense of what might today be termed viral marketing. The summer before the book’s publication, Little, Brown sent promotional materials—an excerpt of the King Alfred Plan alongside details of the book’s publication, all in a manila folder labelled “CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET”—to two thousand booksellers and jobbers. Williams thought that the King Alfred Plan could make more of an impact if presented without the references to the novel, and urged his publishers to take out a one-page ad in the Times to publish the plan without any reference to what it was or where it was from. Williams was “enormously distressed” when he learned that his publishers had balked, both because it seemed to him a missed opportunity to make a splash and because he sensed that the mere act of speculating about the plan’s authenticity had an almost revolutionary potential. For Williams, the documents weren’t fake news but a conduit to a deeper truth. “I don’t believe it is cheap publicity,” he wrote. “The concentration camps do exist. I have since learned that the Federal government does have such a contingency plan. We know that the Army and National Guard as well as the local police are undergoing riot training. What in the hell is cheap about the truth?”

In a schedule that he put together for his sales manager, Patrick McCaleb, Williams suggested that Little, Brown “get the plan in its CIA folder, perhaps, to representatives of the Soviet bloc nations, either press or diplomats.” He wanted copies to go “the embassies of every nation mentioned in the plan” and to “make sure the Germans got a copy.” He also wanted “copies to go in some mysterious fashion to Dick Gregory, James Meredith, Claude McKissick, and Stokely Carmichael,” the black activists who Williams believed would “make the most noise.” The plan had to look like it had no point of origin. “Secrecy can be power, and there is power in secrecy,” Williams wrote to Sions.

In mid-October, Williams asked Little, Brown for a hundred copies of the plan—ones that made no mention of his novel—and began leaving them in subway cars in Manhattan. According to Williams’s friend, the journalist Herbert Boyd, “The ploy worked so well that soon after black folks all over New York City were talking about ‘the plan’—a fictitious plot that many thought was true.” As photocopies circulated, readers themselves edited the plan’s visual presentation to enhance its authentic appearance and reproduced their versions of the plan in oppositional black newspapers. Portions of the plan were redacted; the map was enhanced to include color-coördinated keys and city names where the concentration camps were located; patterned code names such as “REX-84,” short for “Readiness Exercise 84,” were affixed to the documents. The plan migrated north to Boston and west to Chicago, where members of activist groups, unsure whether it was real or fictional, read it at meetings, sometimes aloud, and interpreted how its designs reflected the history of black oppression in America. According to the Black Topographical Society of Chicago, the plan was key to understanding everything from racist hiring practices to how superhighways were “always routed through black ghettoes to facilitate eventual military operations against those communities.”

In 1970, Clive DePatten, a nineteen-year-old from Des Moines who had joined the Black Panther Party following a violent altercation with the police, appeared in front of the House Internal Security Committee to testify to the existence of a plan to exterminate blacks that he had encountered in an activist publication. According to an account in the Hartford Courant, the congressmen let DePatten finish his testimony before informing him that the F.B.I. had already investigated the King Alfred Plan, in 1969, and had “found it to be lifted from a novel, ‘The Man Who Cried I Am,’ by John A. Williams, a black himself.” DePatten nevertheless insisted on its truth. “Even if it actually is fictional, events in the black community are paralleling those set out in the King Alfred Plan,” he said. The urban-renewal projects of the nineteen-fifties and sixties had corralled black Americans “into the ghettoes,” he argued, where they were as vulnerable to state brutality as interned Japanese-Americans during the Second World War or Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. “It is a plan of fear,” the Republican congressman William J. Scherle said at DePatten’s testimony. “If you want to believe it, sure, it will scare the hell out of you.”

Through the early nineteen-seventies, many other people and organizations testified to the truth of the plan before the government: ex-Army spies, who claimed that it was an open secret; the A.C.L.U., which claimed that the Reverend Jesse Jackson was under surveillance by the government. The government was dismissive of all their concerns. Just as Williams had found the American Academy in Rome’s silence proof enough of their racism, they found in this response all they needed to confirm their sense that Williams’s fictional documents bespoke an American truth.

 

The Transformative Power of African American History in the United States

A BRAND NEW BAG:  How African Americans Revolutionized U.S. Culture And Changed the World 1955-1975 (excerpt)

 

by Kofi Natambu

The Panopticon Review 

 

© November, 2023 

 

Dr. Martin Luther King (1929-1968), Jr. and Malcolm X (1925-1965) following  King's press conference at the U.S. Capitol about the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Photo taken on March 26, 1964.  It was the only time these two giants met in person.

 

"Every generation, out of relative obscurity, must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it."

--Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)

"Of all our studies history is best qualified to reward our research"

--Malcolm X  (1925-1965)

 

THE REVOLUTION BEGINS (AGAIN):  1955-1965                

For an entire century prior to the mid-1950s an extraordinary number of black political and cultural activists, intellectuals and writers, musicians and composers, visual artists and athletes, entertainers and workers waged an intense, unrelenting, and bitterly fought public battle for political, economic, and human rights, cultural autonomy, and social respect and recognition in a highly segregated, ruthlessly capitalist, and profoundly racist nation that actively resisted this movement through a pervasive and deeply entrenched apartheid system that legally sanctioned and promoted racial discrimination, oppression, exploitation, censorship, and exclusion in every area of U.S. life, society, and culture. The post-slavery era after emancipation in 1863 was marked by the pervasive denial of voting rights, brutal economic peonage and exploitation of black workers, widespread and extreme forms of overt physical violence by white mobs (i.e. lynchings, beatings, arbitrary imprisonment, rapes, assaults, assassinations, bombings, arson, shootings, etc.) against black people in general, and a distinctly separate and highly unequal social, educational, and economic structure that gave not only white elites but whites in general great punitive power and control over the national black population. Thus in employment, education, health care, housing, access to public institutions and facilities, and the equal opportunity to compete for jobs, wages, and the distribution of resources (as well as enforced legal protections against discrimination and exclusion), African Americans were forced to endure immense suffering, repression, and neglect for many generations after slavery officially ended in January, 1863. Most of these imposed structural, institutional, systemic, and ideological restrictions on the freedom, mobility, and self determination of African Americans lasted well into the 1960s, and of course, many of them are still very prevalent and intact today.

It was this ongoing historical reality that such major and legendary black political and cultural figures as Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) Frederick Douglas (1818-1895), Harriet Tubman (1822-1913), W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), William Monroe Trotter (1972-1934), Paul Robeson (1898-1976), A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979), Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), Richard Wright (1908-1960), Louis Armstrong (1901-1970), Duke Ellington (1899-1974), Bessie Smith (1898-1937) and Billie Holiday (1915-1959) among many others sought eloquently and forcefully to confront and defeat through their tremendous interventions in the general political, social, and cultural life of the nation in the period from the mid 1850s to the mid 1950s. It is this extraordinary legacy that serves as the bedrock historical foundation of the revolutionary movement of African Americans during the mid and late 20th century, and deeply influences the very form and content of what intellectuals, artists, and activists were able to achieve in the crucial historical period of 1955-1975 that is the focus of this study.

1955 marks a major watershed in African American, and thus American, history. It is also significant as a beginning of this modern development in African American thought, art, and activism because that year marked the start of a dramatic collective response of black people in the U.S. to the deeply frustrating limitations and repressions of the late 1940s and early 1950s period when, after a million black soldiers fought against fascism in the name of the United States in the Jim Crow segregated armed forces during WWII (1942-1945) for “democracy and freedom” abroad in Europe and Asia, found themselves still being denied fundamental human and democratic rights in their own country in the immediate postwar era. This virulent racism, coupled with the deadly specter of McCarthyism (1947-1965) in American politics and public policy against all forms of mass-based democratic liberal and radical reform activity as well as all socialist and communist revolutionary movements for freedom, justice, peace, and equality in the United States resulted in millions of African Americans still being widely subjected to the horrific, cruel, and deadly absurdities of racial oppression.

Thus it was in the period from 1955-1965 that a massive amount of intellectual, physical, cultural, and spiritual energy was expended by a forceful and insistent new generation—actually two generations--of African Americans (largely born between 1915-1945) on behalf of a radical updating and expansion of the movements and activities of the previous century of African American intellectuals, activists, and artists. The “New Negroes” of this period often embodied and openly expressed a widely diverse consensus of philosophy, artistry, and social-political thought and behavior that was highly innovative, original, and daring in its approach to questions, problems, and challenges facing the United States in general, and the African American people in particular. What’s noteworthy about the emergence of this new generation of individuals is the fact that they came from widely different class backgrounds and geographical regions yet still shared a cultural sensibility and social consciousness that actively sought to challenge the status quo in politics and art. It is this insistent demand for radical social, ideological, and aesthetic change that unites these historical contemporaries, and serves as the foundation for their stunning interventions in American society and culture. It was not surprising given these general concerns and realities that the period from 1955-1975 eventually proved to be one of the most dynamic, volatile, and radical eras in the history of the United States. This is the narrative that I will examine and tell in this book.

Part I: Who Are These People?: 

 “The New Breed” Demands a Change

In 1955 political, cultural, and social life in the United States was on the surface very staid, conservative, and white. Mass cultural conformity and various forms of social repression were widespread and strictly enforced throughout the nation. White supremacy, sexism, homophobia, censorship, and hegemonic ruling class coercion and domination were common and largely accepted or at least not opposed by millions of Americans. Black people were especially held in contempt and patronizing indifference by millions of white Americans, and though such traditional national civil rights organizations as the NAACP (founded in 1909), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality founded in 1942), and the Urban League (founded in 1913) had made limited progress in their various national and local campaigns for legal, constitutional, social, and economic reforms, it was clear to everyone concerned both in and outside of the movement that these efforts, while necessary, were not sufficient. Neither were the primarily moral and ethical appeals of such nonviolent Ghandian-influenced organizations as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) formed in 1957 or even the separatist black religious and cultural nationalist doctrines, values, and programs of such alternative organizations as Elijah Muhammad’s NOI (Nation of Islam) whose position in the 1950s and early ‘60s was being largely represented and enunciated by its National Minister, Malcolm X, via Muhammad. Many black people during this period were also rapidly becoming involved in trying to either augment, or even in some instances replace, these various ideological and institutional groups with even broader and more secularly militant/radical forms of social theory and activism.

In the cultural and aesthetic sphere such major African American popular artforms as Jazz, Blues, Rhythm & Blues, and Rock and Roll, as well as independent black innovations in literature (fiction, poetry, and the essay), musical and dramatic theatre, dance, comedy, painting, and sports were continuing to make astonishingly rich and creative contributions to modern art throughout the world, and were often at the forefront of the general African American revolution in the U.S. in the period under examination here. Such major iconic artistic figures as Miles Davis (1926-1991), John Coltrane (1926-1967), Chuck Berry (1926-2019), James Brown (1933-2006), Charles Mingus (1922-1979), Sarah Vaughn (1924-1990), Bud Powell (1924-1966), Max Roach (1924-2007), Art Blakey (1919-1990), Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993), Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996), Nat King Cole (1919-1965), Sam Cooke (1931-1964), Dexter Gordon (1923-1990), B.B. King (1925- ), Etta James (1938-2012), Otis Blackwell (1930-2002), Eric Dolphy (1928-1964), Little Richard (1932- ), Chester Himes (1908-1984), Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1934- ), Marvin Gaye (1939-1984), Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), Toni Morrison (1931-2019), Nina Simone (1933-2003), Ishmael Reed (1938- ) Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), Bob Kaufman (1925-1986), Sammy Davis, Jr. (1925-1990), John Lee Hooker (1917-2000), Romare Bearden (1913-), and Muddy Waters (1915-1987), among many others, constitute a genuine revolutionary vanguard of American artists for the mid and late 20th century.

It was in this electrifying and dangerous climate and context of great social and cultural change and conflict that this era (1955-1960) began. Despite the oppressively rigid and severely glacial surfaces dominating American life large cracks and fissures were already beginning to take place just beneath this façade. It’s highly significant to note, for example, that an obscure 25 year old black middle-class Baptist minister from Atlanta, Georgia (with a newly earned Ph.D in philosophy and theology from Boston University), had begun his public ministry in a small Christian church in Atlanta inherited from his father (also a preacher) at almost the exact same time that a poor, equally obscure black 29 year old ex-convict from Lansing, Michigan (and later Boston, Massachusetts), had, after serving a six and a half year sentence for burglary, began working in 1952 as a member and then minister of a Muslim sect in the U.S. known as the Nation of Islam (NOI). After being appointed minister of the largest mosque in the NOI in Harlem, NY in August, 1954, he had quickly emerged as a major leader within the national hierarchy of the organization. These two individuals were completely unaware of each other and were completely unknown to the rest of the country at the beginning of 1955. By the end of the year, however, both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X would be nationally, and in King’s case, internationally famous.

In March of 1955 a legendary 34 year old black jazz musician and composer would die and be immediately catapulted into mythological cultural status. By the end of year an entire new generation of black musicians, singers, and composers who had already been heavily influenced by, and revered this individual, would also be aggressively extending and expanding his musical legacy on a global scale. His name: Charles Christopher Parker, Jr., better known as “Bird.” Two then obscure 28 year old musicians and composers from St. Louis, Illinois, and High Point, North Carolina (later Philadelphia), one of whom had been a member of one of the late master’s groups, and the other who based a large part of his aesthetic, technical, and expressive style on this same person’s enormous contribution, went on to join forces in 1955 in an ensemble whose sound and style revolutionized American music during this period and for all time. Within a year the leader of this group (Miles Davis) would become world famous, and his partner, collaborator, and colleague (John Coltrane) would also quickly follow within three years with a group of his own that would have an equally influential and powerful international impact.

However it was a horrific racially-charged incident on August 27, 1955 that would further shock and enrage black people in the U.S. and be seen by many both then and later as a pivotal historical moment that embodied the zeitgeist of the era. The incident would also serve as a major galvanizing force for the modern civil rights movement and this new generation to aggressively assert itself in the nation at large. What precipated this dramatic turn of events was the vicious murder of a fourteen year old black male by two white adult men. The young boy was from Chicago and was on his summer vacation visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi. Accused of whistling at a 21 year old white woman at a local grocery store near his uncle’s home, the adolescent was then brutally kidnapped by the husband of the woman and his friend on the evening of August 24. Till was forcibly abducted from his uncle’s home and driven out into the country by the white men who made Till strip naked, beat him severely, shot him in the head, mutilated him, and then attached a cotton gin fan to his nude body so that it would sink to the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. The badly bloated and decomposed body was found three days later disfigured beyond recognition.

Till’s mother came to Mississippi to identify her murdered son and return him to Chicago for funeral services and burial and found the hideously disfigured corspe unrecognizable except for a ring that she had given her son before he left for his visit. Incensed and distraught that her child had been the victim of a such a savage racist act, Mrs. Till insisted that her son’s casket remain open at the funeral so that “the whole world can see what they did to my son.” Thousands of blacks attended the funeral, and the story caused a sensation in the national black community in the U.S. where deeply disturbing photos of the ravaged corspe were published in the black and white press (especially in an issue of the highly popular black weekly magazine Jet). The murder and subsequent trial and verdict were also headline news all over the globe as an international readership condemned and denounced the U.S. for its ongoing tradition of racist terror. Meanwhile a rapid, unjust trial was held in Mississippi where the two men were quickly acquited by an openly racist all white male jury. Just as they had done in thousands of previous lynch cases involving the brutal arbitrary murders of blacks by whites throughout Mississippi’s extremely bloody racial history, the white Judge, the jury, the two acquited men, as well as the white wife of one of the two men all publically maintained that Till “deserved” his fate, and that black people in general (and in particular black boys and men) had better “know their place” and continue to stay well inside the rigid boundary lines of segregation.

The shockwave of this event, coupled with the ongoing protests throughout the country calling for voting rights, social and economic equality, democratic reforms, and the end of instutionalized racial segregattion in all areas of American life inaugurated a new generation of African Americans in the historical struggle for revolutionary changes in the society and culture, and this generation (known by many as the “new breed”) was more than up to the task.

The national and international outrage generated by the verdict in the Till case (and of course many other similar incidents of the era) had immediate repercussions throughout the entire black (diasporic) world. It was certainly no coincidence that at precisely the historical moment when African Americans were aggressively asserting themselves in the United States, the citadel of white supremacy in the West, continental Africans and those of African descent in the Caribbean and South America were simultaneously engaged in fierce battles of their own against European imperialism for national liberation and independence. These intense political, economic, cultural, and ideological struggles against French, British, Portuguese, Dutch, and Belgian colonialism in countries like Ghana, Jamaica, Nigeria, Trinidad, Algeria, Kenya, Guyana, Tanzania, Martinique, Senegal, and Barbadoes, among many other newly emerging black nation-states, were instrumental in the extraordinary explosion of radical social, political, and cultural consciousness, organization, and activity that characterized the period.

Thus, the same fierce demands for justice, freedom, and social/economic change that served as the motor force of the nascent modern Civil Rights movement in the United States and spurred the determination of the ‘New Breed’ to insist on a new social and political agenda with respect to “racial matters”, were echoed and openly supported by blacks outside North America who saw their own national struggles and concerns as an integral part of what their brothers and sisters in the U.S. were doing. The international linkages that were advocated and established during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s by such central figures from Africa and the Caribbean as the psychiatrist, political theorist, and revolutionary activist Frantz Fanon (Martinique), the Pan-Africanist and President of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah, the radical political leader and President of Egypt, Gamel Nasser, poet, social critic, and activist Aime Cesaire (also from Martinique), political philosopher and President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, the political theorist, philosopher, writer, and activist leader C.L.R. James from Trinidad, and the legendary revolutionary political activist and leader from South Africa, Nelson Mandela, among many others, were crucial to educating and organizing thousands of black people throughout the world to combat oppression and transform their lives. Not insignificantly African American activists like Malcolm X, and later Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, and James Foreman spent substantial time abroad in Africa during the 1960s and ‘70s prosletyzing on behalf of radical ideological and cultural alternatives to Western forms of colonization.

Another major development of the late fifties period involved the rise of black visual artists, dancers, athletes, singers and songwriters to major mainstream status (if not immediate recognition). The profound aesthetic contributions of these artists led to a massive seismic shift in the form and content of American popular culture and signaled the arrival of new, original conceptions of what could be expressed and achieved in these fields. The rapid emergence and pervasive acceptance of the popular musical expressions known as “Rock and Roll” and “Rhythm & Blues” were largely due to the major musical and lyrical innovations of such legendary black musical figures as Louis Jordan, Chuck Berry, Jackie Wilson, Ray Charles, Charles Brown, Amos Milburn, Etta James, Wynonie Harris, Charles Brown, Otis Blackwell, Bo Diddley, James Brown, and Little Richard who from 1945-1965 essentially invented (and reinvented) these forms, despite the white media’s stubbornly erroneous, brazenly false, and egregiously racist insistence during the late fifties and early sixties (and beyond) that white artists like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison (and later the Beatles and Rolling Stones) were primarily responsible for the music’s existence and evolution.

In painting, dance, and sports African Americans like Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Emma Amos, Augusta Savage, Ed Clark, Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt, Betye Saar, Norman Lewis, Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava, Lois Mailou Jones, Bob Thompson, Alvin Ailey, Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson, Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudolph, Bob Gibson, Bob Hayes, Maury Wills, and Lou Brock brought a startlingly new and dynamic sensibility to the arts of movement, gesture, and visual style that emphasized a highly refined, precise, and nuanced use of speed, mobility, grace, crative expressiveness, and power in their work and expressions. These elements were also evident in the independently unique personalities of these individuals which were often characterized by great dignity, poise, intelligence, discipline, and elegance...(to be continued)...