James Brown: Icon of Black Power

Abstract

Upon his untimely passing on Christmas Day 2006, a flourish of James Brown retrospectives hit the airwaves and mainstream print. As a pop music star in the 1960s, James Brown was a part of the coming of age of an entire American generation. As the engine of a traveling rhythm and blues machine, the relentless touring and driven, polished production of the James Brown revue, Brown was an icon of working class black success in America. As a defiant example of uncompromising “blackness,” James Brown delivered the black aesthetic that so many impatient nationalists in the black arts movement of the 1960s hoped to bring to the black masses. Throughout his half-century long career, James Brown broke so many barriers and redefined so many social categories that one could easily lose track of the scope of his Herculean achievements.