Abstract
Pushing many of the feeble organizations aside, thousands of black youth stormed into militant Black Power organizations from coast to coast. Where there were only small Black Power organizations, they filled the ranks and made them bigger. Where there were no Black Power organizations in their locality, they established branches, and in that manner groups such as the Oakland Black Panther Party, the Los Angeles US Organization, and Amiri Baraka’s Committee for a Unified NewArk (CFUN) became national phenomena in 1968.
It is time for Beauty and Truth to rule the world again. It is time for the evolved beings to reorder this planet.
—Amiri Baraka, “From: The Book of Life”
In the political field, you have to know at each stage if you are doing the possible or not, and preparing the field for the possible for tomorrow or not. This is the problem.
—Amilcar Cabrai, Return to the Source1
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Notes
Amiri Baraka, “From: The Book of Life,” Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965 (New York: Random House, 1971); Amilcar Cabrai, Return to the Source (New York: Monthly Review Press/African Information Service, 1973).
Paul Delany, “Conciliator at Black Parley,” New York Times, March 13, 1972, 30; Vincent Harding, The Other American Revolution (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, UCLA, 1980), 215.
Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 54.
Joe R. Feagin and Harland Hahn, Ghetto Revolts (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 105–108.
Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich, 1984), 191;
LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York: William Morrow, 1963).
Chuck Stone, Black Political Power in America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 125.
The best study of this background is in Robert Curvin, “The Persistent Minority: The Black Political Experience in Newark” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1975); reprinted (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms International, 1975).
For Chicago, see Thomas Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1991)
and Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto (Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1983); for Detroit,
see Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996).
Edward J. Wolak, “A Political Study of the Negro in Newark, New Jersey” (senior thesis, Princeton University, May 1948);
Harold Kaplan, Urban Renewal Politics: Slum Clearance in Newark (New York: Columbia UP, 1963), 155–156.
Mindy Thompson, The National Negro Labor Council: A History. Occasional Paper No. 27 (New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1978).
Robert Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (New York: Anchor, 1970), 131.
A. D. Smith, “‘Ideas’ and ‘Structure’ in the Formation of Independence Ideals,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3 (1973): 19–39, citation 28.
Ron Porambo, No Cause for Indictment (New York: Holt, 1971), 101.
Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 80.
Theodore R. Hudson, “The Trial of LeRoi Jones,” in Kimberly Benston, Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays (Engelwood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 49–50.
Amiri Baraka, Raise, Race, Rays, Raze (New York: Random House, 1971), 52; Baraka, The Autobiography, 264.
See Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York: Vintage, 1976).
Amiri Baraka, “Creation of the New Ark,” in The Black Power Movement: Amiri Baraka from the Black Arts to Black Radicalism, Komozi Woodard, ed. (Bethesda, Md.: University Publication Association, 2000). This is Baraka’s unpublished but invaluable history of the Newark movement.
Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage, 1967).
Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978); see Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation, 107–108.
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© 2003 Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, with Matthew Countryman
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Woodard, K. (2003). It’s Nation Time in NewArk: Amiri Baraka and the Black Power Experiment in Newark, New Jersey. In: Theoharis, J., Woodard, K. (eds) Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8250-6_12
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