Introduction Community Organizing, Grassroots Politics, and Neighborhood Rebels: Local Struggles for Black Power in America

Abstract

The period in American and world history popularly known as the Black Power Movement (1954–1975) is undergoing extensive historical reassessment and reevaluation. A new subfield of scholarship, what I have called “Black Power Studies,” has produced a series of books, anthologies, articles, essays, and conferences that are actively rewriting postwar American history. These new histories build on groundbreaking scholarly works that, although not exclusively focused on Black Power, thoughtfully examine the era within the broader sweep of American and world history. Perhaps the most striking aspect of these recent works is their efforts to challenge the master narrative of the civil rights era, which portrays Black Power as that movement’s evil twin. In that master narrative, Black Power is the figurative and literal embodiment of black rage, anger, and disappointment with the ineffective and glacial pace of civil rights. Black Power enters the historical stage in the bitter aftermath of the civil rights era’s heroic period, between 1954 and 1965, when the possibilities of racial justice seemed unlimited. Similarly, contemporary historical and popular understanding of the civil rights era places stirring oratory and dazzling iconography at the core of a narrative that neatly explains the rise and fall of the movement for nonviolent social justice. Martin Luther King, Jr., John and Robert F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson represent the stars of this story while Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, and Wyatt Walker appear in pivotal supporting roles.