Black Power on the Ground: Continuity and Rupture in St. Louis

Abstract

A sea change is underway in the field of “Black Freedom Studies.“¹ Not only have numerous scholars engaged new chronological, geographical, and conceptual frameworks to complicate popular narratives of postwar Civil Rights struggles (1955–1966), but they have also critically reexamined, and rehabilitated, key figures, organizations, and institutions associated with Black Power (1966–1975). Far from simply provocative rhetoric, inarticulate rage, and self-defeating violence, Black Power encompassed a range of concrete, programmatic initiatives geared toward tangible—indeed, political—visions and goals. Yet, historians and social scientists have further to go in recovering these many legacies. While an earlier wave of scholars excavated the “indigenous” character of Civil Rights campaigns, the growing subfield that historian Peniel Joseph has characterized as “Black Power Studies” remains in need of more local treatments that foreground the groups and activists that seeded the soil for the Black Nationalist renaissance of the mid-to-late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s. As with the Black Freedom Movement writ large, Black Power achieved its successes, experienced its reversals, developed its various strategies, and encountered its myriad opportunities and constraints, on the ground.²