Abstract
In 1948 Harry Haywood wrote, “The Negro Question is agrarian in origin... It presents the curious anomaly of a virtual serfdom in the very heart of the most highly industrialized country in the world.“2 World War II and the advent of the mechanical cotton picker resolved this contradiction by spurring the single largest black population movement in U.S. history. In an ever-expanding tide, migrants poured out of the south in pursuit of rising wages and living standards promised by major metropolitan areas.
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The great exodus of poor people out of the South during World War II sprang from the hope for a better life in the big cities of the North and West. In search of freedom, they left behind centuries of southern cruelty and repression. The futility of that search is now history. The Black communities of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Newark, Brownsville, Watts, Detroit, and many others stand as testament that racism is as oppressive in the North as in the South. Oakland is no different.
—Huey Newton1
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Notes
Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1973), p. 14.
Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1976), p. 11.
Manning Marable, “Foreword” in Rod Bush’s The New Black Vote: Politics and Power in Four American Cities (San Francisco: Synthesis Publications, 1984), p. 3
Nicolas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1991), p. 6.
Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 30.
Edward, C., Hayes, Power Structure and Urban Policy: Who Rules in Oakland? (San Francisco: McGraw-Hill Book, 1972), p. 48.
Ibid; Evelio Grillo, Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2000), p. 131
Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, The US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003), pp. 25–29.
Murch, “Mansour”; Khalid Al Mansour, Black Americans at the Crossroads-Where Do We Go From Here? (New York: First African Arabian Press, 1990).
James Edward Smethur st, The Black Arts Movem en t: L i terary Na tional ism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 260–262.
Eric Hobsbawm, Prim itive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: WW Norton 8c Company, 1959), p. 108.
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© 2010 Peniel E. Joseph
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Murch, D. (2010). A Campus Where Black Power Won: Merritt College and the Hidden History of Oakland’s Black Panther Party. In: Joseph, P.E. (eds) Neighborhood Rebels. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230102309_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230102309_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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