Charles Becker [beckerleschar@orange.sn]
Thursday, January 24, 2013
X-Posted to: H-WEST-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU;H-SAFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU;
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Subject: H-Net Review Publication:  Catsam on Goldberg and  Griffey, 'Black
Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action, and the Construction
Industry' and Magaziner, 'The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in
South Africa, 1968-1977' and Willia...

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Date:  Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:13:46 -0500
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From:  H-Net Staff <revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
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David Goldberg, Trevor Griffey, eds.  Black Power at Work: Community Control,
Affirmative Action, and the Construction Industry.  Ithaca Cornell University
Press, 2010.  x + 265 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8014-4658-0; $24.95
(paper), ISBN 978-0-8014-7431-6.

Daniel R. Magaziner.  The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South
Africa, 1968-1977.  Athens  Ohio University Press, 2010. 298¬Ýpp.  $59.95
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-8214-1917-5; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8214-1918-2.

Yohuru Williams, Jama Yazerow, eds.  In Search of the Black Panther Party: New
Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement.  Durham  Duke University Press, 2006.
 x + 390 pp.  $84.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-3837-6; $23.95 (paper), ISBN
978-0-8223-3890-1.

Reviewed by Derek Catsam (University of Texas of the Permian Basin)
Published on H-1960s (January, 2013)
Commissioned by Zachary Lechner

Reconsidering Black Nationalisms: Black Power, Black Consciousness, and the
Black Panthers

        On a highway in Mississippi Stokely Carmichael called for Black Power.
In Northern California Bobby Seale and Huey Newton raised their fists and
wielded their guns as Black Panthers. And in South Africa Steve Biko rose to
fill the space of a quiescent anti-Apartheid movement by calling for Black
Consciousness.&nbsp;

        These images are not inaccurate as representations of their respective
movements. But they fall woefully short of providing a full picture of the
struggles against white supremacy in the United States and South Africa that
emerged in the late 1960s. And the passage of time has allowed for the
emergence of mythology in the place of history.

        This mythology has in turn flattened and warped the past. Thus, in the
United States, "Black Power" and the Black Panthers have come to represent a
shameful rejection of the nonviolent path embodied by Martin Luther King Jr. In
South Africa, Black Consciousness has too often been seen as representing the
ineffectual and star-crossed aftermath of the crushing of the African National
Congress (ANC) in the wake of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. If in the United
States, Black Power and the Black Panthers represent a rejection of the
integrationism of King and his followers, Black Consciousness is usually seen
as a natural, but ill-fated, outcropping of the suppression of legitimate
protest embodied in the ANC. To be sure, the image of Black Power, the Black
Panthers, and similar movements carry a negative stigma in the American popular
consciousness more than does Black Consciousness in South Africa. But in both
the American and South African examples, various strains of black nationalism
inevitably emerge as being subservient to (and even destructive of) a larger
and perhaps more palatable movement. If King casts a heavy shadow in the United
States, a shadow deepened by his martyrdom, Nelson Mandela and other members of
the struggle generation tend at least to shroud the popular understanding of
Black Consciousness and its main adherents.

        In the last few years, historians have granted Black Power, in its
myriad forms, a good deal of attention. Always a current in the historiography
of race, civil rights, and African American history, the trickle in recent
years has become a flood. Much of the credit for this wave is the result of
Peniel E. Joseph's fine book, ³Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour²²: A Narrative
History of Black Power in America² (2007), a wide-reaching and expansive
exploration of black nationalist alternatives to the prevailing nonviolent
civil rights movement. Unwilling to accept narrow labels or to limit views of
Black Power to its most visible adherents, and certainly seeing beyond the
Black Panthers, Joseph manages to convey the richness of Black Power: the call
for cultural and intellectual autonomy derived from within the black community;
the demand for more than simply overcoming the worst of Jim Crow in the South
but rather demands for a better life in northern cities as well; calls for
Black Power, yes, but also for black pride; and an insistence that black was
indeed beautiful. Joseph both built on and wrote in the midst of a surge of
works emphasizing that in many circles in the South as well as the North
self-defense was considered fully legitimate, revealing how the use of violence
for protection was far more common than the King-centered narrative of civil
rights recognizes. Furthermore, Joseph reminds us of the holistic nature of
Black Power, which encouraged artists, provided meals and books for children,
and pursued community organizing far from the media's glare.

        Providing evidence both that Joseph was not alone in his pursuit of a
richer understanding of these trends and that Black Power was about more than
simply the rhetoric and images that journalists frequently used to capitalize
on the fears of white America are the essays in David Goldberg's and Trevor
Griffey's ³Black Power at Work. ³Their title is to be taken literally, for
Black Power was often about economic opportunity and providing jobs, especially
for the urban working class and working poor. The authors who contribute to
this collection investigate a wide array of case studies showing how
employment, unionism, affirmative action, and Black Power melded to try to
provide economic opportunity for construction workers.

        Initially, many readers might think this focus on construction jobs to
be narrow, even parochial, but instead the book's contributors demonstrate how
in just this one area Black Power proves far more complex and varied than
traditional historiography, never mind the popular perception, has understood.
These case studies "unsettle assumptions," as the editors assert, and feed long
civil rights movement concepts through their emphasis on local politics in the
North, Midwest, and West, emphasizing how local actors often wanted to work
within existing systems (p. 5). Far from demanding separatism, these activists
actually wanted to work within existing labor frameworks and to be integrated
into existing (and white-dominated) labor unions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the
white unions became part of the problem for advocates of jobs for black
construction workers.

        These demands were not easily met, and when Black Power adherents ran
into intransigence, protests and sometimes riots (or at least "riots") emerged,
especially in the summer and fall of 1969, when demands for access, often in
the form of affirmative action, resulted in large-scale protests at least in
part because organizers wanted to "capitalize on white people's fears in the
wake of urban rebellions" (p. 10). In linking Black Power with labor, economic
demands, and affirmative action, the contributors to this volume further
challenge the declension narrative in which the noble nonviolent armies of the
classic phase of the civil rights movement gave way to angry, radical black men
and women. But rather than romanticize their subject, the authors are almost
universally aware that the windows that Black Power activists forced open
tended to close quickly, and "while African American movements to desegregate
the construction industry made affirmative action politically possible, that
moment of possibility was exceptionally brief" (p. 20).

        That the window was open at all is important and reveals the
shortcomings of the simplistic declension narrative. The authors of ³Black
Power at Work² focus, largely effectively, on protest movements that were often
at least loosely affiliated in Brooklyn, Newark, and Philadelphia in the
Northeast; Chicago and Detroit in the Midwest; and the Bay Area out West. The
authors emphasize labor and affirmative action, but also the often intertwined
roles of class and masculinity. If traditional histories of civil rights place
Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson at the center of
national fights, these essayists, looking as they do at the late 1960s and the
1970s, tend to locate their national political center of gravity in Richard
Nixon. Additionally, they highlight the complexities of affirmative action
while, in the end, busting a range of myths on this front too. They show how
white workers and the politicians who have over the years found black workers
useful as political props have blamed affirmative action for various
difficulties with virtually no evidence.

        None of this analysis is as sexy as dashikis and raised fists, perhaps.
But it may well be more representative of what Black Power meant to many of
those individuals in the middle of the movement. The theater of struggle was
great. Jobs, subsistence, and opportunity, however, lay at the heart of Black
Power for the many people whose blackness kept them from opportunity and thus
politicized them to seek some kind of power.

        A 2003 conference held at Wheelock College provided the genesis for the
essays in Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams's fine collection ³In Search of the
Black Panther Party. ³If the contributors to ³Black Power at Work ³see their
topic through the lens of the construction industry and the limited economic
opportunities that it represented, the authors of these essays cover wider
terrain and tackle familiar elements of the Black Panthers. While providing new
perspectives on these well-worn tropes, they seemingly caution readers against
trusting what they think they know about the Panthers without rejecting all of
that inherited knowledge either.&nbsp;The collection is thus not as focused
as Goldberg and Griffey's, but its eclectic and far-reaching ambitions are a
strong point and will open new, and revive some old, avenues for investigation.

        In their introduction, Lazerow and Williams emphasize the theme of
"dynamism" in the history of the Black Panther Party, and after reading the
book as a whole it is hard to disagree with their conclusion. For while the
Black Panthers may in the popular mind represent the apogee of black radical
separatism, the party in fact rejected the rejectionists. In other words, they
denounced the expelling of whites from black nationalist movements, a trend
that Carmichael had perpetuated as chairman of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee and had embraced as prime minister of the Panthers. The
images of the Black Panthers can sometimes overshadow both their words, which
are far more complex than their imagery would suggest, as well as their deeds,
which were multitudinous.

        Lazerow and Williams organize the book thematically, a decision that
allows connected essays to feed off of one another while allowing for depth and
breadth of coverage. Robert O. Self's lengthy essay effectively places the
Black Panther Party within the framework of long civil rights movement
historiography. His essay stands alone. The sections that follow each contain
between one and three essays preceded with an "Introductory Comment" from a
scholar that serves as a synthetic essay. Although the book has its genesis in
a conference, the editors make clear that each contribution saw substantial
revision and reordering so that the introductory chapters are not simply
regurgitations of conference comments; rather, they serve as serious
springboards to themes ranging from the question of violence to local studies
to individual players within the party to the Panthers as actors within larger
coalition politics to a concluding section entitled "The Black Panthers in the
American Imagination."

        The contributors come from a range of disciplines and thus
methodological approaches. But they share a desire to view the Black Panthers
on their own terms, within their specific historical and political context. The
most fascinating essays place their investigations against the backdrop of the
myth making that surrounded the Panthers, eventually revealing the truth within
the myths. Thus rather than reject, say, the idea that the Black Panthers
believed in the use of guns, Bridget Baldwin places the presence of guns within
the context of discourses of self-defense. Rather than emphasizing racial
tension, essays by Joel Wilson, David Barber, and Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar reveal
the ways the Panthers worked with and learned from white and brown radicals.

        Lazerow and Williams have done an important service by pulling together
a range of essays that expand on what we know and reveal a great deal that we
did not know about the Black Panther Party. This book will be a source for
scholars and students of Black Power for a generation and should fuel waves of
future research.

        Turning to the other side of the world, black nationalist movements in
South Africa antedated the rise of Biko and Black Consciousness by more than a
generation. From the rise of the ANC Youth League in the 1940s that saw Anton
Lembede articulate a truly black nationalist ideology and Mandela, Oliver
Tambo, Walter Sisulu, and other Young Turks take over the ANC, to the Pan
Africanist Congress and its rejection of the ANC's post-Freedom Charter embrace
of non-racialism, to Black Consciousness, innumerable South Africans embraced
black nationalisms of varying intensities and scopes. The best treatment of
this history has for more than three decades been Gail M. Gerhart's seminal
³Black Power in South Africa²²: The Evolution of an Ideology², a book that
remains in many ways as vibrant today as it was when the University of
California Press published it in 1978.

        And yet while its endurance speaks to the quality of Gerhart's work,
the book also serves as a reminder that investigations of African nationalism
in South Africa still have ample room for exploration. While there is abundant
work on Biko, whose vibrant life and tragic death, along with the profusion of
his writings, continue to fascinate (note, for example, Lindy Wilson's ³Steve
Biko² (2012),² ³one of the first volumes in the promising new Ohio University
Press Short Histories of Africa series), the larger black nationalist movements
have not seen the explosion of work that Black Power in the United States has
enjoyed in the last decade or so. While Daniel R. Magaziner's marvelous and
inventive book ³The Law and the Prophets ³maintains its focus on what he
acknowledges as the largely inchoate "movement" of Black Consciousness, it also
points a way for future scholars to revisit the legacies of black nationalism,
Black Consciousness, and Biko in the years to come.

        Magaziner emphasizes the intersection of ideology and theology that he
sees at the heart of Black Consciousness during its heyday. He also explicitly
acknowledges the ways that the literature on Black Power in the United States
influenced his own work: "I take cues from new literature on the Black Power
movement in the United States that emphasizes process, not politics, and the
contingent moments around which political movements cohered and fractured, thus
moving beyond grand narratives that make the story triumphantly legible but
less historical" (p. 5). Through this emphasis on process, Magaziner enriches
our understanding of Black Consciousness in its time, even if it occasionally
means that the story he tells is a bit diffuse and not for beginning students
of South African history.

        Magaziner argues that his study's "signature contribution" is that "as
intellectual history, it asserts the importance of both thinkers and their
ideas" (p. 6). While these thinkers (many of whom Magaziner interviewed in one
of the book's signal contributions) were certainly interested in the end of
Apartheid and racial oppression, they thought about larger questions, namely,
"whither are we going?" This query leads to one of Magaziner's central
arguments: "South African black thought during the early 1970s was frequently
less about explicit resistance to apartheid and more about fundamental ethical
questions regarding how one should live in service of the future" (p. 9). As a
consequence, these thinkers reveal the importance of theology to Black
Consciousness, a form of faith that emerged not because of but rather "in spite
of" the racial conditions that prevailed particularly in the period leading to
the Soweto Uprising (p. 11). The result was an ironic outcome by which
engagement with the anti-Apartheid resistance limited the revolutionary promise
that Christianity might offer.

        Some readers may find this assertion problematic in as much as it
trades abstractions of unfulfilled and idealized revolutionary promise for the
very real fight against a very real foe for very real goals, and it might be
easy for critics to use the last sentence of Magaziner's book against him:
"Prophecy, history teaches, always looks clearer from a distance" (p. 190). But
Magaziner is a scrupulous historian who marshals evidence and puts forward
arguments well. His conclusions should certainly transform the way we think
about black nationalist philosophies and liberation theologies.

        One of the most frustrating components of the historian's task is that
it takes a long, long time for changing scholarly perceptions to enter the
general public, if they ever do. Quite literally decades of scholarship exist,
for example, pointing out Kennedy's reluctance and dithering on the question of
civil rights and yet the popular perception is that he was a stalwart supporter
of the movement. With regard to Black Power, in the United States, the
perception of King's nonviolent civil rights movement, embodied in the "I Have
a Dream" speech, giving way to angry and violent black men with raised fists is
likely to continue to endure. So too the smoothed public perception of South
African history whereby Mandela went nobly off to prison, and Biko emerged to
present a predestined-to-fail program of Black Consciousness before he was
killed by South African security forces. It is not that these stories lack
elements of truth, but they reduce history to aphorism, with easy solutions and
obvious good guys, while creating false bad guys and reducing any complexity
that might disrupt the easily digestible narrative. History is at least as much
about the rough edges as it is about the smooth surfaces, as these books so
ably show.

        The books under consideration here take on these longstanding tropes
and in so doing create a historiographical challenge that may or may not
eventually filter down to the general public. But they should at least begin to
shift the conversation, however slightly, so that complicated truths can begin
to emerge. Black Power, the Black Panthers, and the many African nationalists
embodied in the fluid concept of Black Consciousness represented the
culmination of myriad political and intellectual movements. They manifested
themselves in a multiplicity of ways, whether in demands for jobs or the
establishment of soup kitchens; or the emergence of a prophetic form of African
nationalism; or, yes, in the form of angry men with raised fists or Biko's
death somewhere in the Eastern Cape in 1977. The old myths themselves can
contain considerable truth and gain more depth from a true understanding of the
contexts within which those myths developed.&nbsp;

Citation: Derek Catsam. Review of Goldberg, David; Griffey, Trevor, eds.,
³Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action, and the
Construction Industry² and Magaziner, Daniel R., ³The Law and the Prophets:
Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977² and Williams, Yohuru; Yazerow,
Jama, eds., ³In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a
Revolutionary Movement².
H-1960s, H-Net Reviews. January, 2013.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=37963

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No
Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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