Rethinking the Black Power Era (Essay‪)‬

CONVENTIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS NARRATIVES TAKE IT AS ACCEPTED WISDOM that the Black Power movement undermined struggles for racial justice: the authors differ more in the degree of condemnation than in their analyses of its self-destructive impact. The movement's bracing, at times violent, rhetoric, misogyny, and bravado have made it an easy target for both demonization and dismissal but rarely a subject of rigorous historical research. In the increasingly complex historiography of the civil rights movement, Black Power is most often seen as a negative counterpart to more righteous struggles for racial integration, social justice, and economic equality. Black Power stands at the center of narratives of the decline of the 1960s reform efforts, with its destructive reach poisoning the New Left's innocence, corrupting a generation of black activists, and steering the civil rights movement off course in a manner that reinforced racial segregation by allowing politicians an easily defined and frightening scapegoat. The backlash that followed seemingly upended the civil rights movement's potential to establish new democratic frontiers and turned instead to the easy comfort of identity politics and political correctness. The rough outlines of this story provide the basis for scholarly framing of the movement as an unabashed failure. (1)