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This chapter presents the historical context of the black liberation movement in the United States, beginning with a brief history of the civil rights movement, followed by the social science literature and historiography of Black Power. Black Power is not the only sort of political formation that is called to mind when visualizing groups such as the Black Panther Party. The chapter discusses how Black Power has transformed into a political form that is captured in the movement's call for “blackfaces in higher places.” This black political strategy signaled in new racialized norms within organizations and reinforced class divisions within the black community, in hopes of creating new institutional space for African Americans. This aspect of Black Power shaped the development of black mayoral and congressional politics and black convention politics, and then generated a sort of black radical march through the institutions.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood talks about his role in the fight for the self-determination of all Blacks in the United States. Toward the end of 1927, N. Nasanov returned to the Soviet Union after a sojourn in the United States as the representative of the Young Communist International. Nasanov’s observations had convinced him that U.S. Blacks were essentially an oppressed nation whose struggle for equality would ultimately take an autonomous direction and that the content of the Black liberation movement was the completion of the agrarian and democratic revolution in the South. Therefore, it was the duty of the Communist Party of the United States to channel the movement in a revolutionary direction by raising and supporting the slogan of the right of self-determination for Afro-Americans in the Black Belt, the area of their greatest concentration. Haywood also believed that the path to freedom for Blacks led directly to socialism, uncluttered by any interim stage of self-determination or Black political power.

This chapter explores themes of history and identity and relates them to rubrics of nation, exchange, and market forces. It considers what it sees to be the monocultural tendencies of “post”-based rhetorics, suggesting that “an unexamined politics of African Americanism lay at the bottom of post-Blackness.” Taking seriously the implications of ideology and identity as outgrowths of the modern nation-state’s matriculation of capital, it analyzes the very politics that found particular resonance in 1960s and 1970s black liberation movements. It argues that “post-Blackness” is a subterfuge subtended by whiteness, Americanism, and the elite “African Americanism” that it ventriloquizes, making some “posts” desirable or thinkable and others so undesirable and unthinkable, so unquestionable in the current scheme of things.