Search Results

The Black Power movement of the 1960s developed out of anger about the way African Americans were treated in the United States. It emphasized black culture, history, pride, community, and rage. Spokesmen argued that black men were more damaged by racism than black women, that men should be the leaders, head of the household, and dominant. Black women were empowered and thrilled by the Black Power movement, including the Black Panther Party, but many had critiques of its male chauvinism, common to many nationalist movements. Female radical African American activists and Black Arts movement members sometimes did not find the intraracial cross-gender solidarity that they sought and were often disappointed.

Chapter 1 argues that social movements as collective actors rooted in human associations derive their power from different sources, and, through the lens of movement power, the puzzle of reverse sequencing can be adequately explained.

This chapter focuses on Flo Kennedy’s organizing in the Black Power Conference, the National Conference for New Politics and the National Organization for Women and establishes Kennedy’s significance as a leader who bridges movements and translates ideas and strategies from one struggle to another. She brought the ideas of the Black Power movement to the emerging women’s movement and made Black Power into a pivotal ideological influence on the radical feminist politics that was developing among predominantly white women.

Chapter 5 tackles the sharply distinct trajectories of labor and environmental movements due to their pursuit of different forms of movement power; setbacks and crises lead them to acquire each other's home advantage and the possibility of forging a genuine labor-environment alliance thereby increases.

This chapter describes the grassroots movement that erupted on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation to resist non-Indian mining and change forever the trajectory of Indian energy development. As news of Consolidation Coal’s massive proposal spread, tribal members connected this project to regional plans being made for the Northern Plains and began to see coal mining as a final attack on the homeland. Opponents thus launched a passionate resistance movement, fueled partly by concerns over the physical destruction of sacred landscapes, but mostly driven by fears that mining would bring outsiders to disrupt existing customs and values. Becoming minorities in their own land, the Northern Cheyenne believed the tribe would cease to exist as a unique indigenous community.But to mobilize an effective fight for survival, tribal members needed help. This chapter thus describes the confluence of interests among Indians, ranchers, and environmentalists, who cooperated to foment resistance to coal mining in Southeast Montana. This odd partnership helped galvanize Northern Cheyenne against their leaders’ development plans, but importantly, most tribal members did not oppose all mining. The majority favored development as long as their tribal government could regulate its pace and scale so that customs and norms remained undisturbed.

This chapter follows the use of women as symbols in the fractured politics of the Black Power Movement. As the movement for black liberation fragmented, images of the beautiful black woman and calls for stylistic conformity were frequently employed in attempts to forge a unified black identity and to maintain solidarity within black political organizations.

The introduction introduces readers to a puzzle of why did two countries as structurally similar as Taiwan and Korea produced distinct sequences—in reverse order—of the rise of labor and environmental movements, and connects this puzzle to the inquiry of movement emergence, inter-movement relations, and trajectories.

Chapter 3 explains the discrepancy of movement emergence. A movement emerges as the early riser because it takes advantage of a relative lack of structural constraint in the location that corresponds to its specific forms of movement power.

Following the Northern Cheyenne revolt, this chapter moves to the adjacent Crow Reservation to detail similar efforts to resist non-Indian mining there. The bulk of the chapter, however, is dedicated to understanding the contentious intra-tribal debates that ensued over what type of mining this community would allow. One faction of young, educated Crows, living mostly off the reservation, pushed for the creation of a semi-autonomous, expert-laden mineral committee empowered to pursue mining only for minerals the tribe owned adjacent to the reservation. According to this group, developing off-reservation resources would preserve the reservation’s non-Indian character and its physical integrity, both of which were key to preserving the tribe. Another group of older, on-reservation Indians, however, feared the community could not survive without revenue from on-reservation mining. This faction argued that the tribal chairman should retain authority over mineral development, and that changing their traditional governing structure would render the tribe something other than Crow. When the tribe narrowly determined to prohibit on-reservation mining, to place power over its resources in a new governing body, and to impeach its chairman, the Crow not only set tribal energy policy, but also made cultural choices about what it meant to be Crow.

This chapter examines playwright Alice Childress as an early challenger of Black Power ideology through an analysis of her 1969 play, Wine in The Wilderness, and contends that Childress frankly confronts the sexual and racial politics that characterized the public/political/theatrical arena of the 1960s and 1970s by rebutting some of the false notions and sexist rhetoric disseminated during the Black Power movement, namely, the stereotype of the Black matriarchy. Childress documents some of the tensions that arose between the sexes as a result of this myth and exposes the hypocrisy of the Black middle class who spouted slogans espousing racial pride while accepting negative self-definitions and harboring class prejudices. Given the often competing gender/sexual politics of the Women’s and Black Power movements, the chapter examines the message Childress sends about Black women’s roles and positions within their relationships and society and the resolutions that her play dramatizes as it pertains to gender politics.

The Black Arts movement developed as a counterpart to the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and African American cartoonists incorporated Afrocentric themes in their work. The most prominent periodical during the Black Arts movement was Black World magazine. Formerly called Negro Digest, Black World featured original essays, short stories, poetry, and cartoons. This chapter discusses how gag cartoons in Black World from 1970 to 1976 featured intra-racial and interracial commentary between African American and White characters that affirmed, criticized, and challenged racial assumptions. The humor in these gag cartoons reflect a shift in racial class and gender attitudes during the Black Power and Black Arts movements. The chapter includes commentary from cartoonists featured in the magazine who were in a dominant position as creators of images that challenged racial assumptions and interrogated the signs, symbols and substance of the Black Arts movement.

By the 1956 election campaign, preoccupation with the Red menace had measurably declined in party politics. In 1954, Richard Nixon celebrated the exodus of Communists from government, but McCarthy was disappearing and the genre was dying. Anti-communism was even less evident in 1958, when a more potent election totem was the “labor boss.” In 1960 both candidates, Kennedy and Nixon, did their best to edge away from the McCarthy legacy. During the l960s, the “do your own thing” ethic and encouragement of anti-Establishment sentiments, brought about greater public tolerance of political and cultural diversity. The rise of the Black Power movement and such axioms as “Black is Beautiful” and a corresponding growth in other varieties of group pride reflected some degree of broadened tolerance of, it not always a taste for, alternative viewpoints.

Despite sharing many of the beliefs and values of the Black Arts movement (BAM) African American playwright Alice Childress (1916-1994) is rarely mentioned in the context of the BAM. This essay explores why she was omitted from BAM’s narrative given her consistent questioning of racial identity, and her embrace of a Black Aesthetic. The study asserts that Childress’s foregrounding of Black women differentiated her politics and art from BAM’s and the Black Power movement’s male leadership. She did not use the iconography widely associated with them: the raised fist, militarist clothing and guns for example. Rather she chose iconography and settings that told of the Black community she lived in: the kitchen, the iron, the mop bucket, the backyard, the stage. Childress was often pigeon-holed as a “protest” writer, a label that set her apart from BAM whose theorists argued that “protest” writing addressed a white audience and could not speak to the needs of Black people. This essay analyses three of Childress’s plays to make the case that her absence from the BAM narrative was to the detriment of both, contributing to what is often a monolithic and gendered account of that movement, and impacting on Childress’s unwarranted artistic neglect.

Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Philippines for two decades, using his position to amass a personal fortune. When Benigno Aquino—Marcos’s key political rival—was assassinated in 1983, cross-class opposition to the regime erupted. Opposition protests drew international attention, and under mounting pressure, Marcos agreed to hold elections in 1986. Aquino’s widow, Cory, ran against Marcos; no one was surprised when Marcos rigged the election. Just as Cory Aquino announced a plan for nonviolent civil resistance, two military leaders defected. The cardinal of the Filipino Catholic Church asked citizens to protect the two defectors. Millions responded, forming a human barricade between Marcos’s troops and the officers. Civil resisters encouraged the advancing soldiers to defect. After several days, the majority of troops joined the opposition movement. With no sanctioning power left, Marcos fled, and Aquino assumed the presidency.

This chapter turns to the era of the Black Power Movement, probing its contours as the ideological heir to the Civil Rights Movement. It also examines the interpretive work of Albert Cleage. Delivered in October 1967, his sermon “What Can We Give Our Youth” interprets the exodus narrative both as an exercise in radical race politics and Cleage's own pillar of fire politics. While most figures of the Black Power Movement abandoned the Black Church for what they perceived to be its accommodationist orientation, Cleage constructed a theology and a politics that maximized the best insights of the Civil Rights and the Black Power Movements, while remaining grounded in the history and traditions of the Black Church.