Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America - Hardcover

Joseph, Peniel E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805075399 ISBN 13: 9780805075397

Verlag: Henry Holt & Company Inc, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

A compelling history of the Black Power movement in the United States traces the origins and evolution of the influential movement, from the urban militancy of the 1950s, through the rise of a radical new approach to the fight for racial equality, examining the ways in which Black Power redefined racial identity and culture and its lasting legacy. 35,000 first printing.

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Peniel E. Joseph is an assistant professor of Africana studies at SUNY-Stony Brook. The recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Ford Foundation, his work has appeared in Souls, New Formations, and The Black Scholar, and he is editor of a forthcoming anthology on the Black Power movement. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Introduction

To Shape a New World
 
Malcolm X arrived in Harlem in the early 1950s on the heels of the contentious departure of another of its adopted, if little-known, sons. As Malcolm was bounding into Harlem's local political arena, Harold Cruse was settling downtown, still clinging to wistful dreams that he had, temporarily at least, put on hold. As a young boy, Harold Cruse dreamed of becoming a writer. For a southern-born black boy coming of age in the Great Depression, this was an ambitious goal, with long odds. Born in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1916, Cruse moved as a young boy to New York City as part of the exodus to northern cities that would shortly transform African American life. The then-largest internal migration in American history sowed the seeds for Harlem's emergence as a cultural mecca that would become the headquarters for black political resistance, intellectual achievement, and cultural innovation. A second great migration, which started during the early 1940s, of southern-born blacks (which eventually eclipsed its earlier counterpart in both density and geographical breadth), extended to cities and regions recently buoyed by the movement for civil rights. Coalitions of civil rights activists, trade unionists, Communists, and Pan-Africanists led strategic campaigns for racial justice and radical democracy that stretched from gritty Harlem neighborhoods through Detroit's industrial shop floors to Dixie's cradle, Birmingham, Alabama, and out west to Oakland's postwar boomtown.1
 
Cruse's favorite time was spent reading books at the local library. It was no ordinary public library. Harlem was home to the New York Public Library's Negro History Division, a repository of black history and culture founded by the Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile, historian, and curator Arturo Schomburg. Schomburg's passion for African, Caribbean, and African American history provided the residents of Harlem's black community a window onto its past.2
 
In the 1950s, black nationalists stalked Harlem like itinerant Baptist preachers in search of wayward flocks, wistful for the heady post-World War I years, when "New Negroes" reshaped Afro-America with a dose of militancy as effervescent as it was unprecedented. Marcus Mosiah Garvey's dynamic presence had fueled this golden age, when the Universal African Legions (soldiers in Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association) held Harlem captive with precision marching, ornate uniforms, and defiantly proud stares.3 No sooner had Garvey overcome what appeared to be insurmountable organizational, financial, and political obstacles than his movement collapsed, victimized by internal ineptitude, government surveillance, and jealous rivals. Garvey's arrest on charges of mail fraud, and subsequent incarceration during the mid-1920s, made room for other advocates of interracial class struggle who, during the height of the New Negro, could barely be heard above the din of nationalist fervor.
 
If Garvey's absence created space for radicals, the Great Depression invited another front in the war for racial equality: class-based political agitation. With organizing energies fueled by social crises, the Communist Party (CP) made small, but surprisingly robust, headway in Harlem. While Garvey stoked controversy through grand gestures aimed at coaxing dignity from Africa's descendants, the CP offered a Promethean vision of class struggle. As Cruse remembered, anyone who couldn't debate the finer points of Marx and Engels was "considered a goddamned dummy!"4
 
By the late 1930s, the Depression introduced the possibilities of social, cultural, and political revolution at home and abroad and reached Harlem's street corners, barbershops, churches, and other institutions. Much of Cruse's early political education took place at the Harlem YMCA, which served as a debating society, intellectual training ground, and incubator for what Cruse later described as a hotbed of political activity. The all-black neighborhood blurred class distinctions among Afro-Americans, where Harlemites rubbed shoulders with leading black literary lights.5 Virtually every block of Harlem was up for grabs: nationalists exhorting on one corner, while Socialists and others set up their headquarters fifty yards away. Pamphlets on class struggle, Pan-Africanism, and trade unionism compressed decades of social history into easily digestible prose. Walking through parts of Harlem, you risked being bombarded by pamphleteers selling, or sometimes giving away, propaganda that recounted the history of Negro oppression and offered a blueprint for black liberation.
 
Fascism's triumphs in parts of Europe and Africa gave black Americans the opportunity to fight for freedoms abroad that they were denied at home. For blacks the fight against an overseas enemy lent urgency to domestic struggles for racial justice. Stationed in a supply company in Italy and North Africa, Cruse became friendly with Italian Communists. There were pragmatic reasons for such friendships. Preyed on by hijackers and other criminal elements, vulnerable black supply officers negotiated with the Italian Underground as a matter of professional survival and personal protection.6
 
Cruse returned home, more politically conscious and worldly, to a Harlem that had also matured. In fact, postwar New York City became a battleground for some of the most militant and cosmopolitan efforts to achieve racial equality in the United States, and Harlem was the movement's nerve center.7 For instance, seizing opportunities created by postwar momentum for progressive politics, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People--the NAACP--and the Council on African Affairs joined forces to promote a human rights platform for the nascent United Nations.8 Groups such as the National Negro Labor Congress and the Civil Rights Congress, as well as leading black intellectuals (Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes among them), established relationships with Communists that ranged from dangerous flirtation to intimate association.9 Communists, through support of black criminal defendants, sharecroppers, trade unionists, artists, and writers, also played an important, hotly debated role among black activists during this period. Black sympathizers, not to mention members, viewed the CP as a potential vehicle for liberation, while anti-Communists suspected the group of playing African Americans for dupes (a fear promoted by the federal government). The majority of black folk remained neutral, accepting the CP's support in certain instances of bald-faced racial injustice while never coming close to becoming professional members. In 1946, Cruse officially joined the Communist Party. Like many in his generation, he entered radical politics at the peak of its post-World War II popularity, only to come of age amid its steady decline during the Cold War.
 
From rural hamlets and small southern cities to giant urban metropolises, the black postwar generation challenged racial discrimination in industry, labor, housing, and domestic and foreign policy. Paul Robeson, the broad-shouldered Renaissance man who possessed the physique of a football player, the mind of an intellectual, and a sonorous bass voice that thrilled a global listening audience, emerged as the most popular spokesperson for black insurgency during the 1940s.10
 
Robeson's radicalism was rooted in his identification with underdogs of every race, color, and creed, an advocacy that found him proclaiming solidarity with indigenous people from Africa to the Soviet Union. Yet while leaders such as Robeson served as invaluable political mobilizers, a national black freedom movement was brokered, block by block, at the local level by far less glamorous figures.11 Ella Baker (future founder of the Student Nonviolent...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Henry Holt & Company Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0805075399
• ISBN 13: 9780805075397
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 399
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar