Abstract: There is a version of the Black Freedom Struggle that suggests that Black Power was a radical break from the civil rights movement. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only was Black Power a logical extension of civil rights protest – a commonsense response to tangible victories in certain areas and to the slow pace of progress and retrenchment in other areas, but it was also a return to more familiar ways of pursuing freedom, strategies and tactics rooted explicitly in race conscious approaches to change. This presentation (paper/chapter) reconceptualizes the Black Freedom Struggle by inverting the relationship between civil rights and Black Power. Examining the Black Power roots of the civil rights movement reveals the centrality of Black Power thinking to the quest for Black freedom, and makes clear that civil rights activism, especially that which revolved around philosophical nonviolence, broke dramatically from the Black Past, rendering the embrace of Black Power a return to the familiar rather than the start of something dramatically new.
Speaker
Hasan Kwame Jeffries (Associate Professor of History, The Ohio State University)