The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s

Foreword

Foreword Scholars, politicians, activists, and the general American public view the civil rights movement from multiple perspectives. On one extreme is the story of black persistence and success in fulfilling a promise of opportunity and equal rights born during Reconstruction but denied for a century . It emphasizes an effort on behalf of black equality centered on the South and led by Martin Luther King Jr. As the story goes, King and his associates relied on nonviolent civil disobedience, mass protest, and eloquent oratory to secure racial integration and black advancement. Congress ratified their efforts in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act opened avenues for long-denied employment, legal and social justice, and advancement. The number of black college students, for example, rose from less than a quarter million in 1960 to over a million by 1977. The Voting Rights Act led to a great surge in black voter registration and to an astounding increase in the number of black elected officials—especially in the South. On the other extreme is the story of a civil rights movement in fragments by 1968, when King died from an assassin’s bullet. It was a movement destined to be ineffective during the 1970s. Amid a white backlash centered on the issue of court-ordered busing for the purpose of school desegregation and white flight from urban neighborhoods, the majority of African Americans became poorer and more isolated. In 1970, nearly twenty-seven percent of black families earned less than ten thousand dollars annually. By 1986, that figure had risen to over thirty percent, and poverty continued to afflict black communities thereafter. Just as they had earlier, most black children attended segregated schools in underfunded districts. Most black families lived in dangerous, crime-infested neighborhoods , with little prospect of upward mobility. xiv · Foreword Partially as a result of these conflicting narratives, black leadership splintered during the 1970s among integrationist-leaning politicians, nationalists , and Marxists. As political scientist Ronald Walters of Howard University put it, a “new group of black elected officials joined the civil rights leaders and became a new leadership class, but there was sort of a conflict outlook between them and the more indigenous, social, grassroots -oriented nationalist movement.” In The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s, Derrick E. White carefully analyzes the role of a group of black intellectuals during these turbulent times. In 1969, at the start of what White calls the “long seventies,” black historian and theologian Vincent Harding led in the establishment of the Institute of the Black World at Atlanta University. The institute is best known for its role in defining and promoting an effort, begun during the 1960s by black college students, to establish black studies programs and departments at predominantly white colleges and universities. White shows that the chronically underfunded institute did a great deal more than promote black studies. It advocated a practical black nationalism and mediated among ideologically diverse groups. As the nationalists, Marxists, and “traditional civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP” presented conflicting programs, the institute sought a “middle ground.” It strove for a “synthesis of leading ideas and ideologies,” and “consensus” through “collective scholarship.” It also translated ideas into action by encouraging scholarship that served social justice. White portrays the institute as assembling “the greatest roster of Black intellectuals, activists, and artists . . . in post–World War II American history .” Its leaders included (besides Harding) Stephen Henderson and William Strickland. Its supporters included actor Ossie Davis, politicians John Conyers and Maynard Jackson, and historians Lerone Bennet Jr., Walter Rodney, and Sterling Stuckey. The institute attempted to provide a social analysis that combined a black nationalist perspective with an American pragmatism. This was no easy undertaking, and White describes the factors that led to the institute’s termination in 1983. That it lasted as long as it did reflects Harding’s belief that “those determined not to be moved, who know, against all odds, that they will overcome, will continue to create a more perfect union, [and] a more compassionate world.” That the Institute of the Black World’s story has not been told until now reflects a historiography biased toward narratives of direct action, Foreword · xv as opposed to those of people engaged in studied analyses of social problems . The Challenge of Blackness is corrective. It shows how dissent...