Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic

Cotton Comes to Harlem: An Introduction

March against fear the civil Rights movement and the Birth of Black Power In 1966 James Meredith, a nonviolence advocate, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, and the first African American to graduate from the University of Mississippi, began a symbolic walk across the state of Mississippi that he called “The March against Fear.”1 Meredith hoped that his act would “tear down the fear that grips the Negroes in Mississippi,” but the march ended abruptly when on the second day, he was shot by a sniper and so severely injured that he was unable to continue. Like the King assassination that was to come later, the attack on James Meredith seemed to many African Americans to point to the ultimate futility of nonviolent resistance as a direct-action tactic against racism and fear. The Civil Rights Movement responded to the attack on James Meredith by sending representatives from the mainstream civil rights organizations to finish the March against Fear, including Martin Luther King Jr. from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks from the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In film footage of the march, King can be seen to be physically holding Carmichael back from responding to police and anti–civil rights protesters.2 When the march arrived in Greenwood, Mississippi, Carmichael was arrested for trespassing on public property, and when he was released later that evening, he galvaCotton Comes to Harlem an inTroduCTion 2 sPectAcUlAR BlAckness nized the audience that gathered with calls for “Black Power”—a call that Ricks had first uttered that evening—rather than the chant of “Freedom Now” that was customary for the Civil Rights Movement. The notion of Black Power galvanized those within the Civil Rights Movement who perceived it to be stagnating behind the radical legislative change the movement had provoked. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred discrimination in public accommodations, education, and employment, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended discriminatory practices in relation to voting. On 10 December 1964, Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but neither legislative acts nor public accolades seemed to assure the freedom that the Civil Rights Movement— originally called the Freedom Movement—had promised. King began to plan the “Poor People’s March” at least partly in response to those in the Civil Rights Movement, epitomized by Ricks and Carmichael, who wanted to create a vision of the civil rights struggle beyond legislative and court gains. King’s assassination on 4 April 1968, the day after he delivered his iconic “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech in support of a garbage workers strike, caused widespread urban rioting and was widely grieved. Black Power, an idea conceptually diffuse enough to be claimed by Black capitalists as well as Black communists, revolved around the notion of economic independence and cultural self-determination.3 Carmichael and Ricks declared the need for “Black Power” on 16 June 1966, and by October of the same year, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton responded by founding the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. That same month, in the context of widespread campus unrest, James Garrett founded the first Black Student Union, at San Francisco State University, paving the way for the establishment of a black studies program the next year. According to the historian Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar in Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, “by 1967, most major universities and colleges formed Black Student Unions and Black Student Associations” (136). While the Civil Rights Movement had argued for inclusion in educational institutions , the Black Student Union movement insisted on defining the parameters for that inclusion. In the political arena, the Nation of Islam, which had been founded in the 1930s, experienced a meteoric rise in membership throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s, so much so that at the death of its founder, Elijah Muhammad, in 1975, it was the wealthiest African American organization in U.S. history.4 Increasing attention to the Black Power movement in pop- INTRODUCTION 3 ular culture and the news media bolstered existing groups and created new ones. For example, membership in the Nation of Islam doubled after Minister Malcolm X appeared on a Mike Wallace CBS special on the “Black Muslim movement” entitled The Hate that Hate Produced in 1959. Though Black nationalism could claim a history in the United States dating back to...