We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (review)

the alabama review 246 We Ain’t What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama. By Stephen Tuck. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. viii, 494 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-674-03626-0. A welcome addition to the scholarship on the black freedom struggle in American history, Stephen Tuck’s We Ain’t What We Ought to Be masterfully traces African Americans’ fight for freedom from Emancipation to the election of the nation’s forty-fourth president, Barack Obama. The study is an examination of the “long” freedom struggle that culminated in the 1960s protest movement, which he situates in what he calls “protest generations” (p. 2). Such protest generations, he argues, have deep roots that stretch back to the Civil War and extend beyond the sixties to twenty-first-century struggles. Tuck argues that there was “no such thing as a single black protest agenda” or “a single black experience” or “a single black culture”; rather, the long black freedom struggle was fought in diverse ways utilizing varying methods (p. 3). This point meshes with recent black liberation movement scholarship. The primary sources utilized in the volume include firsthand accounts, domestic and foreign newspapers, various legal documents, and material from the National Archives. Most of the book’s substance, however, relies on a significant treatment of secondary sources, many of which have been published in the last twenty years. The first four chapters of the book cover African Americans’ fight for meaningful freedom from the Civil War to the end of the Progressive Era. Chapters 5–7 discuss African American struggles from World War I to World War II. The Civil Rights movement and Black Power are examined in chapters 8–10. The final chapter and the epilogue extend from the Reagan era of the 1980s to the election of Barack Obama. Woven throughout these chapters are the diverse voices of the long black freedom struggle. They range from the story of Robert Smalls and his role in the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ attempts to destroy walls of prejudice near the end of the nineteenth century; from black reactions to Plessey v Ferguson in 1896 to the founding of the NAACP; from Garveyism to the Double V campaign and resistance to white supremacy by returning black World War II veterans; from the women activists who ushered in the Civil Rights movement and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Black Power to Hip Hop; and from Reagan to Obama. But what is new about the book? Not much at all. While the volume will not alter current discourses on black resistance, civil rights, or the July 2011 247 black freedom struggle in America itself, Tuck’s book offers multiple, conflicting, and dialectical stories of the black freedom struggle cleverly woven into a neat pattern of resistance, confrontation, progress, and triumph —while acknowledging that much of this struggle remains still to be reconciled. We Ain’t What We Ought to Be is a synthesis of black history over the last century and a half, an amalgamation of black protest movements , and a fusion of innumerable voices that demanded and created change via generations of black dissent. A book this dense that attempts to cover so much history naturally fails to treat some important topics adequately. The discussion of the Black Panther Party, one of the most vital components of the black freedom struggle, is narrow. Unfortunately, Tuck repeats falsehoods and generalizations about the organization. His description devalues the Panthers as an “incoherent, faction-ridden, anti-white, sloganeering, futile movement of hopeless youth” (p. 331). He portrays the Panthers as sexist and dismisses Elaine Brown, one of the few women leaders of any Civil Rights/Black Power group, as simply “a former lover of Huey Newton” (p. 365). Since 1998, more than fifty-five scholarly works have been written on the Panthers. Much of this scholarship addresses such misrepresentations and would have helped Tuck to produce a more balanced treatment of the organization. We Ain’t What We Ought to Be is nonetheless a great resource for both survey and graduate courses in African American history...