Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (review)

This comprehensive history of the politics of black power incorporates interviews by the author, archival materials, an extensive survey of periodical literature, and a large range of primary sources penned, uttered, and published by black power activists themselves. Historian Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar crafts a text that examines the complexities of the concept of black power. Ogbar argues, "Black Power affected African American identity and politics as much as any speech, march, or legal victory of the civil rights movement" because the thrust of its power was "black nationalism" (2). He is quick to point out that although black power was not always nationalist, it "employed—even co-opted—the activism typified in civil rights struggles and operated on basic assumptions of rights and privileges" (2). Through activism, black power advocates sought the self-pride and self-determination of their political predecessors (Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and A. Phillip Randolph) to forge a group consciousness "that substantively altered American politics and culture" (9).

Ogbar's text is noteworthy because it attempts to integrate the cultural, economic, political, and radical elements of nationalism into a history of black power that has been shaped largely by two institutions: the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). The text surveys a plethora of other black power organizations (including extended commentary on the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress on Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Us Organization, and so forth) and their relationships with both the NOI and the BPP. Still Ogbar argues that the Nation of Islam had the most significant impact on black power activists. This influence is because of the rhetoric of the NOI surrounding the foolishness of integration and "the organizational and leadership skills of [Elijah] Muhammad and his chief minister, Malcolm X" (19). Ogbar argues that the NOI was central in crafting a language and culture of self-determination, black support for black enterprises, and a mass black culture, even as it succumbed to problematic trends: sexism, denigrating blacks in the spirit of racial uplift, and conceiving of the races as entirely separate, distinct, and different peoples.

In Malcolm X, black power found a martyr, particularly after he was gunned down in the Harlem ballroom on February 21, 1965. Ogbar traces Malcolm X's rhetorical influence on Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Stokley Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, and others. Ogbar details the split between advocates for integration and nonviolence and those who saw a future in which revolution would involve self-defense. This book provides a compelling portrait of the gradual transformation that many advocates of nonviolence experienced with the increasing police brutality and state-sanctioned violence and decreasing protection from the state, even after the passage of some of the most remarkable pieces of civil rights legislation in the nation's history. Ogbar also tackles the NOI's incorporation of the lumpen proletariat, the criminal, the street hustler, the prostitute, the gambler, and the downtrodden masses as a model for later black power organizers who embraced the Marxism(s) of Mao, Che, Fidel, and Ho Chi Minh. Organizing the poor black masses became central to the BPP in its community breakfast programs, literacy programs, and other service-oriented projects to benefit inner-city communities. The BPP survival programs integrated black power into the communities that the party members needed for financial, intellectual, and political support.

In creating this tapestry of organizational and intellectual histories, Ogbar is also incredibly savvy in weaving together the relationship between black power and the "Rainbow Coalition" of other vanguard ethnic nationalist organizations that late Panther Fred Hampton was so keen on recruiting for the urban revolution. Ogbar includes the histories (albeit brief) of the Deacons for Defense, the Young Lords (and other Puerto Rican nationalist organizations), the Brown Berets (and other Chicano nationalists), the Young Patriots, the American Indian Movement, the Yellow...