Look Out, Historians! Black Power's Gon' Get You

The title of this new, multifaceted, deceptively fast-moving "narrative" (really, an account and an analysis) of one of the most explosive, if still misunderstood, eras in American history, is appropriately complex, even confounding. On one level, "Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour," evoking the classic 1965 soul song by the recently deceased, Wilson "Wicked" Pickett, makes sense, and not only because of the timing of its release (at virtually the birth of the cry—Black Power!—that defined a historical moment). The rawness, the grittiness, the roughness, the fire and rasp of Pickett's voice; the sweat of the dance that the number immediately produced; the funk that the music both reflected and anticipated; the threat that his masculine style represented to much of white America (a more, if distinctly different, dangerous version of the fifties Elvis, tamed by the mid-sixties); the Gospel insistence he injected into his music ("Lord have mercy," "great God almighty," "can I get a witness," and even at the end of prior efforts, "in the midnight hour")—all, in their own ways, surely reminded some at the time of the just-martyred Malcolm X, the most immediate progenitor of Black Power in America, and much more so than Pickett's closest competitor in this regard, fellow "Soul Stew" product, Otis Redding. If Brian Ward is correct that 1960s soul was "doubly anchored" in the twin streams of historical black consciousness—integrationist and nationalist—Pickett surely belongs to that period (his heyday was 1965–72) of the "'blacker,' more nationalistic style of Rhythm and Blues" Ward describes.¹ Still, there is (apparently) much more to the title, and not simply, for example, the emergence of Black Power at that "dark" hour (the "midnight hour") that the mid-sixties represented for so many. For the choice appears to underscore, if obliquely, the historiographical framework within which Joseph is operating—namely, that Black Power must be seen as having "paralleled, and sometimes overlapped, the heroic civil rights era," the latter mostly "mythology" perpetuated by the media (and future scholars), and now increasingly recognized as part of a much longer history of the organized black freedom struggle (pp. xiii, 179). Elements of a Black Power movement, a concept named well over a decade earlier than it became a slogan, in Joseph's hands was long in gestation, waiting as it were "'til the midnight hour" to emerge full-blown.²

No doubt, some—such as the historian overheard in the book exhibit at the 2005 Organization of American Historians annual meeting, who exclaimed at spying Joseph's book in galleys,"Oh, another book on Black Power!"—will see it as a redundancy, or worse as a burden. After all, the period itself produced a plethora of works, in monograph and essay form—from Julius Lester's slim but smart, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama (1968) to Robert Allen's more substantial, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (1969) to Allen J. Matusow's highly critical, "From Civil Rights to Black Power: The Case of SNCC, 1960–1966" (1969). Moreover, there are now two modern anthologies, including one edited by Joseph himself, along with at least three major overviews.³ However, with the exception of Joseph's collection, much of that work is either dominated by social scientists (and, to a lesser extent, ex-activists) or focuses on specific aspects of the movement in specific places. Further, by contrast, Joseph's Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour seeks broad historical ground, in space, subject matter, and most especially historiography. For the first time, arguably, a historian has taken on Black Power—as a movement and as an era—within an explicitly historical framework.

The result is a strikingly ambitious work (an adjective the author uses twice in his appropriately long acknowledgments). Indeed, the sheer conceit of taking on such a project—interweaving...