Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity.
Ferguson, Karen
Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. Black Power: Radical Politics and African
American Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004.
When I began graduate school in 1990, black power in American
historical scholarship was a chimera: largely dismissed as a chaotically
anarchic, pathologically violent, and/or superficial cultural response
to the failings of the postwar civil rights movement, the stock
conclusion was that black power was an impenetrable mess. Now, through
the recent work of Nikhil Pal Singh, Martha Biondi, Robert Self, Peniel
Joseph, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, black power is beginning
to come into focus as an intrinsic element in the postwar black freedom
struggle, and one with deep historical roots in African-American
intellectual history and the history of black urbanization. Jeffrey O.
G. Ogbar's book provides a fine overview companion to this new
black power scholarship and is especially useful in terms of the
institutional genealogy of the movement.
Ogbar's book begins with the premise that black power has had
far more impact on American culture than the integrationist civil rights
movement or separatist black nationalism ever had. Seeing black power as
emerging from a melding of both impulses, he defines black power as
focused on black self-determination, self-defence in recognition of
whites' ongoing violent assertion of white supremacy, and the
forging of autonomous black spaces within American social,
institutional, and cultural life. In so doing, Ogbar sees black
power's greatest victory as its ability to redefine African
Americans' place in American society as "far more than
background characters in an ostensibly white drama" (3) and in
setting the multicultural course for American racial liberalism.
Through secondary sources, published primary sources, and oral
interviews, Ogbar provides us with a very useful and informative omnibus
survey of black power. Starting with the premise that the Nation of
Islam and its radical rhetoric and ethos of conservative cultural
revitalization provided the ancestral foundation for black power in all
of its manifestations, he traces an extremely valuable genealogy,
culminating in the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party and parallel
cultural nationalist movements like Maulana Karenga's Us
Organization, and the incorporation of black power ideals into the
mainstream civil rights movement. In so doing, he contextualizes black
power beautifully within the society and culture of 1960s
African-American and non-white America at large, especially in his
exploration of the evolving mainstream civil rights response to and
manipulation of black power's "threat" and promise,
particularly as the civil rights movement moved north. He also shows
specifically how Malcolm X's rhetoric and vision inspired--and the
Nation of Islam provided an incubator for--black power activists of all
stripes. Further, he demonstrates how the Black Panther Party, as a
culmination of black power, borrowed from the activist ethos of civil
rights--while rejecting its liberal integrationism--and the assertive
and proud "blackness" and community self defence of the Nation
of Islam--while rejecting its conservative insularity and script of
respectability--in creating the new hybrid of black power. In overcoming
the tactical limitations of these other movements, Ogbar demonstrates
how the Panthers inspired similar activism among Native Americans,
Latinos, and Asian Americans, forever destroying the assumed normative
whiteness of American culture.
Ogbar's book is especially fine in setting the record straight
on a number of myths and puzzles about black power. For example, in
carefully tracing the direct links between and evolution from the Nation
of Islam to later black power projects, particularly in a case study of
Los Angeles activism, he discredits any portrayal of black power as
without institutional or intellectual antecedents. He also does an
excellent job in exploring the role of the violence of white supremacy
in the development of black movements writ large in the 1960s, thus
exploding the dualism of "non-violent" civil rights and
"violent" black power. Revealing too is his exploration of the
Black Panthers' "lumpenism," or their reification of the
machismo and violence of black male ghetto culture in an effort to
mobilize the urban masses, and particularly already organized gang
members. In carefully exploring the evolution of this strategic and
ideological choice, he is able to unpack two confounding issues in the
history of the Black Panthers: the extraordinary internal violence that
racked the Party, and the seeming paradox of its simultaneous sexism and
its pioneering rhetoric and action affirming women's and gay
rights. None of these insights are necessarily original, but the scope
of this work allows Ogbar to show their interconnections, and thus
emerges a more complete and nuanced vision of black power. In short,
this book contributes significantly to the paradigm shift in the
historical representation of black power.
Given the value of this book, it is disappointing that it is not
better edited. Ogbar's arguments and even his definition of black
power emerge clearly only deep into the book and after careful reading
because of an obfuscating introduction that tells us little of what is
to come, non sequiturs and dead-end paragraphs throughout the text, and
sometimes misleading chapter titles. It is also unfortunate, given the
timing of this book's publication, that Ogbar could not enter into
dialogue with some of the new scholarship cited in my introduction, most
of which has found, perhaps because of its focus on local black activism
and African Americans' intellectual outlook, more political
ecumenism and flexibility among black activists and deeper roots to
black power than Ogbar does. For example, given the bifurcation Ogbar
presents between civil rights activism and black nationalism, and his
implicit assumption that black power activists bridged that chasm for
the first time in the 1960s, I would be interested to know what he
thought of Nikhil Pal Singh's notion of a unified "black
public sphere" stretching back to the 1930s, connected
intellectually and ideologically--if not tactically--by a trenchant
critique of America as a nation built on white supremacy and a vision of
black freedom very much akin to Ogbar's definition of black power.
The fact that such a question presents itself, however, demonstrates how
far the literature on black power has come and Ogbar's important
contribution in setting a foundation from which much more can emerge.
Karen Ferguson
Simon Fraser University
