Overview

Mainstreaming Black Power upends the narrative that the Black Power movement allowed for a catharsis of black rage but achieved little institutional transformation or black uplift. Retelling the story of the 1960s and 1970s across the United States—and focusing on New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles—this book reveals how the War on Poverty cultivated black self-determination politics and demonstrates that federal, state, and local policies during this period bolstered economic, social, and educational institutions for black control. Mainstreaming Black Power shows more convincingly than ever before that white power structures did engage with Black Power in specific ways that tended ultimately to reinforce rather than challenge existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies. This book emphasizes that Black Power’s reach and legacies can be understood only in the context of an ideologically diverse black community.

Full Product Details

9780520292116

Table of Contents

Reviews

Davies has re-created a series of nuanced, and often surprising, conversations that complicate our understanding of Black Power as an ideology and as a political movement. In so doing, he also offers a fresh perspective on inequality and exclusion in post- 1960s America. * American Historical Review * Scrupulously researched. . . . Davies lays out a blueprint for understanding what Black Power looked like and how it was co-opted and undermined by group identity politics and economic self-interest. * Journal of African American History *

Davies has re-created a series of nuanced, and often surprising, conversations that complicate our understanding of Black Power as an ideology and as a political movement. In so doing, he also offers a fresh perspective on inequality and exclusion in post- 1960s America. * American Historical Review *

Author Information

Tom Adam Davies is a Lecturer in American History at the University of Sussex.

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