Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: black freedom movement, racial militancy, revolutionary suicide, New York, Black Panthers, Nation of Islam (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Whereas black nationalism can be traced to Marcus Garvey (and his predecessors), Black Power was first articulated by Stokely Carmichael in 1966. This accessible survey looks at "the murky depths of a movement that paralleled, and at times overlapped, the heroic civil rights era," beginning in the late 1950s, with the rise of the Black Muslims, and ending in 1975. Joseph, who teaches Africana studies at SUNY–Stony Brook, brings to light less-known characters like the Rev. Albert Cleage Jr. of Detroit, who helped organize the 1963 Walk for Freedom a month before the March on Washington, as well as fresh judgments on figures like Malcolm X, "black America's prosecuting attorney." He analyzes the negative media coverage of Black Power, offers a discerning take on Carmichael and Charles Hamilton's 1967 book, Black Power, and recounts the emergence of the Black Arts movement. The Black Panthers also get consistent attention, in rise and decline. Drawing on a rich set of sources, including interviews and oral histories, the book also illuminates flash points in Newark, N.J.; Oakland, Calif.; and the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam in 1974. Though it focuses more on politics than culture—e.g., the 1968 Olympics protest gets just a footnote—it's a good introduction to the topic. (Aug.)
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From The Washington Post

Black Power -- the slogan that became a movement -- is seared in the American public memory. Who could forget the iconic poster image of Black Panther leader Huey Newton, garbed in a turtleneck and a black beret, holding an African spear in one hand and a rifle in the other? Or Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their arms in a clenched-fist Black Power salute at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City? Or H. Rap Brown lyrically threatening whites with guerrilla warfare: "If America don't come around, we are going to burn it down"? Or the title of Julius Lester's 1968 classic, Look Out Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama?

Memory, of course, is not always a reliable guide to the past, especially when emotion-laden issues such as race and revolution are involved. So it is fortunate that Peniel E. Joseph, a talented young historian with an open mind, has finally taken us beyond the politics of memory, mining virtually every available archive and printed source relevant to the Black Power saga. The result is an engaging, albeit uneven, revisionist narrative that reveals a hidden world of black intellectual ferment and purposeful political organizing. Challenging the conventional wisdom that the Black Power movement was a tragic misstep along the road to freedom, Joseph makes a strong case that, despite its flaws, the movement actually "accelerated America's reckoning with its uncomfortable, often ugly, racial past."

Placing Black Power advocates in a long tradition of radical dissent, Joseph frames his narrative of the 1960s with a brief but fascinating discussion of early- and mid-20th century racial politics. Ranging from Harlem to Detroit, he presents a diverse cast of "forerunners" -- Garveyites, Black Muslims, Pan-Africanists, and writers and intellectuals such as Lorraine Hansberry and Harold Cruse -- all of whom are introduced in a loosely connected series of biographical sketches and flashbacks. He then turns to the early 1960s and the impact of Third World decolonization on African American identity and politics. Several chapters explore the growing militancy in a wide variety of communities, from Monroe, N.C., where Robert Williams's advocacy of armed self-defense led to exile in Castro's Cuba, to Detroit and the other northern cities where the Nation of Islam was gaining converts and influence. Joseph's treatment of the controversies surrounding Malcolm X's emergence as a charismatic leader is balanced and persuasive, but even more interesting is his discussion of several lesser-known precursors of Black Power such as Rev. Albert Cleage, the Detroit-based leader of the Black Theology movement, Cleage's close associates James and Grace Lee Boggs, Dan Watts of Liberator magazine, and Max Stanford, co-founder of the militant black student organization, Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM).

As Joseph takes us through the years 1960 to '65 -- the classic era of civil rights struggle from the Greensboro sit-ins to the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march -- we begin to see the outlines of a parallel struggle for black autonomy. Complicated by internal squabbles, both ideological and personal, the story line is not always easy to follow, especially the twists and turns of Malcolm X's estrangement from the Nation of Islam. But Joseph's determination to provide a nuanced version of what took place is commendable. Here, most of the attention is on the North, where civil rights historiography is notoriously weak, but roughly halfway though the book he takes the reader southward to the more familiar terrain of Mississippi, the "official" birthplace of the Black Power movement.

Despite his interest in earlier manifestations of black radicalism, Joseph, like most other historians, locates the origins of the Black Power movement in June 1966, when Stokely Carmichael and other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists unveiled a new slogan during a three-week long protest march through the Mississippi Delta. Abandoning the traditional rallying cry of "Freedom Now," Carmichael shouted, "What do we want?" to a crowd in Greenwood, and the crowd shouted back "Black Power!" As the march continued across the Delta, the call and response became a daily ritual, to the consternation of Martin Luther King Jr. and other nonviolent leaders, who feared that a movement of hope and redemption was being displaced by one of anger and racial separatism.

The new slogan and the resulting schism created a furor among white Americans, and Carmichael's explanation that he had simply used Black Power as a political metaphor for self-determination only added fuel to the fire. Time magazine condemned Black Power as "a racist philosophy," and most other observers agreed. Among black Americans, however, the reaction to Carmichael's words was decidedly different and far more complex. "Almost as soon as it was uttered," Joseph points out, "a new wave of black aspirations, dreams, and dissent became encapsulated within one powerful slogan -- Black Power -- that would become as hard to define as it would remain controversial."

In the second half of the book, Joseph documents the rapid rise and the equally rapid fall of the Black Power movement. For the most part, it is a depressing story, punctuated by SNCC's ideological and organizational meltdown, the Congress of Racial Equality's separatist purges, the Black Panthers' running battles with police and the machinations of FBI provocateurs. Some of the movement's problems were ideological and self-inflicted, but, as Joseph correctly points out, Black Power's unhappy history was also a function of brutal governmental repression and white intransigence. In an age of spiraling violence and political polarization, there was plenty of blame to go around, and even the nonviolent wing of the civil rights movement experienced fragmentation and frustration during those troubled years.

The book ends with a brief epilogue on the legacies of the Black Power revolt, which, according to Joseph, reach beyond the "twisted folklore" of "gun-toting militants" vowing "to die in the name of revolution." Four decades later, he insists, politicians, artists and intellectuals continue to find strength in "black identity as first articulated by Black Power." More specifically, he applauds the continuing influence of a 1972 Black Power conference, whose "agenda for urban reform, political accountability, and the promotion of strong local communities through the strategic deployment of black political power remains remarkably relevant." While some readers may find this attempt to redeem the Black Power movement a bit strained and unconvincing, it is difficult to fault an author who brings such a fresh perspective to a topic in dire need of reexamination.

Reviewed by Raymond Arsenault
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; illustrated edition edition (July 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805075399
• ISBN-13: 978-0805075397
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #712,762 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Humane, full-spectrum storytelling, February 23, 2007

By	Paul Grant "Blessed Are the Uncool" (Madison, Wisconsin, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is about more than politics. It's about people, people who are indeed political creatures, but are red-blooded people, with loves, and creativity, and petty rivalries, and regional differences.

Peniel Joseph has really served the public here. I hope this book is picked up by people (like myself) born after this narrative's conclusion. By moving beyond the waters of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver, and looking into the arts, and cultural developments like Kwanzaa, and religion, he was actually able to bring focus to the narrative.

It was very refreshing to see Martin Luther King as more than a teddy-bear on the one hand, and more than a broken record on the other. He was in the first instance a minister--meaning a person of faith who worked with people, in all their humanity. King changed his mind about realities, and grew, and related to people with a flexibility not shared by, say, philosophers.

Joseph leaves us with the stories of men and women, not always heroes, and not too unlike ourselves in their daily lives.

My only regret is the book's ending in 1974. It would have been nice to understand black power's interface with early hip hop, and such.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gripping story well-told, February 26, 2007

By	Carlito's Way (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This book is outstanding! I don't know what I was expecting. I thought, perhaps, that it was going to be an apologia regarding the Panthers. Or, if not that, it would be a polemic detailing how the Panthers "messed everything up". You see, there is a generally accepted narrative regarding the struggle for African-American equality in this country. The narrative goes like this: for a number of complicated reasons, Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation. Eventually, this was followed by Jim Crow segregation and "separate but equal". Various African-Americans engaged in a heroic civil-rights struggle, and they were aided in this struggle by whites (Communist and otherwise) and other sympathetic ethnic groups. The Civil-Rights Era coincided with and/or encompassed an age of general period of civil disobedience which included Vietnam War protests, Labor Union unrest and a continuing feminism movement. A number of solid victories came from the Civil Rights Era, namely, Brown v. Board of Education and the Voting Rights Act. Also, a number of iconic figures, and moments, emerged from this era, namely, Rosa Parks (and the Montgomery Bus Boycott), and Martin Luther King Jr. (and the March on Washington). Then these craaaaaaaazy kids came along, toting guns in San Francisco and following around cops in Oakland. Stokely Carmichael shouted "Black Power!!" at a March Against Fear in Mississippi in 1966. Olympic Medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave Black Power salutes on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics. In the 60 Minutes special, "The Hate That Hate Produced", Mike Wallace told America that a huge group of angry, angry, angry Muslims were proliferating in New York, and Malcolm X was the head nut. All of a sudden, crazy radicals replaced the politics of integration, non-violent protest and collaboration with that of aggressive "black self-esteem" and incendiary revolutionary rhetoric. As a result, these excesses dragged everything down, precipitating a Civil Rights decline. This, coupled with a conservative backlash, continues negatively to affect the lives of African-Americans today. That's the general narrative.

What Dr. Joseph's book does is blow up this narrative by examining the Black Power Movement as a legitimate movement separate and distinct from the Civil Rights Movement. His book illuminates the import and continuing influence of Black Power, while remaining cognizant of the flaws of its leaders. The book places Black Power within a global context, showing that Black Power was about more than the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam. (He writes about 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung and Catros's trip to New York in 1960, when he made a point of meeting with Malcolm X.) Of course, the book DOES scrutinize the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam as well. Dr. Joseph highlights the stars of this period: Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton and Stokely Carmichael. In fact, this book makes clear that Stokely Carmichael is such a seminal figure that he's worthy of having a separate book devoted entirely to him. But Dr. Joseph also tells the stories of lesser known figures such as William Worthy, Robert Williams, Albert Cleage, Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. He argues persuasively that Lorraine Hansberry's, "A Raisin In the Sun" is actually a radical play. He identifies the radical roots of King and he eloquently disseminates what Baraka meant in his essay, "Black Is A Country".

When you look in the back of this book, you see that it has a 22-page bibliography. Sources include interviews and oral histories, as well as extensive archival material. It's clear Dr. Joseph has done his homework. Yet, when you read it, the book does not come off as an inaccessible ivory tower product full of incomprehensible jargon. He presents the story of Black Power as a gripping narrative. He shows the reader that, in a nutshell, the Black Power Movement provides lessons for today's generation of activists. When I read this book, I couldn't believe that no one thought to write such a book before now- a book that treats Black Power as seriously as "Bearing The Cross", "Parting The Waters", "Pillar Of Fire" and "At Canaan's Edge" treat the Civil Rights Era. If you want insight into the humanity of iconic Black Power figures and a clearer picture of the struggle that continues today, this book is the place to start.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From Dusk 'Til Dawn, September 3, 2006

By	Submariner (Woodstock, MD United States) - See all my reviews

Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour has something for everybody. For the casual reader who has a layman's interest in American history it's a very accessible view into an often overlooked yet thrilling part of our national chronicle. For the more serious minded it skillfully presents Black Power as a deliberate, complex and multifaceted movement worthy of considered treatment. Like a good drama the cast of characters includes not only spectacular icons like Malcom X and the Black Panthers but also lesser stars like Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael) and a host of obscure yet significant figures in supporting roles. To top it all off, the scenery shifts from Harlem to Havana to Oakland with even more exotic stops in between.