Mainstreaming Black Power - by Tom Adam Davies (Paperback)

About the Book

"The traditional narrative of the civil rights movement has been that the more moderate demands of the mainstream movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., worked, but that the more "radical" demands of the Black Power movement derailed further success. Mainstreaming Black Power upends the traditional narrative by showing how Black Power Activists in New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles during the 1960s through the 1970s navigated the nexus of public policies, black community organizations, elected officials, and liberal foundations. Tom Adam Davies unites local and national perspectives and reveals how the efforts of mainstream white politicians, institutions, and organizations engaged with Black Power ideology, and how they ultimately limited both the pace and extent of change."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"This book is an outstanding contribution to an expanding body of innovative, insightful, and original scholarship on the Black Power movement. Davies builds upon an already firm foundation of histories produced in the last ten years, ultimately producing the most substantive and significant study of the impact of Black Power on the American political mainstream."--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity

"Davies's argument about the role of white public policy makers in shaping the impact of Black Power is compelling. He demonstrates hard-thinking that brings together often-discrete historiographies behind an overarching interpretation. His case studies highlight the tension between social justice and technocratic solutions to urban poverty. Davies has provided the best analysis I have seen of why Black Power was more moderate and influential than is sometimes acknowledged, but also why the benefits to African Americans of post­-Voting Rights Act black politics have turned out to be so constrained."--Anthony J. Badger, author of FDR: The First Hundred Days

Review Quotes

"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" (6/1/2018 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

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