Front cover image for Waiting 'til the midnight hour : a narrative history of Black power in America

Waiting 'til the midnight hour : a narrative history of Black power in America

Peniel E. Joseph (Author)
A history of the Black Power movement in the United States traces the origins and evolution of the influential movement and examines the ways in which Black Power redefined racial identity and culture. With the rallying cry of "Black Power!" in 1966, a group of black activists, including Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton, turned their backs on Martin Luther King's pacifism and, building on Malcolm X's legacy, pioneered a radical new approach to the fight for equality. [This book] is a history of the Black Power movement, that storied group of men and women who would become American icons of the struggle for racial equality. In the book, the author traces the history of the men and women of the movement, many of them famous or infamous, others forgotten. It begins in Harlem in the 1950s, where, despite the Cold War's hostile climate, black writers, artists, and activists built a new urban militancy that was the movement's earliest incarnation. In a series of character driven chapters, we witness the rise of Black Power groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers, and with them, on both coasts of the country, a fundamental change in the way Americans understood the unfinished business of racial equality and integration. The book invokes the way in which Black Power redefined black identity and culture and in the process redrew the landscape of American race relations
Print Book, English, 2006
First edition View all formats and editions
Henry Holt and Co., New York, 2006
Nonfiction
xiv, 399 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm
9780805075397, 9780805083354, 0805075399, 0805083359
62857842
To shape a new world
Forerunners
At home in the world
Waging war amid shadows
Liberators
Political kingdoms
"Black" is a country
"What we gonna start sayin' now is Black power!"
Storm warnings
The trial of Huey Percy Newton
Dark days, bright nights
Dashikis and democracy
Legacies, 1975-2005