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

Gill Scott-Heron once said "the revolution will not be televised" - so Peniel E. Joseph wrote about it instead. In his provocative book, "Waiting `Til The Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America," the young Brandeis University professor/social activist chronicles the highlights and lowlights of the people and the ideas that made up organized black radicalism in the United States over the last century. While the seeds of black power bore their roots in Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association, the book really takes off during the burgeoning civil rights movement in the 1960s, when black militants like Stokley Carmichael and Malcolm X began to question Dr. Martin Luther King's peaceful resistance tactics to address racism. Joseph does a good job of giving comprehensive biographies of not only the well-known key players like Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin and Angela Davis, the author also pays homage to long-forgotten names, such as renegade journalist William Worthy who befriended Communist leaders in Viet Nam and Cuba during the height of Sen. Joe McCarthy's witch trials. Joseph also points out the failures of some black power groups, most notably the Black Panthers, the militant, Oakland-based cadre that fell from national prominence due to internal conflicts and the vices of the Party's leadership (Huey Newton's drug addiction and Eldridge Cleaver's misogyny and conversion to conservatism). The black power movement left an indelible mark in American history, as can be seen in today's social movements and particularly the rise of hip hop in the 1980s. The black power movement also provided an opportunity for African Americans to see themselves on the international level and unite with other blacks worldwide in the name of Pan-Africanism. With the high amount of support for Sen. Barack Obama's Presidential aspirations from the African Diaspora, its seems like black power may have come full circle. It only begs the question - what would Marcus Garvey have thought of Obama if he lived today?

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

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.

'Waiting' is an ode to the Civil Rights era and it's easily one of the best ever written about this period. It feels like a play, characters come in and out of scenes and each one gets his or her due. Joseph is an excellent writer and reveals a number of things that are generally unknown. Everyone should have this one on their shelves for generations to come. Ignorance is killing Black people.

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.