BLACK POWER AND "THE NEW BLACK POLITICS": SEVERAL TRENDS IN BLACK POWER MOVEMENT INHERITANCES
Iton (2008, p. 82) took particular note of the "Rustinian conceptions of black politics [that] became hegemonic in the immediate post civil rights era." Political science focused on the move, encouraged by Rustin, "from protest to politics."9 The 1965 Voting Rights Act increased the number of BEOs by 121% between 1969 and 1973, when the total was 2,621 according to the 1973 National Roster of Black Elected Officials. By 1983, there were 5,000 BEOs in the United States. Interest in electoral, bureaucratic, and appointed political leaders and processes grew in the subsequent period of black politics, and political science interest in black politics reached its highest level of scholarly engagement up to that time (Joint Cent. Political Econ. Stud. 1973, pp. iii, v). Students of black politics who entered the academy in the 1980s encountered the contemporary works of political scientists Hanes Walton, Ronald Walters, Mack Jones, Robert Smith, Michael B. Preston, Adolph Reed, Jr., Georgia Persons, and James Jennings, among important others. Their research centered political and intellectual theorizing on the outcomes of the Civil Rights Movement and BPM, often more than the politics orienting their practices. The latter, again, was often left to historians and sociologists as political scientists aimed to discern the prospects of the apparently greater electoral efficacy of black voters and the prospects for greater descriptive and substantive representation of black voters among local and national representatives.10
Overall, the emphasis in black politics in the 1980s continued to reflect the pattern of inattention to Black Power theoretically, and to a lesser extent, BPM organizations (see also Smith 1981, Tate 1993). Black Power informed the premises and postulates of the literature of the New Black Politics mainly tangentially as studies focused more on formal and institutional politics (Preston et al. 1987, Johnson 2007).
First, Smith's We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post–Civil Rights Era (1996) provided a fresh analysis of the BPM and its aftermath in both the grassroots movement and electoral politics domains. Smith sees the BPM's impact much more expansively than did previous studies of the era and relates it to both Jesse Jackson campaigns and the first administration of Bill Clinton. Smith's study takes state violence and police repression seriously as part of an explanation for understanding the BPM's internal and external deficiencies, and Smith presciently recognizes its continued relevance as a focus of black political mobilization decades into the post–Civil Rights era. A key lesson from BPM organizing is that "the black community is too ideologically diverse to operate for long in a single, all-inclusive organization capable of representing the interests of the race in its relationship to whites or the larger political order" (Smith 1996, pp. 74–75), such as a black political party. The importance of Smith's study to subsequent scholarship in early twenty-first-century black politics lies in its call for greater, not less, commitment to black nationalist projects and has become increasingly evident since its publication. Students of black politics focused increasingly on Black Power ideologies and the BPM in the 1990s and after.
Second, Dawson's corpus has contributed significantly to black political science knowledge through study of political attitudes and public opinion research. Dawson (2013, p. ix) observes "a stunning absence of analysis of black activism and the political thought generated in the context of black struggles for freedom, equality, and justice" in the study of social movements in the United States, "but also a more general absence of taking race seriously as a historical phenomenon that has profoundly shaped American institutions, politics and civil society." Noticeably absent in Dawson's summary of studies and analyses of black radicalism are political scientists. At the end of the new Black politics phase of black political science in the 1990s, and following his more influential Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics (1994), Dawson (2001) explored a wide spectrum of black political ideologies, including the black nationalism of the BPM. Dawson's studies significantly advanced understanding of the range of ideological orientations, attitudes, and class differences among US blacks. Blacks In and Out of the Left (2013) is perhaps Dawson's most serious engagement with Black Power and the BPM. His scholarly corpus did not produce a book-length study of black nationalism or the BPM.
Smith (2008) points to the political science corpus of Adolph Reed, Jr., which represented a third influence in political science study of Black Power and the BPM11 and gained wide interdisciplinary attention after the 1984 Jesse Jackson campaign and political developments in black politics and culture during the 1990s, when black nationalist sentiment experienced a post–Black Power period of saliency (Tate 1993, Taylor 2014). Reed, a labor-oriented Marxist and veteran activist of movement organizing in the 1960s and 1970s, is perhaps the most well-known male student of black politics in the United States, certainly in elite white intellectual, academic, and left journalistic circles (e.g., Mackaman 2019). Reed's engaged left critical pursuit of the interracial working-class popular front anti-capitalism has ruthlessly criticized most major developments in black politics—from Booker T. Washington's emergence from slavery to the New York Times' 1619 Project controversies and the present-day antiracist movements (Reed 2020, p. 40; Mackaman 2019). In the Holden and Rustinian mode, Reed is the leading black political science opponent of solidarities based on race (especially black nationalist formulations), gender, or other identities, in deference to labor-oriented, class-based organizing or mobilization (Reed 2012). Behind racial solidarities are elite cooptations. Just as readily, Reed's materialist perspective rejects prerogatives of "the very important ways in which class relations are constructed through and in conjunction with gender and race relations. Understanding the roles of gender, race, and other non-class based social divisions within the labor force is particularly important in contemporary rounds of economic restructuring, which is segmenting the labor force in new and ever more complex ways" (Staeheli & Clarke 1995, p. 3).
Drawing on frontline experience, generational perspective, singular compass of mind, systematic criticism, and political writing from a Marxist perspective, Reed largely set the terms of the critical reception of Black Power and the BPM in political science in the post-BPM era and their characterization in scholarship, typically without a scholarly counterpoint or answer. Apart from Smith's We Have No Leaders (1996), no major book-length analysis of Black Power and the BPM in political science existed, alongside the wide-ranging, excursive interventions that mark Reed's work. Although Reed referred to Smith's work in footnotes (Reed 1999a, p. 227, fn. 7; p. 276, fn. 36), Reed opted not to contest it, nor the work of anti-Marxist Robinson (1983), despite well-known criticisms of other contemporaries (Reed 1986a; 1999a, pp. 38–49; 2000). Smith, of the Howard University school (and one significant student of Walters' to develop the nationalist line), and Reed, of the Atlanta University school, indeed share much in their criticisms of Black Power radicalism and its fateful turns following the protests, arts, black conventions, and emergent BEOs of the 1970s. But they sharply part ideologically on the appropriate organizing principles for black political mobilization, informed by Black Power's intervention, and in their conceptualizations of the black community as a political reality (Smith 2008).
Reed's Race, Politics, and Culture (1986a), The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon (1986b), Stirrings in the Jug (1999a), and Class Notes (2000) excoriated Black Power radicalism, BPM organizations, black protest and new urban political leadership, and black nationalism in case studies and partial treatments, through polemicizing black power politics and performing an often one-dimensional, purist quest in the study of Black Power in political science and black politics. Like other prominent black Marxist intellectuals (e.g., Cornel West, Barbara Ransby, Angela Davis, Cedric Johnson, and the late Manning Marable among many others), Reed's genre of polemical political science is properly characterized as anti–black nationalist—and unreservedly anti-antiracist (Reed 2020).
Reed's corpus, which is deeply grounded in high historical and materialist criticism of black American political and urban development, does not amount to systematic study of black nationalism, even in book chapter– and journal article–length criticisms of Black Power (1999a, 2000). Where Smith (1996, p. 75), for instance, argued that the mid-nineteenth-century Negro Conventions forecast the ideological implosions and diffusion of the 1970s movements, Reed's point of entry begins and ends with Booker T. Washington (and Du Bois). The genealogy of Black Power, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, black elected leadership, the 1984 Jackson campaign (Reed 1986b, pp. 31, 128), public intellectual peers in the 1990s, black urban regimes (Bennett 2016), and opposition to the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign are attributed to the bourgeois class leadership strata forged in the uplift assumptions of Washington, Du Bois, and others (Reed 2018, pp. 111–12). One of the consistent stultifying charges made toward black nationalist thought and politics is of the transhistorical nature of many accounts (Robinson 2001, Johnson 2007); it has largely replaced "essentialism" as the slander on black solidarity. Reed both rejects and employs, without qualification, "the black community" in different and sometimes the same writings (1979, pp. 73–74). Where Reed surveys what he terms "vindicationist" scholarship concerning its conceptions of Du Bois's "double consciousness" idea (Reed 1999b, ch. 7), Cruse's penetrating critique of the double-minded device concluded, "It's meaningless. It's an extension of Du Bois's egotistical idealism. In reality he was trying to refashion the whole Negro race in his own image. That is what he was trying to do and it doesn't fit. The double consciousness thing is philosophical romantic crap. It's been handed down as a verity, and it's not. It had nothing to do with those blacks he met when he was at Fisk University. They had no goddamn double consciousness, they knew who they were" (interview in Cobb 2002, p. 297). Cruse's extensive scholarship on the BPM in general is footnoted or all but ignored in Reed's black Marxist politics. Moreover, in W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought (Reed 1999b), rival Garvey is mentioned within the first two pages, scarcely to be referenced again in the text. Garvey is evident neither in analyses of contemporary elites (ch. 5) nor in competition with NAACP liberalism and integrationism, nor related to leadership recruitment and organizational competition in Harlem; he is mentioned summarily in an analysis of Du Bois's "cultural nationalism" during the 1920s New Negro era (Reed 1999b, pp. 76, 82) and omitted from discussion of the "Three Confusions of Du Bois" (racial pluralism, pan-Africanism, and socialism) (Reed 1999b, p. 89). Wilson's thesis of neglect, again, directly highlights Garvey's UNIA and suggests black politics knowledge is incomplete with such inattention in political science study.
Reed's discursive and ambulatory approach to contemporary black political development is not without other contradictions. Reed emanates from an Ivy League institution and is a foremost public intellectual, who loudly criticized fellow academic and public intellectuals for speaking, like the "drums" of Booker T. Washington, to an essential, white audience; he uses "the Jug" and "class notes" for analogies (Reed 2018) but harps on Alexander's poorly titled "New Jim Crow" (Reed 2020, pp. 36, 38) in criticism of antiracist claims. Early on, Reed claimed that his move from organizing to the academy was driven by contemplation of questions seeking account for the failure of left-critical black radicalism in the 1960s (Reed 1999a, p. 2). Much of his corpus explains the internal contradictions of the movement's "race" dimensions, but Reed's scholarship deemphasizes racism, or the "aristocracy of American [white] labor" (see Barbalet 1987).
Reed troubles race consciousness and encourages class consciousness, without accounting for racial discrimination in labor or the New Left. Like Rustin (1965) and Holden (1973), Reed is hard on black nationalism and politics and soft on the racism of whites in left radical circles. Untheorized in much of his corpus is recognition of how the major labor mobilizations of the twentieth century, save Debs and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, mobilized antiblack racism among white labor, while in the United States, black racial politics advanced the democratic project for all groups. As Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker notes, "The Negro people have fought like tigers for freedom; and in doing so have advanced the freedom struggle of all other peoples" (quoted in Smith 2008, p. 19).