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Legacy: Understanding Black Power Forty Years Later
Black History Exhibit
The Johns Hopkins University
Milton S. Eisenhower Library
February 11, 2005 – June 15, 2005
A Generational PerspectiveThis exhibition, Legacy: Understanding Black Power Forty Years Later, is less about a historical period than a whole generation of people. That generation grew up during the period of Black Power and now grows old in a world changed by its ideas. To understand the impact of the movement today, look at the people Black Power shaped, how it affected them, and how, they now influence what we see each day.
Understanding Black Power Forty Years LaterFrom 1966 through 1975, a portion of the population came of age in America to be, in the words of the Nina Simone song of the time, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. They encountered a world that ill appreciated their gifts, exploited their youth, and had no use at all for their Blackness.
The Black Power generation was bequeathed a legacy of civil rights inclusion. They were the first to integrate America's college campuses in large numbers. That distinction exposed them to a world of new possibilities, frustrated by a reality of White hostility—subtle and sometimes open—to what they had to offer creatively and intellectually.
The Black Power generation fought the war in Vietnam. They returned home from the violence of war to communities ravaged by conditions beyond their powerlessness to determine for themselves their own lives.
The prevailing injustice was not the mere unfairness of racial discrimination. It was the absence of power in Black people to define success on their own terms and make it happen. For Black Power, justice is the power to make self-assertion meaningful.
That generation is approaching retirement age today, having matured, in some instances, to positions of power and influence. Many discovered, in the passion of youth, the power of their identity as Black men and women. A few came to forget the impact of Black Power in the expediency of pursing mainstream success. As this generation bumps its head against the "glass ceiling" of America's limitations, a number are rediscovering now their early radicalism, tempered by the practicality of experience.
The legacy of Black Power forty years later reflects youth's radicalism tempered by experience. To understand that legacy is to see passion maturing into something more lasting. What more lasting influence can we discern today from this movement some forty years ago?
The Black Faculty and Staff Association of Johns Hopkins University presents this exhibition on Black Power. Many of its members lived the realities of the Black Power era. They offer this exhibition for those who did not.
The Back Story
As 1965 ended, the Civil Rights movement had won victories that did little to make the daily lives of many Black people different. Schools had been legally desegregated for more than 10 years. But many Black school children still suffered a substandard education in school districts pressed for resources. Legislation had outlawed discrimination. But a large number of Black households were still confined to areas where people wrestled with joblessness and redlining in housing and lending.
As 1966 began, Blacks celebrating the opportunities of the American dream now knew new frustrations with the familiar reality their parents had experienced of dreams denied if not deferred. With mounting frustration borne by expanding and unfulfilled promises of opportunity, many began to question the underlying premise of civil rights that linked progress to assimilation within the mainstream.
Black Power offered new answers to old questions. If paying the price of submerging who you are just to fit in did not produce satisfying change, why not at least enjoy the satisfaction of saying who you are out loud no matter who it bothered?
Black Power thus elevated identity from being a mere incident of distinguishing individuals to an element essential to becoming a whole and complete human being. In the case of Black Power, that meant reconnecting Black people to a heritage reaching across an ocean of water and time.
As whole and complete people shaped by a common legacy that distinguished them from the mainstream, Black Power liberated Black people to say for themselves what they wanted with the expectation that only they could deliver that outcome. Blacks declared, in the words of James Brown, "Now we demands a chance to do things for ourselves. We're tired of beatin' our heads against the wall workin' for someone else." Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)(1969).
The Life Histories of Black Power
Black Power is embodied in the life histories of the Black people who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, clear about who they were, angry about what little it meant to change their prospects and the lives of their children, and moved to do something about it.
In their 20s, doing something might mean screaming out loud, demanding something radical, or even just wanting to hit back. But people who, forty years ago, might be moved by conditions that, as Marvin Gaye put it, "make me wanna holler," found other solutions to their predicament.
Black Power – A Vision for Higher Education
Forty years ago, Charles Simmons was a fan of jazz whose passion drove him to help found the Left Bank Jazz Society in Baltimore. His was the image other people used to sell malt liquor to Black folk.
His Black Power destiny was different. It led him to an experiment with Antioch College in urban education that, when he took it over, became Sojourner-Douglass College, the only Black-controlled independent private college in Maryland. The man in the malt liquor ad then is today president of the college he established.
Back in the day, Black students at Johns Hopkins University were forced to demand conditions enabling them to thrive academically and personally. Today, those demands bear fruit in the university's recently opened Center for Africana Studies.
Black Power – Empowering Words
Black Power found Paul Coates in the Maryland Chapter of the Black Panther Party, a Defense Captain with an interest in books. Today, as co-founder of Black Classic Press, one of a handful of Black-owned publishers equipped with digital printing, he preserves for 21st Century audiences obscure and significant out-of-print works by and about African Americans.
Black Power --Transforming the Face of Hollywood
Black Power emboldened Black filmmakers to take control of the images White America had chosen for their people – sometimes with bad and good intentions. With Black people telling their own stories unapologetically from the vantage of their own experience, Black Power continues to transform popular culture.
Collectively, these life histories provide a context for assessing the impact of the Black Power Movement. In the people who shaped and were, in turned, shaped by it, Black Power has present life. Like them, it has matured and grown wiser with age. What then is the wisdom we draw from them forty years later?
What Did It All Mean?
In a world shaped by Civil Rights to assure that race should never matter, Black Power advanced the idea that being Black has meaning. The idea coincided with growing Black disenchantment with the unfulfilled promise of Civil Rights equality.
Civil Rights delivered for many middle class Blacks an equality that cost their identity as Black people, and for others, particularly the poor in northern cities, little that approached equality at any price. What followed was anger and resentment. Less obvious was the remarkable creativity it sparked about what being Black meant.
Black Power was racial identity asserted as political power. It also supported comparable assertions of identity that defined new possibilities in other fields.
Writers like Harold Cruse, who wrote The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, developed Black consciousness into a framework for analysis in economics, culture, and other subjects. In art and literature, in scholarship, and, as it always had been, in popular culture, with movies and comedy particularly, Blackness mattered.
Today, the impact of Black Power reaches beyond the affairs of Black people. Its elevation of racial identity now defines the politics of outsider groups, who organize around their own respective agendas without regard for how much their efforts may set them apart from the mainstream.
Even for non-Blacks, Blackness today has reality. It forms its own academic discipline on predominantly white college campuses. It defines an identifiable aesthetic of general appeal to varied audiences. It has palpable value in commercial exchange.
Forty years later, Black Power is more than the faint memory of Afros and Dashikis. It’s an empowering view of the world that has inspired other oppressed groups to assert what is in their own best interests.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Stokely Carmichael. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). New York: Scribner, 2003.
Jeffery O.G. Ogbar. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004
William L.Van Deburg. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992
EXHIBIT ONE
Forty Years Ago – Civil Rights at the Crossroads
By the end of 1965, it has been more than 11 years since the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. It is more than two years since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had given his “I Have A Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. A little more than a year earlier, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, making discrimination unlawful in public accommodations, employment, and government-funded programs. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is just beginning to enfranchise unprecedented numbers of Black citizens in the South.
Not just in the South, many Blacks are still pressed to live in conditions that offer little promise. Job prospects remain bleak. Housing in many places continues to be distressed. Everywhere, the police are the same visible and hostile presence where Black people were concerned.
On August 11, 1965, a police stop of a motorcyclist in Los Angeles sparks in Watts an outbreak of violence that continues for 5 days, destroying an estimated $200 million in property, and costing 34 lives. It marks an unqualified rejection of the patient non-violence that had been the hallmark of the Civil Rights Movement. It will only be the first of several instances in which an American city outside the South endures civil unrest over conditions it is the unfulfilled promise of civil rights to change.
AP Photo, 1954
Thurgood Marshall, lead counsel for the NAACP in Brown v. Board of Education, victorious on May 17, 1954. The fruits of that victory prove elusive for many Black people still beleaguered by inequality and harsh living conditions.
AP Photo, August 28, 1963
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King proclaims “I Have A Dream” on August 28, 1963 in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Despite its hopes, Dr. King’s dream remains unfulfilled for many Black people, particularly young people living in the nation’s northern cities by the end of 1965.
Life Magazine, August 27, 1965
Almost two years to the day after Dr. King’s “I have a Dream Speech,” this LIFE Magazine cover for the August 27, 1965 edition reflects a stark change in sentiments within the Black community regarding the usefulness of non-violent protest.
AP Photo, August 1963
The ideas of Malcolm X resonate with Black youth. In his June 4, 1964 speech, he challenges: “We must recapture our heritage and our identity if we are ever to liberate ourselves from the bonds of white supremacy. . . . We must launch a cultural revolution to unbrainwash an entire people.”
The Advent of Black Power – The Promise of New Assertiveness
By 1966, Black anger about the slow pace of change is growing. Many Black people, especially the young, begin to question a prevailing assumption of the civil rights strategy that changing the prospects of Blacks requires the goodwill of Whites.
In June 1966, James Meredith, the first Black student to attend the University of Mississippi, attempts to walk across the state to demonstrate the freedom won through the Civil Rights Movement. Before he can complete the walk, a sniper shoots him. During a rally to support Meredith, Stokely Carmichael, the 25-year-old leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), rouses an audience with an attack on Mississippi justice, proclaiming, “What we need is Black power.” What follows is a call and response that echoes in many settings over the next 10 years, as a speaker asks, “What do you want?” and the crowd responds “Black Power!”
The question underlying what would become the Black Power Movement is precisely the question asked at this rally – “What do we want?” The new understanding, however, is that whatever “we want” requires no necessary consideration of what anyone else may think. It is a call for Black people not merely to be included within the just society, but for the just society to embrace Blackness, as a value determined by Black people and secured by their power – Black Power.
AP Photo/Jack Thornell, June 6, 1966
James Meredith, the first Black man admitted to the University of Mississippi, cut down on a Mississippi road by a sniper’s bullet. Meredith is attempting to walk across the state to demonstrate the freedom won by civil rights. His non-violent assertion is aborted by the violence against him.
Chairman of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 1966-1967
AP Photo, 1967
Stokely Carmichael defines Black Power as a call “for black people in the country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community . . . to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations . . . .”
AP Photo/S.F. Examiner, Undated
Bobby Seale (left) and Huey Newton (right) found the Black Panther Party in Oakland California in 1966. Embodying the emerging political consciousness of Black Power, the Panthers have a 10-point program calling for full employment, decent housing, an end to police brutality, and political and economic self-determination for the Black community.
Black Power as a World View
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
New York: Morrow, 1967
Photographer: unknown. Circa 1971
From works like Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), Black Power develops not merely as a slogan or a statement of racial pride, but a way of seeing and understanding the world and new world possibilities, to shape a Black analysis of culture, economics, policy, and other subjects.
An Understanding of Black Aesthetics
AP Newsday/Jessica Brandi Lifland, December 27, 1997
Maulana Karenga founds the cultural nationalist organization “US” in 1965. It asserts black culture through an African-inspired value system, clothing, language, hairstyle, history, literature, art and music. It also institutes Kwanzaa, as a celebration of Black values, and helps launch the “Black Arts Movement.”
The Black Arts Movement
AP Photo, June 30, 1964
The Black Arts Movement arises in the middle 1960s. It focuses on identifying the African contribution to American and world culture. This movement includes the art of Jacob Lawrence, the writing of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Nikki Giovanni, Ray Durem, Adrienne Kennedy, Larry Neal, and Sonia Sanchez, and the music of Nina Simone.
LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, Black Fire
New York: Morrow, 1968
An anthology of essays, poems, short stories, and plays from over seventy Black writers. From the dustcover, “Most of the writers represented in this book are under the age of 35. They are members of the Black Power generation, the Black Consciousness generation.”
Comic Revolution
Photographer: unknown, Circa 1978
Richard Pryor develops a comedy probing the racial sensitivities of America as seen by a Black man unafraid to say what he sees and how he feels. In the process, Pryor becomes recognized as a comic “genius” making racial identity an affirming subject of comedy.
The Black Franchise – Blackness as Collective Economic Asset
Photographer: unknown, Circa 1978
DJ Don Cornelius takes the tired television dance show format, infuses it with “soul,” and creates “Soul Train,” a viewing staple for young audiences, Black and White, and a reliable source for years of television revenues. Is it the music that Cornelius offers? Or, is he merchandizing Blackness for some future payday?
Forty Years Later – How Do We Assess What Was?
Assessing the impact of Black Power is more than asking whether it reached its goals. As a political movement, the goals of Black Power remain to be fully realized. What then did the anger and the consciousness raising of Black Power accomplish? Was there a lasting importance or influence?
Black Power emphasized the need for a group to define its own goals and interests. Since the 1960’s, other outsiders like women, Native Americans, Latinos, gays, lesbians, and even the elderly, practice the politics of identity rather than assimilation. Isn’t it fair to see in these developments the long shadow of Black Power?
As an assertion of the underlying value of Black ownership or control, Black Power is alive today. Its legacy is a continuing one. This imprint is apparent in the examples provided by Charles Simmons’ founding Sojourner-Douglass College and Paul Coates’ establishing Black Classic Press.
Black Power’s vision of a world with people of African descent at its center may be the clearest legacy of the movement. On campuses throughout America, that vision is the foundation for Black Studies Programs.
By affirming Blackness, not just to make people proud but to shape how we see the world and what we expect from it, Black Power elevated the importance of group identity. Today, in a world where people without identity have no value and little prospect, Black Power has shown us how we can affirm humanity by shaping any number of worlds, with any group at its center.
The Politics of Identity Go Mainstream
(Gray Panthers)
Photographer: Z Sunday
San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, 2004
(Gay Liberation)
Photographer: Peter Hujar
Gay Liberation Front Poster, Circa 1973
Source: Martin Duberman. Stonewall. New York: Dutton 1993.
(Alcatraz)
Photographer: Ilka Hartman, 1969
(Women’s Liberation)
Photographer: Warren Leffler
USN&WR/Library of Congress, August 1970
Black Power politicized group identity for Blacks, making what we wanted a matter of public policy, how we saw things, a matter of public concern, and our own internal organizing to promote our interests, a focus of political organization. Other groups have followed this example, as women, Latinos, and Gays and Lesbians, promote their own political agendas.
Today We Laugh At What Today Affirms Rather Than Shames
USA Weekend/Michael Grecco, 2003
Years after Richard Pryor, Black comedians like Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle make us laugh and think at the same time about their insights as Black men in America.
Photographer: unknown
Wellspring Media
Photos © Copyright 2002 Wellspring Media
But today, they are not alone in this comedy of identity, as performers like Margaret Cho, George Lopez or Paul Rodriguez, or even White comedian, Jeff Foxworthy, joke from their respective identities in ways we could not laugh about in the civil rights era.
The Payday – What is Blackness Worth?
AP Photo/Jennifer Graylock, June 9, 2003
Three years ago, the rate was in billions, as Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, sold BET for about $3 billion. What exactly did he sell, and who really owns it – The Black Franchise, the collective asset Blackness represents? Those questions mean little without the experience of Black Power 40 years ago.
Bottom of Case 1
(Giovanni)
Photographer: Mari Evans, Circa: 2000
The message of Black Power expressed in the music, literature and popular culture. Writers such as Nikki Giovanni, renowned for her call of urgency for Black people to realize their identities, flourished during this period. Journals, such as Black World and Black Scholar brought the words of Black Power proponents to the masses.
The legacy of the Black Power Movement is still being analyzed. Works such as Van Deburg’s New Day in Babylon and the 2004 Johns Hopkins University Press publication, Black Power offer a scholarly look at the topic.
Jeffery O.G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004
William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992
Buttons courtesy of Philip J. Merrill, NannyJack & Co.
EXHIBIT TWO
Sojourner Douglass College...A Black Power Vision of Higher Learning
Self-determination and ownership are critical even to learning. Not everyone can attend an institution where the student’s success, rather than expected failure, is a fundamental assumption. On most mainstream campuses, Black students don’t commonly enjoy that assumption. In the 1960s, Black Power raises expectations of learning to elevate and liberate when people own and control the institutions committed to their learning. In Baltimore, Sojourner-Douglass College is founded by Charles Simmons to fulfill this mission.
By 1966, Simmons is out of the Marines. He secures a degree from Antioch College, a school then interested in recruiting activists for social change. Given the long-term dependence of many Black men and women on others, Simmons concludes that learning must be a vehicle for empowerment, liberation, and independence.
He then opens Homestead Montebello Center, an Antioch College institution in East Baltimore, focusing on providing learning to by-passed urban populations. But when Antioch decides to end the experiment in urban education, Simmons takes the school independent as Sojourner-Douglass College and continues his own education to secure a doctorate in 1978.
Beginning with 13 students in 1972, Sojourner-Douglass College has nearly 2,000 students today. It is working actively in East Baltimore, and five other campuses, to change possibilities not only for the students it graduates, but also for Black people in the surrounding communities who may never attend the school.
Courtesy of Sojourner-Douglass College
Portrait of the College President As A Young Black Man?
Charles Simmons, before Sojourner-Douglass, valued as a prop in someone else’s advertising to sell malt liquor to a predominantly Black market. Asserting a different choice in the era of Black Power, Simmons offers a different product to market with higher expectation from this same audience – liberation through self-determination.
Courtesy of Sojourner-Douglass College
Photographer unknown, Circa 1970’s
The Beginnings – 1972 -1975
Operating in a donated parish house, Simmons conducts a meeting at Homestead Montebello Center of Antioch College. The location would change to a row house on Aisquith Street, then to a building on Caroline Street. Proceeding without Antioch College, Sojourner-Douglass pursues personal freedom and self-assertion for Black people through learning.
Courtesy of Sojourner-Douglass College
Photographer unknown, Circa 1990’s
The Campus Today
In 1975, the college occupies just one floor at its current location. With community support, Sojourner-Douglass is accredited in 1980 and becomes the only Black-controlled, independent institution of higher learning in Maryland. The name Sojourner-Douglass honors the contributions of Black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass.
(Dissertation)
Courtesy of Sojourner-Douglass College
Putting Forth the Vision
Simmons’ 1978 doctoral dissertation describes a Black-controlled institution of higher learning for historically by-passed populations. Embodying the ideas of Black Power, his vision is to free oppressed people from the limitations that other people’s ideas may impose upon them, enabling them to discover their own accomplishment.
Courtesy of Sojourner-Douglass College
Graduation Day
Sojourner-Douglass’ 1975 class had 13 graduates. Five of those first graduates are pictured here on the front row. The 1997 graduation class documents the growth of the school.
Courtesy of Sojourner-Douglass College
The Realization of A Dream –
Decades after that malt liquor ad, Charles Simmons has settled into his role as college president, fulfilling the mission of changing people and building community around the idea of identity.
Kente Cloth
Made in Bonwire. Ghana, the Kente cloth serves as an emblem adorning all graduates and academic honorees connecting them with their African past.
EXHIBIT THREE
Black Thinking on White Campuses: Empowering a Black Point of View
Courtesy of the Johns Hopkins University Black Student Union and Black Studies discipline.
During the 1960s and 1970s, unprecedented numbers of young, bright, and idealistic Black students are admitted to predominantly white colleges in America. Expecting to be welcomed within a campus environment where ideals of academic freedom are supposed to create new opportunities for excellence, these students find hostility – often open – to their presence both personal and intellectual. Disillusioned by a promise of inclusion that requires them to relinquish their Black identity, the students become more assertive and demanding for programs, conditions, and a curriculum to recognize the substance of their Blackness.
On numerous campuses, including Johns Hopkins University, Black students demand Black Studies programs, proceeding from the assumption that their intellectual point of view had something serious to offer the academic community, Black Student Unions, to assure a place on these campuses where they could be free to be themselves, with others like themselves, and for increasing the number of Black faculty, whose common experiences could offer these students guidance and direction comparable to that available to their White colleagues from White faculty.
In 1967, Black Hopkins students John Guess, Bruce Baker, and Douglas Miles choose not just to fit in at JHU, but to create a place where Black students can excel on their own terms. They seek to create a Black Student Union and various other programs to transform campus life for Black students.
Today, JHU’s Black Student Union operates the Excel Youth Conference and mentoring and tutoring initiatives throughout Baltimore. BSU is active in voter registration and also invites speakers such as Dr. Levi Watkins and Nikki Giovanni, who share their perspective of Black struggle with the University. The proposal for a Black Studies program is today embodied in the Center for Africana Studies, which announced it’s opening in 2003.
Photographer: Hoffmann
(JHU Newsletter from May 17, 1968)
JHU Newsletter article dated May 17, 1968, discusses John Guess and the Black student’s set of demands.
AP Photo/Steve Starr, 1969
Pulitzer Prize Winner 1970
Black Cornell Students leave the administration building on April 20, 1969, following a 36-hour sit in. The students, led by Ed Whitfield, demand a degree-granting African American Studies program. The shotguns had been smuggled in amid rumors that there would be a white assault on the building.
Toni Morrison program announcing Black Studies program at Hopkins
Announcement – Africana Center
In 2003, JHU announces the opening of its Africana Studies Center in a reception and dinner featuring Nobel laureate, novelist Toni Morrison.
A Brochure describing the program to be offered by JHU’s Africana Center
The inaugural newsletter for the Africana Center (November 2004)
Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives, 1969
The first Black Student Union is formed at San Francisco State College in 1966. After much agitation, in 1968, the school established the first Black Studies program. The movement swept the country. In 1969 Students at Rutgers hold a unity rally.
Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies, Inglewood, Ca.: Kawaida Publications, 1982
Introduction to Black Studies, by Maulana Karenga published in 1982, challenges conventional scholarship about the Black experience and critically examines the discipline of Black Studies.
Journal of Black Studies, Newbury Park, Ca: Sage Publications
The Journal of Black Studies. This first issue of September 1970, opens a forum for discourse “in the belief that Black Studies is an extremely valid field of research and pedagogy that deserves the attention of an interdisciplinary body of researchers.” Editor’s Message.
Callaloo, Baton Rouge, La : Callaloo
Callaloo, the name for a southern dish combining a hodgepodge of ingredients, this premier African diaspora literary journal, publishes original works by, and critical studies of black writers worldwide. The idea for the journal was born at a meeting of the Southern Black Cultural Alliance in Birmingham, Alabama in 1975.
Black Studies Program Timeline
This timeline represents the sequence by year and selected institutions for formalizing a Black Studies into degree granting programs.
EXHIBIT FOUR
Paul Coates: From Black Panther Defense Captain . . .To Black Classic Press
Paul Coates’ life follows a course that has taken him from a movement defiant in its assertion of self-defense to self-assertion, in the age of information, as a publisher.
More than 35 years ago, Coates is a young man just out the Army working for United Airlines. Attracted to the Black Panther Party’s platform, he becomes involved as a community worker.
FBI infiltration of the Maryland Chapter brings about arrests that thrust 23-year-old Coates into the position of Defense Captain. False charges find him indicted for attempted murder. Exonerated, he works for the party until leaving the Panthers in 1972.
As a Black Panther, Coates chooses the written word as his weapon of choice. He opens a small bookstore in the Spring of 1972. Selling books leads him to publishing them primarily for the same Black audience he had sought to mobilize as a Black Panther.
In 1978, Coates begins Black Classic Press with just $300 in the basement of his home. Today, Black Classic Press is one of a handful of Black-owned publishers, filling a specialized niche, focusing on obscure but significant out-of-print works by and about African Americans.
In 1997, Coates enters into a partnership with noted author Walter Mosley to publish Gone Fishin, the prequel to the novels forming the Easy Rawlins series. Mosley wants to show support for Black publishers. In 2003, Coates again joins with Mosley on a book of essays about the state of the world, called What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace.
Courtesy of Paul Coates
On urban street corners in the 1970s, revolution goes for just $ 0.25 an issue, as Black Power rediscovers the power the Black press has always had – to make real the world Black people know too well that no one else writes about.
Casey King, Oh, freedom! : kids talk about the Civil Rights Movement with the people who made it happen
New York: Scholastic, 1998
Just out the service, in an America where Black communities suffer despite civil rights advances, Paul Coates, 23, is one of many convinced that the Black people must be the key to their own future, controlling their own communities. He joins the Maryland Chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Photo courtesy of Paul Coates, Circa 1975
Attracted by the power of the written word to liberate people’s minds, the same feelings that moved Coates to join the Black Panther Party prompt him, after leaving the Party in 1972, to open a small bookstore specializing in works embodying the principles of Black Power.
Courtesy of Paul Coates
Coates establishes Black Classic Press in 1978, pursuing a mission to keep alive the words of Black writers whose books are out of print. These early pamphlets are his first publications, reprints of important works, which first appeared in 1913, 1918 and 1942.
Survey Graphic
Courtesy of Paul CoatesIn 1981, Coates reprints this special edition of Survey Graphic, edited by Alain Locke, the first Black Rhodes scholar, influential philosopher, writer and guiding force during the Harlem Renaissance. This special edition contains essays, poetry, book reviews contributed by such renowned writers such as W.E.B. DuBois, Arthur Schomberg, Langston Hughes and others.
Courtesy of Paul Coates
Black Power’s call for Blacks to lead their own organizations and support those aspirations resonates in a publishing deal between Walter Mosley and Coates. By bringing the prequel to the Easy Rawlins series to Black Classic Press, Mosley’s deal provides visibility as a model for other Black writers and Black publishers follow. Coates here stands next to a digital printer, making Black Classic Press one of a handful of Black publishers equipped with 21st Century digital technology.
Walter Mosley, What Next: a memoir toward world peace. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2003
Walter Mosley’s What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace is a personal essay about world possibilities written by a Black man for everyman – the ultimate legacy of Black Power.
EXHIBIT FIVE
Black Power in the Movies: Transforming the Face of Hollywood
From the beginning, movies showed the face of America – mostly white faces. When the face was Black, it was not a flattering picture. Most often, the image was servile, docile, threatening, or just dumb.
After World War II, civil rights forged a new agenda. Then, when Hollywood told a Black story, it embodied poignancy, striving, and sometimes defiance, usually portrayed by Sidney Poitier.
But Hollywood’s Black hero of the Civil Rights Era was not necessarily the Black audience’s hero. Hollywood did not consult Black audiences or tap the growing self-awareness emerging on city streets. The audiences arising from Black Power were unashamedly Black, looking to see themselves at the center of stories, without apology or sociological explanation, with an assertive Blackness that required no other justification.
Melvin Van Peebles captured this view of the world in his 1971 movie Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asss Song. The film may have been the first Black Power movie.
It changed the face of Hollywood for a few years, as mainstream producers adapted its all-Black formula in such movies as Shaft, Superfly, Slaughter, Foxy Brown, and many others.
This genre of movies failed to survive the 1970s. Denigrated by some as Blaxploitation, the movies provided work for a generation of Black actors and filmmakers. But what of their impact today?
Can you even imagine such movies of the last dozen years as Malcolm X, Barbershop, Undercover Brother, or Quentin Tarrentino’s Jackie Brown as possible at all without these Black Power movies of the 1970s? Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? they are not.
AP Photo, 20th Century Fox, 1935
The Way It Was
(Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson)
Miss Temple and Friend
Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in the 1935 movie, The Littlest Rebel. Though an accomplished dancer and perhaps the most recognized Black male star of his day, Robinson, like other Black performers, is limited to certain supporting roles, many of them literally supporting in the form of domestics serving White characters.
Photographer: unknown, 20th Century Fox, 1954
(Dorothy Dandridge and cast from “Carmen Jones”)
Star Vehicle – Only in Black
Dorothy Dandridge leads as Carmen Jones in the 1956 movie that won her a Best Actress Academy Award nomination. Securing a featured role in the movie, Dandridge follows a long-tradition allowing such roles in films with all-Black casts in stories borrowed from mainstream themes – here the Bizet opera Carmen.
Just Like the Rest of Us, MGM, 1963
(Sidney Poitier in “Lilies of the Field”)
Sidney Poitier in his Best Actor Academy Award winning role in Lilies of the Fields (1963). An itinerate worker who does more than just build a chapel for an order of nuns, Poitier’s character embodies all the premises of the Civil Rights Era – that Black people can be just like the rest of us – maybe better.
The Black Actor as Superman, Columbia, 1967(Sidney Poitier and cast of “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?”)
Sidney Poitier with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1968). Portraying fictional world-recognized doctor John Prentiss, Poitier’s character is the apotheosis of the Civil Rights Black Hero – the Black man whose twice as qualified as his White competition to get the ultimate reward, Spencer Tracy’s daughter.
The First Black Power Movie, Cinemation, 1971Black Power Arrives
(Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song)
In 1970, Melvin Van Peebles creates Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song. Though seemingly in the tradition of Hollywood’s all-Black movies, the similarity ends there, as the story is unapologetically told from a Black perspective, with the tag line: “Dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who have had enough of the Man."
Warner Brothers, 1971A Hollywood Knock Off
The Hollywood studios follow Van Peebles’ formula with Shaft (1971): a Black director, Gordon Parks; a hero assertively Black and openly defiant of authority; and an original soundtrack performed by a Black popular artist – this time Isaac Hayes, instead of Earth, Wind and Fire. But the original story is a studio vehicle written for a White cast.
Fox, 1974(Claudine)
A Black Power Love Story
Claudine (1974) applies Van Peebles’ approach to tell a love story between a garbage man (James Earl Jones) and a single mother of six (Diahann Carroll): a story written by Black screenwriters, Black characters true to everyday experience, moving to a hit-ridden soundtrack written by Curtis Mayfield and performed by Gladys Knight and the Pips.
Black Power Play at Director, Warner Studios, 1992(Malcolm X)
It’s Impact Afterwards
Malcolm X (1992) is initially to be directed by White filmmaker Norman Jewison. However, the irony of having the filmed story of this icon of Black Power told by a director who is not Black creates enough of a controversy that Spike Lee wins the chance to create what may be his masterpiece.
Universal Pictures, 2002(Undercover Brother)
Black Power Comic Take Off
This comic parody plays the Black assertiveness of the 1970s for laughs, poking fun at the racial sacred cows of the present day. Undercover Brother (2003) takes the movie formula of the 1970s – a Black director, Derrick Lee, Spike’s nephew, a predominantly Black cast, and a soundtrack covering much of the Black music of the 1970s, with its fictional organization, The Brotherhood, Van Peebles’ corporate Sweetback “come back to collect some dues.”
Photographer: Tracy Bennett, MGM, 2002(Barbershop)
Community Ownership 21st Century Style
Both Barbershop movies (2002 and 2004) have much in common with 1974’s Claudine: an ensemble cast, a tender story in which community uplifts, Black characters seeming true to everyday experience, and a driving soundtrack. Its focus is a Black institution of long standing, the Barbershop – in the words of one character, “the Black man’s country club.”
Legacy: Understanding Black Power Forty Years Later
We wish to thank the members of the Johns Hopkins University Black Faculty and Staff Association Exhibits Committee who curated this exhibit.:
Isaac Adegbile, Asst. Director of Admissions
Dr. Floyd Hayes, III, Coordinator of Programs and Undergraduate Studies Center for Africana Studies, Senior Lecturer Department of Political Science, Faculty Advisor to the Committee
Sandy Jenkins, WorkLife Program Coordinator
Gail Johnson, Administrative Assistant, Development and Alumni Affairs
Sharon Morris, Librarian, Committee Chair
Gerald Rasheed, Student, Black Student Union Liaison
Deborah Savage, Administrator, Student Technology Services
Sharon Stenhouse, Administrative Assistant, Center for Talented Youth, Exhibit Committee Webmaster
Camellia Turner, Administrative Assistant, Library, Research Services Collections
Rose Varner Gaskins, Assistant Director, Office of Multicultural Student Affairs
Special thanks are due to program panelists:
Omowunmi Aibana, Johns Hopkins University student
Onawali Ali, Librarian and Archivist, Sojourner-Douglass College
Babatunji Balogun, President, Universal Negro Improvement Association-African Communities League-Baltimore Chapter
Katrina Bell McDonald, Ph.D, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
W. Paul Coates, Founder and President, Black Classic Press
Charles Simmons, Ph.D, President, Sojourner-Douglass College
Black Faculty and Staff Association:
BFSA, founded in 1990, is dedicated to promoting and enhancing identity, sense of community, professional welfare and development among Black faculty, staff and students of the Johns Hopkins University. The organization represents the interest of people of color on all campuses and all levels within the University.