Williams, Rhonda Y. Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century

Excerpt

Rhonda Williams’ Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century examines the political activists and organizations who helped shape the Black Power Movement. Williams traces Black Power’s ideological lineage back to the early twentieth century, highlighting its “roots and routes.” Subverting the perceived tension between tradition and material conditions, the author contends that Black Power is both a “general and timeless goal” and a “historically contextualized set of oppositional ideologies and politics” (p. 4). She adds, “Unarguably, the immediate politics and ‘social situations’ of the mid-1960s contributed to the rise of Black Power. But so too did previous decades of struggles, generations of activists, philosophies, and shifting political cultures” (p. 3). By emphasizing the material conditions that Black communities faced and their ensuing demands, Williams successfully delineates both the continuities and deviations of Black Power politics. The young people who became movement organizers during the late-1960s drew knowledge and inspiration from radicals of past generations. Williams elucidates these generational linkages to locate Black Power within the longer history of the Black liberation struggle. In doing so, she also debunks the prevailing myth that civil rights liberalism, and not Black Power, was a more historically rooted and hence legitimate expression of Black people’s goals and demands. …