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Martial artistry was an important aspect of Black Power organizing in the 1960s and 1970s. Organizations trained children and adults in martial arts in Black independent schools as well as ...

In the early hours of an August morning in 1974, prison officials found the jailer, Clarence Alligood, slumped on a bunk in the women’s section of the Beaufort County jail in eastern North Carolina. His lifeless body bore eleven stab wounds, including one that pierced his heart. Naked from the waist down, one hand held his trousers, the other loosely gripped an ice pick. A trail of dried semen trickled down his left thigh. On the floor was a negligee; a bra hung on the cell door. The prisoner, Joan Little, was nowhere in sight. She was five foot, three inches tall, 20 years old, poor, black and in trouble. He was white, 62 years old, and at 200 pounds, nearly twice her size. On these facts, both sides would agree. Those who believed Joan Little was guilty saw a “hardened criminal with the instincts of a black widow spider,” a Jezebel who had lured the unsuspecting Alligood into her cell with promises of sex. In the moment of his climax, the wanton young woman ruthlessly stabbed the poor, defenseless man and fled from the jail. On the other side, her supporters saw a victim of racism and sexism, a vulnerable African American woman who had valiantly defended herself against one of the age-old and unforgivable crimes of white supremacy. But this was not simply a southern tale. The Joan Little case quickly became a national and international cause celebre, attracting feminists of all kinds, Black Power and traditional civil rights activists, working-class black churchwomen, and prison reformers. Joan Little remained on the lam for only a few days. After officials invoked a Reconstruction-era fugitive law that allowed anyone to shoot and kill her on sight, she turned herself in to authorities in Raleigh, the state capital. A Beaufort County grand jury wasted no time indicting her for first-degree murder. If convicted, Joan would face a mandatory death penalty in North Carolina’s gas chamber. However, a well-oiled defense fund and a broad-based “Free Joan Little” campaign led an integrated, majority-female jury to acquit her in 1975 after deliberating for just over an hour. But none of this had come easily, and without the funds and the activists’ support, Little might well have received a death sentence.

The American religious establishment was surprised and confounded by the emergence of the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s. As part of the ideological shift away from nonviolent protests to self-determination and cultural nationalism, African American reparations demands were revived during those years, adding to the continuing stream of reparations movements among African American activists from earlier generations. Over the previous two centuries African Americans witnessed white Christians and Jews’ participation in and profiting from racial slavery, the international and domestic slave trade, as well as modern forms of labor exploitation. Black Power activists in the late 1960s demanded that predominantly white religious denominations and institutions atone for and help redeem themselves for their complicity in the centuries-long black oppression through the payment of monetary reparations. The reparations funds were to be used to support black-controlled economic institutions that would create jobs for black workers and whose profits would be used for further community development. The Rev. Gerald O’Grady, Jr. was the rector of the prestigious Christ Church Cranbrook, a predominantly white Episcopal church in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Rev. O’Grady was drawn into the reparations debate in the summer of 1969, and became the first pastor in Michigan to confront the

White and black, rich and poor, men and women, liberals and conservatives all lined the streets of downtown Richmond on 7 February 1993 to pay their final respects to Arthur Ashe, an international activist, world champion tennis player, humanitarian, teacher, writer, husband, and father. Many who entered the viewing room had no interest in sports and had never played tennis. One Richmond woman braved the winter cold to honor Ashe as a crusader against South African apartheid, a man who had risked his own career and reputation to help others. Future South African President Nelson Mandela agreed. Following Mandela's release from prison on Robben Island after almost thirty years, a reporter asked him who in the United States he most wanted to see. "Arthur Ashe," was his unequivocal reply. (1) One African American professional standing in line described Ashe as a role model for African American youth. "I owe him at least this," the man told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "He showed me it's OK to aspire. It's OK to be articulate. I never had an older brother. Instead, I had a hero."(2) A Richmond city councilman compared the loss to that of John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "The sea of faces in the line to pay respects to Arthur Ashe Jr. last night represented a melding of races and ethnic groups that observers said demonstrated the universality of Ashe's message," wrote one local reporter. (3) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] From the kite 1960s until his death, Ashe's belief in moderation, open dialogue with his opponents, and respectful disagreement resonated with African Americans and whites in Richmond and throughout the world. Born in segregated Virginia in 1943, Ashe came under the tutelage of his father, Arthur Ashe, Sr., and Robert Walter Johnson, an African American physician and amateur tennis coach. Both mentors instilled in him a philosophy of personal uplift similar to the teachings of Booker T. Washington. Ashe graduated from UCLA on a tennis scholarship in 1966, entered the Army Reserve Training Corps (ROTC), and served as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army from 1967 to 1969. In his prime as the U.S. top-ranked player, Ashe in 1968 became the first African American man to win the U.S. Open; in 1970 he won the Australian Open, and in 1975 at Wimbledon. Historians of race and sport have long overlooked the social, cultural, and political significance of Ashe's life. The literature on race, politics, and sport in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s primarily examines the integration of intercollegiate sports programs, the rise of activism among African American athletes, and the proposals to boycott the 1968 Olympic Games in protest of worldwide racial discrimination. Historians and journalists have consistently privileged the life of boxer Muhammad Ali in surveying a wide range of activism among African American athletes in that era. Although these studies make a compelling case for the importance of African American athletes in the black freedom movement, they lead readers to assume incorrectly that most African American male athletes joined the Black Power Movement, withdrew from white America, and became militant spokesmen for Black Power ideology. Ashe responded to racism in more moderate and nuanced ways, and historians have failed to examine how he and others like him participated in and helped shape worldwide human and civil rights movements. (4) This essay traces Ashe's path to activism from his youth in Richmond to his U.S. Open victory in 1968. It examines a number of personal and environmental influences that shaped his political philosophy: mentors such as his father and tennis coaches, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the Olympic boycott movement, and living in the Jim Crow South, Los Angeles, and at West Point Academy. The sport of tennis. Ashe's family background, his increasing celebrity appeal, and his constrictive status as an officer in the U. …

Bettye Collier-Thomas's Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion is a historical and sociographic masterpiece. The work covers four centuries of African American religious history in tandem with the work of women's advocacy organizations and interracial coalitions. Broadly speaking, what makes this narrative so extraordinary is how Collier-Thomas creates a dialectical dialogue that transcribes competing and complicating justice-making programs into ecumenical strategies for transformation. It is refreshing to read about African American church women as executives in institutions committed to the abolition of slavery, the advent of Freedmen's aid societies, temperance unions, the suffragist movement, civil rights, Black Power for self-defense, and ongoing liberation struggles. The profound literary quality throughout this book, especially the usable truth embedded in the quoted words of politically active religious women, transforms this successful book of faith-in-action stories into an incredible encyclopedic text. As a womanist liberationist theologian, I celebrate Jesus, Jobs, and Justice as an authoritative source documenting how the religious beliefs of the "Black Church community" served as a double-edged sword. Reverberating throughout this work are testimonies about how confidence in the sovereignty of God helped women accommodate to what Collier-Thomas characterizes as "religious masculinity." Among those who embraced this sexist sentiment of elevated authority were laymen and "brotherhood" religious organizations led by African American clergymen who reacted to changes occurring in the national and political arenas regarding the status of women. In effect, men throughout the Black Church community, who were denied the right to vote as United States citizens, wanted to control and constrict women's freedom both in church and society after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. At the same time that all women in the United States were guaranteed the right to vote (yet African American women continued to be disfranchised), anti-female sentiment and gender exclusive language declared that black church women should be involved tangentially, if not excluded altogether from executive administrative boards and leadership councils. In fact, African American men with ecclesiastical power, far too often, essentialized the process of religious masculinity by dismissing, marginalizing, and banishing women to the periphery in decision-making processes. So, while simultaneously fighting racism on the outside and battling against sexism on the inside, African American women held to their belief in God, whose sufficient power, knowledge, and presence gave them emotional poise and spiritual well being so that they could keep on keeping on. Moreover, the womanist agenda requires us to link dynamics in local parishes to larger national and international liberation discourse. Collier-Thomas insists that we pay attention to the answers far too many Christians give to the most basic questions concerning whether God gave men dominion over women. Collier-Thomas offers us scholarly commentary, supported by historical evidence, so that readers can see everyday practices of what was formerly known as "the invisible package of unearned assets." Coded as the natural order of things or normalcy, men minimized, ignored, trivialized, manipulated, and/or denied females full opportunities of serving God in the household of faith. Collier-Thomas's narrative carefully demonstrates the particular workings of de facto sexism in the African American religious community. Collier-Thomas painstakingly pursues throughout the 509 pages of text this question: Does God create females inferior to males? This paramount inquiry goes to the heart of the gender conflict in the Black Church, then and now. More significantly, are men destined to rule over women? According to the divine plan, are husbands ordained to be kings of the castle, masters of the household, the head of the family, possessing unquestionable authority to use and abuse wives at will and whim, as well as having total control in determining how and where children will be raised? …

George Breitman, editor of Malcolm X Speaks, lecturing at a memorial meeting sponsored by the Militant Labor Forum in New York on 11 February 1966, almost a year after Malcolm X was assassinated, discussed that segment of U.S. society in which Malcolm's ideas were "taking root." They were budding "especially among the young people," Breitman declared, "those in their twenties and late teens, and younger even than that." (1) An unidentified faculty member at Tougaloo College, the private black college in Mississippi, informed College Press Service reporter Walter Grant in 1968 that "Malcolm X is more popular than Jesus Christ here. The students actually worship him." (2) Malcolm's young widow Betty Shabazz was quoted in Ebony magazine in 1969 saying that Malcolm's ideology had blossomed into the advancing Black Power Movement, striking "a responsive chord among black people in general, but particularly black youths." (3) In 1971 Chicago Tribune columnist Vernon Jarrett announced that Malcolm still held the mantel as "probably ... the most quoted of all modern black spokesman ... among black leaders of high school and college age." (4) In the late 1950s and early 1960s as the national spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI), Malcolm X became a nationally recognized figure through his organizing activities for the NOI, and his constant and forceful ridiculing of the southern, integrationist, and nonviolent Civil Rights Movement. His rise to prominence was greatly aided by his public lambasting of whites as "devils," and the CBS television documentary, "The Hate That Hate Produced," broadcast nationally in 1959. Malcolm impressed students with his fiery speeches, quick wit, striking analogies, glorification of black people and Africa in general, and down-to-earth yet scholarly presentations. But most students were not attracted to his religious ideology since it was wrapped in the Nation of Islam's theology, which deified Elijah Muhammad, who shunned political activism, preached a strict moral code, denigrated women, denounced all whites as inherently evil, and advocated complete "separation of the races." However, over the years Malcolm's rhetoric became more secularized and matured politically, with those elements that intoxicated black and white students coming to the fore. By 1964 Malcolm had not only left the Nation of Islam after a prolonged suspension and life-changing religious experience in the holy city of Mecca, but had dropped the NOI theology, had become an orthodox Muslim, and had founded the Muslim Mosque Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). With these new organizations, Malcolm began developing and sharing his ideas about black national and international unity, self-determination, self defense, and cultural pride. The boldness of his rhetoric was still attractive and his logic continued to persuade. His love of black people and social justice remained and his authenticity and honesty were even more apparent. This expansive ideological perspective struck a responsive chord among African peoples and African American students throughout the United States. (5) Over the last forty years, the scholarly literature on Malcolm X has offered similar assessments of his powerful impact on black youth in the Black Power era in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In one of the early studies on black student activism, Anthony Orum classified Malcolm as one of the originators of the movement. Frederick Harper, Jeffrey Ogbar, and Alphonse Pinckney alluded to Malcolm's widespread appeal among African Americans, especially the youth. Clayborne Carson discussed Malcolm's influence on the radicalized Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the late 1960s, while Peniel Joseph, Donald Cunnigen, Donald Alexander Downs, and Richard P. McCormick pointed to Malcolm's impact on black campus activists at Cornell, Rutgers, and other colleges and universities. Wayne Glasker described the student activists at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1960s as the "ideological children of Malcolm X. …

INTRODUCTION I was beholden to no one but God, Zion [Baptist Church], and [my wife] Grace. My church made me free, so much so that in Philadelphia, I was called "the Lion of Zion." --Leon H. Sullivan, 1998 (1) In recounting the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, there are some locations that cannot be left out of the story. Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, and Lowndes County, Alabama; Jackson and Greenwood, Mississippi; Albany and Atlanta, Georgia, are places that are essential to the story of "the Movement." While many would add Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the horrible murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner at the beginning of the "Freedom Summer" campaigns in June 1964, it is likely that few would make room for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the list of cities that contributed to the end of apartheid, American style. Adding the "City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection" to the overall story of the Civil Rights Movement, however, would allow historians and other researchers to address a perspective that has arisen among some researchers of the most important movement for social change in the United States in the 20th century. Some historians and social scientists have raised the issue of the "unfinished business" or "lost promise" of the Civil Rights Movement. These authors suggest that rather than pursuing issues of "economic justice" that were associated with the Communist Party and the organized labor movement in the 1930s and in World War II, the NAACP and other civil rights organizations decided to pursue the desegregation of public education and accommodations and black voting rights. These authors note that it was only in the last years of his life that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., took up the issue of economic and employment discrimination with his support of the Memphis sanitation workers' strike and the "Poor People's Campaign" in 1967 and 1968. With the advent of the Black Power Movement, the civil rights coalition splintered and demands for economic justice were drowned out in the cries for Black Power, Chicano Power, Women's and Gay Liberation; and the rise of "identity politics" in the 1970s. (2) The public career of Rev. Leon H. Sullivan, the pastor of Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia, not only involved direct connections with civil rights campaigns launched by the NAACP and Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), but also focused on economic justice issues for African American workers, the expansion of black business enterprises, and the internationalization of the social justice and economic empowerment issues closely associated with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In the wake of the launching of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, African American ministers in Philadelphia organized a boycott of businesses that refused to hire black and other minority workers. Between 1960 and 1963 the "Selective Patronage Campaign" led by Rev. Leon Sullivan and the "400 Ministers" was successful in opening up employment opportunities for black workers in hundreds of businesses that previously hired "whites only." But what happened in Philadelphia inspired boycotts in New York City and in other northern cities, and the movement for economic justice for decades. "As a result of the success of the selective patronage program in Philadelphia," Sullivan recalled, "I came to know Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an associate and friend." More importantly, "the concept of selective patronage became the 'economic arm' of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference" with the launching of "Operation Breadbasket" in 1967 under the leadership of Rev. Jesse Jackson, who subsequently organized People United to Save Humanity (PUSH). (3) The successful boycott led to an increase in employment opportunities for African Americans in Philadelphia, but the problem soon arose of the lack of availability of black workers with the skills and training needed by local industries. …

The April-May 1971 and October 1972 issues of The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research were devoted to the subject "The Black Prisoner," and featured essays and poetry written by black prisoners as well as community organizers and academics from throughout the United States. (1) In the wake of a series of uprisings by African American and Latino prisoners in California's San Quentin Prison in 1971, the April-May 1971 issue of The Black Scholar took the position that the San Quentin prisoners' struggle to fight racism and social injustice was an issue that the journal's readers should engage as well. The Black Scholar reported that African American and Latino prisoners in San Quentin formed the Third World Coalition in February 1971, but were met with opposition from the prison guards and some inmates. This incident was one of many uprisings that took place in correctional facilities where African American and Latino prisoners were developing self-awareness and cultural pride. The Black Scholar and other publications became vehicles for informing readers outside prison walls about the conditions that black inmates were experiencing behind the walls. Over half the population of San Quentin is Black and Chicane. Their future well-being depends in large measure on the outcome of this recent protracted struggle against racism. We of the Third World Community at large must take action and organize support for our brothers inside. ... It's time for the Third World on the outside to investigate the Third World on the inside. San Quentin is a good place to start. (2) This essay is an examination of how black print culture in the early 1970s privileged the voices of black prisoners by inviting incarcerated men and women to share their stories and reflections on the criminal justice system with unincarcerated men and women. "We Are All Prisoners," was the title given to an open letter to The Black Scholar readers from political prisoner Fleeta Drumgo, one of the famous Soledad Brothers. "We" referred to "black people" and not just the highly visible "political prisoners" who were imprisoned because of their ideological beliefs, but to all African-descended people who may or may not have experienced clashes with law enforcement officials or the racialized criminal justice system in the United States. Embedded in the title, "We Are All Prisoners," was the notion that in the early 1970s no black man or woman was completely free of racial constraints that could easily force them to become entangled in the criminal justice system. To illustrate how black print culture sought to facilitate understanding on both sides of the prison walls, I focus on two publications: The Black Scholar, based in Northern California; and Black News, published by the EAST organization in Brooklyn, New York, whose mission was the same as the antislavery journalists--to "Agitate. Educate. Organize." While these publications were not solely dedicated to agitation for black prisoners, they were consistent in their efforts to re-educate African Americans about the prison system and to reach out to prisoners with a message of self-education and self-determination. Most importantly, these two publications shared an unwavering commitment to build bridges between incarcerated and unincarcerated black men and women who, according to their contributors, were imprisoned by racialized social structures offering primarily substandard housing, failing schools, job discrimination, and pressures to integrate physically and psychologically. While The Black Scholar and Black News are central to this discussion, it is imperative to contextualize their efforts to build bridges between black prisoners and the larger African American community. The lens through which I am viewing this project is the long struggle for black self-determination and its impact on the development of black print culture. The role of Malcolm X in serving as a model of literacy is examined because Malcolm helped to redefine the black prisoner in black cultural consciousness, while promoting the value of self-determination most closely associated with the Black Power and Black Arts movements. …

In a January 1980 essay in the Black Collegian, historian Vincent Harding remembered the political activism of the early 1970s with regret and disappointment compared to the "inspiriting sense of collective action, transformative power, great victories, and tragic wounds" of the 1960s. And in a revised periodization, for this scholar-activist "the seventies" began with Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in April 1968. Harding noted that at the time of his death, King was questioning the political, social, economic, and moral foundations of American society. Dr. King's murder spurred tremendous activism, but the inability of social and political activists to make the profound societal changes they so desperately sought revealed the strengths of the entrenched corporate establishment. Harding acknowledged that these substantial obstacles "smashed our vague dreams up against the hard limitations of American structures." (1) Harding's frustrations stemmed from the partial victories of protest movements in the early 1970s and the eventual splintering of these movements by the decade's end. During the 1970s Black Power transformed civil rights activism, dispersing protests in various directions and seeking different solutions to the problem of achieving racial equality. The decade witnessed the growth and creation of numerous black organizations such as the Congress of African People, League of the Revolutionary Black Workers, and Malcolm X Liberation University that sought to expand and deepen the meaning of civil rights and Black Power for the 1970s. These groups provided depth and breadth to the ongoing social activism through involvement in the political arena, cultural affairs, unions and labor organizing, education, feminism, and other areas. Ideologically diverse, these organizations cooperated publicly in the early 1970s in the name of a hypothetical "black unity." Behind the scenes, however, black scholars and social activists were often wedded to particular ideological formations and the resulting divisions strained the well-publicized attempts at unity. (2) Despite these strained efforts, a unified front in attacking American structures and their inherent discrimination continued to be an aspiration for the freedom struggle in the early 1970s. The Atlanta-based Institute of the Black World (IBW) was one of many new black Institutions founded in the late 1960s in the various attempts to achieve to promote "black liberation." IBW was a collective of black scholar-activists and intellectuals, primarily under the leadership of Vincent Harding, that forged operational unity among the various ideological formations and camps within the black freedom struggle by emphasizing social, political, economic, and cultural analyses of American and African American society. IBW's associates, those affiliated artists and intellectuals, fostered unity within the group by adhering to a form of pragmatic nationalism, believing that flexible and carefully constructed social, political, and economic goals and strategies designed to improve black communities were more important than ideological pronouncements, conformity, and rigidity. (3) IBW's pragmatic nationalism differed from the cultural nationalism promoted by Maulana Karenga and Amiri Baraka, and shared by many black artists and college students, and focused on Africa and African peoples in the Diaspora. African-descended peoples have a "distinct aesthetic, sense of values, and communal ethos emerging from either, or both their contemporary folkways and continental African heritage." (4) Cultural nationalists differed ideologically from the revolutionary nationalists of the era who, according to literary historian James Smethurst, called for an "open engagement with Marxism" regarding the U.S. and global political economy, and pursued alternatives to the capitalist approach to economic development. (5) IBW's pragmatic nationalism was rooted in specific activities and issues such as the creation of Black Studies programs and the development of a "black political agenda" for the 1970s. …

With its emphasis on litigation and challenging the laws and practices of the courts and law enforcement agencies, the NAACP played a direct or indirect role in the dismantling of the white supremacist legal structures built into the "American" legal system that carried over from the 19th into the first half of the 20th century. There was a time when those of the Black Power generation and their progenitors went so far as to try and make fun of the stolid, serious middle-class professional approach pursued by the NAACP's national and local leaders. The broad strain of elitism that went along with how the NAACP operated in many places, and the slowness of the process of litigation in achieving positive changes, meant that the organization was open to criticism from members of the younger generation who were anxious to move and sometimes were asked to put their lives on the line "to advance the race." (1) The pedigree of the NAACP certainly explains the elitist tendencies. Since the founders were prominent social reformers, jurists, educators, and philanthropists, the early leadership included elite and prominent professionals in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Washington, DC, and other cities. The racial violence in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908 originally galvanized the Progressive reformers. The NAACP's modus operandi became investigating, protesting, and publicizing incidents of racial violence and lynching, which a few years later would devolve into the "American Pogrom" that took place in East St. Louis, Illinois, in July 1917. (2) In that first decade the relationship between what the masses of African Americans needed and demanded, given their oppressed circumstances, and what the NAACP elites and non-elites would be able to deliver, was often strained and tense and remained this way over the next few decades. From the beginning, poor and working-class black southerners appealed to the NAACP for help surviving in the highly racialized environment of the so-called Progressive South. The NAACP Legal Committee set up the "Legal Bureau" in 1913 to accept complaints and offer assistance, but was quickly inundated with letters and appeals for help. Supported by contributions and membership fees alone, NAACP leaders operated under strong financial pressures from the beginning, and this forced them to scale back what the organization could undertake. In 1913 NAACP attorney Arthur Spingarn remarked, "Every colored man or women in the country who has been cheated or wronged or lost a position or wants a promotion assumes that through our association he can obtain the end he desires." Spingarn, Charles Sturdin, and other attorneys were working pro bono, and the organization was constantly running deficits. Thus according to historian Patricia Sullivan, when the NAACP received hundreds of complaints of "unfair racial bias," the early leaders decided to follow social welfare activist Jane Addams's suggestion, and agreed that "the association limit itself to those cases that tested broad legal principles, such as residential segregation ordinances or voting rights." (3) At the same time, the first major victories actually came in the courts with the Supreme Court decisions in Guinn v. United States in 1915 and Buchanan v. Warley in 1917. In Guinn, Moorfield Storey, one of the leading lawyers in the early 20th century and one-time president of the American Bar Association, was allowed to file an amicus curie brief on behalf of the NAACP in a case brought by Solicitor General John W. Davis in 1913. John Milholland, NAACP founder and president of the Constitution League, brought to Davis's attention the decision of the Maryland Court of Appeals to outlaw the state's "grandfather clause," exempting certain voters from having to fulfill several registration qualifications. Grandfather clauses were placed in state constitutions beginning in the early 1890s to enfranchise poor, illiterate whites who had become disgruntled by the naked class condescension expressed by wealthy planters and politicians who continued to harp on the need for an "educated electorate. …

When Dr. John Hope Franklin died on 25 March 2009, the historical profession lost a true pioneer, a "historian's historian," and one of the most important scholars of the 20th century. For over 70 years, John Hope Franklin contributed major works to African American and American history, and the history of the U.S. South. Dr. Franklin achieved numerous "firsts" as an African American in his illustrious career including what he termed "the triple crown" as president of the three leading professional organizations--American Historical Association (AHA), the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and the Southern Historical Association (SHA). I had the privilege of knowing and interacting with Dr. Franklin over the years in his capacity as mentor and educator, and his scholarship had a profound impact upon me and the research projects I undertook. I first met Dr. Franklin at the annual meeting of the AHA in Washington, DC, in 1969. I was a graduate student who was attending my first major professional conference. That experience was transformative for me and confirmed that I had carved out a niche in the academic world that would be quite satisfying. I was impressed by meeting all of those prominent historians and pleased that I was able to reconnect with Dr. Herbert Gutman for whom I had worked as an undergraduate research assistant and who encouraged me to pursue graduate studies at the University at Buffalo. It was Dr. Gutman who introduced me to Dr. John Hope Franklin. I had become familiar with Dr. Franklin's work beginning with the high school text Land of the Free when I served on the Social Studies Textbook Review Committee for the Buffalo Board of Education. (1) At this meeting, Dr. Franklin was cordial and I was struck by his regal demeanor. Upon learning that I was a student at the University at Buffalo, he inquired about his friend Robert Lively, who was then chair of the Department of History. As I recall, the conversation centered on the history department, the Livelys, and the progress of my research projects. Always formal, Dr. Franklin addressed me as "Miss Williams" and continued to do so for many years. These brief meetings at professional conferences were important to me, for I appreciated the fact that Dr. Franklin seemed genuinely interested in my work, and was willing to discuss it and to mentor a young scholar who was not one of his already numerous students. It was common knowledge that he valued his role as mentor and embraced it wholeheartedly. And he continued his mentoring even after his "students" had become "seasoned scholars." I always appreciated his wise counsel. When Dr. Franklin finally addressed me as "Lillian," I felt that I had his seal of approval and I came to be considered a colleague. That was one of my most joyful days. At an ASALH plenary session in Orlando. Florida, in October 2004, John Hope Franklin shared the challenges he faced as he was writing his autobiography Mirror to America. (2) He reminded the audience of historians and social scientists how important it is for us to take the time to record and preserve our personal histories and to document our activities. Many of us had been participant-observers in the civil rights and Black Power campaigns and were the first generation of African American scholars at many of the nation's leading universities. Some of us were the catalysts that brought curricular change to elementary and secondary education, and founded and staffed the newly created Black Studies programs and departments in colleges across the nation and we need to document these activities. John Hope Franklin paved the way by precept and by example in using his scholarship to transform the pre-collegiate and collegiate curricula nationwide. Dr. Franklin was in a unique position to both observe and write about many of the major historical events of the 20th century. In many ways, he was a participant-observer from his childhood days in Oklahoma to the historic election of Senator Barack Obama to the presidency. …

Just days after the horrific assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on 4 April 1968,1 and two other African American students at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana (there were only four of us out of a student body of 1,100) wrote a letter to the editor of the school newspaper.1 The letter declared that Dr. King's murder marked the end of the nonviolent phase of the Civil Rights Movement and the triumph of "Black Power" as the ideology that would determine the future trajectory of African Americans' struggle for justice and freedom in the United States. Perhaps if Wayne Patrick, Memphis Tufts, and I had been familiar then with John Hope Franklin's classic work, From Slavery to Freedom, we would have been somewhat more circumspect in our pronouncements.2 Howevefr, if we had allowed reason rather than passion to govern our actions, my introduction to Dr. Franklin's monumental scholarly treatise would very likely have been delayed for several years. The response to our declaration was rapid and vicious. The editor posted a heated rejoinder in the same issue in which our letter appeared, denouncing us for having the temerity to suggest that "armed self-defense" was justified. Tensions escalated and anonymous threats of physical violence forced us to accompany each other to class for the remainder of the semester. A white student who had the audacity to write a letter to the editor in support of our position was chased off campus two weeks later, never to return. The proverbial straw that broke the camel's back was the administrators' decision to invite the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, to campus to deliver a major address. Unfortunately (or fortunately as the case may be), neither I nor my two comrades were able to participate in the protest against Wallace's visit mounted by African American students from nearby Indiana State University. Wayne and I were members of Rose-Hulman's track team and we were attending an out-of-town meet on the day of Wallace's speech, which spared us the indignity of being subjected to his racist diatribe. Memphis, who was enrolled in advanced ROTC, was not so fortunate and was required to serve as a member of the honor guard associated with the event.3

Charles L. Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008. Pp. 360. Cloth $55.00. Paper $24.95. Charles Lumpkins provides an important reinterpretation of the 1917 East St. Louis race riot. In American Pogrom Lumpkins challenges Elliott Rudwick's classic civil rights-era account. Writing before the advent of the Black Power movement, Rudwick interpreted the murderous foray through the lens of a then-trendy sociological concept, "social strain theory," and viewed the race riot as the result of white workers responding to racist demagoguery and the job competition coming from black migrant strikebreakers. And influenced by the nonviolent character of many civil rights campaigns and earlier interpretations of African Americans' responses to racial terrorism, Rudwick depicted African Americans as passive victims who were "terrified" into "inactivity" during the riot. Reflecting a generational paradigm shift in historical scholarship, Lumpkins respectfully repudiates Rudwick's interpretation. Lumpkins abandons the "race riot" terminology, replacing it with the concept pogrom. This shift in nomenclature is not trivial; it evidences a profound reinterpretation of the events of 2-3 July 1917. As the title indicates, Lumpkins views these events more as an effort at "ethnic cleansing," or in this case "racial cleansing," that reflected whites' desire to transform East St. Louis into a "sundown town," rather than simply a mob action by a "majority group" against a "minority group." Thus the "East St. Louis pogrom" resulted primarily from the ongoing conflicts in the relations between real estate capitalist-politicians and African American politicians and community leaders over African Americans' attempts to forge an autonomous political organization. Thus Lumpkins's corollary thesis is that local white capitalists bore primary responsibility for creating the climate and sparking the pogrom, not white workers, as Rudwick had argued. And whereas Rudwick found passivity and ineffectiveness in the African American response to the violence, Lumpkins, like Malcolm McLaughlin in Power, Community, and Racial Killing in East St. Louis (2005), found militant action. As did McLaughlin, Lumpkins found that all-black or black majority neighborhoods on the city's south side escaped unscathed because African Americans armed and protected themselves. Thus, Lumpkins places African American resistance and agency at the center of his analysis. To effect this reconceptualization. Lumpkins situated the pogrom within the context of the long history of the African American experience in East St. Louis, and substituted Richard W. Thomas's model for the "community-building process," for Rudwick's use of social strain theory. The community-building framework focuses attention on African American self-activity, on the construction of an autonomous black civil society, and the corresponding building of a black counterpublic, made up of a network of movement activists, organizations, and news publications. Thomas's framework is exceedingly broad, perhaps too all-encompassing to constitute a rigorous methodological approach for studying African American communities. Nevertheless, the framework encouraged Lumpkins to ferret out African Americans' efforts "to survive and progress ... and to create and sustain a genuine and creative communal presence"; the framework also facilitated his search for connections among black social institutions, social networks, organizations, black resistance during the pogrom, and the renewal of their struggle for freedom, justice, and power afterwards. Lumpkins lacks the sources to sustain a thorough treatment of specific associations or activists; therefore, he provides snapshots of the activities of several organizations and individuals before the pogrom. Lumpkins mentions the East St. Louis Chapter of the Afro-American Protective League of Illinois. …

We should be careful about using those terms that might turn our friends off. The terms "faggot" and "punk" should be deleted from our vocabulary, and especially we should not attach names normally designed for homosexuals to men who are enemies of the people, such as Richard Nixon and John Mitchell. Homosexuals are not enemies of the people. --Huey P. Newton (1970) I behaved like a prisoner of love. --Jean Genet (1981) French writer Jean Genet revealed in a 1975 interview with German writer Hubert Fichte, "I could only feel at home among people oppressed by color or factions in revolt against whites. Maybe I'm a black who's white or pink, but still black." Apparently, Genet was echoing the views of a generation of elite white intellectuals and artists who articulated a revolutionary subjectivity by identifying with the liberation struggles of oppressed people of African descent around the world. (1) Actors, artists, and intellectuals such as Jean Seberg, Marlon Brando. Bert Schneider, Jean Genet, Leonard Bernstein, Agnes Varda, Jean Paul Sartre, Romain Gary, and political radicals such as Ulrike Meinhof of Germany's Red Army Faction, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, and Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground all proclaimed an affinity for and affiliation with the Black Panther Party (BPP) and saw the Panthers as providing important models not only for political and social change, but for profound personal transformations. The Black Panthers became masters at creating a radical visual and discursive language of affiliation and identification that expressed the need for personal involvement in liberatory social and political change. In September 1970 BPP Chairman Huey P. Newton declared at the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention that "homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in society. They might be the most oppressed people in society ... maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary." (2) Newton was attesting to the complexities that the Panther model of identification articulated as both a theory and praxis of revolutionary self-making. It is impossible to attribute the widespread appeal of the Black Panther Party to non-African Americans, women, and sexual minorities to the caricatures found in many contemporary accounts that embody a simple phallocentric masculinity and a repository of reductionist racial politics. This essay examines the ways the models of identification offered by the Black Panther Party created and provoked a radical affiliation among people as far removed from the African American struggle as the openly gay literary artist Jean Genet and Hollywood actress Jean Seberg. It asserts that the Black Panther Party's discourse of affiliation and identification created a space within radical political discourse for gender and sexual outsiders to rearticulate themselves discursively as empowered by their outsider status and association with "revolutionaries." The Black Panther Party differed from other contemporaneous radical political formations of the Black Power era because the leadership was able to promote the empowerment of African Americans while articulating a vision of radical political possibility and change that included the "refiguring of identity" across a broad spectrum of political, gender, and sexual categories. Black Panther iconography relied on the models of affiliation and identification reflected in the "vanguard model of political activism" proposed by Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Guerilla Warfare and later cogently rearticulated by Regis Debray in Revolution within the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America. (3) In Guerilla Warfare Che Guevara used the example of the Cuban Revolution to demonstrate the ways in which a small group of revolutionaries could successfully foment revolution in the face of the challenges posed in facing off against a large state-sponsored, professionally trained army. …

Many people have commented that with the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, this is a wonderful time to be a historian or other scholar of the African American experience. In the person of President Obama we have the coming together of the multiple meanings and conceptualizations of the designation "African American." While his father was from Kenya, Barack Obama understands that he and his family are African Americans culturally; but unlike for many of us, Obama's "African" connection is as real and apparent as the "American." The election of President Obama in many ways is the realization of social and political trends that began with the launching of the modern Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. But in many ways this is "the best of times and the worst of times" for U.S. African Americans. On 29 February 2008, while Barack Obama was successfully winning Democratic presidential primaries, the New York Times published an article on the report from the Pew Center for the States stating that in 2007 the U.S. prison population rose to 1.6 million, that "more than 1 in 100 adults are in prison," and that "the U.S. inmate population is the highest in the world." For those who would like to argue that with the election of President Obama, Americans have entered a new "post-racial" era, we need to call their attention to the reports of The Sentencing Project, Human Rights Watch, and other groups that have documented the disparities in the rates at which African Americans and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, despite roughly equal rates of illegal drug use. The Sentencing Project reports that while African Americans represent about 13 percent of the monthly drug users, they represent 35 percent of the arrests, 55 percent of the convictions, and 74 percent of those sentenced to prison for drug possession. African American men in 15 states were imprisoned on drug charges at rates ranging from 20 to 57 times higher than those of white men. As a result, one out of every 15 black men is in prison, and for those between the ages of 20 and 24, the rate is one in nine. And increasingly, black women are also targeted by the "prison-industrial complex" so that one out of every 18 black women born in 2006 can expect to go to prison in her lifetime, while for white women the expected rate is one in every 108; and whereas one out of 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 38 was behind bars in 2007, the rate for black women was one in 100. This high incarceration rate means that on any given day, one out of every 14 black children has at least one parent in prison. The drug laws that were put into effect, and the harsh sentencing rules, are not merely the result of politicians wanting to demonstrate that they are "tough on crime," but are also a reflection of the way the U.S. political system currently operates. Thus wealthy lobbyists for the private prison industry not only participated in the writing of these new drug laws and contributed heavily to both Democratic and Republican politicians' campaigns, they also lobby to make sure that there are no changes in these laws that would stem the flow of prisoners into these private prisons. Therefore, if African Americans organized to change drug sentencing laws, and thus decrease the numbers of black children and adults being incarcerated by the thousands for "victimless" crimes, we would have to compete against the resources and influence of the private prison industry for support among politicians. In other words, we could move beyond moral indignation and outraged rhetoric to mass marches and public protests, but we would still have to raise the "filthy lucre" to pad the pockets of the politicians and their political campaigns to effect any type of meaningful legislative changes. Moreover, with the economic meltdown, the gross disparities in the circumstances for African Americans compared to white Americans further undermine arguments about the onset of a "post-racial" era in the United States. …

I had met with African students in America many times, on college campuses around the country. I'd read the newspapers and watched television reports, and had a basic sense of current events across Africa, the wave of liberation movements there. I felt a sense of communion, a sense of fellowship with these rising nations of Africa, and especially with the young men and women who were so much at the heart of it all. --John Lewis, SNCC Chairman, 1963-1966 (1) At the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, 16-18 April 1960, the delegates declared unequivocally: "We identify ourselves with the African struggle as a concern for all mankind." To reinforce this claim, Antioch College undergraduate Alphonse Okuku from Kenya was a featured speaker at the conference. Okuku was invited to address the radical implications of the "African struggle" and to express words of solidarity with young activists at the forefront of the student sit-in movement engulfing the U.S. South. (2) In many respects Okuku was part of a politically ambitious generation of African students who were attending U.S. colleges and universities and were firmly committed to ending all vestiges of European colonialism in Africa. In addition to the urgency and momentum of student protest activity, many African American students in the U.S. had witnessed the awesome display of militancy among continental African students at an ecumenical religious conference in Athens, Ohio, several months before the SNCC gathering. (3) This event, along with the persistence of Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. South and a rising awareness of anti-colonial movements in Africa, prodded many into action at their respective campuses and beyond. For the better part of the 1960s SNCC was the most conspicuous national student organization engaged in the struggle to eradicate Jim Crow segregation, or American apartheid. No student group rivaled its political reach and organizational depth. SNCC assisted local people and their organizations in securing the franchise and making small, though significant, advancements in improving the living conditions for black southerners. (4) Yet from its inception, SNCC organizers saw their local efforts as inseparable from larger international movements engaged in similar and sometimes overlapping struggles for freedom and self-determination. SNCC took a concerted interest in anti-colonialism and nationalism on the African continent and throughout the Third World. Because of its decentralized organizational structure and the relative autonomy of its members, SNCC's internationalist vision was not uniform. As a result, SNCC's rarely acknowledged internationalist work has generally been understood as merely a corollary to its post-1966 demands for "Black Power." (5) On the contrary, however, SNCC's internationalism was far more organically rooted in the organization and the experiences of its members than has heretofore been acknowledged, and it operated in tension and in tandem with the organization's domestic agenda. Indeed, SNCC's efforts, though organizationally anchored in the struggle for civil rights in the U.S. South until at least 1964, were never solely preoccupied with civil rights. Longstanding material, psychic, and existential concerns with freedom, dignity, and political powerlessness enabled many in SNCC to recognize--as previous generations of black freedom activists had--that the problems that black folk faced in the United States extended far beyond the borders of Mississippi and Alabama. (6) SNCC's internationalism, particularly as it pertained to Africa, was an outgrowth of the extensive social and political networks it developed through grassroots organizing, nurtured on college campuses, and strengthened through international travel and fundraising activity within and beyond the United States. …

Like most Americans of my generation, I had learned little about Indo-China in my schooling. To me, it was a vaguely recalled blob of purple on the map of Asia, clinging to the southeastern border of China. Robert S. Browne (1) This [the year of 1963] has proved to be the summer of "Vietnam" as well as of civil rights! I have been rather busy with the former. Robert S. Browne (2) African American economist Robert Span Browne (1924-2004) is not widely recognized among the pantheon of black liberation movement leaders. However, during the decade of the 1960s, he was among the first public figures to criticize U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and also emerged as a major spokesperson for black separatism, reparations, and decolonization. He helped inaugurate the teach-in movement on U.S. college campuses in 1965, often serving as the leadoff speaker and sharing the stage with prominent antiwar activists such as historian Staughton Lynd and Dr. Benjamin Spock. He also traveled to Vietnam multiple times to bring back eyewitness accounts of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. Browne even attempted to negotiate terms for peace with the Vietnamese National Liberation Front in Paris in 1968 as part of a delegation that included playwright Arthur Miller. Although Browne moved away from the antiwar movement during the late 1960s, he became a dedicated activist on behalf of black nationalist causes and African independence. This essay seeks to draw attention to the underrecognized political vision and career of Robert S. Browne. A focus on Browne's early life and involvement in the antiwar movement provides a unique opportunity to examine the global and personal influences on the reemergence of black nationalism and internationalism in the late 1960s. From 1955 to 1961 Browne was stationed in Cambodia and South Vietnam as a foreign aid advisor under the auspices of the U.S. government. There he witnessed firsthand the decolonization of these former French colonies, even as he served as an agent of U.S. Cold War policies. In addition, Browne married a woman of mixed Vietnamese and Chinese ancestry during his stay in Southeast Asia, an action that ultimately led to his removal from his government post. He and his wife subsequently raised a multiracial family of four children in the Untied States as Browne became a visible spokesperson against U.S. economic and military intervention in Indochina and a leading advocate for Black Power. To analyze the international and familial influences on Browne's political activism, this essay will focus on three aspects of his life. The first section examines how Browne's early frustrations with American race relations, which were intricately connected to economic inequalities, led to his interest in travel and his desire to live abroad. The second segment analyzes how race shaped Browne's work and family life during his stay in Southeast Asia. The final section describes how Browne utilized his international experiences and multiracial family to construct his political identity as a critic of U.S. intervention in Indochina. This study of Robert S. Browne seeks to contribute to the growing scholarship on black internationalism. (3) Browne's life and politics suggest a different trajectory than those explored by earlier scholars. Some studies have focused on how African Americans perceived international events, and how these global events shaped the development and reception of black freedom struggles within the United States. Other studies have analyzed African American leaders and cultural figures who traveled and lived abroad. However, these individuals tended to either make brief visits such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, or lived abroad for an extensive period of time due to their status as political exiles such as Robert F. Williams and W.E.B. Du Bois. In contrast, Browne resided and worked in Southeast Asia for six years as an agent of the U. …

The movement for "Black Power" represented in many ways a new phase in the black freedom struggle in the United States and other parts of the African world. And whereas the campaigns in the United States to end legal segregation and to advance black civil rights have been the subject of scholarly analysis for several decades, Black Power Studies is an emerging subfield in African and African American Studies and in the history of the African Diaspora. And even at this early stage of scholarly research and interpretation, certain themes and trends have emerged in the examination of the Black Power Movement (BPM), especially regarding continuities and discontinuities with earlier social, political, and cultural movements among African-descended people. This Special Issue of The Journal of African American History presents "New Black Power Studies," which document those characteristics shared with earlier black social movements as well as those organizations, activities, and leaders who arrived on the political and cultural scene only in the late 1960s and 1970s. (1) Scholars have already described the preoccupation with Africa and African affairs on the part of Black Power groups such as Malcolm X's Organization of Afro-American Unity, Maulana Karenga's US Organization, the Republic of New Africa; the advocates for the creation of Black Studies programs; and Stokely Carmichael and other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members in the late 1960s. (2) Fanon Che Wilkins in his essay "The Making of Black Internationalists: SNCC and Africa Before the Launching of Black Power, 1960-1965" presents a well-documented account of the relations between the black student activists and Africa in the 1960s. James Forman, who served as SNCC Executive Secretary beginning in early 1961, had been involved in African Studies from his undergraduate years when he studied with social scientist St. Clair Drake at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Forman established the connections between SNCC and the Pan African Students Organization in the Americas and other international student organizations, and coordinated joint protests and other activities with African students and diplomats in the United States. The 1964 trip of eleven SNCC members to Africa solidified the relationships between the newly independent African nations and African Americans, and laid the groundwork for increased international activities in the Black Power era in the late 1960s. The Black Power era witnessed not only a cultural and artistic revolution among African-descended people in various parts of the world, but also the appearance of a wide variety of new black publications, including Black Scholar, First World (magazine), The Journal of Black Studies, and The Review of Black Political Economy, founded in 1970 by economist Robert S. Browne. (3) In her essay "An African-Vietnamese American: Robert S. Browne, the Antiwar Movement, and the Personal/Political Dimensions of Black Internationalism," Judy Tzu-Chun Wu examines the unique internationalist perspective that Browne brought to the movement for Black Power. Browne not only lived and worked in Southeast Asia for the U.S. government in the 1950s, he also married a woman of Vietnamese and Chinese ancestry. When nationwide protests erupted in the late 1960s over the U.S. war in Vietnam, Browne emerged as the "authentic African Vietnamese voice" in numerous antiwar campaigns and protests. Wu documents Browne's activities in support of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam long before that stance was taken by other civil rights and Black Power leaders and organizations. As Browne pointed out, "I was the one Black who had been connected with [the antiwar] movement before prominent Blacks like Martin Luther King, Julian Bond, and Dick Gregory eventually spoke out." The movement for Black Power emerged in the United States in 1966 and eventually spread internationally to the Caribbean and South America, and in South Africa with the launching of the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steven Biko. …

Strife between the US Organization and Black Panther Party generated one of the most devastating intergroup rivalries among factions within the Black Power Movement. This feud ultimately yielded violence throughout the black public sphere in southern California, with the most notorious being the fatal clash in January 1969 on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus that left Black Panther leaders Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter and John Huggins dead, and US member Larry Watani Stiner wounded. (1) As both groups and their supporters became more sectarian in this rivalry, so did a lexicon that positioned the Panther's "revolutionary nationalism" at odds with US's "cultural nationalism." Partisan subjectivities notwithstanding, competition for dominance within Los Angeles black nationalist and radical politics supplanted ideological difference as the basis for the US/Panther tensions. Battles over control of certain "turf" occurred in multiple public places in Los Angeles and San Diego, and manifested in mass rallies, community meetings, schools, and among student organizations. Through much of 1968 and 1969, the Black Students' Union at UCLA would emerge as one of the most contentious theaters of this conflict. (2) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) counterintelligence measures provoked and encouraged violence within this California-born sectarianism. Several scholarly works, however, have asserted that undercover agents provoked and participated in the shootings at UCLA. (3) Some have problematically and uncritically resuscitated versions of a story advanced by a Penthouse magazine interviewee named "Othello," who alleged that Larry and George Stiner were FBI agents who orchestrated an assassination of Carter and Huggins. The most powerful rebuttal to the contention of US complicity with the state in the killings of Huggins and Carter has yet to find a public voice, that of Larry Watani Stiner himself. Having spent the last decade in San Quentin Prison, his unpublished memoir goes beyond personal vindication, expanding our understanding of both the spatial and ideological terrain of political exile among Black Power activists. The very notion that Stiner, a cultural nationalist activist, would find himself wrongly imprisoned, exiled, impoverished, and re-imprisoned runs counter to characterizations of cultural nationalists as inherently complicit with the state, in opposition to "revolutionary nationalism." A lingering binary view of the US/Panther conflict in Black Power scholarship obscures FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's monolithic conception of diverse activists and organizations in the black freedom struggle as composite forces within a singular category, "Black nationalist hate groups." For FBI purposes, the "hate group" mantra operated with the same elastic utility as the "communist" label during the late 1940s and 1950s Red Scare. (4) Along with large numbers of African Americans in the latter half of the 20th century, the Stiner family in 1955 migrated westward from Houston, Texas, to Los Angeles when Larry was seven years old. By 1963 his family had bought a home on West 75th Street, off Florence Avenue in South Los Angeles. Two months after Larry graduated from Manual Arts High School, the Watts Rebellion of August 1965 erupted, transforming the politics of black radicalism in Los Angeles. Larry, along with his brother George, joined the cultural nationalist US Organization in 1966. Larry Stiner eventually rose to a leadership position in the US paramilitary wing, the Simba Wachanga. By the late 1960s under the leadership of Maulana Ron Karenga, US had grown into a major black nationalist force in southern California, but its leadership was experiencing an ideological and organizational challenge from the Black Panther Party (BPP). Panther chapters in Los Angeles and throughout urban America grew rapidly after a highly publicized armed protest at the California state capitol in Sacramento in the spring of 1967. …