Sunday, March 28, 2010

civil rights/black power questions

According to Jeffrey Ogbar, author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, two crucial components of Black Power are black self-determination and black pride. Where do these components manifest themselves in the assigned readings?

In his examination of Black Power’s tangible contribution to the political landscape in Oakland, California during the late 1960s and into the late 1970s, Robert Self makes no mention of the Black Panthers’ “Survival Programs”—free breakfast programs for children, free health clinics, correctional facility busing programs—as a significant factor in building the party’s political influence. These programs were essential components to Panther efforts to reach the community in a meaningful way. To what degree did Black Power depend on the mobilization of average African Americans to gain a foothold in the consciousness of the nation?

Considering that civil rights activists such as King often employed armed guards along with the fact that the Civil Rights Movement was constantly embroiled in, and largely dependent on, violent confrontation, can, as Tyson believes, “nonviolent interracialism, rather than Black Power, [be considered] the anomaly” (544)?
Also take into account the point at which Robert Williams’s and King’s respective beliefs in self-defense overlap, as pointed out by Tyson (561).

Absent Cold War geopolitical concerns would Brown have been decided in favor of desegregation in the first place? If so, how much later than 1954?

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