The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era

After a period of relative neglect, a spate of recent publications has energized Black Power studies. Scholars have enthusiastically set about demolishing the traditional narrative, which viewed Black Power as marking a decisive (and regrettable) break with the civil rights movement, by highlighting continuities and similarities between the activism of the 1950s and early 1960s with the militant fervor that followed. In his introduction to this edited collection Peniel E. Joseph outlines the historiographical terrain and sets the scene for the essays that follow. Jeanne Theoharis explains the historical context for the Watts rebellion of August 1965. By focusing on the two decades of cross-generational and cross-class organizing that took place there after World War II she challenges the “use of the Watts uprising as a dividing line between the righteous civil rights movement and the underclass Black Power one” (p. 32). Theoharis argues that a history of dashed expectations and broken promises fueled, in part, the events of August 1965.