Beyond The Black Power Salute

Unequal opportunity sparked Jim Brown’s endeavors to encourage Black development while Billie Jean King fought so that women tennis players could earn more money and enjoy greater freedom. Gregory J. Kaliss examines these events and others to guide readers through the unprecedented wave of protest that swept sports in the 1960s and 1970s. The little-known story of the University of Wyoming football players suspended for their activism highlights an analysis of protests by college athletes. The 1971 Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier clash provides a high-profile example of the Black male athlete’s effort to redefine Black masculinity. An in-depth look at the American Basketball Association reveals a league that put Black culture front and center with its style of play and shows how the ABA influenced the development of hip-hop. As Kaliss describes the breakthroughs achieved by these athletes, he also explores the barriers that remained--and in some cases remain today.

The year 1968 was ablaze with passion and mayhem as protests erupted in Paris and Prague, throughout the United States, and in cities on all continents. The Summer Olympic Games in Mexico were to be a moment of respite from chaos. But the image of peace – a white dove – adopted by organizers was an illusion, as was obvious to a record six hundred million people watching worldwide on satellite television. Ten days before the opening ceremony, soldiers slaughtered hundreds of student protesters in the capital. In Games of Discontent Harry Blutstein presents vivid accounts of threatened boycotts to protest racism in the United States, South Africa, and Rhodesia. He describes demonstrations by Czechoslovak gold medal gymnast Věra Čáslavská against the Soviet-led invasion of her country. The most dramatic moment of the Olympic Games was Tommie Smith and John Carlos's black power salute from the podium. Blutstein furnishes new details behind their protest and examines how this iconic image seared itself into historical memory, inspiring Colin Kaepernick and a new generation of athlete-activists to take a knee against racism decades later. The 1968 Summer Games became a microcosm of the discord happening around the globe. Describing a range of protest activities preceding and surrounding the 1968 Olympics, Games of Discontent shines light on the world during a politically transformative moment when discontents were able, for the first time, to globalize their protests.

This groundbreaking volume examines the transnational dimensions of Black Power - how Black Power thinkers and activists drew on foreign movements and vice versa how individuals and groups in other parts of the world interpreted 'Black Power,' from African liberation movements to anti-caste agitation in India to indigenous protests in New Zealand.

“A powerful and poignant memoir” of an African American athlete who defied the establishment—decades before Colin Kaepernick (Cornel West, New York Times–bestselling author of Race Matters). An NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literary Work—Biography/Autobiography John Carlos was a bronze medalist in the two hundred-meter race at the 1968 Olympics, but he is remembered for more than his athletic accomplishments. His and his fellow medalist’s Tommie Smith’s Black Power salutes on the podium sparked controversy and career fallout—yet their show of defiance, seen around the world, remains one of the most iconic images of both Olympic history and African American history. This is the remarkable story of John Carlos’s experience as a young man in Harlem, a track and field athlete, and lifelong activist. “This book is fascinating for more than just the sports history, as the text talks about Carlos’ connection to Dr. King, basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Olympic runner Ralph Boston, baseball legend Jackie Robinson and boxer George Foreman. Carlos even comments on topics in today’s news including First Lady Michelle Obama, the value of Twitter, the antics of athletes like Chad Ochocinco and Terrell Owens, and his views on an award he received at ESPN’s 2008 ESPYs.” —Chicago Tribune “John Carlos is an American hero . . . I couldn’t put this book down.” —Michael Moore, filmmaker and New York Times–bestselling author of Here Comes Trouble

Two American athletes made history at the 1968 Summer Olympics, but not on the track. They staged a silent protest against racial injustice. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medalists in the 200-meter sprint, stood with heads bowed and black-gloved fists raised as the national anthem played during the medal ceremony. The Australian silver medalist wore a human rights badge in support. All three would pay a heavy price for their activism. A Life magazine photograph seen by millions would ensure that the silent protest was remembered, and eventually admired, as a symbol of the battle for equality and civil rights.

In the past few years, a new generation of progressive intellectuals has dramatically transformed how law, race, and racial power are understood and discussed in America. Questioning the old assumptions of both liberals and conservatives with respect to the goals and the means of traditional civil rights reform, critical race theorists have presented new paradigms for understanding racial injustice and new ways of seeing the links between race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. This reader, edited by the principal founders and leading theoreticians of the critical race theory movement, gathers together for the first time the movement's most important essays.

Some of the most exciting and innovative legal scholarship has been driven by historical curiosity. Legal history today comes in a fascinating array of shapes and sizes, from microhistory to global intellectual history. Legal history has expanded beyond traditional parochial boundaries to become increasingly international and comparative in scope and orientation. Drawing on scholarship from around the world, and representing a variety of methodological approaches, areas of expertise, and research agendas, this timely compendium takes stock of legal history and methodology and reflects on the various modes of the historical analysis of law, past, present, and future. Part I explores the relationship between legal history and other disciplinary perspectives including economic, philosophical, comparative, literary, and rhetorical analysis of law. Part II considers various approaches to legal history, including legal history as doctrinal, intellectual, or social history. Part III focuses on the interrelation between legal history and jurisprudence by investigating the role and conception of historical inquiry in various models, schools, and movements of legal thought. Part IV traces the place and pursuit of historical analysis in various legal systems and traditions across time, cultures, and space. Finally, Part V narrows the Handbooks focus to explore several examples of legal history in action, including its use in various legal doctrinal contexts.

Images of upraised fists, afros, and dashikis have long dominated the collective memory of Black Power and its proponents. The “guerilla” figure—taking the form of the black-leather-clad revolutionary within the Black Panther Party—has become an iconic trope in American popular culture. That politically radical figure, however, has been shaped as much by Asian American cultural discourse as by African American political ideology. From the Asian-African Conference held in April of 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, onward to the present, Afro-Asian political collaboration has been active and influential. In Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities, author Rychetta Watkins uses the guerilla figure as a point of departure and shows how the trope's rhetoric animates discourses of representation and identity in African American and Asian American literature and culture. In doing so, she examines the notion of “Power,” in terms of ethnic political identity, and explores collaborating—and sometimes competing—ethnic interests that have drawn ideas from the concept. The project brings together a range of texts—editorial cartoons, newspaper articles, novels, visual propaganda, and essays—that illustrate the emergence of this subjectivity in Asian American and African American cultural productions during the Power period, roughly 1966 through 1981. After a case study of the cultural politics of academic anthologies and the cooperation between Frank Chin and Ishmael Reed, the volume culminates with analyses of this trope in Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Alice Walker's Meridian, and John Okada's No No Boy.