Black Power White Control

The vital issue facing urban America during the 1960's—the downward spiral of poverty, deterioration, and exploitation in poor neighborhoods—was attacked by The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) in Chicago. John Hall Fish, an active participant in TWO, tells the story of one of the most exciting, controversial, and significant experiments in community control. Founded in 1961 by a group of clergymen, with tactical advice from Saul Alinsky, TWO grew to become the major force for community development and self-government in the Woodlawn area. The author traces TWO's history as it struggled to achieve significant community control over the problems that threatened the black inner-city community. He concentrates on three controversial programs: the Youth Project (involving the Blackstone Rangers), the Woodlawn Experimental Schools project, and the Model Cities program. Although TWO ultimately failed to overcome the entrenched opposition of city agencies, its very survival, the author argues, is a measure of its success. For as the cumbersome urban bureaucracies prove ever more ineffective, it is the existence of organized and experienced community organizations that will determine the possibility of neighborhood rebirth and renewal. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Black Power at Work chronicles the history of direct action campaigns to open up the construction industry to black workers in the 1960s and 1970s. The book's case studies of local movements in Brooklyn, Newark, the Bay Area, Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle show how struggles against racism in the construction industry shaped the emergence of Black Power politics outside the U.S. South. In the process, "community control" of the construction industry—especially government War on Poverty and post-rebellion urban reconstruction projects— became central to community organizing for black economic self-determination and political autonomy. The history of Black Power's community organizing tradition shines a light on more recent debates about job training and placement for unemployed, underemployed, and underrepresented workers. Politicians responded to Black Power protests at federal construction projects by creating modern affirmative action and minority set-aside programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but these programs relied on "voluntary" compliance by contractors and unions, government enforcement was inadequate, and they were not connected to jobs programs. Forty years later, the struggle to have construction jobs serve as a pathway out of poverty for inner city residents remains an unfinished part of the struggle for racial justice and labor union reform in the United States.

In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.

Explores business development in the Black power era and the centrality of economic goals to the larger black freedom movement. The Business of Black Power emphasizes the centrality of economic goals to the larger black freedom movement and explores the myriad forms of business development in the Black power era. This volume charts a new course forBlack power studies and business history, exploring both the business ventures that Black power fostered and the impact of Black power on the nation's business world. Black activists pressed business leaders, corporations, and various levels of government into supporting a range of economic development ventures, from Black entrepreneurship, to grassroots experiments in economic self-determination, to indigenous attempts to rebuild inner-city markets in thewake of disinvestment. They pioneered new economic and development strategies, often in concert with corporate executives and public officials. Yet these same actors also engaged in fierce debates over the role of business in strengthening the movement, and some African Americans outright rejected capitalism or collaboration with business. The ten scholars in this collection bring fresh analysis to this complex intersection of African American and business history to reveal how Black power advocates, or those purporting a Black power agenda, engaged business to advance their economic, political, and social goals. They show the business of Black power taking place in thestreets, boardrooms, journals and periodicals, corporations, courts, and housing projects of America. In short, few were left untouched by the influence of this movement. Laura Warren Hill is assistant professor of history at Bloomfield College. Julia Rabig is a lecturer at Dartmouth College.

Combines history and biography to interpret the last half century of black politics in America as represented in the life and work of a pivotal African American public intellectual. From his leadership of the first modern lunch counter sit-ins at age twenty to his work on African American reparations at the time of his death at age seventy-two, Ronald W. Walters (1938–2010) was at the cutting edge of African American politics. A preeminent scholar, activist, and media commentator, he was founding chair of the Black Studies Department at Brandeis, where he shaped the epistemological parameters of the new discipline. Walters was an early strategist of congressional black power and a longtime advocate of a black presidential candidacy. His writings on the politics of race in America both predicted the constraints on President Obama in advancing African American interests and anticipated the emergence of the white nationalism found in the Tea Party and Donald Trump insurgency. In this fascinating book, Robert C. Smith combines history and biography to offer an overview of the last half century of black politics in America through the lens of the life and work of the man often described as the W. E. B. Du Bois of his time. Robert C. Smith is Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University. His many books include African American Leadership, coauthored with Walters, and What Has This Got to Do with the Liberation of Black People? The Impact of Ronald W. Walters on African American Thought and Leadership (coedited with Cedric Johnson and Robert G. Newby), both also published by SUNY Press.

A study of how the Arab-Israeli conflict affected the American civil rights movement. The 1967 Arab–Israeli War rocketed the question of Israel and Palestine onto the front pages of American newspapers. Black Power activists saw Palestinians as a kindred people of color, waging the same struggle for freedom and justice as themselves. Soon concerns over the Arab–Israeli conflict spread across mainstream black politics and into the heart of the civil rights movement itself. Black Power and Palestine uncovers why so many African Americans—notably Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali, among others—came to support the Palestinians or felt the need to respond to those who did. Americans first heard pro-Palestinian sentiments in public through the black freedom struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. Michael R. Fischbach uncovers this hidden history of the Arab–Israeli conflict’s role in African American activism and the ways that distant struggle shaped the domestic fight for racial equality. Black Power’s transnational connections between African Americans and Palestinians deeply affected US black politics, animating black visions of identity well into the late 1970s. Black Power and Palestine allows those black voices to be heard again today. In chronicling this story, Fischbach reveals much about how American peoples of color create political strategies, a sense of self, and a place within US and global communities. The shadow cast by events of the 1960s and 1970s continues to affect the United States in deep, structural ways. This is the first book to explore how conflict in the Middle East shaped the American civil rights movement. Praise for Black Power and Palestine “An indispensable read on the civil rights and Black Power era, shedding new light on just how deeply the Arab-Israeli conflict has shaped black domestic politics. Anyone interested in why conflict in the Middle East continues to cast its long shadow over U.S. foreign and domestic policy should read this book.” —Cynthia A. Young, The Pennsylvania State University, author of Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left “Michael R. Fischbach explores one of the most important international ramifications of the political awakening of African Americans in the 20th century: how movements ranging from the Black Muslims and Black Panthers to SNCC and the NAACP related to the Palestinian struggle. Original and timely, Black Power and Palestine offers fascinating insight into a vital issue in the self-definition of the African American community, one that continues to have great relevance today in the growing linkages between the Black Lives Matter movement and Palestinian activism.” —Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University, author of Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East

First published in 1983, Race, Ethnicity and Power focuses on contemporary race and ethnic relations in six countries and looks at the historical context by tracing how various forces and factors, such as group power capabilities, shaped present-day ethnic and race relations. It describes how English settlers, and their descendants used their power historically to control major political, economic and social structures, and to shape the cultural policies of these countries. It explains how ethnic and race relations are best understood by assessing the changing power capabilities of Anglo and non-Anglo groups, and shows how changes in group relations are the consequence of two major factors: modification in group power resources and capabilities, and changes in situational factors. This book will be of interest to students of sociology, political science, ethnic studies and international relations.