• Corpus ID: 152484504

The Four Histories of Black Power: The Black Nationalist Sector and Its Impact on American Society

@inproceedings{Rojas2014TheFH,
  title={The Four Histories of Black Power: The Black Nationalist Sector and Its Impact on American Society},
  author={Fabio Guillermo Rojas and W Carson Byrd},
  year={2014}
}

• F. Rojas, W. Byrd
• Published 2014
• History

Interest in the Black Power movement and its various political, social, and cultural organizations remains high among scholars and members of the Black community. Scholarship on these organizations and the movement’s overall trajectory often discusses how these organizations faltered by not fulfilling their role of leading the Black community in the post-Civil Rights era. In this paper, we revise this view with a survey of scholarship on the many organizations that defined the Black Power movement. We call this collective effort the “Black Nationalist Sector” and it encompasses all organizations of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s whose organizational identity was based in some part, if not wholly, on the promotion of distinctive Black interests from a nationalist perspective. Our review shows that the view of Black Power as a short lived political movement is misleading. Relying on a wealth of recent scholarship, we identify four different paths within the Black Nationalist Sector: radicalized confrontation, cultural production, institutional advocacy, and alignment. Each path has a distinctive history and impact on American society.