Not Just Black and White:
Peniel Joseph's acclaimed new book recaptures the nuances of Black Power
The complex realities of the Civil Rights struggle are rapidly fading into myth. While real-life heroes like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are repackaged as cardboard saints, the fiery radicals of the Black Power movement — Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Stony Brook's own Amiri Baraka — are routinely denigrated, ridiculed, or ignored.
Peniel Joseph wants to change that. "We're fed a conventional version of the period that's preachy and unthreatening," says Joseph, an assistant professor in Stony Brook's Africana Studies department. "Students realize it's supposed to be good for them, so naturally it's dull — like spinach or broccoli."
That's why Joseph, a '93 Stony Brook alum, is on a mission to recapture the true flavors of a turbulent and controversial era. His new history of the Black Power movement, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour, is a major reassessment of the period that's drawn raves from Manning Marable, Robin D.G. Kelley, and other leading lights of African-American studies.
(Joseph will deliver a public reading from the book at on Tuesday, November 7, at 4:00 pm in the Melville Library’s Javits Room.)
Fluently written and meticulously researched, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour demands our attention. It's a bracing piece of narrative history and a vigorous challenge to conventional wisdom.
Beyond the "Heroic Period" of Civil Rights
Traditional accounts focus on what Joseph calls the "heroic period" of Civil Rights — beginning with Brown vs. Board of Education and culminating in the legislative triumphs of 1964-65. Stokely Carmichael's 1966 embrace of Black Power is portrayed as the crucial turning point, after which the movement collapses in a downward spiral of revolutionary posturing, riots, gunplay, and drugs.
Joseph, however, emphasizes continuities where others see contradictions. Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour looks beyond Dr. King's much-mythologized campaigns in the Southern states, locating the roots of Black Power in the postwar militancy of the urban North.
Joseph's scholarship finds no dramatic break between Civil Rights and Black Power, but describes a multifaceted cultural and political evolution — one that happens as much in people's heads as in the streets.
"Carmichael is the key figure, the bridge between Dr. King and the Panthers," Joseph says. "He's never on the sidelines throughout the whole period. If we want to understand what happens to the Civil Rights movement, we need to understand what happens in the mind of Stokely Carmichael."
Getting the Story Right
Joseph's empathy for the people like Carmichael — fervent activists struggling to reconcile theory with practice — is evident in both his scholarship and his pedagogy. He lectures in the present tense, emphatically breathing life into the flawed heroes and star-crossed struggles of African-American history.
This ardent engagement with the past dates from his childhood in Jamaica, Queens, where his mother — an amateur historian in her own right — assumed personal responsibility for her sons' intellectual development.
"I grew up in a family where dinner table conversation centered on Haitian history, contemporary labor politics, and anti-racist struggles," Joseph writes. "My mother’s tales of tumult, passion, joy, and sorrow inspired a life-long fascination with social justice."
Hence Joseph defines himself as a scholar-activist, and a recent series of high-profile op-eds on hot-button debates justifies the claim. But if his scholarship is informed by social engagement, it's never diluted or distorted.
"First and foremost, we need to get the story right," he says. “If we just look at the evidence and let the story unfold, the true drama of the era emerges.”
More from Peniel Joseph:
"Black Power's Quiet Side" (New York Times June 19, 2006)
"Black Power's Powerful Legacy" (Chronicle of Higher Education July 21, 2006)
"Is Bill Cosby Right?" (Washington Post Aug. 20, 2006)
