Fig 16. Welfare Rights March on Las Vegas Strip.jpg

Welfare Rights March on Las Vegas Strip, March 6, 1971. Courtesy University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Libraries

Civil Rights-Black Power Era West

The African American West in 20th and 21st Century History and Culture

Immediately after World War II had ended, Black workers across the West were the first people fired and divested when downsizing and base closures occurred in defense industries, despite the fact that many had acquired high work skills and advanced educations. For Black youth like future Black Panther Party founder and leader, Huey P. Newton, this divestment of the western inner city and its people led to the postwar rise of a multiracial youth culture made up of street gangs and a street culture informed by infrapolitics—or a culture of masked political dissidence—that took the place of labor unions and living wage employment for dislocated workers in places like West Oakland.

Many Black westerners tried to overcome this loss of hope by combining their resources with like-minded community members of color and becoming community activists. After the war, this is what Tuskegee Airman Lincoln J. Ragsdale, his wife Eleanor, and his brother Hartwell did in South Phoenix to survive their frustrated optimism, and thrive in an increasingly white supremacist Arizona. From their native Oklahoma to Arizona, the Ragsdales’ main tactic for fighting structural racial discrimination started with their strong sense of dignity, their family’s mortuary business, traditional black community institutions such as the Black church, and founding and working with civil rights organizations like the Greater Phoenix Council for Civic Unity to accomplish their definition of freedom.[1]

The postwar civil rights politics that informed Black westerners like the Ragdales was rooted in freedom rights expression of the early-twentieth century and lived experience. For example in 1940s Texas, African American Texans were still fighting for the right to vote in Democratic primary elections, a struggle that began in 1924. Represented by NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund (NAACP-LDF) Director-Counsel Thurgood Marshall, Black Houstonian Lonnie E. Smith’s U.S. Supreme Court case set the precedent for fair voting by suing Harris County election official S. S. Allwright in 1944. In Texas, this immediately led to the massive increase in registered African American voters from 30,000 in 1940 to 100,000 in 1947.

Within the broader scope of Black suffrage in the West, the actual test of the Smith v. Allwright verdict paralleled the moderate increase of civil rights era Black politicians such as California Assemblyman Byron Rumford and Texas Senator Barbara Jordan, who were pioneers in uniting the Black vote and cultivating broad interracial support for the election of Black politicians with minority-Black populations ranging from 1-to-35 percent.

In the post-civil rights era, multiracial coalitions, redistricting, and nationalized local elections have resulted in Blacks having an effective voice in many western governments and electing African American politicians to high office such as U.S. Congresswomen Maxine Waters (D-California) and Mia Love (R-Utah), and mayors Tom Bradley (D-Los Angeles), James Chase (D-Spokane), Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), Norm Rice (D-Seattle), and Ivy Taylor (I-San Antonio), to name a few.[2]

More commonly told in civil rights literature is how the movement exposed the illegal separate and unequal structure of local segregated schools and school districts that violated the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Since the 1910s, this was the claim that western civil rights organizations were making, such as the Albuquerque NAACP that fought to integrate New Mexico school districts and the University of New Mexico.

Forty years later, African Americans in places such as Phoenix and Topeka were fighting a similar fight, the main difference being that in most parts of the West this battle was not sparked in multiracial communities with small Black populations, but in concentrated Black communities. Similar to the struggle for Black suffrage, African Americans turned the potential ills of the ghetto into a base of political-economic empowerment. Organizations such as the Greater Phoenix Council for Civic Unity and the Topeka NAACP fought segregation in employment, housing, and in public places such as restaurants and theaters, with education as their greatest target.

Breakthroughs for this struggle began in 1935, during the NAACP’s courtroom assault on public universities that denied qualified African Americans admission to graduate and law programs that had no separate and equal graduate programs for blacks to attend. In the South-West, this led to desegregation decisions that set precedents for national school desegregation verdicts in Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (1948), Sweatt v. Painter (University of Texas) (1950), and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950).[3]

Arguably more impactful was the movement to desegregate public education, which extended from the courtroom assault on segregated public universities and institutions. During the fall of 1951 in Arizona, this struggle led to the voluntary desegregation of Tucson’s School District 1. Two years later (1953) it resulted in the voluntary desegregation of Phoenix’s Encanto School District and the court-ordered desegregation of Phoenix Union High School. These desegregation efforts, and the Mendez et. al. v. Westminster School District decision (1947) set the precedent for the national defeat of segregation in public education to occur a year later in Brown v. Board of Education at Topeka (1954-1955).

That said, it is important to note the complex and uncommon nature of the western civil rights movement. For example, the Mendez decision desegregated public education for Mexican Americans (and implicitly African Americans) in Orange County, California, using social scientific evidence to support the argument that segregated education conditioned Mexican children to feel inferior and harmed their capacity to be productive citizens, because “separate but equal” will always be unequal. Assisting Mendez family attorney David Marcus, was NAACP-LDF’s Thurgood Marshall who, along with California Governor Earl Warren, took close note of this case to the U.S. Supreme Court which later resulted in Brown. Less frequently noted in most histories was that several months after the 1947 Mendez decision, Warren “signed [the] bill ending school segregation in California, making it the first state to officially desegregate its public schools.” Thus, an action that had the national effect of desegregating U.S. public schools was signed by the man who, as chief justice, would later write the 1954 opinion in Brown.

From Brown to the present, community members, courts, and policy makers have been grappling with racially imbalanced public education and the resegregation of public education. These items would not be effectively addressed in western states until after 1965: after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; when the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union effectively linked residential housing patterns to separate and unequal education; when municipal busing plans were established; and when black lawyers such as Denver’s Morris Cole and civil rights activists like Santa Clara County’s Maurice Hardeman became municipal judges after 1958.[4]

The postwar demand for legal justice was ignited by concerned African American westerners and their allies of diverse backgrounds. Common was the grassroots efforts of people like Salt Lake City’s Albert Fritz, whose push for social justice within Utah and the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) emerged from the belief that he was just as good as any white person. Under his leadership as Salt Lake City’s NAACP president (1955-1964), freedom rights activism to end segregation in employment and in public accommodations for African Americans and Mexican Americans (then the largest minority in Utah) notably increased.

Similar to other Black western communities such as nearby Cheyenne, Wyoming, which passed a public accommodation bill in 1957, Salt Lake City’s movement was bolstered by the unprecedented increase in its Black population. According to anatomy professor and Black Utahn Charles “Chuck” Nabors, the LDS instigated much of the discrimination by excluding Blacks “from its priesthood as proof of their inferiority [in life and in death],” yet took an indifferent stance on civil rights insisting that “We only get into politics on moral issues.”

By 1964, Utah’s civil rights movement snowballed into an international struggle, attracting the participation of civil rights icons such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., entertainers like Ella Fitzgerald, athletes’ refusal to play Brigham Young University, prospective converts in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and, rhetorically, Mormon politicians seeking national office. In 1964, this activity pressured the passage of the state’s first civil rights bill, the Public Accommodations Act—which allowed Blacks access to city motels in compliance with Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nine years later (1973) the movement forced Utah legislators to further desegregate public accommodations. This was followed by the 1978 Revelation on Priesthood which granted qualified Black men (and later black women) the priesthood and has had arguably the most far-reaching impact on social relations in the state—this includes providing the model for protest that gay LDS members are currently using to fight for their own access into the priesthood.[5]

In other parts of the West, African Americans and racial liberals pioneered civil rights tactics popularized by the southern civil rights movement. The most notable of this type of activity occurred in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas, and in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma—two years before the more iconic Greensboro Sit-ins in North Carolina sparked the national shift in civil rights tactics to non-violent direct action. The former was led by cousins Carol Parks-Haun, 19, and Ron Walters, 20, leaders of Wichita’s NAACP youth council, who on July 19, 1958, sat at the cusp of social change in the U.S. In Wichita, they organized the first lunch counter sit-in to end segregation at Dockum Drugstore. For Parks, requesting a meal at this popular lunch counter was always humiliating for blacks because “You'd come in and go to the end of this counter and when you were served anything, it was in disposable containers.” For Walters, Wichita was “Mississippi up north. So we tried to break it down and we deliberately chose Dockum because Dockum was part of a chain…and we felt if we could do something there in the heart of town, it might have a consequence.”

For a month the NAACP youth quietly sat at Dockum’s lunch counter for dinner on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, until August 11, the day the owner broke down and told his manager to “Serve them—I'm losing too much money.” Eight days later, Oklahoma City NAACP youth adviser “Clara Luper and fourteen well-groomed children ranging in age from six to fifteen walked into Katz Drugstore, sat down, and ordered soft drinks. The waitress refused to serve them.” In Oklahoma, this triggered a new phase in their civil rights movement, rooted in local Black town empowerment, the Sipuel, McLaurin, and Brown court cases, and the upsurge of direct action activism in the Great Plains.

The most important aspect of this phase was Black women and Black youth partnering with Black men in the public sphere to break local color-lines by non-violently placing their bodies in the crosshairs of potential white terror, and demanded immediate change. What followed was westerners waging sympathy strikes and participating in voter registration drives for legal freedom in the South, and demanded their own freedom from de facto racial discrimination in housing, education, public accommodations and at department stores, grocery stores, and corporations such as Woolworths, Safeway, and General Electric.[6]

By 1965, the slow-to-moderate pace of racial and economic reform transformed the civil rights struggle in western communities from “Freedom Now” to “Black Power.” Despite the passage of civil rights legislation for public accommodations, fair employment and fair voting practices, public policy and conscious decisions by the white majority maintained unfair employment practices and exclusionary single-family housing in local elections in places thought to be making racial progress in 1964 such as in Seattle and in California. This was behavior to safeguard white privilege and to create separate and unequal societies for white and other people of color. Social customs and public policy such as California’s Proposition 14—which notoriously outlawed fair housing—were the actual manifestations of what the Kerner Commission Report of Civil Disorders (1968) warned the U.S. was moving towards after 1968.

In the metropolitan West white privilege took root far sooner, which resulted in the rash of urban disturbances and near disturbances occurring from 1965-1969. Disturbances began on August 11, 1965, in Watts, in the form of a six-day rebellion against poverty, police abuse, residential isolation and inadequate education whose epicenter was the ghetto. Similar to the later Los Angeles uprising in 1992, the Watts uprising was sparked by deeply entrenched structural racism, a growing racial wealth gap, and the police brutalization of Black Los Angelinos/as. In this instance it was Marquette Frye and his mother and brother who were arrested and badly abused by California Highway Patrol officers. What ensued afterwards was arguably the most unforeseen urban rebellion in U.S. history. It took place in an area larger than Manhattan and resulted in 34 deaths, 1000 injuries (most of them suffered by African Americans), and property damage estimated to be $200 million.

From Watts’ ashes emerged nothing more than failed promises to invest in the South-Central Los Angeles’ Black community and from the failure arose the physical manifestation of the West’s Black Power movement. This movement “began with the ideal that African Americans should define and control the major institutions in their community, whose economic and political resources should be mobilized for its development and eventual parity alongside other communities.”

Prior to 1965, elements of this movement were developed by Black nationalists like the Nation of Islam (NOI) and Black student activists inspired by the NOI’s message, such as the University of California at Berkeley’s Afro-American Association (AAA) (1962)—“California’s first indigenous Black nationalist organization.” In the example of the AAA, from the aftermath of Watts (and the assassination of Malcolm X) emerged several movements that transcended the group’s initial quest to fight injustice through the creation of a Black middle class.

In Watts, former AAA member Maulana Karenga addressed the Los Angeles’ urban crisis by creating an African communitarian movement that intersected Black Nationalism with Pan-Africanism and socialism. Central to this movement was the African reclamation philosophy Kawaida theory, and the US Organization (meaning “us African people”), which translated Kawaida principles into cultural practice. [7]

In Oakland, former AAA member Bobby Seale used the Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center to empower community members with federal Community Action Program resources and to encourage young adults to be critical and to voice their opinions. Former AAA member Huey P. Newton frequented the Anti-Poverty Center to talk politics and read the center’s law books. On October 15, 1966, the two founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. This revolutionary nationalist organization demanded full socioeconomic equality through the creative use of media, self-defense, survival programs, and community control tactics. The Panthers rapidly evolved from being one of many Bay Area freedom rights organizations to entering 1968 in the vanguard of the international freedom rights struggle.

The U.S. West contributed to this struggle in a variety of powerful ways. San Francisco State saw the formation of Black student unions and Black/Ethnic studies departments. A Black arts movement took hold whose goal was to “end discrimination in the motion-picture industry, recording studios, and musicians’ unions” through groups like Los Angeles’ Underground Musicians Association. Black amateur athletes stood up for Black empowerment, human rights, and democratizing American education and sport. This was pioneered at San Jose State which is remembered in association with the 1968 Summer Olympics when Tommie Smith and John Carlos made their famous Black fist salute.

Activism also emerged among diverse communities with other freedom movements partly modeled on the Black freedom movement. This can be seen in the American Indian movement, Antiwar movement, Asian American movement, Chicano/a movement, Environmental Justice movement, LGBTQ movement, Feminist movement, and Hippie movement.[8]

After Watts, the offshoot freedom movements typically began with counterculture youth forging interracial alliances reminiscent of Black-Brown coalitions formed during World War II to promote human rights and to combat discrimination in the courts through the use of non-violent protest and mass demonstrations.[41]

In Seattle, Black youth and third-generation Japanese youth (i.e. Sansei) forged a freedom rights campaign centered on human rights and non-violent protest that contradicted the sensibilities of their parents, who for decades expressed indifference to one another’s culture and ambitions: i.e., for African Americans, ending structural racism, especially in housing; and for second-generation Japanese Americans (the )—who survived internment and Washington State’s Anti-Alien Land Act (1921-1952)—intermarriage, urban disorder and relating with their children. By 1967, the consolidation of the late-1960s freedom movement centered on the campaign for civil rights/Black power, forced entrenched white supremacists to acknowledge that Black lives mattered.

For Black communities and their allies the result was increased harassment from the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program COINTELPRO, and a white backlash from “kitchen table” activists in suburbs such as Scottsdale, Arizona, and Garden Grove, California—who, like politicians, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, equated freedom with anti-communism, capitalism, low taxes, limited regulation, private property, Protestant family values, small government, and being tough on law and order. By the mid-1970s, the West’s freedom rights movement set many communities on the path of democratization before it slowed to a crawl because of growing conservativism, agent provocateurs, stagflation, internal conflicts, hetero-patriarchal chauvinism, and arrests, assassinations and the resignation of key Black leaders. [9]

NOTES

[1] Gerald Horne, “Black Fire: ‘Riot’ and ‘Revolt’ in Los Angeles, 1965 and 1992” in De Graaf (et al.), Seeking El Dorado, 377, 381, 385-387, 393; Robin DG Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), 7-9; Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 45-49; Sides, L.A. City Limits, 169-198; Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community, 233; and Whitaker, Race Work, 1-21.

[2] Hine, “The Elusive Ballot,” 279-301; and Sanford N. Greenberg, “White Primary” in Texas State Historical Association, The Handbook of Texas (URL: https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/wdw01). Barr, Black Texans, 179, 231; Lawrence P. Crouchett, William Byron Rumford, the Life and Public Services of a California Legislator: A Biography (El Cerrito, CA: Downey Place Publishing House, 1984). For demography see Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 286-287. Also see Office of Maxine Waters, “U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters” (URL: http://waters.house.gov/); Stephanie Mencimer, “Mia Love: Representative from Nowhere: Utah's New Congresswoman is a Symptom of What Happens When Local Elections are Nationalized” in Mother Jones (URL: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/mia-love-congress-utah-representative-nowhere); Darron T. Smith, “She Looks Black, but Her Politics Are Red: What Mia Love’s Victory Means for the Face of the GOP” in Huffington Black Voices (URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/darron-t-smith-phd/mia-love_b_6116466.html); Raphael J. Sonenshein, “Coalition Building in Los Angeles: The Bradley Years and Beyond,” in De Graaf (et. al.), Seeking El Dorado, 450-474; Mack, Black Spokane, 124-148; James Richardson, Willie Brown: A Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community, 3; and Josh Baugh, “The Evolving Mayor Taylor” in San Antonio Express-News (March 26, 2016) (URL: http://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/The-evolving-Mayor-Taylor-7184934.php).

[3] The City of Albuquerque, “The Civil Rights Era in Albuquerque” (URL: https://www.cabq.gov/humanrights/public-information-and-education/diversity-booklets/black-heritage-in-new-mexico/the-civil-rights-era-in-albuquerque); and Goldstone, Integrating the 40 Acres, 14-30; Henderson, “Lucinda Todd and the Invisible Petitioners of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas”; Reese, “Clara Luper and the Civil Rights Movement in Oklahoma City, 1958-1964,” 331-333; Brown Wattley, A Step toward Brown v. Board of Education; Whitaker, Race Work, 133-172. Also see Campney, “’Hold the Line’.

[4] Tucson Unified School District, “Bridging Three Centuries: ‘One of the most progressive and advanced systems in the United States 1940-1959” in District History (URL: http://www.tusd.k12.az.us/contents/distinfo/history/history9305.asp); Whitaker, Race Work, 113-124. Quoted in United States Courts, “Mendez v. Westminster Background” in United States Courts (URL: http://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/get-involved/federal-court-activities/mendez-westminster-re-enactment/mendez-westminster-background.aspx). Also see Henderson, “Lucinda Todd and the Invisible Petitioners of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas,” 312-327; Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Segregation Now: Investigating America’s Racial Divide” in ProPublica (URL: https://www.propublica.org/article/segregation-now-full-text); Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York, Broadway, 2006); W.J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); San Jose Mercury News, “Why Court Ruled Against San Jose,” May 18, 1984; and Stanford Law School-Robert Crown Law Library, “Jackson v Pasadena City School District” in Supreme Court of California Resources (URL: http://scocal.stanford.edu/opinion/jackson-v-pasadena-city-school-dist-27149); and Natalie Munio, “Morris Cole, ground-breaking Denver judge, dies at 83” in Denver Post (May 21, 2016) (URL: http://www.denverpost.com/2016/05/21/morris-cole-ground-breaking-denver-judge-dies-at-83/); Cornell University Law School, “Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado” (URL: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/413/189); and Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors, 82-83.

[5] Leslie G. Kelen, and Eileen Hallett Stone, Missing Stories: An Oral History of Ethnic and Minority Groups in Utah (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1996), 101-106; Ronald G. Coleman, “Blacks in Utah History: An Unknown Legacy” in Utah History To Go (URL: http://historytogo.utah.gov/people/ethnic_cultures/the_peoples_of_utah/blacksinutahhistory.html); and “Preface” (to African-American Community Oral History Section) in Kelen, Missing Stories, 66-69; and Kim Ibach, and William Howard Moore, “The Emerging Civil Rights Movement: The 1957 Wyoming Public Accommodations Statute as a Case Study” in Phil Roberts, Readings in Wyoming History (URL: http://www.uwyo.edu/robertshistory/introduction_to_readings_in_wyo.htm). Quoted from Kelen, Missing Stories, 115. Also see Thomas G. Alexander, “The Civil Rights Movement in Utah” in Utah History to Go (URL: http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/utah_today/thecivilrightsmovementinutah.html); Newell Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981), 166-174, 178, 180-196; Newell G. Bringhurst, and Darron T. Smith (eds.), Black and Mormon (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 1-12, 82-115, 148-166; Kelen, Missing Stories, 72, 77-78, 114-115; United States Department of Justice, "Title II of the Civil Rights Act (Public Accommodations)" (URL: https://www.justice.gov/crt/title-ii-civil-rights-act-public-accommodations); and Tad Walch, "Elder Christofferson explains updated LDS Church policies on same-sex marriage and children” in Deseret News (November 6, 2015) (URL: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865640934/Elder-Christofferson-explains-updated-LDS-Church-policies-on-same-sex-marriage-and-children.html?pg=all).

[6] Quotes are from Carla Eckels, “Kansas Sit-In Gets Its Due at Last” in NPR (October 21, 2006) (URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6355095). For more on this subject see Gretchen Cassel Eick, Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-72 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 1-11; Linda Williams Reese, “Clara Luper and the Civil Rights Movement in Oklahoma City, 1958-1964,” 328, 331-333; Wattley, A Step toward Brown v. Board of Education; Broussard, Expectations of Equality, 141-147; Coughty, “Lubertha Johnson,” 47-54, 59-66; Eick, Dissent in Wichita, 45-52; Mack, Black Spokane, 100-120; Robert A. Goldberg, “Racial Change on the Southern Periphery: The Case of San Antonio, Texas, 1960-1965,” in Bruce A. Glasrud (ed.), African Americans in South Texas History (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2011), 280-312; Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors, 119-120; 215; Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 289-291; Whitaker, Race Work, 146-147; and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, “Your Life Is Really Not Just Your Own: African American Women in Twentieth-Century California” in De Graaf (et al.) Seeking El Dorado, 218-223.

[7] Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941-1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 190-227; De Graaf, “African American Suburbanization in California, 1960 through 1990,” 415; National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Kerner Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), xiii-xxxvi; Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors, 93; Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community, 201-209. Moreover see Robert Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East L.A. (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 2008), 31-52; Horne, “Black Fire,” 377-381; and The Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 69-73; Darnell Hunt, and Ana-Christina Ramon (eds.), Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 243-265.

Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Sides, L.A. City Limits, 169-193. Errol Wayne Stevens, Radical L.A.: From Coxey's Army to the Watts Riots, 1894-1965 (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 2014), 306-317. Also see Baldassare (ed.), The Los Angeles Riots, 1-18.

[36] Quote is from Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community, 217. Also see Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1-5, 117-207; Peniel Joseph (ed.), The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007); Murch, Living for the City, 3-14; Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 1-10; and Robert O. Self, America Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 217-255. Quoted in Murch, Living for the City, 71. Rich discussions on the Black student movement also include David Hilliard (ed.), The Huey P. Newton Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 45-46; Peniel E. Joseph, “Black Studies, Black Student Activism, and the Black Power Movement” in Joseph (ed.), The Black Power Movement, 259-262; and Bobby Seale, Seize the Time; The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York, Random House, 1970), 12-25, 30, 46. Lastly see Molefi Kete Asante, Maulana Karenga: An Intellectual Portrait (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009), 107-113, 119-124; Brown, Fighting for Us, 33-36, 74-106, 159-162; Maulana Karenga, Kawaida and Questions of Life and Struggle (Los Angeles, CA: University of Sankore Press, 2008); and Keith A. Mayes, Kwanzaa: Black Power and The Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2009), 47-134.

[8] Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) 1-16; Seale, Seize the Time, 35-73, 113-125; Hilliard (ed.), The Huey P. Newton Reader, 9-19. Quote is from Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), back cover, 1-15, 52-89. Other sources include Brian D. Behnken (ed.), The Struggle in Black and Brown: African American and Mexican American Relations during the Civil Rights Era (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska, 2011); Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press), 43-78; Douglas Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath (Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press, 2004); Jeanelle Hope, “Black, yellow, and shades of purple: Radical Afro-Asian Collective Activism in the San Francisco Bay Area from the Perspectives of Women in the Struggle, 1966-1972” (Syracuse, NY: Master’s Thesis, 2014); Joseph, “Black Studies, Black Student Activism, and the Black Power Movement,” 264-277; Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, “Rainbow Radicalism: The Rise of the Radical Ethnic Nationalism” in Joseph (ed.), The Black Power Movement, 193-228; Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left, 1-8, 89-122, 153-179; Ibram H. Rogers, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 89-126; Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 45-92; Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors, 163-200; and “’Doing the Right Thing for the Sake of Doing the Right Thing’: The Revolt of the Black Athlete and the Modern Student-Athletic Movement, 1956-2014” in The Western Journal of Black Studies (Fall 2014), 260-278. See Kevin Leonard, The Battle for Los Angeles: Racial Ideology and World War II (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 147-198; Lisa Y. Ramos, “Not Similar Enough: Mexican American and African American Civil Rights and the Causes of Black-Brown Disunity” in Behnken (ed.), The Struggle in Black and Brown, 19-48.

[9] Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community, 223-233; David Mura, Turning Japanese: Memoir of a Sansei (New York: Grove Press, 2007); and Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Little, Brown and Company, 1989), 212-229. For more on the “kitchen table” activists concept see Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3-19, 111-146. Also see Murch, Living for the City, 168-170.

Voting

Education & Courts

Priesthood & Rights

Direct Action

Black Power

Notes