1) After fighting fascism overseas in World War II, more than one million African Americans came home ready to fight to end apartheid in the United States.
The veterans constituted only one segment of a larger constellation of Black business leaders, pastors, women, and students, who marched and organized, led sit-ins and boycotts, got beaten up and arrested, experienced psychological terror and physical torture, and even got murdered by police in cold blood.
It’s at times a more beautiful and terrible history, which reveals our national failures, shows us our limitations, and highlights perhaps our most inspiring mass movement that sought to bust up the legal, institutional, and cultural pillars of racial apartheid and Jim Crow. First, what were the goals of the movement?
What major achievements could it claim by the mid-1960s?
What role, if any, did the federal government play in realizing those goals?
What civil rights organizations were crucial in embracing the new mood, imperatives, and cultural aesthetic of Black Power?
What goals of the movement were not realized in the 1960s?
What happened to keep us from realizing these goals for the past fifty years?
Why do politicians and business leaders invoke a mythic national fable of some heroic civil rights era that locates the history of the struggle in the distant past?
And how have activists from 2010 to 2020 made it clear that there is no disconnect?
