HST61022 Black Power: Race, Gender, and Liberation in the United States and Beyond

15 credits, Semester one
Module leader 2023-24: Alex Ferguson

Module summary

During its time in the 1960s and 1970s and in its immediate aftermath, the Black Power movement was often caricatured and castigated as a violent, misogynistic, incoherent and self-destructive betrayal of the Civil Rights movement. But in recent years, scholarship which Peniel Joseph has termed “Black Power Studies” has situated the movement within the longer history of the Black freedom struggle. These works suggest that Black Power was not a break from the recent past, but part of the long history of Black armed self-defence and transnational activism, and an important contribution to Black American identity making, political thought, and political power. The movement called for racial solidarity, cultural pride, and self-determination, and connected its work at the local and national level to the global struggle against racial oppression and exploitation. In this module, we will explore the historiography of the Black Power movement, as well as key primary sources. We will seek to understand the development of the movement’s political power at the local level; the emergence of the Black Panther Party in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the Black Power movement in the Caribbean; the relationship between Black nationalism and internationalism; the Black Arts Movement and Black identity in the 1960s and 1970s; Black women’s role in the development of the movement’s political power and contribution to Black feminist thought in the 1970s and beyond; and the legacies of these events in the era of the Movement for Black Lives.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, you will be able to:

Identify and analyse the key events which shaped and were shaped by the Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s
Situate the Black Power movement within the broader history of the modern United States
Identify and critically assess historiographical debates in the field, as well as primary sources and relate them to these historiographical debates
Critically examine primary sources and the historiography of the Black Power movement to produce evidence-based and persuasive arguments

Assessment methods

Assessment type - % of final mark

3000 word essay - 100%

You will complete a 3000 word essay on a topic related to one of the module's key themes. You will define your own essay topic in discussion with your tutor.

Additional learning and teaching information

Teaching and indicative seminar plan:

The module will be taught in five, two-hour classes. You will also have individual tutorial contact with the module tutor in order to discuss your assessment for this module.

Selected reading:

Ann Marie Angelo, Black Power on the Move: Migration, Internationalism, and the British and Israeli Black Panthers (Chapel Hill, 2021)
Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley, 2013)
Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, (Chapel Hill, 2017) [ebook]
Kevin Gaines, African Americans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill, 2006)
Hassan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York, 2010)
Peniel E. Joseph (ed), The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, (New York, 2006)
Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power, (New York, 2007)
Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York, 2014)
Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and The Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King (New York, 2020)
Sean Malloy, Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War, (Ithaca, 2017) [ebook]
Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
Kate Quinn ed., Black Power in the Caribbean (Gainesville, 2015)
Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003) [ebook]
Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham, 2016) [ebook]
Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008)
Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin (eds), Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York, 2001)
Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill, 2001)
William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago, 1992)
Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20 th Century, (New York, 2015) [ebook]
Komozi Woodward, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill, 1999)

Page updated

Report abuse