Cedric J. Robinson University of Califomia, Santa Barbara

Transcription

1 566 The Journal of African American History architect of the war in Vietnam (and the brother of William Bundy of the Central Intelligence Agency), the foundation provided critical funding and legitimacy to Black Studies as an instmment of integration rather than as a libratory political movement. In his conclusion to Black Power in the Belly of the Beast, Judson Jeffries does finally address sexism and the politics of gender. He writes, "In addition to being short on funds, the Black Power movement failed to adequately address the woman question." Jeffries charges that the most egregiously sexist groups were the cultural nationalists who equated black femininity with overt and ritualized performances of female submissiveness and subordination to males, and he obligingly offers some instances. On the other hand, Jeffries acknowledges Manning Marable's indictment of the Panther Eldridge Cleaver's extreme sexism, but shies away from this obvious contradiction in his own thesis: "[Cleaver's] infamous and unsettling exposition against Black women need not be recounted here." His rationale for the Black Power Movement's collusion with patriarchy, however, is a social legacy: "On the whole. Black men have historically ignored or downplayed the particularity of Black women's oppression." Some of his contributors implicitly disagree, for peppering many of these essays are accounts of women (black and non-black) who risked their lives for a radically transformed American society. Some of them brought leadership to the Black Power Movement not only at its inception, but while it experienced the most severe excessives of extemal repression and intemal exploitation. At no time did they deserve that their exemplary conduct as liberationists, or their abuse at the hands of the authorities and their comrades, be marginalized. Cedric J. Robinson University of Califomia, Santa Barbara Muhammad Ahmad (Maxwell Stanford, Jr.), We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Pp Paper, $ We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations by Muhammad Ahmad is an important work, a must read for serious scholars of black radicalism, the 1960s, and the black liberation movement in its Civil Rights and Black Power phases. However, though important, the text is problematic in a number of ways. The numerous typos and repetitions and occasional factual errors make it a difficult read. Ahmad's narrative and analysis deserved better it deserved the editorial support of its publisher. However, readers who push through the writing difficulties will be rewarded with an abundance of new information and the occasional illuminating observation about the black

2 New Black Power Studies: Book Reviews 567 liberation organizations, especially the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Black Panther Party (BPP), and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), perhaps the four most significant radical black organizations in the period from 1955 to Ahmad and RAM were significant, if largely unknown. His and the organization's praxis influenced African American activism in the 1960s. As RAM's first national field chairman and founder of its successor, the African People's Party (APP), Ahmad helped construct the theory and practice of revolutionary black nationalism, a synthesis of Marxism and black nationalism. Yet, despite a visible record of contribution, Ahmad and RAM, like many other black radicals and their organizations, have been reduced to apparitions, ghostly images whose episodic appearances in the scholarly literature render them more myth than real. Ironically, though unknown to the public and absent or minimized in the scholarship, Ahmad and RAM's significance was validated by United States intelligence agencies' records of constant surveillance and harassment. We Will Return in the Whirlwind is part contemporary history, part political analysis, and part memoir. Ahmad's navigation of these parts is uneven. The book is more successful as a memoir. Its importance lies largely in Ahmad's reconstruction of events in which he was an historical actor. In one of his more significant contributions, Ahmad discusses the process of his own political development, particularly the role of previous generations of black radicals in developing his political consciousness. However, despite his documentation of the mentorship of young black radicals by Queen Mother Audley Moore, James and Grace Lee Boggs, and others, in the end we are left to conclude that while important, these relationships were individualistic, episodic, and lacked the institutional foundations to transmit the knowledge from the 1930s radical cohort to the emerging 1960s generation. Rather than affirm a story of continuity, Ahmad's narrative actually confirms that the intergenerational linkage had been severed. Yet, where these links were forged, as in the case of Ahmad and RAM, the results were extraordinary. Discussing his and RAM's involvement in Philadelphia black politics between 1963 and 1965, the transitional years from civil rights to Black Power, Ahmad provides an important corrective to the historical record of the protests against the city of Philadelphia's failure to enforce nondiscrimination clauses in municipal contracts. Like hundreds of other local militant or radical black organizations which due to their dedication, grassroots connections, and organizing skills played critical roles in organizing community struggles RAM's contributions have been minimized or erased from the historical record. These unsung groups often did the hard work canvassing door-to-door and in barber and beauty shops, tavems, and parks but their contributions are usually

3 568 The Journal of African A merican History absent or diminished in the historical record. We Will Return in the Whirlwind corrects this tendency by boldly reinscribing RAM more centrally into the historic two-month long protests against Philadelphia's construction industry and building trades unions in the spring of This local struggle registered nationally and established the context that led President John F. Kennedy to issue Executive Order on 22 June Kennedy's mandate encouraged "by affirmative action, the elimination of discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin" in federally assisted construction contracts. According to Ahmad, RAM's role extended beyond his and Stanley Daniels's arrests during the protests. In his account, RAM activists' survey revealed strong community support for the planned demonstrations. Additionally, according to Ahmad, using equipment borrowed from the local NAACP branch, RAM went door-to-door and organized working-class African Americans and members of street gangs to participate in the upcoming protests. In Ahmad's narrative, RAM was cmcial to the organization and success of the protests. In the conventional narrative told by historians Thomas Sugrue and Matthew Countryman, Ahmad, Daniel, and RAM's involvement is relegated to their beating and arrest by "Philadelphia's Finest." Unfortunately, the conventional liberal story, which excludes or greatly minimizes the role of militant and radical activists, is usually the story of record. Here, Ahmad's recollection of the struggle to open the construction industry and building trades unions to African American yvorkers sewes to remind us that official archives often recast black liberation struggles to privilege liberal, middle-class black activists and organizations. Though his political analysis is occasionally insightful, too often it is limited by his compulsion to settle old scores. After Scot Brown's Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (2003), why continue to deride the US Organization as the "United Slaves"? Though Ahmad tries to present a balanced portrait of the BPP, in the end his treatment is problematic. In The Black Panther Party Reconsidered {[99%)., Charles Jones challenged the recurrent myths surrounding the BPP, so why does Ahmad repeat the unsubstantiated assertion that the BPP was composed largely of "'lumpen' ex-pimps, stick-up men, [and] dope pushers"? To his credit, Ahmad's discussion of gender relations in the BPP is nuanced and serves to refute another myth about the Panthers. His treatment of gender in the BPP is an important departure from his examination in SNCC, RAM, and the LRBW. Ahmad asserts the "correct" position on gender relations, but except in the BPP, he largely fails to explore the contributions of women to the strategic and theoretical development of radical black organizations and ideology between 1960 and It is revealing that Ahmad does not analyze any of the radical black women's organizations examined by Kimberly Springer in Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist

4 New Black Power Studies: Book Reviews 569 Organizations, (2005). This is particularly troubling since the period she covers overlaps with Ahmad's. Not only are women and gender virtually absent in his discussions of RAM and the LRBW, but his exploration of gender in SNCC ignores Frances Beal's articulation of the "Triple Oppression Thesis" and the evolution of black feminism from SNCC's Black Women's Liberation Caucus to the Black Women's Alliance to the Third World Women's Alliance. The book is least successful as an historical study. In this area the work simply suffers from poor documentation and a lack of diversity in the primary sources; in other words, the sources do not always support his analysis, or Ahmad tums out to be the only source for information presented. These problems reflect the publisher's failure to make appropriate investments in an important story. We Will Return in the Whirlwind is an important book that works best as a memoir. Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, eds.. In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, Pp Cloth, $84.95; Paper, $ Emerging out of the 2003 Wheelock College conference, "The Black Panther Party in Historical Perspective," In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement is a collection of essays examining the cultural and historical legacy of this controversial, yet innovative black nationalist organization that symbolized the militant phase of the black freedom struggle and was considered the vanguard of the radical Left in the late 1960s. Divided into five parts. In Search of the Black Panther Party relies on resources such as contemporary articles and interviews with founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, and vital primary sources, including the papers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Counterinteiligence Program, COINTELPRO. Recent scholarship is well represented, resulting in a collection of essays that treat their subject in a scholarly, yet sensitive manner. In the introduction the editors Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, who also organized the conference, highlight the problematic historical interpretations of the Black Panthers by scholars and the media. They contend that many "scholaractivists" and "activist-scholars" of Black Panther history succumb to selective memory and subjective interpretation. Equally, they take umbrage with critics who assert that the Panthers were a front for criminal activity and practiced brutal misogyny. Lazerow and Williams offer the collection of essays as a begihning of "the process of historicizing, not simply judging, the Black Panthers."

5