The text and visuals combine for an educational, eye-opening experience.
An illuminating text accompanies visuals from an exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Black Power movement.
The very phrase “black power” continues to polarize, making some fearful and others proud, often along racial lines. The editors recognize that Black Power remains “one of the least understood and most criminalized and vilified movements in American history” as well as one that, as the opening chapter puts it, “is still too often viewed as a destructive, short-lived, and politically ineffectual movement that triggered white backlash, resulted in urban rioting, and severely crippled the mainstream civil rights movement.” Though it lasted little more than a decade, undermined by the FBI and other official provocation and internal dissension, its legacy seems more vital than ever, as the Black Lives Matter movement and the racial conflagrations in cities across the country suggest how much has and hasn’t been accomplished. Chapters from academic researchers and testimonies from participants (including Kathleen Cleaver) suggest the range of the movement’s impact and implications, how it spawned similar movements among Asian Americans, Latinos, and American Indians while exhibiting a militancy that would transform progressive activism at large, as well as how it ultimately transcended both racial and national boundaries as a force for human rights. This heavily illustrated book serves as a catalog of sorts for a similarly titled exhibition curated by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and it reflects a legacy that encompasses arts and culture (from poetry to visual arts to free jazz), educational initiatives, prison reform, and even fashion. It also illuminates how schisms between the more politically radical Marxists and those who focused more on culture and were less politically doctrinaire resulted in tensions that caused the movement to crumble from within as police and FBI officials presented plenty of outside pressure (often beyond legalities).
The text and visuals combine for an educational, eye-opening experience.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62097-148-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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