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Chapter 31: Black Power
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Stamped from the Beginning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Discrimination, Racist Ideas, and Ignorance
Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge
The Invention of Blackness and Whiteness
The Illogic of Racism
Summary
Analysis
Presidential candidate Richard Nixon wants to appeal to racist voters but knows that by being too explicit, he will only attract the support of hardcore segregationists, a minority of the larger group of racist voters. Instead he pursues what historians call the “southern strategy,” which involves signaling racist ideas without ever naming race. Nixon pulls this off by claiming that “Law and order has broken down in this country” and promising to restore it. The strategy is successful; Nixon wins the election.
As Kendi indicates here, the compromise represented by the “southern strategy” isn’t reached because Nixon and others like him want to appeal to antiracists as well as racists. Rather, they know they need to appeal to assimilationists who tend not to think of themselves as racist. As a result, Nixon must express racist ideas in a veiled, covert way.
Themes
In 1969, Davis is due to start her first academic job at UCLA. However, after the FBI learns that she is a member of the Communist Party, California Governor Ronald Reagan orders her to be fired from her post. Fighting this move, Davis manages to be successfully reinstated thanks to intervention from the California Superior Court. In February 1970, a campaign begins to free three Black Power activists incarcerated at Soledad State Prison in San Jose. Davis gives a speech at a rally demanding that the “Soledad Brothers” be released. Reagan doubles down on his efforts to fire her, citing her condemnation of a UC Berkeley psychologist whose research supports segregationist ideas.
Kendi uses the story of Angela Davis’ early years as a professor in the University of California system to highlight how “free speech” has always been restricted for Black radicals. Although Davis is a highly pedigreed and accomplished scholar, Reagan and other forces relentlessly conspire to characterize her as dangerous and incompetent in order to get her removed from her post.
Themes
In August 1970, the Soledad Brothers make an escape attempt aided by Jonathan Jackson, taking three hostages in a courtroom. A shootout ensues in which two of the inmates, Jackson, and the judge are killed. Police claim that one of the guns Jackson used belongs to Davis, and they charge her with counts of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. Davis flees her arrest warrant in the manner of “a fugitive trying to avoid slavery or worse.” She is placed on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list and images of her are circulated with her famous Afro. By this point, Kendi notes, the Afro has become a symbol of the Black Power movement, although it is also associated with Black cinema and especially the genre of Blaxploitation. Some Black people rebuke Blaxploitation for its vulgarity and flirtation with racist ideas.
Like many Black Power activists, Davis is indicted on dubious charges involving resistance to police violence and political imprisonment. Kendi shows how, throughout this era, the police spy on, intimidate, assault, incarcerate, and murder Black activists. If any defend themselves or fight back, they are immediately killed or incarcerated. In this sense, Davis is only a “criminal” in the sense that she falls within a category invented to suppress Black freedom. The comparison of her flight to an enslaved person’s escape is therefore apt.
Themes
In October 1970, Davis is captured and incarcerated in New York. It is while she is in prison that she begins developing what she later calls “embryonic Black feminist consciousness.” Back in August, Frances Beal attended the National Organization for Women’s Strike for Equality in New York, representing the Third World Women’s Alliance and demanding that the pursuit of Davis be dropped. Meanwhile, in the world of literature, both Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou publish narratives with a distinctly antiracist worldview. In December, Davis is extradited to California. She spends her time in prison reading.
This passage contrasts two very different phenomena that Kendi suggests are nonetheless inextricable from each other: the brutality of incarceration and the Black Power movement suppression and the burgeoning Black feminist literary culture that emerges via Davis, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou in this era. It is against the former violence that these three authors and others like them write, building a vision for a new, antiracist world.
Themes
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The mode of antiracism Davis practices is different from the civil rights model still being enacted in the country at large. Where the latter form only prohibits overt and explicit discrimination, Davis and other Black Power activists seek to focus on eliminating Black poverty. In the ensuing years, more Black politicians are elected around the country, but it soon becomes clear that they will not necessarily work in the interests of Black people. When Davis’ trial takes place, the prosecutor intends to show that Davis was not interested in freeing the Soledad Brothers as political prisoners, but rather fleeing her George Jackson only because he was her lover. This argument is ultimately unsuccessful, and Davis is acquitted. As she walks free, she promises to devote her life to freeing others from prison.
Like many radicals throughout history—and particularly Black radicals—Davis undergoes an intellectual transformation while in prison. Whereas she had already always been committed to fighting racism and economic exploitation, it is while she is incarcerated herself that she comes to focus on the prison system as an equally key point of focus. Kendi shows that, by incarcerating Angela Davis, prosecutors inadvertently helped give birth to the modern abolitionist movement.
Themes
The Watergate scandal of 1973 highlighted the hypocrisy of Nixon, the “law and order” president, evading a single day in prison. In 1975, Davis takes an academic position at Claremont College’s Black Studies Center and is disappointed to find assimilationist ideas such as uplift suasion still circulating there. At the same time, the momentum of the Black feminist and LGBT movements is gradually building. Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde renounces the idea that people of color, women, and queer people should be “expected to educate” their oppressors into seeing their “humanity.”
Kendi suggests that, like other figures in the book, Audre Lorde is ahead of her time in her insistence that injustice must be examined through the lens of intersectionality and that no group of oppressed people should be excluded from the fight for justice. Her visionary worldview is part of why she is still so frequently cited to this day.
Themes
Black feminist writer Ntozake Shange, meanwhile, writes a play that debuts on Broadway in September 1976. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf comes to be embraced as the “black feminist bible.” Like Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (1982), For Colored Girls attracts condemnation for those who are concerned it portrays Black men in a negative light, adding fuel to racist fires. At the same time, Kendi suggests that part of the problem of these concerns is their insistence on reading individual Black characters as representative of all Black people.
One of the lessons of Kendi’s book is that Black cultural production should be allowed to be complex, challenging, and controversial. Kendi notes that, rather than decreasing its literary and political value, the debate that ensues around The Color Purple confirms what an important novel it is.
Themes
Tensions continue to rise with the publication of Michelle Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman in 1979, which critiques the sexism of Black men and the false stereotype of the headstrong, invincible Black woman. Yet Wallace’s book also contains some racist arguments as well. After critique from fellow Black feminists, she ultimately revises her original claim that Black machoism was the main reason the Black Power Movement failed (while acknowledging the reality that it was one important reason). Meanwhile, another controversy arises when the white actress Bo Derek chooses to wear her hair in cornrows in 1979, which are soon nicknamed “Bo Braids.” This all takes place in a moment in which Black women are still regularly punished at school and work for wearing their hair in braids and other natural hairstyles.
As Kendi’s example of “Bo Braids” shows, conversations around cultural appropriation have been happening since the 1970s and earlier.
Themes
In 1977, the TV show Roots: The Saga of an American Family airs on ABC, depicting the story of an African named Kunta Kinte who is kidnapped from Gambia and enslaved in Virginia. Writer Alex Haley, on whose book of the same name the series is based, claims to be a direct relation of Kinte and traces Kinte’s descendants through history over the course of the narrative. The show is wildly successful, inaugurating a new era in the representation of slavery.
Here, Kendi encourages readers to think back to the many examples he’s provided of racist ideas that assert that Black people have been corrupted and dehumanized by slavery. In many ways, Roots is a challenge to this notion, highlighting the strength, dignity, beauty, and resilience of enslaved people across multiple generations and endowing the descendants of the enslaved with a new pride.
Themes
