black power - book - 2006 - Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America
Peniel E. Joseph
Henry Holt & Company
2006
399 pages

Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour is a historical survey of ‘black power’, an umbrella term applicable to social movements dedicated to empowering black communities in 20th century United States.  The book charts a path from figures such as the pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey to the millenarian Nation of Islam, through to the American Civil Rights movement (and the specific organizations that constituted it) up to the Black Panthers.  Author Peniel E. Joseph (a professor of history working at Tufts University in Massachusetts) is as thorough as possible with his material charting the splintered path each leader and organization takes to their conclusion.  His narrative peters out as it moves into the 80s when it focused mostly on mainstream political figures such as Jesse Jackson (who was, himself, a civil rights activist as a young man), as a kind of apotheosis to the far more radical past that allowed figures such as him to move closer to the moderate centre.

Of course, the narrative is dominated by all of the figures that would be expected: Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr, Stokely Charmical, and finally the Black Panther leadership (Cleaver, Seale, Newton, etc).  There are, of course, a large number of other important figures but these are the names that drive Joseph’s (and possibly any) narrative of American black activism.  There are also a number of binaries at play in Joseph’s narrative: Marxist vs protestant influence, separatist vs integrationist, non-violent civil disobedieance vs armed resistance/violent struggle.  One thing that I hadn’t quite noticed until after completing the book is that it is primarily focused on the radical edge of black social movements.  Figures such as W.E.B. DuBois and organizations like his NAACP are discussed, of course, but are given far less attention than groups like the SNCC or the Black Panthers.  Also, the book has a detailed bibliography subdivided into publication type and the index is structured so that subtopics of major topics are indexed.