Africana Studies and the Decolonization of the US Empire in the Twenty-First Century

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Quoted in Harding 1982.

2. This has increasingly been recognized by scholars and activists in the last 20 years. For details see Von Eschen 1997, James 1998, Solomon 1998, Maxwell 1999, Woodard 1998, R. Bush 1999, 2009, Baldwin 2002, Biondi 2003, Singh 2004.

3. See Denning 1997.

4. In the late 1940s embodied in Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party.

5. I am aware that Du Bois is not considered to be part of the Race First radicals of the New Negro movement. But I argue above that he adopted Race First radicalism in his writings from 1910–1935 and never turned back. There is an extensive literature on the New Negro Movement and on the Black Popular Front. I started my own investigation (R. Bush 1999) with Vincent (1971, 1973), Foner (1978), Hill (1987), and Garvey (1969). Since then, interest in the New Negro and the Black Popular Front has grown.

6. The Revolutionary Action Movement arose in the context of Robert F. Williams' 1963 confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan, which is discussed below. See Ahmad 2007 for details.

7. This usage of the term underclass (dating from the 1980s and 1990s) should not be confused with the way the same term was deployed, along with “culture of poverty,” in the 1960s – first by liberal intellectuals such as Oscar Lewis and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and later by conservatives such as Edward Banfield – in culture wars against Black and Latino youth.

8. When Williams later returned to the US and secured an academic position at the University of Michigan, many were disappointed that he did not assume a position at the head of the movement as some of the authorities had feared. Some then ask how this manifests the dynamics of anti-imperialism. His decision not to assume a leadership position upon his return does not diminish his role in the anti-imperialist movement of the 1960s.

9. This was the occasion when Malcolm X, in response to a question from the audience, made the comment about the assassination of John F. Kennedy being a case of the “chickens coming home to roost.” For this statement he was suspended from the Nation of Islam, initially for 90 days, and then indefinitely. We can see in this comment that Malcolm X had moved beyond the limits of the Nation of Islam.

10. This is not to deny that some members of Black Popular Front of the 1940s also played an important role within the civil rights movement. See Biondi 2003 and Baldwin 2002.