Black Power Movement
This page features a small selection of UConn library and external resources to support learning and research pertaining to the Black Power Movement. This list is meant to be exploratory and is not a comprehensive representation or list of the library's holdings.
For additional assistance, please contact Samuel Boss, at samuel.boss@uconn.edu.
Black Power
"....emphasized black self-reliance and self-determination more than integration. Proponents believed African Americans should secure their human rights by creating political and cultural organizations that served their interests."
-- National Museum of African American History & Culture, on the The Foundations of Black Power (2019).
Photo: Black Panther Party providing sickle cell anemia testing at Black Community Survival Conference, March 30th, 1972. Courtesy of Standford University. Link.
Collection Highlights
Black Power Mixtape, 19657-1975 (2011) is a 9-part documentary series by Swedish journalists drawn to the US by stories of urban unrest and revolution. Featuring prominent figures like Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, and Eldridge Cleaver, the filmmakers captured movement leaders in intimate moments and remarkably unguarded interviews. Available in DVD format at the UConn library. Watch a clip:
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Black Power: the politics of liberation in America
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A revolutionary work since its publication, Black Power exposed the depths of systemic racism in this country and provided a radical political framework for reform: true and lasting social change would only be accomplished through unity among African-Americans and their independence from the preexisting order.
Call Number: E185.615 .C32ISBN: 9780394700335Publication Date: 1967-09-12 -
Black Power Beyond Borders: the global dimensions of the Black power movement
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This groundbreaking volume examines the transnational dimensions of Black Power - how Black Power thinkers and activists drew on foreign movements and vice versa how individuals and groups in other parts of the world interpreted 'Black Power,' from African liberation movements to anti-caste agitation in India to indigenous protests in New Zealand.
Call Number: Special Collections C13478ISBN: 9781137285058Publication Date: 2012-11-28 -
The Black Power Movement: rethinking the civil rights-Black power era
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The Black Power Movement remains an enigma. Often misunderstood and ill-defined, this radical movement is now beginning to receive sustained and serious scholarly attention. Peniel Joseph has collected the freshest and most impressive list of contributors around to write original essays on the Black Power Movement. Taken together they provide a critical and much needed historical overview of the Black Power era. Offering important examples of undocumented histories of black liberation, this volume offers both powerful and poignant examples of 'Black Power Studies' scholarship.
Call Number: E185.61 .B6 2006ISBN: 9780415945950Publication Date: 2006-03-24 -
Engines of the Black Power Movement: essays on the influence of civil rights actions, arts, and Islam
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The decade of the 1960s was an era of protest in America, and strides toward racial equality were among the most profound effects of the challenges to America's status quo. But have civil rights for African Americans been furthered, or even maintained, in the four decades since the Civil Rights movement began? To a certain extent, the movement is popularly perceived as having regressed, with the real issues tabled or hidden. With a view to assessing losses and gains, this collection of 17 essays examines the evolution and perception of the African American civil rights movement from its inception through today.
Call Number: E185.615 .E54 2007ISBN: 0786425407Publication Date: 2006-12-12
Black Arts Movement
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"After Mecca": women poets and the Black Arts Movement
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The politics and music of the sixties and early seventies have been the subject of scholarship for many years, but it is only very recently that attention has turned to the cultural production of African American poets. In "After Mecca," Cheryl Clarke explores the relationship between the Black Arts Movement and black women writers of the period. Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Alice Walker, and others chart the emergence of a new and distinct black poetry and its relationship to the black community's struggle for rights and liberation. Clarke also traces the contributions of these poets to the development of feminism and lesbian-feminism, and the legacy they left for others to build on. She argues that whether black women poets of the time were writing from within the movement or writing against it, virtually all were responding to it. Using the trope of "Mecca," she explores the ways in which these writers were turning away from white, western society to create a new literacy of blackness. Provocatively written, this book is an important contribution to the fields of African American literary studies and feminist theory.
Call Number: PS310.N4 C48 2005ISBN: 0813534054Publication Date: 2004-11-22 -
The Black Arts Movement: literary nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s
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Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement. Taking a regional approach, Smethurst examines local expressions of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity, while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally changed American attitudes about the relationship between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically transformed the landscape of public funding for the arts.
Call Number: PS153.N5 S56 2005ISBN: 9780807829349Publication Date: 2005-05-09 -
Black Post-Blackness: the Black Arts Movement and twenty-first-century aesthetics
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A 2008 cover of The New Yorker featured a much-discussed Black Power parody of Michelle and Barack Obama. The image put a spotlight on how easy it is to flatten the Black Power movement as we imagine new types of blackness. Margo Natalie Crawford argues that we have misread the Black Arts Movement's call for blackness. We have failed to see the movement's anticipation of the "new black" and "post-black." Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of twenty-first century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780252099557Publication Date: 2017-05-12 -
In Search of Our Warrior Mothers : Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement
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The Black Arts Movement (1965-76) consisted of artists across the United States deeply concerned with the relationship between politics and the black aesthetic. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers examines the ways in which black women playwrights in the movement advanced feminist and womanist perspectives from within black nationalist discourses. La Donna L. Forsgren recuperates the careers, artistic theories, and dramatic contributions of four leading playwrights: Martie Evans-Charles, J.e. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, and Barbara Ann Teer. Using original interviews, production recordings, playbills, and unpublished manuscripts, she investigates how these women, despite operating within a context that equated the collective well-being of black people with black male agency, created works that validated black women's aspirations for autonomy and explored women's roles in the struggle for black liberation. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers demonstrates the powerful contributions of women to the creation, interpretation, and dissemination of black aesthetic theory, thus opening an interdisciplinary conversation at the intersections of theater, performance, feminist, and African American studies and identifying and critiquing the gaps and silences within these fields. -- Cover page 4.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 0810136953Publication Date: 2018 -
SOS/Calling All Black People : a Black Arts Movement Reader
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"This volume brings together a broad range of key writings from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, among the most significant cultural movements in American history. The aesthetic counterpart of the Black Power movement, it burst onto the scene in the form of artists' circles, writers' workshops, drama groups, dance troupes, new publishing ventures, bookstores, and cultural centers and had a presence in practically every community and college campus with an appreciable African American population. Black Arts activists extended its reach even further through magazines such as Ebony and Jet, on television shows such as Soul! and Like It Is, and on radio programs. Many of the movement's leading artists, including Ed Bullins, Nikki Giovanni, Woodie King, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Touré, and Val Gray Ward remain artistically productive today. Its influence can also be seen in the work of later artists, from the writers Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and August Wilson to actors Avery Brooks, Danny Glover, and Samuel L. Jackson, to hip hop artists Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Chuck D. SOS -- Calling All Black People includes works of fiction, poetry, and drama in addition to critical writings on issues of politics, aesthetics, and gender. It covers topics ranging from the legacy of Malcolm X and the impact of John Coltrane's jazz to the tenets of the Black Panther Party and the music of Motown. The editors have provided a substantial introduction outlining the nature, history, and legacy of the Black Arts Movement as well as the principles by which the anthology was assembled."--Google books viewed Feb. 2, 2021.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 1613762763Publication Date: 2014 -
Spectacular Blackness: the cultural politics of the Black power movement and the search for a Black aesthetic
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Exploring the interface between the cultural politics of the Black Power and the Black Arts movements and the production of postwar African American popular culture, Amy Ongiri shows how the reliance of Black politics on an oppositional image of African Americans was the formative moment in the construction of "authentic blackness" as a cultural identity. While other books have adopted either a literary approach to the language, poetry, and arts of these movements or a historical analysis of them, Ongiri's captures the cultural and political interconnections of the postwar period by using an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from cinema studies and music theory. She traces the emergence of this Black aesthetic from its origin in the Black Power movement's emphasis on the creation of visual icons and the Black Arts movement's celebration of urban vernacular culture.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780813929606Publication Date: 2009-12-16
Black Panther Party
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The Black Panther Party: service to the people programs
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The Black Panther Party represents Black Panther Party members' coordinated responses over the last four decades to the failure of city, state, and federal bureaucrats to address the basic needs of their respective communities. The Party pioneered free social service programs that are now in the mainstream of American life.The Party's Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation, operated with Oakland's Children's Hospital, was among the nation's first such testing programs. Its Free Breakfast Program served as a model for national programs. Other initiatives included free clinics, grocery giveaways, school and education programs, senior programs, and legal aid programs.Published here for the first time in book form, ""The Black Panther Party"" makes the case that the programs' methods are viable models for addressing the persistent, basic social injustices and economic problems of today's American cities and suburbs.
Call Number: HV3185.O35 B55 2008ISBN: 9780826343949Publication Date: 2008-05-30 -
Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party
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This fascinating book gathers reflections by scholars and activists who consider the impact of the Black Panther Party, the BBP, the most significant revolutionary organization in the later 20th century.
Call Number: E185.615 .L4777 2001ISBN: 0415927838Publication Date: 2001-03-22 -
Off the Pigs!: the history and literature of the Black Panther Party
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Call Number: E185.615 .O33ISBN: 9780810809017Publication Date: 1976-06-01
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The Revolution Has Come: Black power, gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
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In The Revolution Has Come Robyn C. Spencer traces the Black Panther Party's organizational evolution in Oakland, California, where hundreds of young people came to political awareness and journeyed to adulthood as members. Challenging the belief that the Panthers were a projection of the leadership, Spencer draws on interviews with rank-and-file members, FBI files, and archival materials to examine the impact the organization's internal politics and COINTELPRO's political repression had on its evolution and dissolution. She shows how the Panthers' members interpreted, implemented, and influenced party ideology and programs; initiated dialogues about gender politics; highlighted ambiguities in the Panthers' armed stance; and criticized organizational priorities. Spencer also centers gender politics and the experiences of women and their contributions to the Panthers and the Black Power movement as a whole. Providing a panoramic view of the party's organization over its sixteen-year history, The Revolution Has Come shows how the Black Panthers embodied Black Power through the party's international activism, interracial alliances, commitment to address state violence, and desire to foster self-determination in Oakland's black communities.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780822373537Publication Date: 2016-11-17 -
Seize the Time: the story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton
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"Bobby Seale, Chairman of the Black Panther Party, defendant in the Chicago conspiracy case, and one of the New Haven Panther 14, writes from jail about himself, his party, and its leadership -- the black men who have changed themselves, have changed America, and in the course of it, have caused an enormous controversy about our liberties and institutions."--From the dust-jacket front flap.
Call Number: E185.615 S37Publication Date: 1970
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
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A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC
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Activists and historians reflect together on the civil rights movement and its meanings, and on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's place in American history. "The reminiscences and reflections voiced at the SNCC reunion remind us of the remarkable vision and courageous dedication of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Framed by Cheryl Greenberg's eloquent and probing introduction, the SNCC veterans' comments about the triumphs and limitations of their movement represent a major contribution to the historical literature on race and power in modern America."--Raymond Arsenault, University of South Florida On the occasion of the SNCC's 25th anniversary, more than 500 people gathered at Trinity College in Connecticut to both celebrate and critique its accomplishments. More than 40 SNCC members tell their stories and reflect on the contributions, limits and legacies of the movement in A Circle of Trust. Engaging in spirited debate with each other, with historians of the movement, and with contemporary political culture more broadly, these former and perpetual activists speak of their vision of a just society and what still remains to be done. With increasing racial tension and the continued debate over integration and separatism in America in the 1990s, the content of this conference is more relevant than ever. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg begins with an overview of SNCC and introduces each of the chapters of oral history. Participants explore the origins of SNCC, its early adoption of nonviolent protest, its ultimate renunciation of liberal integration and embrace of militant black radicalism, its refusal to repudiate far-left organizations, and controversies over the roles of women in SNCC and society at large. The result is a thoughtful, moving, sometimes acrimonious, sometimes celebratory account of one of the most significant civil rights organizations and its successes and failures.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 0813524776Publication Date: 1998-02-01 -
From Sit-Ins to SNCC: the student civil rights movement in the 1960s
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In the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of the historic sit-in at Woolworth's lunch counter by four North Carolina A&T college students, From Sit-Ins to SNCC brings together the work of leading civil rights scholars to offer a new and groundbreaking perspective on student-oriented activism in the 1960s. The eight substantive essays in this collection not only delineate the role of SNCC over the course of the struggle for African American civil rights but also offer an updated perspective on the development and impact of the sit-in movement in light of newly released papers from the estate of Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI, and MI-5. The contributors provide novel analyses of such topics as the dynamics of grassroots student civil rights activism, the organizational and cultural changes within SNCC, the impact of the sit-ins on the white South, the evolution of black nationalist ideology within the student movement, works of the fiction written by movement activists, and the changing international outlook of student-organized civil rights movements.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780813043647Publication Date: 2012-08-05 -
The River of No Return: the autobiography of a Black militant and the life and death of SNCC
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The classic memoir by Cleveland Sellers that offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into his volunteer work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the 1960s civil rights movement. Among histories of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there are few personal narratives that are as compelling and insightful as The River of No Return. Besides being an insider's account of the rise and fall of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), this riveting memoir is an eyewitness report of the strategies and the conflicts in the crucial battle zones as the fight for racial justice raged across the South. Tracing SNCC volunteer Cleveland Sellers' zealous commitment to activism from the time of the sit-ins, demonstrations, and freedom rides in the early '60s, this fascinating narrative encompasses the Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964), the historic march in Selma, the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, and the murders of civil rights activists in Mississippi. Sellers also recounts the turbulent history of the SNCC and tells the powerful story of his own dedication to the cause of civil rights and social change. The River of No Return has become a standard text for those wishing to perceive the civil rights struggle from within the ranks of one of its key organizations and to note the divisive history of the movement as groups striving for common goals were embroiled in conflict and controversy.
Call Number: E185.97.S44 A37ISBN: 9780062824318Publication Date: 2018-01-23 -
SNCC, the new abolitionists.
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SNCC: The New Abolitionists influenced a generation of activists struggling for civil rights and seeking to learn from the successes and failures of those who built the fantastically influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It is considered an indispensable study of the organization, of the 1960s, and of the process of social change. Includes a new introduction by the author.
Call Number: E185.61 .Z49 1964Publication Date: 1964
Online Resources
- Black Panthers Collection | Television news collection from the San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive at San Francisco State University
- Black Panther Party Newspaper | Free full-text access to a digital collection of the Party's official newspaper, with issues ranging from 1967-76
- FBI Vault | Surveillance record from the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Black religious, social, and political organizations and their leaders
- Huey P. Newton Foundation | Organization providing information on the history of the Black Panther Party with video, sound files, and other primary sources
- SNCC Digital Gateway | A documentary website by the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University that uses documents, photographs, and audiovisual material to chronicle SNCC’s historic struggle for voting rights.
- Vanderbilt Television News Archives | Contains digitized video of network television news reporting on the Black Panthers back to 1967. Non-digitized news segments can be requested from the archive. Search for "Black Panthers"
