The dissertation examines the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), a Black Power attempt to build a black boycott of the 1968 US Olympic team that ultimately culminated in the infamous Black Power fists protest at the 1968 Olympics. The work challenges the historiography, which concludes that the OPHR was a failure because most black Olympic-caliber athletes participated in the 1968 games, by demonstrating that the foremost purpose of the OPHR was to raise public awareness of “institutionalized racism,” the accumulation of poverty and structural and cultural racism that continued to denigrate black life following landmark 1960s civil rights legislation. Additionally, the dissertation demonstrates that activist black athletes of the era were also protesting the lack of agency and discrimination traditionally forced upon blacks in integrated, yet white-controlled sports institutions. The dissertation argues that such movements for “dignity and humanity,” as progressive black activists of the 1960s termed it, were a significant component of the Black Power movement. The dissertation also examines the proliferation of the social belief that the accomplishments of blacks in white-controlled sports fostered black advancement and argues that the belief has origins in post-Reconstruction traditional black uplift ideology, which suggested that blacks who demonstrated “character” and “manliness” improved whites’ images of blacks, thus advancing the race. OPHR activists argued that the belief, axiomatic by 1968, was the foremost obstacle to attracting support for a black Olympic boycott. The manuscript concludes with a discussion of the competing meaning and representations of Smith and Carlos’s protest at the Olympics.

This thesis examines a local activist group in the rural town of Belle Glade, Florida during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This research falls in line with many New Black Power studies. These New Black Power studies challenge existing notions of the Black Power and Civil Rights eras and their relationship to one another. It challenges the time frames, geography and ideology of both of the eras. This case study of a the group in Belle Glade is not the first to examine the similarities of the Black Power and Civil Rights eras, where many groups who affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement and shifted towards Black Power tactics, it does present an interesting dynamic of a group which self-identified as a Black Power group to an approach more associated with the Civil Rights Movement. The methods used in the in studying the COBY, the moniker of the group, included archival research from newspapers and city commission meeting minutes. Additionally, ethnographic research methods were also used in the form of personal interviews. This thesis will add to the scholarship of New Black Power studies by providing another example of groups in history which challenge existing notions of two distinct movements in the Civil Rights and Black Power eras.

This dissertation examines African American women's gender-specific theorizing and intellectual production during the black power era. Previous histories of this period have focused primarily on the theoretical and activist roles of African American men. This study shows how black women radicals shaped the movement through an examination of their written and cultural production within various black power political ideologies, including cultural nationalism, revolutionary nationalism, and black power feminism. / African and African American Studies

This is a study of the manifestations and permutations of the Black Power era principles and ideologies in New Orleans from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. By highlighting little-known and often neglected groups along with popular organizations, this work illuminates how these groups shaped and rethought the their objectives and tactics in the contested terrain of post-Civil Rights New Orleans. Making extensive use of archival resources, newspaper articles, memoirs, interviews, and secondary literature, “There are Some Bad Brothers and Sisters in New Orleans” focuses on the ways in which disparate organizations, groups, and individuals, wrestling with the highly fluid idea of Black Power, attempted to refashion the political and cultural landscape of the Crescent City. This dissertation contributes a more nuanced analysis of this famous city and continues the recent surge in Black Power Studies that emphasizes local examples of Black Power. This work tells the story of New Orleans; of shootouts and showdowns; liberation theater and war helicopters; schools and southern political rules. The central objective of this study is to provide a more complete and in-depth look at the major themes (Cultural Nationalism, Revolutionary Nationalism, Black Arts, student movements, political power, and independent education) of the Black Power era by calling attention to its distinctive but informative examples nurtured in the incomparable city of New Orleans. This dissertation argues that the roots of Black Power in New Orleans were shattered, disparate, and ad-hoc in nature. As such, its thrust failed to bear the social, cultural, economic, and political fruit hoped for by its advocates. / text

Instruments of Righteousness investigates the class-, race-, and gender-based identities and intersections of women and men in the Black Power movement and their various organizing activities to gain certain and defined concessions from federal, state, and local governments. It argues that the intersections of Black Power and anti-Vietnam War activism created changing definitions of black masculinity and femininity, expressed through anti-draft and anti-war work. Black Power and anti-war activism cannot and should not be investigated separate from one another. The experiences of Black Power soldiers, antiwar members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and the Third World Women’s Alliance, and exiled black Americans highlight the ways the anti-Vietnam War and Black Power activism depended on each other for rhetorical, theoretical, and personnel needs. Additionally, it explores the ways that Black Power organizations articulated “Third World” mentalities in their anti-war battles. By espousing a shared identity with people of color throughout the world, Black Power organizations placed themselves in a transnational conversation among radical, decolonizing nation-states. Black Power’s advocates’ roles as non-governmental actors in the Third World strengthened ties with and presented new images of United States citizens throughout the decolonizing world.

The impact of Black Power rhetoric and ideology in Louisville, Kentucky in 1967-1970 is explored. The role of Black Power in shaping the discourse of Louisville’s black counter-public and civil rights counter-public is analyzed in the context of the 1967 open housing demonstrations, the May, 1968 riot, and the trial of the ‘Black Six’. Black Power played a vital role in community organizing and in displays of black national and cultural pride. It actively challenged the city’s mystique of Southern white paternalism embraced by the mayoral administration of Kenneth Schmied. Despite that administrations allegations, Black power rhetoric in the West End did not play a significant role in the riot that left two African American youth dead.

<p>The US Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was an organization of the Black Power Movement, a cultural and a political nationalist movement central to the history of the African-American Freedom Struggle. The Black Panthers' anti-imperialist politics, militant visual style, grassroots strategies, and community programs appealed within and beyond the United States. Between 1967 and 1972, people of color struggling under class and ethnic oppression in six countries outside the United States formed Black Panther Parties inspired by the US Panthers. In the United Kingdom, West Indians, West Africans, and South Asians formed a Black Panther Movement in 1968 and in Israel, a group of Mizrahi (Arab) Jews founded a Black Panther Party in in Jerusalem in 1971. This dissertation examines these two movements with reference to the US Black Panthers in order to place local, national, and global histories in dialogue. </p><p>This study adopts a transnational framework that conceives of Black Power as a movement of global migrants. From 1948 to 1967, over two million people from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean migrated to the UK and Israel. These migrants' overlapping experiences of displacement and class- and ethnic-based oppression led them to establish Black Panther groups in their new home countries in order to raise their political concerns under a collective banner. These people chose to become Black Panthers specifically because the US Black Panther Party offered a name and style that connected their global brothers and sisters to a range of grassroots strategies promoting interethnic solidarity and the collective advancement of black communities against the social structures that fostered racism. Through the examination of oral histories, photographs, letters, fliers, passport stamps, films, court cases, and surveillance files, this study focuses on how these global Panther activists represented themselves and their politics in the public sphere.</p><p>Both the British and Israeli Panther movements first organized in response to the city police's harassment of youth in their neighborhoods. Their respective critiques expanded from an opposition to police brutality to systemic goals of improving housing, education, welfare, and employment for blacks. Both of the nation-states in which these groups emerged relied upon the US for military stability and economic support during this period, such that the British and Israeli Panthers saw confrontations with their respective governments as acts of resistance to American Empire.</p><p>This dissertation, then, is at once a community study of two branches of a transnational social movement as well as a larger story. The broader narrative reveals how everyday people responded to the American Empire in the 1960s and 1970s, how the US Black Panthers translated black internationalist politics into urban neighborhoods, and how people outside the US constructed narratives about African-Americans as a way of making sense of racial formations at home. This work also demonstrates how foreign governments and media producers appropriated African-American history for a variety of in political purposes during this period. This examination enables a deeper understanding of the transnational black freedom struggle, as it centers the role that people of color outside the United States played in creating and sustaining Black Panther Movements that confronted American and British Empires from the grassroots.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 515-535). / Microfiche. / 2 v. (536 leaves), bound 29 cm

Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-90). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [395]-404). Also available on the Internet.