Black Power

Welcome to...

Intellectualradio.com. We here with my brother Earl, Black Station, Black Pride, Black Power.

And this is Dr. Revan Fellows, a.k.a. Geraldine's son.

And you know we with the New Black Agenda.

I have to merge all these topics into one book.

And I was always worried about when people read it, would they find it interesting? Would they not find it interesting? What would they find more? So at one point, I wanted to get away from the book and focus on other research topics, such as black social movements, like black power, civil rights.

And it was not until 2015 with the uprising that happened in Baltimore City that due to the death of Freddie Gray.

He was a young black man who died in the hands of police officers.

And that's what you're seeing here.

And you've mentioned a number of organizations that were a big part of this, obviously some of them more local, but we've also already talked about or mentioned at least the NAACP.

What about other sort of regional or national efforts? I mean, Black Power, Black Panthers, how are they a part of this as well?

So, okay, so that goes back.

What about, he's not Australian, but Peter Norman in the 1968 Olympics, I think.

He did the Black Power stance, which was a huge...

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

...moment for racial equality.

which helped him to hone his skills as an organizer and a budding revolutionary theoretician.

Jimmy and Grace were married in 1954 and went on to enjoy a 40-year partnership as revolutionists in the labor and Black Power movements.

After splitting with Raya Danievskaya in 1955 and then with C.L.R. James in 1962, the pair went on to develop their own revolutionary philosophy, which they called dialectical humanism, explicitly contrasting this new philosophy with the dialectical materialism of other American Marxists in their midst.

So pivotal were the developments taking place in the Black Freedom Movement in 1963, that James Boggs saw fit to proclaim the dawning of a new era in human history, naming it the era of dialectical humanism.

At the same time, Jimmy and Grace were actively seeking to learn broader lessons from revolutionary movements taking place around the globe throughout the first half of the 20th century.

So while dialectical human is, to a considerable extent, the result of an internal critique, a critique of themselves and their comrades, Jimmy and Grace also re-examined their previous thought in light of their own careful study of revolutions around the globe, the results of which are documented most extensively in their 1974 book, Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century.

But they also, for example, taught a course at Wayne State in 1970 that was just called On Revolution, where they were inviting a lot of young people involved in the Black Power movement into thinking in a global way about what kinds of lessons can be gleaned from successive efforts to change particular parts of the world.

So the building blocks of dialectical humanism, as I call them, they're derived from several sources, including, as we've already mentioned, Grace's work with CLR and Raya in the Johnson Forest Tendency, but also Jimmy's upranking in the segregated South and experiences organizing in and around the Chrysler plant in Detroit.

of that in the book as well.

And then, of course, I was writing about a place, Brownsville, and as I began to do my research and also interviewed Brownsvillians like 91-year-old James Johnson, who migrated there from the South when he was five, I began to learn that this neighborhood has an incredible history as a center for black self-determination movements, black power movements.

And I couldn't really write about Brownsville without also paying respect to this history and reckoning with it.

So since the book came out in April, I've given a lot of different types of talks with different themes.