Black Power

And a good five-year run out of this.

This genre followed the civil rights and black power movements.

These movies starred and featured proud, strong Black heroes and heroines who fought oppressive or criminal figures.

Most notable movies seen as starring this subgenre are Shaft and The Most...

Okay.

Okay? In first grade, okay, I, I raised the Black Power fist-

Yep

... and got sent to the principal's office for putting up the Black Power, uh, uh, sign for the, uh, uh, Pledge Allegiance, right? And so they called my mom and said, "Your son is in the office.

He put up the Black Power sign, the Black Panther sign in class.

Um, we need you to come down here." She kinda liked-

What?

... "What the is my son doing in your office?" She knew, right?

When the Rasta Movement in Jamaica began to look toward Ethiopia, they were picking up the threads of the redemptive Pan-Africanism that Garvey had first laid down.

Even the Black Power Movement of the 1960s, with its focus on Black-owned business racial pride, and cultural nationalism was essentially a revival of the UNIA's domestic strategies.

Garvey was a visionary who forced the world to realize that the era of European colonial rule was not just wrong, but fundamentally, historically doomed.

He was a man who dared to look into the abyss of white supremacy and declare that the Black race had a future, a destiny, and a power that were entirely of its own making.

But the nonviolence chant last forever.

As SNCC became more politically active, it shifted away from students and nonviolence and adopted greater militancy after the mid-1960s as an advocate of the burgeoning black power movement, which was a facet of late 20th century black nationalism.

Mm-hmm.

So

with a NYP talk show.

And we usually start the class out with something called the Black Power Libation.

And the way that goes, I call out a name and then the response is Black Power.

So we're going to start out with that.

All right.

All right.

I say, Asada Sikor.

Black Power.

And of course, up here we have the images of W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, who were the kind of forefathers of these political insurgencies to be taken up by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, respectively.

And we've asked this larger question, right? In what ways can we map these political ideologies onto popular music during these eras of the civil rights and black power movements? We talked about how soul maybe was a little bit more assimilationist.

We're gonna move into funk today.

And as we move into funk, we're gonna kind of cross a little bit more over into the separatist camp and try to think through how does funk embody, how does disco embody these two different ideologies that have been Two of the main political ideologies in the history of black political thought, of course, again, a little bit of a simplification of the complexity of black politics in this country, but these are definitely kind of the two major poles that we can kind of think about in terms of the history of black political thought.

And we also have the linking of religion and racial politics through soul music, something we're going to see in hip hop as well, especially with the adoption of a lot of Muslim kinds of ideologies and aesthetics in early hip hop.

Of course, in the civil rights, we're talking more about Christianity than we are about Islam.

But as black power begins to kind of supplant civil rights, we're going to see a kind of transformation or a shift from Christianity towards Islam.

And lastly, so many of the soul music hits of the 1960s became civil rights anthems in and of themselves.

And along with that, I, you know, in many ways internalized this myth that Asian Americans are a passive model minority, that, you know, we don't protest, we don't resist, we just try to assimilate.

And particularly, even when, you know, I got very, very deeply, uh, focused on studying Black history and Black studies in my undergraduate years in college, I was very fortunate to have some, some great teachers who helped me better understand the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement.

I simply believed, wrongly, [chuckles] that Asian Americans were not involved in any way.

And of course, um, there were Asian Americans even in the civil rights a- and Black Power movement.

I, I worked for a long time, uh, with Grace Lee Boggs in Detroit, who was absolutely at the forefront of the civil rights and Black Power movement with, with her husband, an African American autoworker and labor, uh, Black Power, uh, radical and intellectual, um, James Boggs.

Uh, Yuri Kochiyama in, in Harlem was a close confidant of Malcolm X, but there were also folks in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, like Ed Nakawata, who's, who's now in Philadelphia.

Um, so there are so many examples, not just of individuals, but of organizations.