Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics

Description

Exploring the major political and intellectual currents from the Black Power era to the present, Cedric Johnson reveals how black political life gradually conformed to liberal democratic capitalism and how the movement's most radical aims-the rejection of white aesthetic standards, redefinition of black identity, solidarity with the Third World, and anticapitalist revolution-were gradually eclipsed by more moderate aspirations. Although Black Power activists transformed the face of American government, Johnson contends that the evolution of the movement as a form of ethnic politics restricted the struggle for social justice to the world of formal politics.

Cedric Johnson is associate professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minnesota, 2007).

"Revolutionaries to Race Leaders is a thought-provoking and challenging read. Johnson's understanding of Marxist-Leninist ideology and its representation in the Black Power era and afterward is impressive, as is his retelling of the struggles to create powerful black political organizations and their larger social meaning to American society in the latter part of the twentieth century." -African American Review