Cedric Johnson. Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of American Politics.

Bindas, Kenneth J.

Cedric Johnson. Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of American Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 320 pp. $60.00 cloth/$20.00 paper.

Cedric Johnson's Revolutionaries to Race Leaders comes at a perfect time, for in it he analyzes the struggle for legitimacy within the Black Power movement in the sixties, and how myriad internal debates and external attacks both formulated and re-formulated the political dialogue and opened the door to more traditional political activism. Not that he is entirely supportive of the mainstream entrance of black people into the established political process, for one gets the impression that he would be more comfortable with a more separate political party with some power that better represented African American interests. Yet Barack Obama's election as President in 2008 reaffirms Johnson's basic point, that the Black Power movement arose in response to the limitations of liberal democratic reform, and while it worked toward an indigenous ethnic political ideology, debate over tactics and policy inevitably divided the activists and allowed for race to subsume the larger discussion of economic opportunity.

Johnson begins with an excellent discussion of the tone and import of Harold Cruse and Amiri Baraka to the emergence of the Black Power movement. Cruse "concluded that industrial workers were no longer the central protagonists of historical revolution," but that "colonized peoples with blacks as America's domestic colony" would be the leaders in the social transformation (4). By resurrecting Cruse, Johnson provides a foundation for understanding the divisions that would emerge within the Black Power movement, which he understands in one instance as having been "elite brokerage over popular mobilization" (40). While Cruse outlined the value of cultural identity within the new political debates, Baraka worked to produce art and inspire the interconnection between black aesthetics and black politics. Baraka believed the militants could bring about the mobilization of the black working class (whereas Cruse feared the militants' romantic view of revolution), and worked hard to help promote ending black political exclusion. Yet the ascendency of black people into leading political positions in cities like Newark, Detroit, and Cleveland exposed the divisions between the radical social-transformation ideology of the militants and the pragmatic political expediency of the elected officials.

Section two of the book provides detailed accounts of the organization, operation and impact of 1972's Gary Convention, African Liberation Day, and the evolution of the National Black Political Assembly. These chapters are very informative, but the nearly blow-by-blow accounting makes for dry reading. The Gary convention sought to build a black united front and outline clearly the political and social goals in the National Black Political Agenda. Also, while the convention drew over 2,776 delegates and 4,000 alternates to the Match event and produced the above- mentioned National Agenda document, it also revealed significant divisions "which posed a serious challenge to the pursuit of operational unity" (87). In the preamble, the framers of the Gary Declaration outline the basic humanistic values of the struggle for black political power and voiced in Obama's campaign: "we more for nothing less than a politics which places community before individualism, love before sexual exploitation, a living environment before profits, peace before war, justice before unjust 'order' and morality before expediency" (108). Divisions between the more ideological radicals and practical activists made the Gary event seminal, but both groups round long- term unity difficult to maintain. The same holds true for the creation of African Liberation Day, as the desire to raise consciousness over the complicity of U. S. corporations doing business in repressive states in Africa brought initial unity to disparate African American political groups; long-term unity proved difficult, however, largely due to "ideological conflicts within" the converts to Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory. The May 1972 event, held in Washington, D. C., drew between 15,000 and 30,000 participants and led to larger nationwide events the following year, but power struggles over the legitimacy of race and class "isolated radical activists from each other, and perhaps, more critically, the retreat toward doctrinaire ideology alienated radicals from vast sectors of the African American population" (171). The final chapter in this section explores how the National Black Political Assembly and other black political organizations operated and withstood the attacks within the increasingly conservative political landscape. Calls for an independent black political party and the struggles to create a workable agenda and build unity outside the established political arenas proved difficult; these activities "were increasingly characterized by conventions and meetings more often than actual popular mobilization" (215). Meanwhile, those working within the technocratic structure of the Democratic Party worked to legitimize Jesse Jackson's campaigns for President in 1984 and 1988.

For Johnson, this entrance into the mainstream was not a positive but rather a "recessive development for those who sought to abolish inequality and to reorganize the U. S. political economy along radically egalitarian lines" (218). Pointing to the furor over comedian Bill Cosby's comments about the divisions within the African American community, Johnson correctly posits that in America, "the ghetto is never represented as a community that can be rebuilt, revitalized, or renewed, but as a zone that must be escaped, avoided, and policed" (226), thus representing the retreat of the Black Power ideology that sought to empower these communities. The fault, though, is not just society's, according to Johnson, but also lies with the "internecine struggles over ideology" (226) among the radicals and their inability to turn their community activism into political power. 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. Much of what he argues is still valid, and is thus also an excellent mapping of the debates that were raised during Obama's run for the White House.

Reviewed by

Kenneth J. Bindas

Kent State University