Futures of Black Power

Illustrating new frameworks for recognizing and studying Black Power and Black radicalism

Rewriting narratives that present Black Power as related but marginal to the Civil Rights Movement, this book uncovers and centers unexpected sites of Black Power activism within the Black freedom struggle. In this collection, leading scholars look at how we study the past and suggest new ways historians can recognize Black Power and Black radicalism in the future.

In Futures of Black Power, Ashley Farmer offers a framework for developing Black Power archives, Jasmin Young makes the case for oral history collections dedicated to the study of the movement, and D’Weston Haywood discusses Afrofuturist underpinnings in the Nation of Islam. Interspersed with their essays are oral history interviews with activists Kathleen Cleaver, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Mabel Williams, and Nikki Giovanni.

These essays and primary sources show how today’s scholars of Black Power are incorporating memory studies, gender studies, and intellectual histories, and they point the way forward to new avenues for research and public engagement. They collectively illustrate the need to preserve and remember the variety of voices, actions, and imaginings that constitute Black Power, elements of Black history that are often ignored or forgotten.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.