Abstract
The study of Black Power has matured in the last fifteen years. In the 1990s, few scholars had produced systematic and rigorous treatments of Black Power. For the most part, interested readers had to rely on first-hand accounts from Black Power leaders such as Huey Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide or Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time. Of course, these texts are invaluable because they offer detailed accounts of Black Power, but they lack the scope and vision of a well-crafted historical or social scientific treatment.
In the 1990s, that situation slowly began to change, and historians led the way. There was the publication of William L. Van Deburg’s (1992) New Day in Babylon, which surveyed the cultural impact of Black Power. By the mid-2000s, interested readers could read more thorough narratives of the rise and impact of Black Power such as Peniel E. Joseph’s (2006) Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour and Jeffrey Ogbar’s (2005) Black Power: Radical Politics and African-American Identity. These publications were accompanied by a generation of writings that examined specific political groups, like Waldo Martin and Joshua Bloom’s (2013) Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party and Scot Brown’s (2003) book Fighting for US.
In comparison, sociological writings on Black Power have been fewer, but they have begun to emerge. Perhaps the first modern sociological text on the movement is that written by the author of this review, From Black Power to Black Studies (Rojas 2007), which examines how social movement goals were translated into specific organizational contexts such as higher education. Later, Alondra Nelson (2011) examined the public health goals of the Black Power movement by examining various policy initiatives of the Panthers. Recently, Chris Davenport (2014) has used data from the Republic of New Africa to explore how states repress movements. What these texts have in common is a focus on how Black Power articulated itself as a political process, whether in promoting public health and education or in the interaction of a movement with the state.
This rich and flowering literature is the setting for Joyce Bell’s The Black Power Movement and American Social Work. Bell’s empirical strategy may take some readers by surprise. Social work is not the type of setting that one associates with the fiery radicals of the 1960s. Indeed, the typical narrative about Black Power—one that I think is a severe error—is that it is a perverse outgrowth of the Civil Rights movement than can safely be ignored.
My own view, and that of scholars such as Ibram X. Kendi and Derrick White, is that Black Power represents a sustained and radical attempt to rearticulate the black community’s relationship with white society. Black Power is not merely the story of a few epic figures, like Huey Newton or Kathleen Cleaver, and their often sensationalistic actions. It is the story of men and women across America who attempted to create spaces for people of the African Diaspora in all spheres of social life. If one accepts this view of Black Power, then it is easy to see that Black Power expressed itself in many ways. One important expression of Black Power has been in the professions, where African American professionals adopted black ideology and demanded that the professions reform themselves in ways that would allow them to better serve black interests.
Bell’s exploration of Black Power draws attention to this process. She deftly explains how Black Power asserted itself in the academic profession (the Association of Black Sociologists), clinical psychology (the Association of Black Psychologists), and American politics (the Black Congressional Caucus). Then she turns the focus to the profession of social work, which is a very smart choice. It is a profession of importance in American social life, and it is a form of work that has had a strong and deep connection to sociology. Furthermore, as a profession that must confront social problems on a daily basis, American social workers have often been called upon to explain their role. How do they help their clients? In what ways, exactly, does social work reinforce or ameliorate racial inequalities?
Bell’s account describes a social work profession that was often slow to respond to both the Civil Rights movement and Black Power. Bell’s narrative comes to a climax when recounting how black social workers attempted to assert leadership roles in the profession. The result was that the black social workers decided to exercise an exit strategy. The National Association of Black Social Workers emerged from the National Federation of Settlements to ensure that there was an element of black leadership in their profession.
This book is a valuable contribution to the broader scholarly discussion on the origins and impact of Black Power. It advances two important lessons for social movement scholars. First, Black Power was a multi-arena movement that occurred in fields like social work, academia, and health. Black Power was not exclusively, or even primarily, about militant political groups like the Black Panthers or US. It might even be the case that the modal Black Power organization was something like the National Association of Black Social Workers. Second, the exit strategy of the Black Power social workers created a cohort of Black Power organizations like the National Association of Black Social Workers. These Black Power groups have survived for over forty years and are relatively understudied by both historians and sociologists. It is to her credit that Bell’s book has started to remedy this situation. My hope is that sociologists will see this book as a new opportunity to understand the powerful aftereffects of the Black Power movement.