Likewise, the vision of Carmichael, eyes blazing on a humid Mississippi evening as he asserted that only raw political power could definitively protect the lives of African Americans living in the South, persists in our cultural history. The image of Malcolm, his fingers stabbing the air to make a point about racial oppression in America, remains searing. Hailed as bold oracles of racial militancy, their defiant identification with underdogs, ranging from prisoners to sharecroppers, made them particularly attuned to democracy’s shortcomings and jagged edges. However, Malcolm’s and Carmichael’s confrontational styles and combative words have obscured their pivotal roles in transforming American democracy. Read Excerptįrom Malcolm X’s vivid denunciations of racism outside of Harlem’s gritty storefronts, to Stokely Carmichael’s dramatic call for Black Power in Mississippi, radical black political activists during the civil rights and Black Power era openly questioned America’s capacity to extend full citizenship to African Americans.

Newton, Amiri Baraka, Tupac Shakur, and Barack Obama, Dark Days, Bright Nights will make coherent a fraught half-century of struggle, reassessing its impact on American democracy and the larger world. Told through the lives of activists, intellectuals, and artists, including Malcolm X, Huey P. Joseph resurrects the movement to elucidate its unfairly forgotten achievements. This political explosion initially took the form of the Black Power Movement, conventionally adjudged a failure. Joseph argues that the 1965 Voting Rights Act burst a dam holding back radical democratic impulses. Joseph puts this pat assessment to the test, showing the 60s - particularly the tumultuous period after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act - to be the catalyst of a movement that culminated in the inauguration of Barack Obama. In Dark Days, Bright Nights, acclaimed scholar Peniel E.

The Civil Rights Movement is now remembered as a long-lost era, which came to an end along with the idealism of the 1960s.

The dark days club series in order