Futures of Black Power: Reimagining the Black Past

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.