African Americans - Politics and Government - History, Civil Rights - Movements & Figures, 20th Century American History - Civil Rights, U.S. Politics & Government - 1945 - 1989, Civil Rights - United States, U.S. Politics & Government - 1945 to Present,
Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
This is the first comprehensive study of African American politics from the end of the 1960s civil rights era to the present. Not an optimistic book, it concludes that the black movement has been almost wholly encapsulated into mainstream institutions, coopted, and marginalized. As a result, the author argues, African American leadership has become largely irrelevant in the development of organizations, strategies, and programs that would address the multifaceted problems of race in the post-civil rights era. Meanwhile, the core black community has become increasingly segregated, and its society, economy, culture, and institutions of governance and uplift have decayed. In exhaustive detail Smith traces this sad state of affairs to certain internal attributes of African American political culture and institutional processes, and to the structure of American politics and its economic and cultural underpinnings. Sure to be controversial, this book challenges both liberal and conservative notions of the black political struggle in the United States. It will serve as a major reference for academic study and a point of departure for political activists.Editorials
Booknews
Smith (political science, San Francisco State U.) studies the political history of the black community for the past 30 years, subjecting discrete events to an aggressive analysis in order to examine the processes and consequences of the institutionalization of the civil rights movement. He looks at the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, the Black Political Convention of 1972, the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill, and other events, evaluating both the strategies and the politics aimed at implementing the black agenda, and the agenda itself. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Book Details
Published
November 1, 1996
Publisher
Albany : State University of New York Press, 1996.
Pages
396
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780791431351