Why wouldn't the Black Power Movement be considered successful?
The reason I unenrolled in one Harvard University political course
I blinked and looked at my smartphone. I blinked again. Surely this had to be a typo. There was no way in the world this Harvard University course was saying that the Black Power Movement was on the “Less Successful” side, along with the Anarchist Movement, the Utopian Movement, the Socialist Suffrage, the Community Movement and the Nativist Movement.
On the “More Successful” side were the Jacksonian Movement, the Abolitionist Movement, Women’s Suffrage, the Progressive Movement, the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Right Movement. And it’s not that I don’t think the latter movements listed in the “Citizen Politics in America: Public Opinion, Elections, Interest Groups, and the Media” course are important. I just couldn’t get past the Black Power Movement not being on the same side as the Civil Rights Movement.
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Downplaying the Black Power Movement reminds me of people who think Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is more palatable than Malcolm X. The icons had the same end goal, just a different delivery. Was the “less successful” issue that Stokely Carmichael, chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, removed white members? And with that decrease, this led to a drop in the SNCC’s fundraising and political clout? Or, maybe the “less successful” issue was that John Lewis was booted out? Those kinds of reasons weren’t brought up though. The movement was just considered “less successful” and brushed to the side like a trend.
That didn’t sit right with me. No disrespect to the Civil Rights Movement (or even John Lewis), but when a family member or friend wants to have a Black-themed era party, they’re not talking about wearing fluffy skirts, blouses and fresh roller hairdos. They’re not talking about wearing a suit and tie with polished dress shoes.
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What I see when I have walked in many doors, including college parties with attendees that were too young to be alive when it happened, is weave gone missing, naturals everywhere, afro pics properly placed, dashikis hanging, all-black attire properly pressed and a massive amount of sunglasses. (Of course, some of the era parties I’ve been to are a happy medium and have hairdos and hair attire that lean more toward Clinton Ghent or Don Cornelius on “Soul Train.” But even at those parties, I still see some folks strolling around like movie extras from “Judas and the Black Messiah.”)
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And there is no way we’re leaving either of these parties without loudly blasting James Brown’s “Say It Loud ~ I’m Black and I’m Proud.” This is when Black folks are at the epitome of “blackity, black and I’m black y’all.” Next to the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Power Movement is a close second in successfully showcasing African-American people who are proud of their culture, their race, their background, their literature, their history, their politics, their music, their social activism, their everything.
Be careful who you call Liberal
By the time I got to the part of the Harvard University course where Bill Maher was categorized as a “Liberal,” I really tapped out. The same white guy who called himself a “house n**ger” on his HBO show a week before NWA’s Ice Cube was supposed to visit? The same guy who came out in a purple pimp suit, talking like Barry White and claiming that’s how former President Barack H. Obama should act? The same guy who completely ignored every single racist remark from the phone call with Donald Sterling and was more upset that the former Los Angeles Clippers owner was being recorded? That’s who Harvard University considers Liberal?
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Count me out. I unrolled from that course. As much as I enjoyed two of the political courses — but unenrolled in almost 20 non-political courses for a variety of reasons — the “Citizen Politics in America: Public Opinion, Elections, Interest Groups, and the Media” course was when I remembered that this is the same university that allowed its former President Claudine Gay to be harassed, lied about and mistreated until she quit in a matter of months. All good things must come to an end, and this was the course that made me finally go, “Enough is enough.”