Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers (UVA Press, 2025) explores the local dynamics, national connections, and global context of the Black freedom movement in Harlem from 1954 to 1964, illuminating how activists, organizers, and ordinary people mounted their resistance to systemic racism in the Jim Crow North. The richness of Black radical thought and action in this period made Harlem a key battleground in the national civil rights movement, transformed local Black grassroots politics, and facilitated the rise of Black Power in New York City. At the same time, the city’s attempts to clamp down on activists revealed the repressive nature of Northern liberalism and heralded the expansion of the carceral state. Peter Blackmer argues that this decade of confrontations between Black communities and white state power caused Harlem residents and activists to seek “new means” for achieving freedom within a city, state, and nation determined to deny it. Tracing the dual evolution of Black radicalism and white resistance, Unleashing Black Power offers a new framework for analyzing the epochal urban uprisings in the 1960s.

Guest: Peter Blackmer (he/him) is an associate professor of Africology and African American Studies at Eastern Michigan University and his research and teaching explore the ways in which Black-led grassroots organizing campaigns for self-determination in the 20th and 21st Century United States have shaped local and national politics through struggles for civil rights, human rights, and political power in American cities.

Host: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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