Tom Adam Davies, “Mainstreaming Black Power” (U. Cal Press, 2017)

What is Black Power? Does it still exist in the so-called post-racial 21st Century? How does Black Power relate to similar movements, like Black Lives Matter? There as so many questions, but there may now be a scholar and text to help answer many of them. Mainstreaming Black Power (University of California Press, 2017) upends the narrative that the Black Power movement allowed for a catharsis of black rage but achieved little institutional transformation or black uplift. Retelling the story of the 1960s and 1970s across the United States and focusing on New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles this book reveals how the War on Poverty cultivated black self-determination politics and demonstrates that federal, state, and local policies during this period bolstered economic, social, and educational institutions for black control.

Mainstreaming Black Power shows more convincingly than ever before that white power structures did engage with Black Power in specific ways that tended ultimately to reinforce rather than challenge existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies. The author emphasizes that Black Power’s reach and legacies can be understood only in the context of an ideologically diverse black community.

Author Tom Adam Davies is a lecturer and a school visits representative in American History at the University of Sussex. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Leeds and is a specialist in twentieth-century postwar political and social American history, with a particular focus on the history of race in the United States and the relationship between public policy and mainstream political institutions and movements for social, economic and political change. Davies has also written and recorded a six-part podcast lecture series on the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements for Massolit, a company which produces audio-visual online educational content primarily for A-Level students across the United Kingdom. Mainstreaming Black Power is his first book.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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