Black Power, White Heat

Know about the book -

Black Power, White Heat is written by Alice Echols and published by Oxford University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 019778903X (ISBN 10) and 9780197789032 (ISBN 13).

A rich history of cross-racial coalitions and alliances of the Sixties' freedom movement, acclaimed historian Alice Echols's Black Power, White Heat reshapes our understanding of the entire era. Through the mid-1960s, the Civil Rights Movement in America was by and large a cross-racial alliance. Beginning in the late 1960s, though, conventional wisdom holds that the adoption of Black Power by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--SNCC, one of the most important movement organizations--and the rise of the Black Panthers led to a fracturing of that cross-racial coalition. In Black Power, White Heat the eminent 1960s historian Alice Echols argues that the truth on the ground was much more complicated than that. Focusing on SNCC and the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, she shows how white liberals remained important allies of and actors within the movement. As she details, this continuing solidarity involved a whole cast of characters in specialized, professional roles. First, there were movement attorneys, whose innovative and self-consciously radical lawyering resulted in numerous legal victories. Also crucial were editors, such as John J. Simon who worked at some of America's biggest trade presses and made possible the publication of books by Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, and Huey Newton, among others. Finally, she underscores how important money was to the struggle. Movement histories typically turn on theoretical and strategic breakthroughs and re-positionings, entirely sidestepping the matter of money. Yet movements don't live, much less thrive, on political purity. They have bills to pay, and not just for bail, court costs, and lawyers' fees. Ultimately, the portrait that emerges is of an enduring cross-racial coalition that belies the standard narrative of racial politics in the late 1960s. Lastly, she shows how conservatives in large part forged the narrative that racial solidarity had collapsed, with Tom Wolfe's groundbreaking "Radical Chic" essay playing a key role. Not only will this reshape our understanding of the era; it sheds important light on the current controversies surrounding identity politics, social justice movements, and who gets to participate in them.