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Does the Movement Need a King?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2016

PETER J. LING
PETER J. LING*
Affiliation:
Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham. Email: [email protected].
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Extract

Not every book sent for review comes with two pages of endorsements from the great and the good. Stokely is accompanied by glowing approval from such familiar names as Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Robin D. G. Kelley, Michael Eric Dyson, Gerald Horne, Charles Oglethorpe, and David Levering Lewis. Even without the para-textual apparatus to guide one's judgement, however, there is enough in this biography of Stokely Carmichael for any scholar of the civil rights movement to relish. This may not be the “definitive biography” that John Stauffer declares it to be, but it is indisputably important. In essence, Joseph argues that Stokely is the missing panel in a triptych of heroes, flanked on either side by the already canonized Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. In key respects, he insists, Stokely was the synthesis of Malcolm and Martin.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , May 2016 , pp. 465 - 470
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

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References

1 Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, 91 (2005) 1233–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Glenn Eskew, The Won Cause: Memorializing the Movement through the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (Atlanta: Georgia State University Press, 1998).

3 Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006); Joseph, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama (New York: Basic Civitas, 2010).

4 Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

5 Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour.

6 Stokely Carmichael (with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell), Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003).

7 Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).