Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"To Serve, Educate, Unify, And Organize": The Black Panthers' Free Breakfast Program And Cointelpro In The United States, 1968-1971, Joshua Sinclair

The Exposition

The creation of the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren marked a shift away from the community defense origins of the Party, focusing more on community outreach and unification. The social and political implications of the Program – expanded interest by black and white moderates, and growing popularity of the party in general – made the breakfasts and the Party targets for the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO.) With the end goal of neutralizing the Panthers in mind, the FBI had a prime target to focus this work in the Breakfast Program.

Poulin-Burrage, Edward "Teddy", Brendan Mcbrine

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Edward “Teddy” Poulin-Burrage is a biracial queer man who has lived in the Portland area for just about his entire life. Teddy has been deeply involved in the world of activism for more than half his life at this point, including with the Southern Maine Workers Center, Sexual Assault Response Services, Portland Racial Justice Congress, Pride Portland, Equality Maine, and other groups. Teddy has mostly done behind the scenes work for these organizations, usually focusing on coalition-building and forging relationships with other organizers. On top of this, Teddy has been a regular in the local gay bar scene for quite …

“For All You Know, I Might Be A Black Panther”: How The News Media Cultivated White Anxiety In The United States And Became A Modern Panopticon For Black Power, Caitlin Grace Leishman

History ETDs

Building upon French philosopher Michel Foucault’s analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, I argue that throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, the news media and resulting culture nurtured and reinforced the postcolonial narratives that associated Blackness with criminality. I analyze the national newspaper coverage for their narrative portrayal of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). The national media and U.S. government targeted the BPP and Black Power politics to discredit them and the overall movement for Black Liberation. I argue that this media-state project only intensified during the 1970s and into the 1980s with the country’s turn to …

"For All You Know, I Might Be A Black Panther": How The News Media Cultivated White Anxiety In The United States And Became A Modern Panopticon For Black Power, Caitlin Grace Leishman

History ETDs

Building upon French philosopher Michel Foucault’s analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, I argue that throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, the news media and resulting culture nurtured and reinforced the postcolonial narratives that associated Blackness with criminality. I analyze the national newspaper coverage for their narrative portrayal of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). The national media and U.S. government targeted the BPP and Black Power politics to discredit them and the overall movement for Black Liberation. I argue that this media-state project only intensified during the 1970s and into the 1980s with the country’s turn to …

Race Before Nation: African American Activists And Their Response To The War In Vietnam, Nicholas L. Busby

Grand Valley Journal of History

The escalation of America’s war in Vietnam coincided with the culmination of the long-fought civil rights movement. Most, if not all, Black leaders voiced opposition to the Vietnam War before the end of the 1960s. However, it was the racially disproportionate statistics in the military in the early years of the conflict to activists fracture within the movement. Regardless of when individual Black leaders spoke out, what they specifically spoke out against, and how radically they voiced opposition, Black leaders put race before nation when voicing an opinion on Vietnam.

Backdrop To A Musical Revolution: Urban Uprisings, Black Power And The Vietnam War Shatter The Politics Of Respectability In Popular Music, Mark Naison

Occasional Essays

No abstract provided.

The Making Of The Classic Period Of The Long Black Power Movement In Los Angeles, California, Sherwin Keith Rice

CGU Theses & Dissertations

It is often believed that the Black Power Movement started after civil rights/black power activist Stokely Carmichael declared, “We want Black Power” in Greenwood, Mississippi on June 16, 1966 and ended in the 1970s. Similar to the Civil Rights Movement the Black Power Movement is often examined through a dominant narrative short movement view. Some scholars suggests that “Black Power” stood for a change in direction away from the nonviolent civil rights approach. But Black Power is an enigma and it means different things to different people. It is just one element of the Black Freedom Struggle. Black Power uses …

"Not Just Whites In Appalachia": The Black Appalachian Commission, Regional Black Power Politics, And The War On Poverty, 1965-1975, Jillean Mccommons

Theses and Dissertations--History

During the Black Power era of the late 1960s and 1970s, Black activists in Appalachia used the opening of the War on Poverty to wage a regional war against institutional and environmental racism. Through the Black Appalachian Commission, a grassroots organization created in 1969, Black activists worked to expose racism in local and federal policy as the root cause of poverty for Black Appalachians, who they argued were the poorest in the region. Their outward self-definition as Black and Appalachian was a political strategy to garner power over resources earmarked for Appalachians. The term “Black Appalachian'' was more than a …

Captain America And Social Movements: Civil Rights And Feminism In Captain America Comics From 1968-1989, Julianne Edwards

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Boston Black United Front And Community-Centered Alternatives To The Carceral State, Joseph W. Sikowitz

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis is a history of the Boston Black United Front’s (BBUF) activities combatting the growing carceral state in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The BBUF was an “umbrella” organization within Boston’s Black community during the Black Power era and was particularly active on issues of police shootings, court appointments, prison reform, and street crime. This thesis examines these aspects of the carceral state, the network of criminal justice institutions that arose following World War II in Boston, and shows that the BBUF were responding to the early stages of this trend. Committees, rallies, and ideology were …

“Attracted By The Light But Repelled By The Heat”: The Final Years Of The Southern Conference Educational Fund (Scef) And The Turn To The New Communist Movement In The South., Hannah C. White

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

This thesis focuses on the final years of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), including the organization’s split in 1973. During the late sixties and early seventies, SCEF operated, with its headquarters in Louisville, as an interracial southern civil rights organization that focused on organizing whites in the struggle against racism, oppression, and exploitation. This thesis unpacks SCEF’s relationship with Louisville’s Black Panther Party and examines the ways in which interracial organizing grew to be more problematic during the turn of the decade with the rise of nationalism, Black Power, and a new attention to the intransigent racism that continued …

Power Primers: Black Community Self-Narration, And Black Power For Children In The Us And Uk, Karen Sands-O'Connor

Research on Diversity in Youth Literature

No abstract provided.

Soul Liberation: Black Christian Intellectual Engagement With Black Power, Jemar Tisby

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the Civil Rights movement, Black Christians figured prominently as clergy, leaders, and foot soldiers in the struggle. As a result, the presence of Black Christians during this phase of the Black activism is well-documented by historians. During the Black Power era, however, scholars tend to overlook the ongoing presence and significance of Black Christians in the movement. Soul Liberation corrects this omission by studying Black Christian engagement during the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

A Natural Fit For The Natural State: The Emergence Of Black Power Organizations In Arkansas From 1968-1975, Maurice D. Gipson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study seeks to explore how Black Arkansans on college campuses in rural towns navigated their local circumstances while embracing tenets of Black Power. By 1968, public PWIs in Arkansas were contending with an influx of Black students due to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Even though many of the universities had been integrated years and even decades earlier, they were still ill-equipped for the number of Black students that would enroll and descend upon the towns during this period.

‘Black Intifada’: Black Arts Movement, Palestinian Poetry Of Resistance And The Roots Of Black And Palestinian Solidarity, Nadia Alahmed

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary contrapuntal study of Black Arts, Black Power Movements, Palestinian Poetry of Resistance and Palestinian Nationalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It starts with the examination of shared historical, political cultural and aesthetic forces that propelled the emergence of these movements and how their shared ideological matrix determined the resonance of their political and artistic strategies and goals. It moves on to analyze Black discourse on the Palestine/Israeli conflict from 1948, until the 1967 War, using W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin as models, showing how its key characteristics premeditated the transformation of this discourse …

Blaxploitation’S Revolutionary Sexuality: Rethinking Images Of Male Hypersexuality In Sweetback & Shaft, Austin D. Cook

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Where scholarship exists on the subject of black male hypersexuality in Blaxploitation film, consensus suggests these films perpetuate racist imaginings of black sexuality. This project reevaluates the significance of Blaxploitation’s sexual imagery and argues against the traditional understanding of it. I assert that Blaxploitation’s images of hypersexuality should be understood as revolutionary for the way that they re-appropriate racist images and repurpose them to serve antiracist ends. Specifically, I argue the movement’s most prolific films, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and Shaft (1971), supply the two main strategies employed through Blaxploitation in defining the movement’s revolutionary sexuality: one links Black …

Imagining Revolutionary Feminism: Communist Asia And The Women Of The Black Panther Party, Benjamin Young

Research & Publications

Using newspapers, autobiographies, and interviews, this article examines the ways in which women of the Black Panther Party imagined the women of Vietnam, China, and North Korea as radical archetypes during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Using Judy Wu’s theory of “radical orientalism” in conversation with Ashley Farmer’s concept of the “gendered imaginary,” I argue that the Panther women imagined the women of “the East” as pioneers in world revolution and women’s liberation in order to protest against gendered injustices within the Party and broader U.S. society. This article also investigates the realities on the ground for the women …

The Creation And Development Of Rise, Paul Randall Mcinnis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In “The Creation and Development of Rise”, I will explain how my play evolved from the initial writing process until the actual production of the show. The Department of Theatre allows students to experience the development of new work through the functions of the classroom. The goal is to simulate how a process would occur in the professional world. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the journey of creation within Rise. Rise tells the story of the community of St. Marie, Louisiana during Mardi Gras, 1972. The play highlights the city’s triumphs and downfalls, and it is set …

The Tuskegee Revolt: Student Activism, Black Power, And The Legacy Of Booker T. Washington, Brian P. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The Tuskegee Revolt: Student Activism, Black Power, and the Legacy of Booker T. Washington” is a historical study of a student movement that challenged prevailing educational and political ideas in the nation’s most ideologically important historically black university. The late 1960s student movement at Tuskegee Institute played a significant off-campus role in shaping local, regional, and national social movements and politics. In the process, these Tuskegee students turned their attention back on-campus, and attempted to radically revise their school’s educational framework. Founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881, Tuskegee Institute represents the origin of a particular (and recurring) political-educational-paradigm for …

“It Is Time For Artists To Be Heard”: Artists And Writers For Freedom, 1963–1964, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

In The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, James Smethurst writes that “Black arts cultural nationalism draws on a long history.” He describes the cultural nationalist stance we associate with Black Arts as involving a concept of liberation and self-determination that entails some notion of the development or recovery of a “true” national culture,” conveying “an already existing folk or popular culture,” often relying on recognizable African elements. Black arts cultural nationalism expressed the linkages between Black Arts and Black Power even before they were specifically named and identified. In particular, Black arts cultural nationalism …

Black Lives Examined: Black Nonfiction And The Praxis Of Survival In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Ariel D. Lawrence

Theses and Dissertations

The subject of my thesis project is black nonfiction, namely the essay, memoir, and autobiography, written by black authors about and during the Post-Civil Rights Era. The central goals of this work are to briefly investigate the role of genre analysis within the various subsets of nonfiction and also to exemplify the ways that black writers have taken key genre models and evolved them. Secondly, I aim to understand the historical, political, and cultural contributions of the Post-Civil Rights Era, which I mark as hitting its stride in 1968. It is not my desire to create a definitive historical framework …

Black Power And Neighborhood Organizing In Minneapolis, Minnesota: The Way Community Center, 1966-1971, Sarah Jayne Paulsen

Theses and Dissertations

The Way Opportunities Unlimited, Inc. was a non-­‐profit community center that operated from 1966—1984 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Inspired by the national black power movement that arose in the 1960s, this community center led a local movement for African American equality. This thesis investigates The Way as a unique example of how black power ideology was implemented at the local level, in a city with a statistically small black population, presenting a northern urban context often overlooked by historians. The Way offered a space where aspiring young black musicians could perform, including Prince.

What Did You Do In The War?, Charles Krumbein

Mighty Pen Project Anthology & Archive

A young Army lawyer has to stop an officer from executing protesting soldiers.

Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit.

Weird Propaganda: Texts Of The Black Power And Women’S Liberation Movements, Marie Buck

Wayne State University Dissertations

“Weird Propaganda: Texts of the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements” examines texts of the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements: the early Black Arts Movement anthology For Malcolm; the now-canonical texts Our Bodies, Ourselves; The Black Woman; and Sisterhood Is Powerful; a number of pamphlets and other small press works; and the Black Panthers’ newspaper. This project argues that writers and activists used senses of the uncanny, along with elements of science fiction and fantasy, to negotiate the day-to-day uncertainties of political organizing and, more broadly, political hope. The texts examined here convey particular political views in an explict …

"Daring Propaganda For The Beauty Of The Human Mind:" Critical Consciousness-Raising In The Poetry And Drama Of The Black Power Era, 1965-1976, Markeysha D. Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a literary and intellectual history of the contributions of black American theorists, poets, and dramatists in the 1960s and 1970s towards the establishment of black critical consciousness in order to lay grounds for black people to experience a fuller existence as human beings through black-centered creations and presentations. Through the following chapters, I establish the framework and evolution of black psyche-liberation theories—spanning Du Bois’s theory of double-conscious through the contributions of black artist-theorists like Baraka, Neal, and Woodie King, Jr., followed by examinations at length of the theories of black liberation in praxis by the poets and …

Belton, Frank Interview 2, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Frank Belton was raised in the Morrisania neighborhood of the South Bronx for most of his life. He left in January of 1960 to attend Morgan State College, now Morgan State University, and returned to the South Bronx after receiving his degree in June of 1965. In the first interview session Frank discussed growing up in the Morrisania neighborhood. In this session he talks about his return to the South Bronx and the changes that he noticed.

When Frank returned from Morgan State, he moved only a few blocks from his parents home on Chisholm Street, to Teller Ave and …

Muckraking And C.O.B.Y (Cry Of Black Youth): Uncovering A History Of Organizing In Belle Glade, Raymond A. Hamilton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines a local activist group in the rural town of Belle Glade, Florida during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This research falls in line with many New Black Power studies. These New Black Power studies challenge existing notions of the Black Power and Civil Rights eras and their relationship to one another. It challenges the time frames, geography and ideology of both of the eras. This case study of a the group in Belle Glade is not the first to examine the similarities of the Black Power and Civil Rights eras, where many groups who affiliated with …

Political Art Of The Black Panther Party: Cultural Contrasts In The Nineteen Sixties Countermovement, Melissa Seifert

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

The Black Power Movement found its beginning in the late fifties with sit-ins and freedom rides, which conveyed a new racial consciousness within the black community in the United States. However, these initial forms of protest were non-violent. The civil rights movement did not see a great deal of violence until nineteen sixty five when Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party. Through the pages of the Party's newspaper the Black Panther, resident artist Emory Douglas used his drawings to persuade action and vengeance. His work is similar in style to the work of Pop artist …

Revolution Or Reform: Contradictions Within The Ideology And Actions Of The Black Panther Party, 1969-1970, Jana Cary-Alvarez

Honors Program Theses

Surprisingly limited scholarship exists on the Black Panther Party, and much of that scholarship has an extremely divided view of the Party; either the Party is separatist or built alliances, either the Party is revolutionary or reformist. By studying the Black Panther newspaper in the year 1969, "The Year of the Panther," it becomes clear that the Party was all of these things. The party created alliances with a wide variety of groups while maintaining that they were a Black Power organization. It practiced revolutionary Communism while advocating reform of the American system. In short, the Black Panther Party was …

Freedmen With Firearms: White Terrorism And Black Disarmament During Reconstruction, David H. Schenk

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

The outcome of the Civil War brought freedom to over six million slaves of African descent. These Freedmen communities remained a critical source of labor for the agrarian based economy of the southern U.S. Conflicts erupted because former slaves sought to exercise their new freedoms against the restrictions placed on them by local authorities. New laws, mob actions and acts of organized white terrorism were used to subjugate free citizens and return them to their former stations of labor. Political activities and participation in the electoral process were violently discouraged. Vocal opponents of the new system were often targeted for …