Revisiting the Black Struggle: Lessons for the 21st Century (original) (raw)

2002, Journal of Black Studies

This article critically examines the cumulative successes and failures of the African American struggle for liberation and equality, and it hints at the future direction of the Black movement in the United States. Specifically, it demonstrates how the Black movement legally dismantled direct institutional racism and why it failed to eliminate indirect institutional racism. This article also explains why the objectives of cultural self-determination and fundamentally transforming Black America were not successful. By looking at the major problems of the Black community today, this article emphasizes the need to learn critically from the past struggle and leaders in order to incorporate the best experiences in the future struggle for economic development, self-determination, and multicultural democracy. With the emerging of the 21st century, African Americans, their allies, and supporters need to critically reassess the cultural, ideological, political, and economic aspects of the past struggle to account for the successes and failures of the Black movement and to map out the future strategy of struggle, because the majority of African Americans still face serious crises. By critically and comprehensively reevaluating the process through which the African American movement was produced by social structural and conjunctural factors (i.e., politicized collective grievances, cultural memory, economic change and social transformation, international politics, migration, urban community formation, elite formation, production and dissemination of liberation knowledge, cognitive liberation, and the development of social infrastructures in forms of institution, organization, and human agency), we can identify some important insights that are necessary to develop the strategy of future struggle for this society. The Black struggle was produced by 86