Waiting 'til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

Historian Peniel E. Joseph traces the origins, evolution, and decline of the Black Power movement, arguing that its roots run far deeper than iconic imagery suggests. Rather than treating Black Power as a sudden rupture from the civil rights era, Joseph presents it as a parallel movement that developed alongside the struggle for integration, from postwar radicalism through the mid-1970s.

The book opens in postwar Harlem, where two defining figures arrive. Harold Cruse, a Virginia-born writer who came north in the Great Migration, received his political education in Harlem's radical milieu before developing a vision of Black nationalism rooted in self-determination. Malcolm X arrived in the early 1950s as a convert to the Nation of Islam (NOI), a Depression-era religious group led by Elijah Muhammad that preached racial pride and economic uplift. By the mid-1950s, Malcolm was an emerging national figure whose radicalism took shape against the backdrop of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, a gathering of nonwhite nations.

Taking command of Harlem's Mosque No. 7 in 1954, Malcolm attracted intellectuals, allied with Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and resonated with northern Blacks facing overcrowded housing, unemployment, and police harassment. Mike Wallace's 1959 television documentary The Hate That Hate Produced introduced the NOI to white America, establishing Malcolm as a new kind of Black militant.

International developments energized Black radicalism. Ghana's independence in 1957 under Kwame Nkrumah, prominent Black activist and performer Paul Robeson's 1958 call for Black political power, and the Cuban revolution of 1959 expanded the movement's horizons. LeRoi Jones, a Newark-born poet, visited Cuba in 1960 and was transformed. Cruse's visit produced his 1962 essay "Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American," bridging Black nationalism and Marxism. In September 1960, Cuban leader Fidel Castro relocated to Harlem's Theresa Hotel, where Malcolm greeted him. The assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in February 1961 triggered a protest at the United Nations, and James Baldwin, one of the era's foremost Black writers, characterized the unrest as evidence of gathering discontent.

Joseph turns to Black radical activism in northern cities. In Detroit, Reverend Albert Cleage Jr. reimagined Christianity as a tool for Black liberation and organized the Group on Advanced Leadership. The Revolutionary Action Movement, founded in 1962 by radical college students, promoted revolutionary nationalism inspired by Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams, a former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter president who called for armed self-defense. When Los Angeles police killed NOI member Ronald Stokes in 1962, Malcolm was enraged, but Muhammad ordered the Nation to stand down, exposing the contradiction between militant rhetoric and organizational passivity.

The year 1963 intensified this convergence. Cleage and fellow Detroit minister Reverend C. L. Franklin organized the Great Walk for Freedom in June, drawing over one hundred thousand people, with King delivering an early version of his "I Have a Dream" speech. In November, Malcolm delivered "Message to the Grassroots" in Detroit, distinguishing between the house Negro who identified with whites and the field Negro who despised oppression. Three weeks later, his inflammatory remark about Kennedy's assassination led to his suspension from the NOI and permanent break with the organization.

In March 1964, Malcolm declared independence from the NOI, founding Muslim Mosque Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. He delivered "The Ballot or the Bullet," arguing that civil rights must be elevated to human rights. On extended tours of Africa and the Middle East, he completed the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, after which he acknowledged he no longer condemned whites solely for skin color. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.

The day after Malcolm's death, Jones announced the creation of the Black Arts Repertory Theater and School, catalyzing a national movement. The August 1965 Watts uprising in Los Angeles revealed the limits of legal equality without economic progress, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X turned Black radicalism into a widely read literary topic.

Joseph shifts focus to Stokely Carmichael, born in Trinidad and raised in the Bronx, who joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) after graduating from Howard University. In Lowndes County, Alabama, where Blacks outnumbered whites four to one but virtually none were registered to vote, Carmichael helped organize an all-Black political party using the black panther as its ballot symbol. Elected SNCC chairman in May 1966, he rejected integration as "an insidious subterfuge for white supremacy" (131).

The June 1966 Meredith March became the occasion for Carmichael's historic declaration. After activist James Meredith was shot on his solo March Against Fear through Mississippi, King, Carmichael, and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) leader Floyd McKissick continued the walk. On June 16, after his twenty-seventh arrest, Carmichael introduced the slogan to an electrified crowd in Greenwood: "What we gonna start sayin' now is Black Power!" (142). CORE adopted Black Power as policy, while the NAACP cut off cooperation.

Black Power provoked intense government repression. President Johnson blamed the slogan for stalling civil rights legislation and personally requested Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance of Carmichael. The FBI expanded its Counter Intelligence Program (Cointelpro) against Black nationalist organizations. The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, gained attention through armed police patrols. Carmichael and political scientist Charles Hamilton published Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, distinguishing between individual and institutional racism. The 1967 urban riots in Newark and Detroit deepened the crisis; Jones, beaten by Newark police, adopted the name Amiri Baraka and began community organizing.

The year 1968 brought cascading crises. King was assassinated on April 4, triggering violence in 125 cities. Newton's trial became a cause for a multiracial coalition, and his conviction on voluntary manslaughter was a partial victory. Richard Nixon won the presidency by exploiting racial divisions, and Eldridge Cleaver, the Panther leader and author of Soul on Ice, and Carmichael went into exile, Cleaver to Cuba and Carmichael to Guinea.

Joseph traces the Panthers' decline through government repression and internal crisis. The 1969 police killings of Chicago Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark drew public sympathy, while Newton's 1971 expulsion of Cleaver's faction after a televised confrontation produced factional violence. Meanwhile, Baraka's community organizing helped elect Kenneth Gibson as Newark's first Black mayor in 1970, and Angela Davis, a Communist professor and activist tried for aiding a prison break, was acquitted in 1972.

The 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, represented the apex of Black Power's mainstream influence. More than eight thousand delegates gathered under a banner of unity without uniformity, and the Washington Post editorialized that "black power comes of age" (283). Ideological fractures soon followed. At the 1974 convention, Baraka shocked delegates by calling for Socialist revolution, and a struggle between nationalists and Marxists dissolved the movement's key organizations.

In an epilogue, Joseph follows the movement's key figures. Newton returned from exile and earned a doctorate but was killed in Oakland in 1989. Carmichael, who changed his name to Kwame Ture in honor of mentors Nkrumah and Guinean president Sékou Touré, promoted Pan-Africanism from Guinea until his death in 1998. Joseph argues that while civil rights earned Black Americans dignity, Black Power accomplished "a no-less-remarkable task, fueling the casually assertive identity and cultural pride that marks African American life today" (303).