- Malcolm X and The Black Nationalist Tradition
- Seeing Racism as Constitutive of American Society: built into the very fabric of the culture as well as the political, economic, and social institutions
- Nonviolence and the Stereotype of Black Male Irresponsibility: To African-American critics of nonviolence the willingness of the civil rights leadership to "turn the other cheek" in the face of white racial terrorism: the church bombing in Birmingham that killed 4 little girls in 1963, the disappearence of the 3 civil rights workers in MS in the summer of '64, the murder of white Detroit activist Viola Liuzzo during the Selma-Montgomery march in 1965, etc.-- seemed only to confirm the racist stereotype that black men were too lazy and weak to provide for and defend their families. If black men were not willing to take action (use violence) to defend their homes and families-- a right that seemed fundamental to American citizenship-- then how could we expect whites to view us as deserving of those citizenship rights.
- Rejecting Assimilation into Whiteness: And to critics of integration, the desire of civil rights leaders and their followers to move into white neighborhoods, attend white schools, socialize with white liberals
and sleep with their sons and daughters
was little more than an acknowledgement that white cultural practices, white values, white intelligence and even white bodies were not only preferable to their black equivalents
but also more desirable.
- "The Ballot or the Bullet": Demanding Self-Determination over African-American Lives and Communities. The question of what Black Nationalists and Black Power advocates sought instead of integration cannot be summarized in a sentence or two. Black Power activists ranged from advocates of Black Capitalism and cultural nationalists who believed that blacks should pull back from political activists until they were able to rid themselves completely of Euro-American cultural values in favor of an African-derived culture to those who were prepared to pursue armed struggles in order to achieve either a separate black nation in the American South or, in the case of the Black Panthers, a multi-racial revolutionary movement of the poor capable of establishing socialism in the United States.
Who was right? Was, as the integrationists argued, inclusion the necessary first step for creating a racially just society? Or were the nationalists right that white America would never tolerate the full inclusions of African-Americans? What exactly accounts for the persistent racial inequalities between blacks and white more than 30 years after the passage of the federal civil rights laws?