The African Americans: Rubenstein Recap #6

The final episode of The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, “A More Perfect Union (1968 – 2013),” explored African Americans’ strides in the wake of the civil rights movement against the backdrop of deeply rooted inequalities that persist into the present. The extraordinary civil rights gains of the 1960s did little to undo the economic barriers facing black Americans. Black power – the dream to empower African Americans political and economically – became the rallying cry of the 1970s. During that decade, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense started community programs in Oakland, CA, while cultural nationalists embraced African heritage and art to spread the message that black was beautiful.

The Gwen Lewis Afro-American Company, a dance company in Oakland, was part of a flourishing black arts movement in the 1970s that saw reclaiming African heritage as part of the liberation struggle. Walter J. Taylor Papers, 1934 – 2000.

Affirmative action programs gave some African Americans the chance to attend elite colleges and climb corporate ladders and helped fuel a growing black middle class.

The Black Student Alliance at Duke was formed in 1969 and continued to provide support and represent the interest of African American students throughout the following decades. This 1981 newsletter, called The Grapevine, reminding black students that they are part of a community and urging them to reach out to both black faculty and black workers on Duke’s Campus. Black Student Alliance records, 1969 – 2006.

But throughout the 1980s, the majority of black Americans found no escape from the poverty and unemployment that confined them to abandoned inner cities and rural areas.

This list of observations drawn up by the Black Caucus, a labor group focused on African American workers, in 1984 laid out the tremendous barriers facing black workers twenty years after the civil rights movement. Theresa El-Amin Papers, 1960s – 2010.

This 1987 calendar, published by the Black Seed organization, maps out the progression of the black liberation struggle. After the rising poverty and drug wars of the 1980s, the arms of the clock read that it’s revolution time. Theresa El-Amin Papers, 1960s – 2010.

Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs then targeted poor black neighborhoods and sent hundreds of thousands of black men to prison with harsh sentencing laws, a reality that lead to numerous legal battles in the last thirty years. Yet when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he fulfilled the dreams of centuries of African Americans. But as the effects of the disaster of Hurricane Katrina (2005) and controversy over the death of Trayvon Martin (2013) made clear, continuing racial inequality run deeper than one black president could solve.

Post contributed by Karlyn Forner, John Hope Franklin Research Center Graduate Intern.