Unleashing Black Power

Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers

Peter D. Blackmer

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780813953779
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Reappraising the rise of the civil rights movement in the iconic center of Northern Black life

Unleashing Black Power explores the local dynamics, national connections, and global context of the Black freedom movement in Harlem from 1954 to 1964, illuminating how activists, organizers, and ordinary people mounted their resistance to systemic racism in the Jim Crow North. The richness of Black radical thought and action in this period made Harlem a key battleground in the national civil rights movement, transformed local Black grassroots politics, and facilitated the rise of Black Power in New York City. At the same time, the city’s attempts to clamp down on activists revealed the repressive nature of Northern liberalism and heralded the expansion of the carceral state. Peter Blackmer argues that this decade of confrontations between Black communities and white state power caused Harlem residents and activists to seek “new means” for achieving freedom within a city, state, and nation determined to deny it. Tracing the dual evolution of Black radicalism and white resistance, Unleashing Black Power offers a new framework for analyzing the epochal urban uprisings in the 1960s.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 A “Rising Tide” Coming In, 1954–1957
• 2 “The Negro Revolt,” 1958–1959
• 3 The Limits of Liberalism in Harlem, 1959–1960
• 4 The Spirit of Bandung, 1959–1961
• 5 The New Afro-American Nationalism, 1961–1963
• 6 Interracial Organizing and Black Self-Determination, 1960–1963
• 7 Rent Strikes and Repression, 1963–1964
• 8 The Time Has Come, 1964
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index