Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity.

Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. By Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar. Reconfiguring American Political History. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, c. 2004. Pp. xii, 258. Paper, $23.00, ISBN 0-8018-8275-3; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-7957-4.)

This sympathetic treatment of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s offers a concise and at times insightful portrayal of one of the most fascinating moments in the African American freedom struggle. Proceeding from the premise that "Black Power was an organic response to the limitations of rigid black nationalism and the civil rights movement," Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar argues that organizations such as the Nation of Islam, the Black Panther Party, and a host of lesser-known groups reoriented African American political, cultural, and class identities in ways that were both refreshing to some and troubling to others (p. 191). While much of the territory covered by this book has been traversed by Alphonso Pinkney, William Van Deburg, and others, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity is an intriguing foray into a time and place in American history that has been visited far too infrequently by historians and others.

Ogbar is correct in characterizing the Black Power movement as a series of foundations constructed over time by African Americans who desired to assert a more positive black identity, to challenge a dominant civil rights ethos that had not paid the dividends that the investment of activists seemed to warrant, or to simply connect the struggle for black self-determination in the United States to the concomitant global struggles of other oppressed people. In this vein, the author describes a movement that was forged over decades and that drew ingredients from a myriad of places and was not wholly coherent or precise in meaning or emphasis. Black Power was often what those who uttered the term (or were labeled as adherents of it) desired it to be. It was embedded in the racial chauvinism and petty capitalism of Elijah Muhammad's "conservative" Nation of Islam; it was glamorized in the gun-toting, ideologically versatile culture of "radical" Black Panthers; and it was catered to, for various reasons, by black moderates and white university officials, who witnessed the advent of black studies programs on previously unaccommodating campuses. If nothing else, Black Power represented continuities and contradictions, opportunities and frustrations, in a country that had yet to fully reckon with a civil rights struggle whose lingering irresolvability had made the Black Power phenomenon possible in the first place.

This work is strongest as a vantage point for glimpsing the many permutations of Black Power rhetoric, symbols, and agendas. The section on the ways in which radicalized African Americans influenced identity politics in other communities, such as those of Puerto Ricans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and working-class whites, is particularly enlightening. Moreover, Ogbar has indelibly scratched the surface of a rich oral history that has yet to be comprehensively explored. The book falters only when it comes to probing depths that seem to beg for more exploration. For example, the sexism engrained in the Black Power movement gets short shrift; there is only a two-page discussion of the issue, which is nearly apologetic (pp. 182-84). Furthermore, conceptual templates for sorting black nationalism into classical and modern varieties seem underdeveloped (and largely unchallenged) here, though many iterations of Black Power do not easily fit into either category. There are a few overgeneralizations in the work that will not wholly convince some readers, such as the statement, "Black Power's appeal eclipsed the integrationist drive" by the late 1960s (p. 125). Still, despite these observations, this book delivers on its promise to further illuminate a topic too often ignored and misunderstood.

CLAUDE A. CLEGG III

Indiana University at Bloomington