The Elasticity of Black Power

Review of Tom Adam Davies, Mainstreaming Black Power (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017)

The flexibility of the meaning of Black Power has allowed the phrase to have various meanings such as a call for a revolution to topple America, slogan for anti-capitalistic fundamental reformation of American society and economy, and racial empowerment through American capitalism. Tom Adam Daviesʼ book Mainstreaming Black Power examined Black Power as a form of racial empowerment through capitalism and argued that the African American middle-class was actually part of Black Power history. Moreover, he asserted that white politicians, officials, and business leaders engaged with Black Power and succeeded in controlling the way African Americans sought power, which whites achieved by manipulating the meaning of Black Power so that it no longer meant total change of the American structure through redistributive policies but economic advancement through diligent work and self-help. Davies called the controlled incorporation of African Americans into white American middle-class society “mainstreaming.”
The precondition of Daviesʼ arguments is that the meaning of Black Power
is elastic, which he justified by interpreting the pioneer of Black Power Studies, Peniel E. Josephʼs definition of Black Power as “pursuing self-determination through black political and economic empowerment, the redefinition of black identity, greater racial pride on solidarity, and a critical emphasis on a shared African heritage and history of racial oppression” (p.92). The implicit logic is that “Black Power was open to interpretation” without any determined path for racial empowerment (p.218) because, according to Daviesʼ description, Joseph did not refer to the way African Americans should achieve racial empowerment. Therefore, Davies was able to study the African American middle-class in terms of Black Power.
To study how Americans sought control over the meaning of Black Power, which is a history of the struggle for how African Americans should empower themselves, Davies chose New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta to conduct his case studies. However, it is problematic that he did not mention the particular reasons he selected them. Although he emphasized the importance of local history to counter the dominant narratives by scholars such as Allen Matusow and Gareth Davies (pp.7-8),1 Davies did not discuss why he did not choose other cities such as Oakland, California.
Mainstreaming Black Power contains four chapters. Chapter 1 explored the War on Poverty to argue that President Lyndon Johnsonʼs policies, despite seeing no need to reform the American economic and social structure, fostered both African American activism that sought redistributive policies to fundamentally reform American economic and social structures and whitesʼ fierce anger over redistribution. According to Davies, Robert F. Kennedy considered the War on Poverty to be a failure and learned how whites manage African Americansʼ demand for power.
From the beginning, the War on Poverty had difficulties related to eradicating poverty. A research group led by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin proposed the opportunity theory, which emphasized the structural origins of urban decay and led to the creation of the Community Action Program (CAP), one of the War on Poverty’s main programs. Washingtonʼs officials, in contrast, believed that the poor’s attitudes and behaviors should be improved. President Johnson favored officials, seeing no need to change the American structure, and sought to create jobs for male African American workers.
Despite Johnsonʼs unwillingness to reform America structurally, poor
African Americans actively sought control over the operation of CAP services, which is why local officials in New York and Los Angeles fiercely refused to include the poor in the administration of antipoverty agencies. In Atlanta, however, although antipoverty programs seemed to be successful and cause no interracial confrontation, agencies operating the CAP were dominated by the local African American middle-class. This was one of many examples that indicated intra-racial class conflicts in Atlanta.
The War on Poverty also caused the rise of white resentment towards redistributive policies, which Robert Kennedy thought he had to ameliorate. In 1967, Congress amended the CAP to give local authorities the power to select which community groups to offer federal subsidies to, which led to the exclusion of the local poor from its administration. When poor, urban African American mothers led the welfare rights movement, which Davies claimed the War on Poverty amplified (p.50), the movement raised the “sense of injustice over redistributive liberal social policy” among “many ʻmiddle Americansʼ” (p.53). The resurgence of African American demand for redistributive justice and white rage against the War on Poverty made Kennedy believe that America needed something that simultaneously managed African American empowerment and preserved white interests.
Chapter 2 examined how Kennedyʼs Community Development Corporation
(CDC) programs and President Richard Nixonʼs black capitalism, which aimed to embed capitalistic white middle-class “mainstream” values into African Americans, appealed to Black Power activists. Davies asserted that this attraction was due to their ideology of African American economic nationalism, which resonated with the white politicians’ view of economic advancement. The gender bias that claimed men should work instead of women also connected whites and Black Power advocates, leading to an intersexual conflict over control of the CDC. Despite this bias, Davies maintained that African Americans achieved economic empowerment and simultaneously cultivated racial pride and unity through the CDC.
After the Watts Riot in 1965, Kennedy conceived the idea of the CDC, a
tax-exempt organization with a federal antipoverty fund to regenerate urban ghettos to appease white anger and divert African Americans away from the radicalism of trying to topple America by developing their own urban leadership, which he believed the War on Poverty failed. Therefore, he called for private business investments for the CDCʼs urban renewal. He thought that private funding would not infuriate whites and that experience of working for the CDC would eliminate African Americansʼ radical activism.
However, the CDC programs involved gender bias that demanded men to work rather than women. In fact, when Kennedy launched the Bedford- Stuyvesant Renewal and Rehabilitation Corporation (R&R) in 1966 as the first CDC in New York, an intersexual conflict occurred over control of the R&R. African American men, including the militant Black Power activist Sunny Carson, felt excluded from the R&R, which they thought went against the gender norm. Kennedy also shared gender bias partly because African American masculinists would have a greater influence on youth. In the end, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC) replaced the R&R in 1967, excluding the R&Rʼs female leaders from the BSRC. Gender hierarchies were an essential part of Kennedyʼs racial empowerment plan.
The attraction of Black Power activists and black capitalism’s purpose
were similarities between President Richard Nixonʼs black capitalism and the CDC. Although Nixonʼs economic policy toward African Americans differed from Kennedyʼs CDC in that Nixon increased the number of federal contracts going to urban minorities, black capitalism appealed to Black Power radicals such as Floyd McKissick, who once presided over the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), because they had black economic nationalism endorsing self- help and the male-breadwinner norm. Moreover, Nixon was so sensitive to whites that they expected African Americans who endorsed black capitalism to contribute financially and accept the “mainstream” values of diligent work and self-help. He tried to placate whites while regulating African Americansʼ way of economic success.
Despite the gender bias Kennedy, Nixon, and Black Power militants
shared, Davies argued that African Americans succeeded in empowering themselves economically through the CDC. The BSRC developed local redevelopment programs, including a mortgage pool from which local residents could draw money to become property owners, and campaigns to invite major corporations such as IBM into Bedford-Stuyvesant. Moreover, the headquarters of the BSRC became Restoration Plaza in 1972, which functioned as a commercial center. Furthermore, the fact that the BSRC survived the economic devastation of the 1970s indicated its vitality.
More importantly, Davies asserted that the BSRC fostered racial pride and
unity alongside its economic enterprise. Restoration Plaza was also a cultural center that accommodated various cultural facilities. In addition, the BSRC helped establish Medgar Evers College, a famous African American college in New York City. Furthermore, the BSRC relied on radical Black Power advocates such as Carson to celebrate blackness. Davies averred that the

BSRC “mainstreamed” local African Americans while also allowing them to foster racial pride and solidarity.
Chapter 3 discussed how African Americans sought educational community control, or the idea that schools should be operated by local people or people of their choosing, as they challenged the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)ʼs ideal of school integration and how whites successfully suppressed the African American poorʼs struggle for community control. Davies argued that the movements for educational control “blurred the lines between civil rights and Black Power activists” (p.117). However, Davies also showed that while community control movements were lost in the face of white resistance, African American leadership in Atlanta joined whites to defeat community control.
Not only Black Power advocates but moderate civil rights activists sought
community control. In Los Angeles, students were influenced by the US Organization, a Black Power activist group, and led protests to demand community control. In 1967, when African Americans in the city protested the deleterious conditions of their schools, operated by white administrators, the local NAACP and churches also joined the protest with organizations such as the Black Panther Party, US Organization, and CORE.
Davies maintained the CAP, CDC, and Black Power invigorated grassroots activism for community control (pp.135-137). Black Power advocates believed it could counter the notion that poor African American educational achievement was due to ailing culture and promote economic advancement. If schools were operated by African American staff, it would provide better education while teaching African American history, which Black Power activists considered “as a tool of black liberation” (p.139).
However, African Americans who sought community control were lost. In Los Angeles, although there were some victories, including the increase of African American administrators, educational quality did not improve. Worse still, the presence of security grew to prevent African American protests. In New York, the Board of Education was decentralized in 1969, which had fiercely resisted school integration. However, this decentralization did not contribute to with expanding community control.
In Atlanta, both white and African American bourgeoisies conspired to oppress local African Americansʼ fight for community control. Since African American middle-class leadership was exceptionally strong in Atlanta, it opposed school integration. In fact, since Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education allowed busing as a tool for school integration in 1971, Atlantaʼs African American leadership forged the “Atlanta Compromise” with the local white establishment, which demanded no more busing in exchange for the former gaining administrative positions in African American-dominated schools. The local African American leadership made community control in Atlanta a mere means of expanding their economic interests.
The African American poor fought back against the compromise, but
Atlantaʼs whites and African American leaders defeated them. It is true that interracial grassroots activists fought against the deal, and the NAACP dissolved the Atlanta branch in a betrayal of the organization’s struggle for school integration. However, Armour v. Nix upheld the compromise in 1980. Davies concluded that the fight for educational community control proved how strong the white mainstream establishment was, which limited and shaped African American movements.
Chapter 4 analyzed two African American mayors, Tom Bradley in Los Angeles and Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, to show that intra-racial class division worsened in both cities despite their different stances. On the one hand, Davies asserted that the discrepancy derived from white establishment, which succeeded in controlling the meaning of Black Power and racial empowerment. On the other hand, while “affirmative action city hiring and municipal contract disbursement were the most viable method for advancing black interests” (p.172), they deepened the disparity as well.
When African American political power grew rapidly from the mid-1960s,
there were various political agendas that reflected the contrast between Bradley and Jackson. At the 1972 Gary Convention, radical participants demanded fundamentally redistributive, anti-capitalistic reform, and even independence from America. At the same time, the resolution of this convention also included calls for federal support of racial economic development, that is, black capitalism. African Americans were never a monolithic political group.
African American mayors had to adjust themselves to the environment of the cities that it was their duty to govern. In white-majority Los Angeles, where it was almost impossible for a mayor to endorse redistributive policies.

Bradley presented himself as “race-neutral.” He had to appeal to whites because it was neither African Americans nor Hispanics that ultimately voted him to office. In contrast, due to white flight, African Americans formed the majority in Atlanta. As such, Jackson sought redistributive policies without worrying about white support.
Despite this difference, both mayors eventually succumbed to whites. During the economic crisis of the 1970s, Bradley was able to gain federal funds for the poor to spend on housing problems, which he redirected to central business downtowns despite their original intention. By contrast, Jackson redirected funds for business districts towards poor African Americans. However, in 1977, Jackson also abandoned his stance because of white pressure, when he established an office “dedicated to maintaining a strong central business district” (p.203).
Davies insisted that affirmative action, which seemed to eradicate systemic
racism for African Americans, undermined redistributive justice because it exclusively benefited the African American middle-class while strengthening the gender hierarchy. Nixon aimed to economically empower minority men through affirmative action, under whose administration the policy reached the golden age. Implemented under Bradley and Jackson, affirmative action strengthened the gendered economic norm.
Davies concluded that political empowerment strengthened the economically advantaged, even though radical Black Power advocates tried to channel political power to fundamentally reform American society and economy. For Davies, both cases revealed the powerful influence of white institutions on determining the course of racial empowerment.
In the final “Conclusion,” Davies reaffirmed that Black Power was not necessarily confined to achieving redistributive justice through grassroots activism because Black Power was so ambiguous that it defined no single path towards the goal and left room for interpretation. For Davies, Stokely Carmichael’s claim that the belief of being included in the world of white middle-class would never erase the institutional racism was just one school of Black Power. Throughout his arguments, Davies emphasized the elasticity of the meaning of Black Power by focusing on the understudied school of Black Power and its clash with “traditional” Black Power, as well as their complicated relationship with white interest and power, which strongly shaped its meaning.

Mainstreaming Black Power followed studies on Black Power that focus on the struggle for power within the United States rather than Black Powerʼs internationalism or anti-imperialism. While Cedric Johnson conducted early research on Black Power from this perspective and analyzed Black Power activists’ transition from mass mobilization to elite politics, it was Devin Fergus and Karen Ferguson that particularly inspired Davies (p.237). Fergus examined how white liberals in North Carolina tried to negotiate and control demands by Black Power activists. Similarly, Ferguson explored how the Ford Foundation engaged with Black Power so that Black Power adapted to the American system. Both Fergus and Ferguson significantly affected Davies because they showed that whites and Black Power actually interacted.2
Johnson was a forerunner of Davies in that his book “described how black
political life gradually conformed to liberal democratic capitalism in political style and ideological commitments,” that is, how Black Power radicals conformed to the white political order. In addition, Johnson had already indicated that “the Black Power movement contained much ideological and regional variation.” That was why he was able to examine Black Power activists who eventually succumbed to the American way of politics.3 If it were inappropriate to call such politicians Black Power advocates, he could not have studied them as Black Power history.
However, there was a considerable difference from Daviesʼ study. Johnson,
a political scientist, was interested in Black Power in the political arena rather than local African Americans. He organized his book into two parts: the former was an intellectual history of Black Power, asserting that Harold Cruseʼs and Amiri Barakaʼs ideas of vanguard politics undermined popular mobilization and “served to legitimate the emerging regime of race-relations management;” the latter was a political history of how events and organizations such as the 1972 Gary Convention, African Liberation Support Committee, and National Black Political Assembly symbolized the retreat from popular movement to the elite

politics. Johnson “focus[ed] deliberately on the middle ground between the powerful and the wider citizenry.”4 In short, unlike Davies, Johnsonʼs study was limited to Black Power activistsʼ entrance to political institutions and ideas supporting it.
Devin Fergus overcame Johnsonʼs limit by focusing on the interaction between white liberals and Black Power activists in North Carolina instead of political participation. Although his argument that “liberals helped reform Black Power so that by 1980 black radicals and their successors were more likely to petition Congress than to blow it up” does not seem different than Johnsonʼs claim that Black Power adapted itself to the white political order, Fergus primarily aimed to argue against the prevailing notion that Black Power fractured liberalism in the 1960s, which he claimed researchers such as Allen Matusow and Gareth Davies asserted.5 In addition, Fergus dealt with the creation of the Malcolm X Liberation University, the “Free Joan Little” movement̶Black Power activists support of the woman, who killed a white jailer to defend herself̶ and the Soul City project, or a planned community built by the Black Power militant Floyd McKissick. Fergus explored concrete achievements by Black Power advocates and found that the accomplishments were the results of the interaction between white liberals and Black Power activists. Therefore, he expanded the scope of the study on Black Powerʼs feats.
Davies owed much to Fergus because Fergus studied white liberals who engaged with Black Power, but they emphasized different points. On the one hand, both Fergus and Davies studied how white liberals interacted with Black Power while they extended the reach of research on Black Powerʼs various achievements. The two researchers highlighted the importance of white liberal engagement with Black Power. In addition, Davies explored the intersexual conflict over control of the CDC, and Fergus revealed that African American “nationalists behaved no differently from many of their white brothers” in the “Free Joan Little” movement with regard to the unequal gender relationship.6
On the other hand, while Davies emphasized the elasticity of the meaning of Black Power, Fergus stressed the interplay between white liberals and Black Power itself. Moreover, Fergus argued that the connection between white liberals and Black Power caused the resurgence of the New Right, which meant that the conservative opposition to Black Power radicals never weakened even after white liberals moderated Black Power. Although Davies did not discuss whether the interplay aroused white resentment, he implied that the taming of Black Power did not give rise to white resistance by emphasizing that the War on Poverty generated white hostility while Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon strived to appease white people and empower African Americans. For Davies, white rage was directed against redistributive policies, not white liberalsʼ engagement with Black Power.
Karen Ferguson followed Fergus in that she also tried to counter the notion that liberalism in the 1960s unraveled because of Black Power by deeply focusing on the Ford Foundation and finding the organization’s unique idea of racial integration. She revealed the Foundation’s “commitment to racial assimilation through a counterintuitive and seemingly paradoxical policy of [Black Powerʼs] racial separatism.” She showed that the Ford Foundation’s odd engagement with racial separatism was to foster African American leadership that would represent the race “in a pluralistic and meritocratic body politic.” Although Black Power recipients refused the organization’s strategy, their thinking “was still often shaped by a mainstream liberal conception of pluralism, race, and social change,” which connected the Foundation and Black Power. Therefore, Ferguson argued that “black power developed within a larger context that was shaped largely by the imperatives of elite white power, including the Ford Foundationʼs.”7
This claim does not differ from Fergusʼ and Daviesʼ main arguments that
white liberals institutionalized Black Power within America, but she asserted that the Ford Foundations policies towards African Americans “presaged conservative urban public policy.” She considered white liberals to be forerunners of neoliberal conservatism, including Robert Kennedyʼs CDC programs. While her contention resonated with Fergusʼ argument that interactions between liberals and Black Power energized white conservatism, Davies countered Ferguson by stressing the success of the CDC. Ferguson was critical of the Ford Foundation because it “abandoned any notion of genuine transformation in inner cities,”8 but Davies reinterpreted Kennedyʼs CDC and pro-capitalistic Black Powers racial empowerment positively.
In short, Davies contributed to the academic narrative that white liberals were successful in managing African Americansʼ racial empowerment in his own way. While Fergus emphasized the white conservative opposition to the Black Power that white liberals moderated, Davies underlined the success of white liberals in alleviating white rage as they empowered African Americans. Whereas Ferguson depicted the Ford Foundations liberalism as a precursor of neoliberalism and criticized the organization, Davies affirmatively reevaluated the CDC by emphasizing that it succeeded to a considerable degree regardless of if it was neoliberal. Moreover, Davies developed the examination of a conservative brand of Black Power by focusing on how middle-class African Americans were empowered with the help of Black Power radicals while Cedric Johnson explored political participation of Black Power activists into the American political arena and Black Power ideas that supported Black Powers entry into elite politics.
With regard to the critique of Daviesʼ book, he gave the impression that the white establishment, poor and middle-class African Americans, and contemporary gendered norm were all monolithic. As a result, he failed to incorporate some exceptional facts into his main arguments. For example, he introduced a white Catholic priest, Father Austin Ford, who led the grassroots activism against the “Atlanta Compromise” and ran Emmaus House, a community support center with mainly white staff seeking empowerment for the local poor. Davies contended that “the interracial and faith-based Black Power organizing evident in Atlanta was unusual” (p.161). Father Ford could have complicated Davies’ arguments for being a Catholic priest opposed to the white establishment, which tried to control Black Power.
However, Davies did not portray Father Ford as such. All one can learn is
that there was a white priest named Father Austin Ford and a community support center called Emmaus House that fought for the urban poorʼs empowerment. The role the unusual coalition played in Atlantaʼs history of white (and African American) establishments that tried to control the meaning

Davies persuasively argued that the meaning of Black Power was ambiguous, it does not necessarily guarantee that African Americans who sought pro- capitalistic racial empowerment were Black Power activists. Readers can refuse his proposal for inclusion of white-friendly empowerment and may even show that his definition of Black Power was inappropriate. However, the discussion on how to define Black Power is extremely important because it will not only expand studies on Black Power into various directions but also strengthen the basic logic of why Black Power should be anti-capitalistic. The fact that he significantly promoted the debate is the most remarkable contribution Davies made to Black Power history.
In conclusion, despite its faults, Mainstreaming Black Power succeeds in
expanding the scope of Black Power by questioning the presupposition that the meaning of Black Power is limited to anti-capitalism or fundamental reformation of economic and social structures, and arousing controversy over what the expanded reach of Black Power includes. His arguments were based on the monolithic understanding of the white establishment, poor and middle- class African Americans, and gender hierarchy. This tendency led him to insufficiently incorporate exceptional facts such as Father Austin Fordʼs interracial coalition, the NAACPʼs simultaneous endorsement of both school integration and educational community control, the associations disbanding of Atlantaʼs local branch, and the R&Rʼs female leaders into his arguments. Notwithstanding these defects, Davies successfully called for an overhaul of our assumptions that Black Power is anti-capitalistic. Some scholars would deepen discussions on how to define Black Power when they argue against Daviesʼ assertion that African Americans who sought pro-capitalistic racial empowerment that was managed, or “mainstreamed,” by whites are also Black Power activists. Others might expand the meaning of Black Power into new directions. The debate he caused would significantly contribute to the Black Power scholarship.