New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975

by William L. Van DeBurg

The most comprehensive account available of the rise and fall of the Black Power Movement and of its dramatic transformation of both African-American and larger American culture. With a gift for storytelling and an ear for street talk, William Van Deburg chronicles a decade of deep change, from the armed struggles of the Black Panther party to the cultural nationalism of artists and writers creating a new aesthetic. Van Deburg contends that although its tactical gains were sometimes short-lived, the Black Power movement did succeed in making a revolution—one in culture and consciousness—that has changed the context of race in America.

" New Day in Babylon is an extremely intelligent synthesis, a densely textured evocation of one of American history's most revolutionary transformations in ethnic group consciousness."—Bob Blauner, New York Times

Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Outstanding Book Award, 1993

Genres: History, American History, African American, Nonfiction, Race, Politics

388 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1993

Reviews

[Stephani · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book makes a good reference book for the subject and the time period. However, I give it only two stars for two reasons:

1) It's almost exclusively male in its history. It makes slight mentions of women like Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez and Angela Davis, but you'd think that Black Power was just a man thing by this book. It does talk about how Black women's criticism of sexism and "Black macho" in Black Power, but it reads as if the author is blaming the criticism for Black Power's decline, not sexism and misogyny in the the movement itself.

2) The book downplays some of the other serious problems with the major Black Power organizations and figures. For example, it mentions in passing that there were shootouts between the Black Panthers and Maulana Karenga's group US, but it doesn't tell that two Panthers were shot and killed by two US members. The book also makes this statement: "[Karenga] had served five times the minimum sentence for assault with intent to do great bodily harm." Karenga had served four years in prison because he and another US member had imprisoned and tortured two women members for supposedly trying to poison him.

Unfortunately, when left-wing, radical movements have bad apples or a bad side, we progressive people tend to minimize or deny, just like with the author of this book. Then the right-wingers expose these things and use it to undermine progressive movements and beliefs. It's just like when the feminist movement tried to purge lesbians; nobody wants to own up to that having happened now.

What are we afraid of? As Black folks like to say, "tell the truth and shame the devil." The enemies of progressive change ("the devil") will have no ammunition to shoot us down if we own up to everything, good and bad.

[Malik · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this book. Before anything critical, I appreciate Van Deburg's cultural approach in the later chapters, and I think overall the book is organized well. His introduction to the variations of the ideology was appreciated. I think being a euroamerican limited the depth of his cultural analysis throughout the book. He correctly understands culture as one aspect of a grand concept including political, economic, and social construction, yet it feels as though his privileging for the cultural, both the perceived positive AND negative aspects of it, is also informed by his own romanticization and blinders imposed by other contemporary accounts [then in the 80s] of the BPM. For example, he highlights that some, after the BPM ended, suggested that the era was one of Macho dominance, a point which he does not refute, and in general Van Deburg himself does not engage the depth of Black women in the era beyond this.

He opens and closes the book arguing the idea that products of the Black Power movement cannot narrowly be defined as political and revolutionary militancy, ignoring the cultural afterlives that the 65-75 era developed. Yet he doesn't really ask himself whether/how the remaining cultural legacy exists because it was the most useful to the majority society.

[AskHistorians]

A good introduction to the black power movement.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wonderful book chronicles the Black Power Movement and American culture from 1965-1975 (haha as the title very well indicates). It is very straightforward and gives no excuses. It is well written and though I bought for a text book for a class, I would find myself keep reading beyond what was assigned for the class because it was so interesting. The book touchs on all aspects of the Black Power Movement, and also ties in the subject to American culture on the whole. Very informative and very interesting.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Van DeBurg knows his material. He weaves together the various bits of Black Power rhetoric, belles lettres, newspapers, interviews, etc. to form a lucid, believable narrative. And his notes are pure research gold.

[Tory · Rating 3 out of 5]

An overview for people who are unfamiliar with the black power movement. My civil rights movement professor recommended it, but now I wonder why since he covered everything in here, and better. The content in this book is very vague to describe the big picture.

[Tressa Childs · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved it

[Chad Lamb · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting look at the Black Power movement and why it died out. Not really in my interests, though.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considerably less threatening to whites than the average well-armed guerilla warrior, black culture nevertheless promoted resistance and survival during slavery, offered spiritual sustenance throughout the Segregation era, and provided a foundation and reference point for the early civil rights movement. Through various forms of cultural expression, the sociologically and economically disenfranchised of the Black Power years learned that they could define themselves without playing obeisance to whitey. Whether represented by subversive slave folk tales or celebratory soul serenades, Afro-American culture was the central, irreducible, irreplaceable element in the ongoing struggle for psychological liberation and empowerment. (p. 304)

Van Deburg begins the book with the death of Malcolm X and ends it with the death of Elijah Muhammad. It is the struggle within the Black Power movement to appropriate and redefine Malcolm X as symbol that he finds a compelling organizational principle for the movement. Van Deburg's is a study of the culture of a movement that was essentially cultural and more directed at Black self-esteem than at terrorizing whites. Press coverage hardly ever got it right though. And social scientist too have missed the essentially cultural message of the movement.

Studies that showed minimal support for the militants obscured the fact that when the various surveys are sifted more thoroughly, Black Power almost always is revealed to be more popular in its cultural aspects than it was as a political enthusiasm. Support for the movement promoting the study of African languages and culture, for example, tended to run between 40 and 60 percent of those polled. Black Studies programs that would include such courses were even more popular ... Distinctive hair styles, clothing, cuisine, and music won endorsement won endorsement from a wide range of age groups within Black America ... (p. 17)

Getting inside the movement, Van Deburg (like Terry Anderson in his study) goes deep into the sources of the Movement culture. He studies the material produced by the movement, to include speeches, poems, essays, position papers, organizational materials. What emerges is a program for black cultural power. Van Deburg moves form the militants and their programs to ideologies of black power into a consideration of culture as folk expression. He concludes with a discussion of culture as literary and performing arts. The more extreme utterances, calls to violence, were a means of self-defense. Stokely Carmichael was putting the nation on notice that blacks were not going to take the beating and more. They would hit back. From that basic point of self-protection would emerge the cultural respect that "non-violence" could never deliver.

This approach has the benefit of presenting a much richer portrait of the movement than was previously available, but allowing them to speak for themselves also has a downside. Jeffrey T. Sammons, reviewing the book for the Journal of Southern History, points out that Van Deburg's book is excessively critical of those outside the movement and inadequately critical of those inside the movement. Robert Zangrando is slightly more generous in his AHR review, characterizing it as a work that "has the voice of its advocates and practitioners rather than its detractors." Harry Belafonte is left as the "Black Caucasian" the movement condemned him without any analysis of the longer historical perspective, whereas Eldridge Cleaver (who later became a fundamentalist Christian) is severed from his future history. Frozen as a moment in time, the period of 1965-75 is not historicized the way that Sammons would like it to be (it would seem that the conclusion of the paperback rectified this problem) Sammons finds Van Deburg's use of social theory derivative and heavy handed, bringing him to loose a great deal of the complexity of the movement in the interest of fitting individuals into developmental theories which their lives really don't fit into. But this does seem a bit petty, since we do see the impact of the Black Power Movement all around us.