Black Politics / White Power Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven

The popular media have portrayed the Black Panthers mainly for the rhetoric of violence some members employed and for the associations between the Panthers and a black militancy drawing on racial hostility to whites in general. Overlooked have been the efforts that branches of the organization undertook for practical economic and social progress within African-American neighborhoods, frequently in alliance with whites. Yohuru Williams' study of black politics in New Haven culminating in the arrival of the Panthers argues that the increasing militancy in the black community there was motivated not by abstractions of black cultural integrity but by the continuing frustrations the leadership suffered in its dealings with the city's white liberal establishment. Black Politics/White Power is an important contribution to a discovery of the complexities of racial politics during the angry late sixties and early seventies.

Yohuru Williams is Associate Professor of History and Co-Director of Black Studies at Fairfield University. He is the author of A Constant Struggle: African-American History from 1865 to the Present: Documents and Essays (2002). He also served as an advisor on the popular civil rights reader Putting the Movement Back into Teaching Civil Rights. He has two forthcoming books from Duke University Press on the Black Panther Party, co-edited with Jama Lazerow of Wheelock College, and is finishing a single-authored book entitled Six Degrees of Segregation: Lynching, Capital Punishment and Jim Crow Justice 1865-1930.