Making Peace With the 60's by David. Burner, Princeton (1996)

"The rights movement sought, in effect, to bring black Americans under the Declaration of Independence. It stood for one of the truest beliefs of the American experiment: that it should be an aim of a good society to eliminate, as far as possible, the arbitrary and vicious barriers that background and surroundings erect against the full achievement of personal identity. That principal will never, can never, become fully realized, but it is an imperative toward American politics should strive. Nonviolence was fitting for a movement demanding liberation from arbitrary constraints, for that conduct fosters self-discovery and self-making. But another aspirant to the liberation of black Americans had been long present, and in the middle and late 1960s this alternative vision gained prominence once again. This was the concept of race as the nearly exclusive foundation of the identity of African-Americans. As beguiling as nationalism, that corrupter of recent Western and world history, as seductive to American blacks as white racism has been to whites, that embrace of blackness came close to negating the civil rights movement" (p. 49).

"As to the more aggressive assertiveness that accompanied black power: some of this found its rationale in a selective reading of a subtle and insightful book, The Wretched of the Earth, by the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, born in Martinique and a resident of Algeria at the time of his death in 1961. Though he wrote not of the United States but of the Third World, Fanon had wide renown, and black power leaders, among them Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, were drawn to his work. Fanon's thesis is that only through active resistance to their oppressors can oppressed people achieve inner as well as outer freedom, and an authentic collective identity" (p. 52).

The radical black power movement excluded those not black enough for its liking. "In 1967, the year that SNCC officially excluded whites from membership, CORE did the same" (p. 68).

"Though the civil rights movement won formal and in many ways informal equality and brought sizable numbers of blacks into the middle class, it failed to cut the Gordian knots, the most enduring social problems that came out of the country's racial past. Since the great days of the rights demonstrations, black Americans have been prey, more than the rest of the country, to forces corrosive of social order. Especially visible is a black under class, trapped in a world of drugs, crime, illiteracy, and shattered families. The instabilities of black families, a growing number of them headed by women and mired in welfare dependency, were at the core of black social malaise. So argued the sociologist and politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a controversial position paper published in the mid-sixties. Today far more blacks die annually, victims of other blacks, than were killed in all the lynchings in American history. Others are living victims not of the Ku Klux Klan but of street drugs supplied by their black brothers. Drugs, disintegrating families, street violence--these are the ills that threaten black communities, and no vocabulary of black rage will begin effectively to address them" (p. 82)."

This is truly a stellar example of scholarship about the 1960s.