TheDefendersOnline: Review of Peniel Joseph's Dark Days, Bright Nights

This review appears in edited form on TheDefendersOnline.com.

*****

In Dark Days, Bright Nights, historian Peniel E. Joseph examines President Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House, an almost unbelievable achievement that is still startling in its historic significance. Even as late as the last few months leading up to the primaries, few experts would have guessed that the first Black president was on his way to Pennsylvania Avenue – not journalists, not public policy wonks, not sociologists, and not even most historians. As Spelman College Professor of History Jelani Cobb asked his colleagues soon after the general election, “Not one of us predicted this. How’d we miss this?” Joseph explores what they missed and why from a point of view that, perhaps, many will find controversial.

A Professor of History at Tufts, author, editor, and recipient of several prestigious fellowships, Joseph asserts that The Age of Obama is a direct result of the very militancy our 44th president has so carefully distanced himself from. Organized in 4 chapters, Dark Days, Bright Nights traces a legacy of Black male leadership linking three men: Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the third, a man abandoned by his father, raised by a single mother, and sent to live with his grandparents. A half brother to siblings not only on his father’s side, but to a sister on his mother’s side, too. A man whose personal narrative is strikingly similar to the experiences of countless, nameless disenfranchised Black men who were meant to be among the primary beneficiaries of Black Power Activism, a man whose name the world knows: Barack Hussein Obama. Joseph does not linger too long on Obama’s personal narrative in Dark Days, Bright Nights; instead, he highlights aspects of the president’s widely-known biography as a way to re-imagine Black Power.

In the first chapter, an essay called “Re-imagining the Black Power Movement,” the author identifies this largely misunderstood and understudied era as the precursor to multiculturalism and diversity – a requisite for mainstream acceptance of a mixed-race son of an immigrant African and European-descended Kansan with an Asian sister, two Black daughters, and a white grandma named Toot.

Joseph also examines Black Power not as a misguided assault on American institutions, but, rather, and certainly more accurately, as an international force fueled by sharecroppers and students, trade unionists and tenant right’s activists, along with “intellectuals, poets, artists, and politicians,” all of whom were inspired by icons Carmichael and X, men whose work “helped to expand the boundaries of American democracy.”

Situating Black Power at the center of our participatory democracy identifies The Movement as essential to the success of America’s foundational ideal, Lincoln’s promise of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Just as Frederick Douglass’ “famous maxim that power ‘conceded nothing without demand’” produced an activism that pressured Abraham Lincoln to deal with the nation’s peculiar institution of slavery, Carmichael, X, and a more militant Martin Luther King than most care to recall demanded the 20th century freedoms that enabled Obama’s 21st century victory. Joseph suggests that the more radical aspects of icons like Douglass and King have become just as obfuscated as the qualities Carmichael and X possessed that mainstream middle Americans of all colors would applaud. The problem of reducing Black Power to nothing more than radical militancy is more than just a problem of bad PR, Joseph asserts, it’s wrong, a deceit that too many Americans believe is truth, a lie that has lingered for nearly half a century.

According to Joseph, Stokely Carmichael, who coined the term, “defined Black Power as black unity in the service of elected political power…Black Power called for – indeed mandated – a new political ethos that would seek the eradication of poverty, violence, war, and despair. In this, Carmichael shared King’s concern over humankind’s very fate.” The media failed to highlight “the Carmichael who believed in democracy’s powers to heal the South’s racial wounds [and] remained permanently scarred by the little-cited murder of his friend Jonathan Daniels, a white organizer gunned down in Lowndes County in 1965.”

In the chapter “Stokely Carmichael and America in the 1960s,” Joseph compensates for mediocre media coverage as well as historical inaccuracies that too often derive from prejudice and fear. Joseph’s elegant and substantive penetration of Carmichael’s family life, his dedication to democratic ideals, his skilled work as a local organizer, the international component of his activism, and his decision to change his name to Kwame Toure make the man too often reduced to half-truths whole.

Joseph also moves beyond two-dimensional poster-sized images of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz in the chapter “Malcolm X, Harlem, and American Democracy.” Joseph emphasizes the reasons for Malcolm’s effectiveness, particularly his work as a community organizer. This author also reveals Malcolm’s fascinating relationships with writers from John Henrik Clarke to James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry to Maya Angelou, Albert Cleage to Rosa Guy. In addition, Joseph documents the important international influence of Malcolm X on events like the Afro-Asian Conference in Indonesia and the New York visit of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, which, Joseph asserts, “positioned Harlem at the center of Cold War intrigue.”

Few schoolchildren in this country grasp the impact Malcolm had on international politics, but Dark Days, Bright Nights provides a perspective on the Cold War connection between the liberation of Africa and the liberation of African Americans that is far more accurate than textbook accounts of this pivotal moment in world history. Joseph helps restore “the contours of [Malcolm’s] domestic and global activism.”

Here at home, “Malcolm’s political, cultural, and intellectual leadership transformed postwar America. As an activist, intellectual, organizer, and icon, he sought to reimagine the very meaning of American democracy.” This force of Malcolm’s imagination has powered African American leadership through the decades. Dark Days, Bright Nights traces Black Power activism through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to lay a pathway to the inauguration of the first Black president on January 20, 2009.

About Joseph’s work Komozi Woodard, Professor of History at Sarah Lawrence College, says, “Peniel Joseph is one of the young lions in the field of Black Power Studies who have the firm understanding of American history required to map the contours of the Black Power politics that links Amiri Baraka’s organizing of the Gary Convention and Jesse Jackson’s leadership of the Rainbow Coalition to the rise of the mass political movement that propelled Barack Obama into the White House. Thus, Peniel Joseph outlines the complicated way that the independent thrusts of Black Power led African Americans into inter racial coalitions in the Democratic Party. This is American history at its best!”

Because too few know or fully understand the Black Power Era, it is also American history that we – all Americans – need. About Malcolm X, Joseph bemoans the sad reality that, “There is still no definitive biography of this important historic figure, and scholars too often rely on his speeches as a means to explain his impact rather than actively seeking to reconstruct the breadth and depth of his political activism.” Perhaps this at least partly answers the question historian Jelani Cobb has asked: why no one in the Ivory Tower saw Barack Obama coming.

“It has been a source of mild frustration that so few academics have even dwelled on this question,” Cobb says, “preferring to launch into assessments of what Obama ‘means’ or how his election ‘fits’ into history. But those assessments can't hold much weight given the fact that somewhere, somehow we should have seen this coming. Or at least seen changes that suggest that it was possible. We were caught looking the other way and I don't think many of us have been humble enough to admit it.”

Author Peniel Joseph calls on all of us to look at Black Power, the very movement that gave rise to the Obama Moment. According to Joseph, two icons, Carmichael and Malcolm, paved the way for today’s icon, Obama.

Ignorance over one of the most important era’s in American history made everyone “miss it” – and so much more. In fact, viewed in the context of Black Power and through the 20/20 hindsight Joseph employs to peer into the mid-20th century, Obama’s rise isn’t quite so startling after all.