About the Author

Prior to his retirement, William L. Van Deburg was the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His previous books include "New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975" and "Black Camelot: African-American Culture Heroes in Their Times, 1960-1980", both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

To Van Deburg, the Black Power movement was not solely a political phenomenon that yielded minuscule gains for African Americans. It was ``essentially cultural,'' a ``collective thrust . . . toward racial pride, strength, and self-definition.'' Along with revolutionaries like the Black Panthers, community control activists and separatists, the movement included cultural nationalists such as Amiri Baraka (who later became a Marxist) and Maulana Ron Karenga. In fostering self-actualization, Black Power, in Van Deburg's telling, employed soul music, urban folktales, paintings, prison writings and comedy. Black novelists, playwrights and poets, rejecting definitions of aesthetic beauty they claimed were specific to whites, crafted ``alternative formulations that were far more relevant to black people,'' contends the author, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin. This vigorous, impassioned study sifts through the cultural legacy of the Black Power movement for a new generation seeking racial equality and identity. Photos. (Oct.)

The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s was an adaptive, broad, cultural movement that advanced African American self-definition and became a lasting influence on the entire American way of life, explains historian Van Deburg. In place of the mass media's portrayal of an extremist fringe of fly-by-night groups sloganeering for dead-end goals, he brilliantly illuminates a central, solid, multidimensional movement with deep historical roots and wide appeal among blacks. It reached out in folkways, language, the literary and performing arts, and religion, he shows. Extending the critical approach of his Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture (Univ. of Wisconsin Pr., 1984), Van Deburg moves to the cutting edge of explaining culture's role in filtering U.S. history as he clarifies Black Power's shape and size and its presence in much that Americans now see and hear daily. Highly recommended for collections on blacks, cultural history, or recent America.-- Thomas J. Davis, Univ. at Buffalo, N.Y.