Summary: William Ware In The Banner

Introduction
On a hot summer day in August 1999, Nashville police officers arrested William Ware on the basis of state sedition charges that two white citizens had brought against him. Night judge Draper? swore out the warrant against Ware after the two citizens, who also happened to be lawyers, had consulted with each other after. Both had seemingly taken issue with a statement that Ware had allegedly made during a visit to the city’s controversial Liberation School: “black people should try to achieve political, social, and economic power by any means necessary, including violence.” The basis for the sedition charges that the unequal pair of lawyers filed seemed to be taken right out of the coverage of the Ranner, the city’s evening newspaper

In his later life, Ware showed up in court several times. But this time not as defendant, but as expert witness on behalf of black musicians and as party in a suit aimed to get religious shrines and other sacred objects returned to his congregation. Different from the more notorious black power advocates like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, Ware’s life trajectory has received little attention. The encounter in Nashville was the only one in which he stood in the limelight, at least as far as the Banner was concerned. Receiving only limited attention from the nation’s most popular newspapers, Ware arrest in Nassau coincided with a wave of urban unrests unheard of in the nation’s history. Moreover, it happened during a time of consolidation, when Southern local and state governments began to cooperate with federal police agencies to “contain” the increasingly unruly masses of poor people in the nation’s urban centers. In addition, different from the two other black power proponents, whose audacious rhetoric and later life stories squarely fit into a historical narrative that long portrayed the black power movement and its most prominent protagonists as at best mentally unstable at worst as outright criminal, and responsible for both the decline of whites’ support for blacks’ civil rights and that of the nation’s cities, Ware’s later life looks, at least at the first glance, suspiciously ordinary (for the sake of a better word). It has the potential to demonstrate the more nuanced and less easily detectable reverberations of a search for black empowerment that for many, including Ware, was also a struggle to define a positive identity during a time that many cultural, social, and economic traditions of Africans or African-descendants were deemed utterly backward, if not outright