The Need for Black Rage in America

During and a few years after the later part of the Jim Crow Era, a more “violence for violence” type of rage ensued. Figures such as Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, Paul Robeson, and the Black Panther Party became the dominant groups of the Black Power Movement. The black power and civil rights movements of the 1960s were fundamentally working class and poor people’s movements that greatly impacted the Afrikan-American community (Marable, 2000 (1983): 30, 90; ibid, 2007). In 1968, for example, there were over 2.5 million black members of AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) and UAW (International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America). Black workers occupied the most dangerous, lower-paid jobs inside unions (Marable, 2007) and it was for these reasons why they suddenly rise against white employers. They helped decrease the unemployed population in the community, helped organize workers to unionize and fight for fair pay, better working conditions, etc., and increased their political, economic, and social ability. For instance, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters movement was the first Black labor organization to receive charter from the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Among the leadership, like A. Phillip Randolph, also founder, of local civil rights movements by virtue of their organizing experience, constant moving between communities and freedom from economic dependence on local authorities. The Black Power movement also emphasized racial pride and creation of black political and cultural institutions to nurture and promote Black collective issues and advance black values, as opposed to multiculturalism (wha...

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...cks/Afrikan-Americans/Negroes way to take back and redefine their identity in their own terms, to finally realize that they are not inferior, and to demand their rights in their house or shall I say home of America. Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton put it perfectly: “Where there is oppression there is resistance and ‘where oppression grows, resistance grows’” (1967:194). Black rage is but a resistance to the extreme cruelty in all U.S. spheres they have been subject to since the rooting of America. Blacks resisted and they won the battle but the war is not over for racism, marginalization, inequality, and exclusion still exists in institutions today, despite the laws enacted, the aid given, and our current U.S. President being a Black man. Black rage has become not only a self-fulfilling prophecy but a necessary component of the Black American way of life!