Cedric Johnson

Ending the horrors of police violence requires addressing economic inequality In the wake of the mass protests following the police murder of George Floyd nearly every major consumer brand had proclaimed their commitments to antiracism, often with new ad campaigns to match their tweets. Very little in the way of police reform has been achieved. Still less was achieved around policies that might help the millions of black Americans living at or below the poverty line. Why has anti-racism been such a powerful source of mobilization but such a poor means of building political opposition capable of winning big reforms? This volume revisits a debate that transpired during Black Live Matter’s first wave. Writing against the grain of popular left sentiments, Johnson cautions against a new ethnic politics. Instead, he calls for broad-based left politics as the only viable means for ending the twin crises of racial inequality and police violence. Redistribution, public goods, and multi-ethnic working-class solidarity are the only viable response to the horrors of police violence and mass incarceration. It just so happens that fighting the conditions that make crime and violence inevitable is also the means by which we can build a working-class majority and a more equal and peaceful nation.

Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter

The Panthers Can't Save Us Now

The Black Power movement represented a key turning point in American politics. Disenchanted by the hollow progress of federal desegregation during the 1960s, many black citizens and leaders across the United States demanded meaningful self-determination. The popular movement they created was marked by a vigorous artistic renaissance, militant political action, and fierce ideological debate. Exploring the major political and intellectual currents from the Black Power era to the present, Cedric Johnson reveals how black political life gradually conformed to liberal democratic capitalism and how the movement's most radical aims--the rejection of white aesthetic standards, redefinition of black identity, solidarity with the Third World, and anticapitalist revolution--were gradually eclipsed by more moderate aspirations. Although Black Power activists transformed the face of American government, Johnson contends that the evolution of the movement as a form of ethnic politics restricted the struggle for social justice to the world of formal politics. Johnson offers a compelling and theoretically sophisticated critique of the rhetoric and strategies that emerged in this period. Drawing on extensive archival research, he reinterprets the place of key intellectual figures, such as Harold Cruse and Amiri Baraka, and influential organizations, including the African Liberation Support Committee, the National Black Political Assembly, and the National Black Independent Political Party in postsegregation black politics, while at the same time identifying the contradictions of Black Power radicalism itself. Documenting the historical retreat from radical, democratic struggle, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders ultimately calls for the renewal of popular struggle and class-conscious politics. Cedric Johnson is assistant professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Black Power and the Making of African American Politics

Revolutionaries to Race Leaders

A critical collection on the politics of disaster and reconstruction in New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans

The Neoliberal Deluge

Contemporary policing reflects the turn from welfare to domestic warfare as the chief means of regulating the excluded and oppressed The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way we think about race and policing. Why did it achieve so little in the way of substantive reforms? After Black Lives Matter argues that the failure to leave an institutional residue was not simply due to the mercurial and reactive character of the protests. Rather, the core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial injustice that underpins the crisis of policing: socio-economic inequality. For Johnson, the anti-capitalist and downwardly redistributive politics expressed by different Black Lives Matter elements has too often been drowned out in the flood of black wealth creation, fetishism of Jim Crow black entrepreneurship, corporate diversity initiatives, and a quixotic reparations demand. None of these political tendencies addresses the fundamental problem underlying mass incarceration. That is the turn from welfare to domestic warfare as the chief means of regulating the excluded and oppressed. Johnson sees the way forward in building popular democratic power to advance public works and public goods. Rather than abolishing police, After Black Lives Matter argues for abolishing the conditions of alienation and exploitation contemporary policing exists to manage.

After Black Lives Matter

Robert C. Smith

Robert G. Newby

A compelling intellectual and political study of a leading post–civil rights era African American political theorist and strategist. It is rare that a major leader of a protest movement also becomes an accomplished scholar who provides valuable insight into the movement in which he participated. Yet this was precisely what Ronald W. Walters (1938–2010) did. Born in Wichita, Kansas, the young Walters led the first modern sit-in protest during the summer of 1958, nearly two years before the more famous Greensboro sit-in of 1960. After receiving a doctorate from American University, Walters embarked on an extraordinary career of scholarship and activism. Shaped by the civil rights and black power movements and the African and Caribbean liberation struggles, Walters was a pioneer in the development of black studies and “black science” in political science. A public intellectual, as well as advisor and strategist to African American leaders, Walters founded numerous organizations that shaped the post–civil rights era. A must read for scholars, students, pundits, political leaders, and activists, What Has This Got to Do with the Liberation of Black People? is a major contribution to the historiography of the civil rights and black power movements, African American intellectual history, political science, and black studies. Robert C. Smith is Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University. He is the author of several books, including John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Ethnic Incorporation and Avoidance and Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same, both published by SUNY Press. Cedric Johnson is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics. Robert G. Newby is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at Central Michigan University.

The Impact of Ronald W. Walters on African American Thought and Leadership

What Has This Got to Do with the Liberation of Black People?

A compelling intellectual and political study of a leading postcivil rights era African American political theorist and strategist. It is rare that a major leader of a protest movement also becomes an accomplished scholar who provides valuable insight into the movement in which he participated. Yet this was precisely what Ronald W. Walters (19382010) did. Born in Wichita, Kansas, the young Walters led the first modern sit-in protest during the summer of 1958, nearly two years before the more famous Greensboro sit-in of 1960. After receiving a doctorate from American University, Walters embarked on an extraordinary career of scholarship and activism. Shaped by the civil rights and black power movements and the African and Caribbean liberation struggles, Walters was a pioneer in the development of black studies and black science in political science. A public intellectual, as well as advisor and strategist to African American leaders, Walters founded numerous organizations that shaped the postcivil rights era. A must read for scholars, students, pundits, political leaders, and activists, What Has This Got to Do with the Liberation of Black People? is a major contribution to the historiography of the civil rights and black power movements, African American intellectual history, political science, and black studies.

The Black Power movement represented a key turning point in American politics. Disenchanted by the hollow progress of federal desegregation during the 1960s, many black citizens and leaders across the United States demanded meaningful self-determination. The popular movement they created was marked by a vigorous artistic renaissance, militant political action, and fierce ideological debate. Exploring the major political and intellectual currents from the Black Power era to the present, Cedric Johnson reveals how black political life gradually conformed to liberal democratic capitalism and how the movement’s most radical aims—the rejection of white aesthetic standards, redefinition of black identity, solidarity with the Third World, and anticapitalist revolution—were gradually eclipsed by more moderate aspirations. Although Black Power activists transformed the face of American government, Johnson contends that the evolution of the movement as a form of ethnic politics restricted the struggle for social justice to the world of formal politics. Johnson offers a compelling and theoretically sophisticated critique of the rhetoric and strategies that emerged in this period. Drawing on extensive archival research, he reinterprets the place of key intellectual figures, such as Harold Cruse and Amiri Baraka, and influential organizations, including the African Liberation Support Committee, the National Black Political Assembly, and the National Black Independent Political Party in postsegregation black politics, while at the same time identifying the contradictions of Black Power radicalism itself. Documenting the historical retreat from radical, democratic struggle, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders ultimately calls for the renewal of popular struggle and class-conscious politics. Cedric Johnson is assistant professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Cedric Johnson

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