Professional Affiliation

Organizing Director, Peace Action, and Director of its Peace Voter Fund

Expert Bio

I came to this project somewhat circuitously. My interest in history has always been strongly connected to political engagement. My earliest connection to both politics and history was during the Vietnam War, when I marched first with my parents and then on my own. Now I look back with some wonderment on how the war colored everything then, a politics of everyday life that produced quite a few organic intellectuals not to mention genuine popular curiosity about the roots of U.S. foreign policy. For me, it bred a basic conviction regarding the right of ordinary U.S. citizens to demand foreign policies reflecting their nation's own democratic premises. From the early 1980s on, my focus was on supporting human rights and self-determination in Central America at a time when the region's small republics were the eye of the storm for U.S. diplomacy. I led numerous delegations -- of students and eventually Members of Congress -- to El Salvador. This led to my dissertation research at Rutgers, examining the history of domestic opposition to U.S. interventionism in Latin America from the 1950s onwards. A book resulted: Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (Verso, 1993). Where the Boys Are focused on the years between 1957 and 1961, when a very disparate group of North Americans actively supported Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement. The Cuban rebels seemed to fulfill many quasi-political needs, from the New York Times seeking a liberal revolution in the Third World, to premature black nationalists who saw the power of a revolutionary state to override de facto segregation overnight. In between these two poles, a wide array of young men admired Castro personally. After that book, my interest turned more and more to black politics -- and the stories that had not been told. While the historiography of the civil rights movement is massive and extraordinarily impressive, African-American political life outside of the South is barely documented. The Black Power movement itself can only be studied via memoirs and journalistic treatments. Tracking down leads for a biographical piece on the seminal social critic Harold Cruse, author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), I felt as if a new world of political and artistic ferment was opening up. From that discovery came the impetus to write a new history of black politics in the 20th century, highlighting the search for real black power.

 

Education

B.A. (1983) Columbia University; Ph.D. (1992) Rutgers-New Brunswick

 

Expertise

20th century U.S. politics and social movements

Wilson Center Project

"Black Power in Twentieth Century America"

Project Summary

I propose to write a book examining how African Americans developed organized political power over the course of the 20th century, with particular emphasis on rethinking the character of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, situating it in the larger national and international context of post-1945 politics and culture. Major topics will include:

• the "Black Popular Front" of the 1930s and 1940s;
• the relative ineffectiveness of McCarthyism in the separate world of Black America; and
• the significance of African decolonization to both U.S. government policies and African-American political culture.

Major Publications

• "More Than Just a Politician: Notes Towards a Life and Times of Harold Cruse," in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Revisited: A Thirty-Year Retrospective, James Miller and Jerry G. Watts, eds. (Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 2001)
• "Consensus and Contradiction in Textbook Treatments of the Sixties," Journal of American History, September 1995
• Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (Verso, 1993)