Civil Rights Movement – [سي نجيب]

Adolph Reed, Jr. : Race, Politics, and Culture

Echange entre Adolph Reed, Jr., Timothy W. Luke, Alex Willingham, David Gross, Paul Piccone, Andrew Feenberg, Jennifer Jordan et Joel Kovel paru dans le livre édité par Adolph Reed, Jr., Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s, Westport, Greenwood Press, 1986, p. 245-273

American Democratic Party politician and Senator from New York, Robert F Kennedy (1925-1968) shakes hands with local residents as he visits riot damaged properties and commercial stores in Washington DC in April 1968 following a period of rioting and civil disorder triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King. (Photo by Rolls Press/Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)

Part IV
What’s left ? : An Exchange

REED:
The opening paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire might be applied to radical activism in the 1960s. When the counterculturists and black nationalists proclaimed a revolutionary break with bourgeois culture, they did so in a language that affirmed the mass-marketing culture’s principle of self-definition through commodity consumption. When the New Left sought wholesale theoretical clarity, the principal turns taken — Marxism-Leninism and Pan-Africanism — entailed departure from lived history and initiation of a search for authenticity in the past. In each case the goal of authenticity — ultimately a variety of the quest for selffulfillment — overrode engaged political critique.

Adolph L. Reed, Jr. : The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon

Extrait du livre d’Adolph L. Reed, Jr., The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986, p. 41-60

Reverend Jesse Jackson (left) at the Palais de l’Elysee, at the invitation French President Francois Mitterrand. A translator sits between them. (Photo by THIERRY ORBAN/Sygma via Getty Images)

4
Mythology of the Church in Contemporary Afro-American Politics

Exceptionalist approaches to black politics typically are fed by the mystique of black churchliness and religiosity, which postulates a peculiarly racial basis of participation and representation. According to this view, which assumes the organic leadership model, the church is the elemental unit of political mobilization in the black community. Because its structures are decentralized and operate at the « grass roots, » the black church can be construed as an authentically popular institution. Moreover, because this view also assumes a pandemic black religiosity, the church can be understood to be prior and superior to electoral or otherwise procedural institutions as a source of popular legitimations.