Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

A gripping narrative that brings to life a legendary moment in American history: the birth life and death of the Black Power movement With the rallying cry of "Black Power!" in 1966 a group of black activists including Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton turned their backs on Martin Luther Kings pacifism and building on Malcolm Xs legacy pioneered a radical new approach to the fight for equality. Waiting Til the Midnight Hour is a history of the Black Power movement that storied group of men and women who would become American icons of the struggle for racial equality. Peniel E. Joseph traces the history of the men and women of the movement--many of them famous or infamous others forgotten. Waiting Til the Midnight Hour begins in Harlem in the 1950s where despite the Cold Wars hostile climate black writers artists and activists built a new urban militancy that was the movements earliest incarnation. In a series of character-driven chapters we witness the rise of Black Power groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers and with them on both coasts of the country a fundamental change in the way Americans understood the unfinished business of racial equality and integration. Drawing on original archival research and more than sixty original oral histories this narrative history vividly invokes the way in which Black Power redefined black identity and culture and in the process redrew the landscape of American race relations.