We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era (African American Studies)

About this book

This comprehensive study of African American politics since the civil rights era concludes that the black movement has been co-opted marginalized and almost wholly incorporated into mainstream institutions. CHOICE 1997 Outstanding Academic Books This is the first comprehensive study of African American politics from the end of the 1960s civil rights era to the present. Not an optimistic book it concludes that the black movement has been almost wholly encapsulated into mainstream institutions co-opted and marginalized. As a result the author argues African American leadership has become largely irrelevant in the development of organizations strategies and programs that would address the multifaceted problems of race in the post-civil rights era. Meanwhile the core black community has become increasingly segregated and its society economy culture and institutions of governance and uplift have decayed. In exhaustive detail Smith traces this sad state of affairs to certain internal attributes of African American political culture and institutional processes and to the structure of American politics and its economic and cultural underpinnings. Sure to be controversial this book challenges both liberal and conservative notions of the black political struggle in the United States. It will serve as a major reference for academic study and a point of departure for political activists.