The Defeat of Black Power: A Critical Book Review that Reflects on the Meaning of the National Black Political Convention of 1972
When seeking to educate our people in politics, concerned with liberation or historical defeat, we must clarify that the search for Black unity while emotionally moving on one level, is often based on strategies that subordinate everyday Black people to agendas that serve a Black elite. The ideological claims of many activists, what they appear to believe or stand for, and the values that seem to clash, can confuse the matter.
Leonard N. Moore’s The Defeat of Black Power: Civil Rights and the National Black Political Convention of 1972 takes an incisive look at the National Black Political Convention (NBPC) that occurred in Gary, IN. The book chronicles how during the weekend of March 10–12, 1972, over 8,000 Black people, from different political perspectives, made the trek from various corners of the United States to convene to craft a national Black political agenda in the lead up to the 1972 presidential election. The book emphasizes the existence of two primary political factions represented at the NBPC, the Black political class, in its nascent stage, closely aligned with civil rights organizations, and Black Nationalists, many of whom had long held the belief that Black people’s survival depended on their pursuit of Black self-determination through establishing a separate Black nation within the United States. The author depicts these two factions from within Black America as vying for the legitimacy to speak for and represent the interests of everyday Black people.
Could ordinary Black people not speak for themselves in 1972? And why set a Black agenda leading up to conventional electoral politics in a country that many accepted was oppressive? Did Black autonomy mean separate values and institution-building in contrast to white official society or not?
The book’s title, The Defeat of Black Power, speaks volumes in that it highlights that the author’s conception of Black power is rooted in elite representative government, as compared to power wielded by the common people through direct self-government. A question that readers of Moore’s work might ponder is can there be Black power without power to the common people?
To Moore’s credit, he alludes to, at various points in the book, some Black people’s foresight that those involved in the organizing of the NBPC were seeking to sell Black people out to the Democratic Party and had no interest in exposing and upending the status quo. These same voices critiqued the undemocratic way in which the leadership and agendas of the conference were chosen. Unfortunately, the book does not center this independent political thought.
Through painstaking research, Moore goes to great depths to illustrate the political context in which the NBPC took place, the organizers’ purpose for the gathering, the various meetings and strategy sessions leading up to the convention, and the creative conflicts of the various groups and personalities involved in executing what some of the participants viewed, at the time, as one of the greatest Black political gatherings of the 20th century. When Black people gather in large numbers to have a conference is this a historical accomplishment in and of itself? Perhaps it is more precise to say that the movement for the conference, a social motion of many small local planning meetings, should be remembered for its significance. This is a result that ordinary people emerging from their workplaces and neighborhoods more often have a chance to be heard and learn some things before the authority of conveners of the larger gathering overtakes them. And overtake and repress the voices of those from among the Black multitudes the conveners did. One example of this documented by Moore was when Diggs abruptly closed the nomination process for permanent chairpersons of the NBPC after he, Baraka, and Hatcher had been nominated as permanent chairpersons. Attendees vigorously objected to the repression of their voices, and many threatened to pull their support from the convention causing Baraka to work overtime doing damage control. Even after damage control, ordinary people’s voices went unacknowledged and were papered over by Baraka’s talk of “unity without uniformity”.
Some might argue that the numerous conference attendees who arrived in Gary were allowed to participate like everyone else. The distinction between participation and direct democracy is an all-important distinction for those assessing the NBPC’s democratic quality and for contemporary political actors wishing to make political interventions in the 21st century. Democracy means majority rule. Participation often serves as a pacifier placed into the mouths of ordinary people after they raise critiques about not having enough involvement in the decisions made by politicians who rule above society. Activists for hierarchical government who have attached themselves to a “progressive” regime often run interference for rulers by introducing participatory democracy models as remedy to address the problem of ordinary people not holding the reins of society. Despite politicians’ and activists’ attempts to bewilder ordinary people by passing off participatory democracy as direct democracy, it must be understood that participation is not direct democracy where ordinary people govern by setting the agenda, putting forth independent proposals of their own, and how determinations made by commoners will be carried out. Despite many pronouncements by the conveners of the NBPC about everyone participating, the minority made up of professional politicians, those a part of civil rights officialdom, and those recognized as charismatic Black nationalist were those who held sway with regard to decision making at the NBPC, not the multitudes of commoners who made the trek to Gary under great adversity.
Despite the conveners’ and participants’ diligent work to come up with a political agenda that spoke to where they felt Black people were within the political landscape in 1972, less than three months after the gathering, the Black unity that had been projected leading up to and during the conference, had disintegrated into discord due to many individuals’ desire to secure themselves a place within the status quo of propertied individualism and enter into society’s top-down rules in ever-changing times.
The two major conveners that the book depicts as Black political forces in opposition to one another were Charles Diggs and Amiri Baraka. Diggs was chairman of the newly minted Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and Michigan’s first Black Congressman. Amiri Baraka was a Black Nationalist based in Newark, New Jersey who had been persistently calling for a Black Political Convention at Nationalist gatherings he convened through a Black Nationalist organization he founded known as the Congress for African People (CAP). In 1971–72, Baraka was, and many believed, the leading voice in the Black Nationalist movement. Where critical historians like John Henrik Clarke acknowledge this, it doesn’t mean that Clarke and others believe Baraka led and strategized as he should have.
In 1970, Baraka had been a driving force behind the election of Newark, New Jersey’s first Black mayor Kenneth Gibson. Baraka and other Black Nationalist oriented activists formed the Committee for a Unified Newark (CFUN) that was pivotal in getting out the vote for Gibson. This is a crucial point we should not misunderstand. For before Baraka went through various ideological transformations highlighting his concern for socialism and anti-imperialism, the fact was he was invested in the election of capitalist politicians in his home city and across the United States. He never ceased to be so and was later among the Black “radicals” who promoted the election of Emperor Barack Obama.
In 1972, Baraka’s leadership within the Black Nationalist movement might’ve only been able to be eclipsed by Maulana Karenga (FAKA Ron Karenga). Karenga was a cultural nationalist, leader of the US Organization (“us” in contrast to “them” — the whites), and founder of the Kwanzaa holiday, and the principles that undergird it known in Swahili as the Nguzo Saba, or Seven Principles. Karenga’s US took part in electoral coalitions that brought to power Los Angeles’s first Black mayor, Tom Bradley, a former police officer.
We have to must be aware that by 1972, the decline of the militancy of the Black Panther Party and the demise of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, left the Black Power movement without its sharpest anti-capitalist currents. They increasingly took part in electoral politics in Oakland and Detroit. Moore illustrated this when he documented Bobby Seale’s, one of the founders and chairman of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, appearance at the NBPC where he stated, “[I]f you are participating in changing the system in any way, you are a revolutionary too.” Seale was documented as telling the conference attendees that he would not refer to any of Gary’s Black police officers as pigs and would only refer to them as his “brothers” because they had treated him so well individually. Following his appearance at the NBPC, Seale would run for mayor of Oakland in 1973 while still serving as chairman of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Though aspects of the Pan African movement, which Baraka participated, increasingly looked to the politics of the African continent to express an anti-imperialism, such activists also engaged electoral politics in Washington, DC and were part of the Marion Barry administration. Alert to this emerging broader context, let us return to Moore’s narrative.
Richard Hatcher, elected mayor of Gary, Indiana in 1967–1968, rode the wave of the zeitgeist of Black Power into office, was the third convener and host of the NBPC. Hatcher is described by the author as serving as an intermediary of sorts between Black elected officials and civil rights leaders, and Black Nationalists who the author suggests had ideological and strategic differences about the road map forward for Black America. Hatcher was one of the first of a handful of Black mayors elected in urban cities that had significant Black electorates after what many would consider the height of the Black Power Movement in 1968. The other newly elected mayors, who were also involved in the organizational efforts and the NBPC itself were Detroit’s Coleman Young (elected mayor in 1973) and Newark’s Kenneth Gibson. While many viewed these mayors’ elections as the ascension of Black people to power in these urban centers, they were not. Though these mayor’s political machines projected a new moral authority,; the most insightful Black radical thinkers never took this claim seriously.
There were several Black urban rebellions in the United States between 1967–68 in cities like Newark, NJ; Detroit, MI; Baltimore, MD; Chicago, IL; Washington, D.C.; Kansas City, MO; and Milwaukee, WI among others. By the late 1960s, Black power and self-defense had supplanted civil rights and non-violent protest as the preferred perspective among many Black commoners. It was the Black multitudes (working class, unemployed, and the street force) who burned private and public property, overturned police cars, and left shattered glass in their wake in 1967–68.
The election of the first wave of Black mayors between 1967–1975 was in direct response to the self-directed liberating activities of ordinary Black people who were not a part of Civil Rights organizations, and in most cases, not even a part of organizations spawned during the Black Power period (1965–1975). These mayor’s elections were a part of the State’s (particularly the left block of capital) efforts to ensure that the social upheaval of the late 1960’s did not turn into social revolution by overturning the entire system and having ordinary people establish their own self-government.
Ordinary Black people were in revolt against the reforms of the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s as best represented by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For the most insightful among the dispossessed, they were seen as ‘too little, too late’, and designed to project and integrate a certain class of Black people into the mainstream of American life. The grassroots were also revolting against the hellish conditions of poverty, police brutality and degradation that many of them were forced to suffer in urban centers in the North and Midwest. 60 Sixty years into post-Civil Rights and Black Power America we see that no matter how many pieces of civil rights legislation or other policy initiatives that rulers pass in the name of reconciling ordinary people with their abusers, there will always be a large swath of not only Black commoners, but also white commoners, who will be locked out of the mainstream of society. This doesn’t mean the terms of order of official society are valid; opportunity to be a propertied individualist and manager of servile lives is not legitimate.
Afterall, civil rights legislation aimed at “empowering” Black people has been passed since 1866. A nation-state is a hierarchy of social classes. This means that a nation-state and by extension, a city-state will always have many people at the bottom rungs of society being degraded and exploited. These Black mayors were ushered in as counter-revolutionary forces to reconcile ordinary Black people with the State and capital at a time when rulers and the guard dogs of capital, the police, were running scared.
I know that some people will say that many Black people were involved in the election of the first wave of Black mayors. This cannot be denied. However, the people who got out the vote and were highly involved in this election were already in hot pursuit of the American dream promised by civil rights. Most of those involved with these elections fell into one of three categories that may have overlapped with one another in some instances. They were a part of the Black middle/professional class. They aspired to become a part of the Black middle/professional class and lived vicariously through the rise of Black firsts. Lastly, they were not politically astute to foresee the way the system worked and how the mode of rule was changing from the white racial state to multicultural America, and the role that both Black politicians and Black activists who operated inside and outside of the Democratic Party would play in this transition. To this very day, most do not grasp the relationship of the so-called Black United Front to the Democratic Party and the imperial super-rich. Moore’s book does not clarify this.
Many people believe that civil rights were primarily about fighting against discrimination and segregation. While this is partially true, we must ask ourselves to what end was this fight against racial discrimination and segregation of public accommodations projected? The dismantling of dejure segregation, when it was not a necessary direct action, anti-fascist fight, could was a necessary cover to obscure what civil rights was about.
Civil rights were, and are, about the professional and middle classes of Black people being integrated into propertied individualism, and certain Blacks ability to enter into the established rules of hierarchy and domination. This was and is all a part of the United States’ projection of how it is exceptional. As the U.S. conquers, it claims it is a benevolent empire or not an empire at all, while bragging on its historical progress as represented by some Blacks personal advancement.
Black history, as with all history, is best used as a compass to know where one is in the present and is going in the future, and to assist in side-stepping the pitfalls encountered by those before us. Unfortunately, most professional historians today go about recording historical events, dates, and facts in what too many scholars search for, an objective manner, approaching a properly weighed scientific experiment.
History is not merely a series of dates, facts, and events. Those dates and events must have life breathed into them through a philosophy of history that uncovers the purpose and motivations of historical actors so that such histories can be useful for individuals seeking to make political interventions in the future and to forecast the next development in radical political thought. Otherwise, history is subordinated to statesmen and their policies. This is, at least in part, why many claim that history repeats itself. Every politician above society doesn’t come from the same party, or have the same personality and policies. But every freedom movement must historically fail if those activists taking part, and those historians writing about it, do not see everyday people as the chief actors.
Does history really repeat itself? Or does it appear to be the case because certain historical narratives, while documented immaculately ,their meanings are not made clear, resulting in those who are sincere about making radical political interventions continue uing a vicious cycle. Necessary lessons of history cannot be made clear, absent a philosophy of history that centers ordinary people as primary actors and not mere stage props to charismatic leaders such as elected officials or others seeking power and influence for themselves in the form of patronage politics and elite brokerage. This is the major problem with the author’s historical take on the NBPC.
The author centers charismatic personalities and rulers holding power in electoral office. Despite the author’s attempt to distinguish between the political ideologies of Black integrationists (Black elected officials and civil rights leaders) and Black power advocates (Black nationalists), at the end of the day the only difference between the two factions attempting to be contrasted is in style, not substance. In the early 1970s, it would surely be difficult for many to recognize that both factions, that the author aimed to contrast with one another, substantially had the same goal and motivation-power for themselves and their relatively small group of cronies above society. It is now clear, looking back on how the NBPC was organized and executed, that the charismatic, elected officials, civil rights leaders, and Black nationalists centered in Moore’s book did not believe that ordinary Black people could govern themselves. For both sides, ordinary Black people were props to establish their legitimacy with White America and steppingstones to power and the elite brokerage and ethnic patronage that would become evident in the way that Black politicians governed. It was no different from business as usual. It was the status quo with a Black aesthetic. That continues to be the case in the 21st century.
In 2026, there are over 600 Black mayors of cities in the United States. This is more profound when we consider Black people rarely live in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, or Vermont. Many of these mayors rule in in the former strongholds of racism, segregation, and lynch law in the American south in cities such as Birmingham, AL; Montgomery, AL; New Orleans, LA; Jackson, MS; Newark, NJ (where Baraka’s son, Ras, is currently mayor) and Atlanta, GA, among a host of others. Many of these cities boast a Black police chief or some other social identities deemed inherently progressive (women, LGBTQAI+) at the helm of the respective mayor’s police states. There are 70 African Americans in Congress with 65 in the U.S. House of Representatives and 5 in the U.S. Senate.
In 1972, there were a handful of Black mayors, 13 Black people elected to Congress, and the number of Black heads of law enforcement agencies were almost exclusively relegated to locales in the south that had overwhelmingly majority Black populations. There appears to be a correlation between the increase of Black suffering and the increase of the number of Black elected officials ushered into office — a racial disparity, an unequal outcome, nobody likes to talk about. This is not to suggest corruption[MT2] [AM3] above society which is embarrassing the race. This requires accepting the Black elite represent the political power of everyday Black people. A Black radical democratic perspective does not accept that.
Could the reason for this be that these individuals represent the interests of capital and they are on the side of the permanent slaughter? The Black political class’s relationship to the larger Black community is totalitarian in nature in that Black politicians claim to speak for and represent the empowerment of ordinary Black people while they continue to suffer exploitation and degradation most efficiently administered by these Black rulers. Black people are forced to organize impending confrontations with those who share their name, image, and likeness. That This is difficult to do. It must confront a paralysis of instincts that is total until the next leap is made.
As in Gary in 1972, there are still activists for the government today who collaborate with the Black political class in the name of fighting racism in a Black United Front with Black politicians while claiming to be fighting for “the people” while they stuff their pockets with money from the white rich who have bought and paid for those same Black politicians. They yelp like rat dogs about white privilege while they never find a white billionaire’s money they won’t take. Looking back at the NBPC from 2026 one thing is clear. There can be no Black power without power to the common people. Yet, why does the image and identity of Black power persist if it was in fact defeated long ago? It is the most advanced veil of the empire of capital and the police state today. And if Black people largely agree with white racists and imperialists on the terms of order and power then the beauty of Black people, separate from the fashions and silhouettes we prefer, is overstated.
This post was syndicated from Stories by Adofo Minka on Medium
