Blacks In and Out of the Left: Past Present and Future

Available in 2012

Based on Dawson’s 2009 Du Bois lectures at Harvard University, Blacks In and Out of the Left examines the two most active phases of 20th century of black leftist insurgency: 1917-1940(53) & 1964-1980. The key question going forward for black politics, and specifically radical black politics is “what is to be done,” or “where do we go from here” as Martin Luther King framed the same question in 1967. There are important lessons from both periods, Dawson argues, for rebuilding a progressive black politics. He also critiques various theorists’ narratives of the Black Power Movement that claim that black movements and their “imitators” (according to critics such as Todd Gitlin) were responsible for the fragmentation of the left and more generally progressive politics in the latter third of the twentieth century.