Title: Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism
Author: Nishani Frazier
Year of Publication: 2017
Thesis:
Demonstrates how CORE was influenced by and influenced the Black Power Movement, highlighting its efforts to desegregate in the 40s, as well as its model of shared community ownership (more nuanced than the Nixon administration's pivoting of Black Power as Black Capitalism).
Time: 1940s-1970s
Geography: Cleveland, OH
Organization:
Preface: The Whiz behind the Curtain
- Describes the author's reluctance to make plain her use of oral history and her own family's history in her work. The confusion was around the way oral history (particularly Black oral history) needs to be explained and justified and can quickly become mired in questions of objectivity.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Things like That Happen in History
- Not an even balance between means/ends
- Roy Innis doesn't encompass BP shift
I. "...highlights early variances in CORE philosophy before it reached a full expression of black power in the mid-1960s" (xxxiii)
1. How CORE Began
- 1942-1945
- origins, nuances, dissonance with FOR (Fellowship of Reconciliation)
- James Farmer - prodigy student @ Howard/Columbia, introduced to FOR (started in 1914 by Christian pacifists. Bayard Rustin also a member.
- See: "Brotherhood Mobilization Plan"
- See: Jack Spratt coffeehouse sit-in - (Black people reluctant to join with nonviolent protest as centerpiece)
- MOWM features black leadership vs. CORE
- Depression boosts Black self-help in Cleveland
- Also attempts to desegregate the city. See hot dog incident, Euclid beach, etc.
2. Negroes Will Not Be Pacifists
- 1946-1953
- Examines non-conformists w/in CORE "related to self-defense, black nationalist philosophy, and...protest etiquette." (xxxiii)
<--demonstrates a longer tradition of militancy (xxxiii)
3. An Eager Band
- 1962-1964
- shift to black leaders/revival of Cleveland CORE (CORE was mostly white run early on)
4. Lonely Are the Brave
- 1964
- School desegregation
<--local activists can "can influence chapter developments and push it beyond the boundaries set by national office." (xxxiv)
II. Black Power Era (xxxiv)
- CORE moves from local to national & serves as a site of national policy making (xxxiv)
5. New Directions to Black Power
- 1962-1965
- local politics leaning more strongly toward Black Power (xxxiv)
<---"Chapter 5 represents the fluid dynamics among local, regional, and national events that move all of COE ever closer to black power." (xxxiv)
6. Breaking the Noose
- 1965-1966
- White leadership declines
- Target City Projects (ballot / bullet to elect Carl Stokes)
- Carl Stokes - 1967 - "first black mayor of a major urban city" (xxxiv)
7. Harambee City
8. A Nation under Our Feet
- "Community Self Determination Bill" - goal to establish a "federally backed community development corporation." (xxxiv)
9. Until
Notes
Index
Type:
Methods: Chronological + thematic
Sources: Uses familiial & oral histories
Historiography:
George Houser - Erasing the Color Line (1951)
James Peck - Cracking the Color Line (1961)
James Farmer - Freedom When? (1965)
Meier & Rudwick - CORE (1973)
James Farmer - Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (1998)
Brian Purnell - Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (2013)
Keywords: black power populism
"Black power populism encapsulated socialist elements of wealth sharing that forced the American economic system to open its doors to more citizens. From 1966 to 1969, a few CORE leaders fashioned and pushed through an economic project which sought to broaden capitalism and turn one black community into an economic force. They choce the city of Cleveland, Ohio, as the site of this experiment, and named the project Harambee, a Swahili word meaning pull together and connoting the idea of self-help. Harambee's placement in Cleveland was a direct outgrowth of the rise of local CORE members into the national office whose critique of capitalism and advocacy of community control paved the way for Harambee's existence. More than any site, Cleveland represented teh best of black power populist efforts to reshape and empower the black community, and the ways in which it did so form the structure of my mother's CORE." (xxxiii)
Themes: "means" vs. "ends" oriented. Former tied to ideology of nonviolence; latter not (xxx-xxxi)
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
"My mother, aunts, and uncles were, in fact, authoritative sources of historical knowledge (not just facst) about CORE's black power period. Why should I not tell 'their' story? How could I not tell their story given their influence in CORE's black power era?" (xv)
"Therein lay the difference between how I understood oral history's import versus other historians including Meier and Rudwick. For me, oral history interviews were more than a compilation of facts, data, and proof. I'd seen how the philosophical transformation of CORE to black power worked its way into my mother and famiy's personal, professional, and political lives--long after the organization's demise. Black power was not a failure. Its lessons lived with them and in them long after their CORE died. To understand their experience, you had to do more than speak to them. You had to hear. You had to know. And through it, I came to appreciate a different CORE." (xvi)
Notes:
The preface is a very useful account with references in defense of oral history and particularly when it comes from family.
Engages with testimonio on p. xvi. - see Walter Ong. See Michael Frisch (shared authority)
Difficult to locate book - not readily in stacks at UO & copy is $40 on Amazon - intro is mostly available there w/pieces of some chapters. aug, 2020)
See Frazier's website here: HARAMBEE CITY
See podcast interview here: Ep. 12: Black Power Vs. Black Capitalism (W/ Nishani Frazier) by The Next System Podcast | Free Listening on SoundCloud
From interview: Centered not in black nationalism but debate comes through requests for gov't supported community-based projects designed to give Black people access to capitalism.
1. CORE failed to institutionalize the economic reforms
2. Couldn't be economically independent from outside sources of funding.
3. DID, however, figure out how to run an entire economic ecosystem
Excellent presentation & features a rich discussion of the gentrification of sound.