Research Guides: Black History Month: 2023 Theme: Black Resistance

Overview of Black Resistance

2023 - Black Resistance

African Americans have resisted historic and ongoing oppression, in all forms, especially the racial terrorism of lynching, racial pogroms, and police killings since our arrival upon these shores. These efforts have been to advocate for a dignified self-determined life in a just democratic society in the United States and beyond the United States political jurisdiction.

The 1950s and 1970s in the United States was defined by actions such as sit-ins, boycotts, walk outs, strikes by Black people and white allies in the fight for justice against discrimination in all sectors of society from employment to education to housing. Black people have had to consistently push the United States to live up to its ideals of freedom, liberty, and justice for all. Systematic oppression has sought to negate much of the dreams of our griots, like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and our freedom fighters, like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer fought to realize.

Black people have sought ways to nurture and protect Black lives, and for autonomy of their physical and intellectual bodies through armed resistance, voluntary emigration, nonviolence, education, literature, sports, media, and legislation/politics. Black led institutions and affiliations have lobbied, litigated, legislated, protested, and achieved success.

Adapted from: Association for the Study of African American Life and History. 2023. https://asalh.org/black-history-themes/

Glimpses in Time: Resistance and Rebellion

Assassination of George Jackson - August 21, 1971 On August 21, 1971, George Jackson, an abolitionist, author, and prisoners’ rights movement leader, was assassinated by guards during a rebellion at San Quentin State Prison. At the time of his murder, Jackson had served 10 years of a one-year to life sentence for stealing $70 from a gas station. Seven and a half of those 10 years served were spent in solitary confinement. In 1970, while imprisoned, George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Cutchette were charged with the murder of Prison Guard, John Mills. The three became known as the “Soledad Brothers.” The same year, George Jackson published his prison letters in the book Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson.
Assata Shakur (Former Black Panther member) Former Black Panther Assata Shakur was a target of the FBI’s deliberate attempts to criminalize political dissent and intimidate activists. In the 1970s, the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO surveillance program targeted and killed leaders of the Black Liberation Movement using tactics later investigated by Congress and found to be illegal. As recently as 2013, the FBI still included Assata on its Ten Most Wanted list.
Ferguson Uprising - August 9, 2014 On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The collective grief and outrage of yet another Black life taken by state-sanctioned violence incited a community-led uprising that lasted over 300 days and inspired nationwide protests as well as the formation of the Movement for Black Lives, including legal support infrastructure. While the St. Louis County Prosecutor recently announced he would not charge the police officer who murdered Mike Brown, the legacy of the Ferguson uprising is felt today as communities across the globe rise up in defense of Black Lives. Mike Brown Forever.
Watts Rebellion - August 11, 1965 On August 11, 1965, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles rose up in rebellion in response to police brutality against a Black man during a traffic stop. Mounting instances of police brutality, housing discrimination, and failing school systems served as the kindling for a five-day-long rebellion. Following the uprising, and despite the findings of a gubernatorial commission, city and state officials failed to improve the social and economic conditions in the Watts neighborhood.

Adapted from: Black August - A Celebration of Freedom Fighters Past and Present. 2021. https://ccrjustice.org/black-august#weektwo

"Now Tulsa Does Care”: A White Tulsan’s Perspective on the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 In the years following World War I, devastating race riots erupted across the U.S. The 1921 Tulsa race riot, a 24-hour rampage by white Tulsans, was one of the most vicious and intense race riots in American history before or since. Between 75 to 250 people were killed and more than 1,000 black homes and businesses were destroyed. In this article, Amy Comstock, personal secretary to the editor of the Tulsa Tribune, attempted to shield Tulsa’s white citizenry from criticism and fix blame for the riot on an ostensibly impoverished and licentious black community. From: History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web
A Black Candidate Runs on Civil Rights in 1940s New York A poster distributed in support of Benjamin A. Davis’s 1945 campaign for a seat on the New York City Council. A lawyer and communist who was first elected to City Council to represent Harlem in 1943, Davis was a fierce advocate of fair employment, fair housing, and an end to police brutality. From: HERB: Social History for Every Classroom
Black Students Union and Black Organizations Demonstration Against Genocide and Racism This flyer from 1976 advertises a protest, sponsored by the Black Students Union and other Black student organizations, against “genocide and racism in the city’s university.” The protest, held at the United Nations Plaza in Manhattan on Paul Robeson’s birthday, was in response to austerity measures that severely cut funding to vital city services and CUNY, and overwhelmingly targeted working-class class communities of color. From: CUNY Digital History Archive
Boston Abolitionists Warn Slave Catchers (1850) In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which required police officers everywhere in the country to capture escaped slaves and return them to their owners. Although anyone who was caught helping escaped slaves could be arrested and face large fines, abolitionists resisted the law and continued to support the actions of enslaved people seeking freedom.
Rosa Parks Takes a Stand Against Segregation Rosa Parks gained international fame in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat in the "whites-only" section on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks, an employee of the Montgomery Fair department store and secretary for the NAACP, later said, "It was just time... there was opportunity for me to take a stand to express the way I felt about being treated in that manner." This record from the Montgomery Police Department details Parks' arrest and fingerprinting. Although not the first to challenge segregation laws on buses and elsewhere, Parks' act of civil disobedience launched the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott, the event which catapulted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. into fame and sparked the modern Civil Rights Movement.
“Let Us Reason Together”: W. E. B. Du Bois Defends Black Resistance Thousands of southern blacks and returning black soldiers moved north after World War I, looking for good jobs, respect, and security. The Great Migration prompted a series of urban race riots; it also nurtured the era of the “New Negro,” a time when cultural expression and black self-help organizations proliferated. The Crisis, the national magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), offered one of the earliest and most powerful endorsements of the “New Negro.” In an editorial following a 1919 riot in Chicago, Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois advocated black self-defense and armed resistance. From: History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web
“Speak, Garvey, Speak!” A Follower Recalls a Garvey Rally The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, a brilliant orator and black nationalist leader, turned his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) into the most important black organization in the United States in the early 1920s. Garvey’s speeches drew huge audiences, and stories of his stubborn resistance in the face of white hostility proliferated among his supporters. In an oral history interview, devotee Audley Moore remembered that Garvey’s defiant behavior at a rally in New Orleans caused “the [white] police [to] file out . . . like little puppy dogs with their tails behind them.” She proudly recalled the crowd intimidating the police by raising their guns and chanting “speak, Garvey, speak.” From: History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web
“We Must Destroy the Capitalistic System Which Enslaves Us”: Stokely Carmichael Advocates Black Revolution In June 1966, Stokely Carmichael first voiced the slogan “Black Power” during a march in Mississippi. He later explained that the slogan was “a call for black people in this country to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.” Carmichael’s rhetoric, influenced by Malcolm X, revealed a growing divide in the civil rights movement between those who encouraged interracial collaboration and those who advocated black separatism. This testimony before a Senate subcommittee investigating internal security includes an interview Carmichael recorded during a visit to Cuba in 1967. Although he advocated an international struggle to end capitalism, Carmichael later declared Communism is “not an ideology suited for black people.” From: History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web

Adapted from: Historicizing Black Resistance in the US. https://ashp.cuny.edu/historicizing-black-resistance-us

Teaching and Reading Materials

Black Lives Matter: A Short Reader on Police, Protests, Racism, and Riots A collection of excerpted writings by radical Black activists from Reconstruction to the present, produced by CUNY Struggle, a collective of students and teachers affiliated with the City University of New York.
A History of Racial Injustice This daily calendar, put out by the Equal Justice Initiative, provides a set of tools for learning more about people and events in American history that are critically important but not well known.
Online Resources for Learning Civil Rights History A list of resources to explore and expand your understanding of the American Civil Rights Movement as part of a larger struggle for human rights and racial equality.
Reading Towards Abolition: A Reading List on Policing, Rebellion, and the Criminalization of Blackness The co-editors at the Abusable Past have compiled this list to provide adult readers with quick access to collected resources for teaching, learning, and acting in the wake of the most recent wave of police killings in U.S. cities.
The Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List A wide-ranging list of books, suitable for children, young adults, and adult readers and including fiction, nonfiction, classic texts, and more recent titles.
Teaching in an Uprising: Readings on Race and Democracy – AAIHS This extensive reading list and syllabus for adult readers was compiled by Trish Kahle, a Postdoctoral Social Sciences Teaching Fellow in the Department of History and the College at the University of Chicago, and published on the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society.