Black Consciousness in the United States

By: Waldo E. Martin

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Black Consciousness in the United States

One of the most important aspects of the Civil Rights (1945–1965) and Black Power (1966–1975) movements, or simply put, the Movement, was the increasing awareness among contemporary African Americans of the centrality of a positive racial identity. Black Consciousness here refers to how and with what consequences individuals of African descent in the United States have defined themselves as a people.

Since the creation of the American nation, and especially since emancipation during the Civil War and Reconstruction years, each generation of blacks have consistently endeavored to build on the struggles of their forbears. Black Consciousness crystallizes this enduring sensibility of struggle—both failure and achievement. Consequently, it includes how they have collectively viewed their history and culture. Black Consciousness also reflects the relationship between Africans in Africa and those spread throughout the African diaspora, in this case African Americans in the United States.

Black eventually succeeded Negro as the major term of self-definition during the Black Power years. In the late 1980s, in the aftermath of a smaller cultural nationalist moment, African American superseded black as a preferred term of self-reference. In the early years of the twenty-first century, black and African American are often used synonymously. Historically, the group, or race, has encompassed both Africans and Africans mixed with other groups, notably Europeans and indigenous Americans. Stretching back to the arrival of the first Africans in America, the ongoing melding of a diversity of African peoples and experiences into a singular group and experience was a profound historical and cultural development. Variously referred to as Negroes, coloreds, and blacks, most Africans in America by the nineteenth century were born in the United States. As a result, their consciousness as a unique people evolved simultaneously with the notion that they, like whites or Caucasians, were not only a race, but inherently American as well. These two allegiances—to the Negro race and the American nation—have decisively shaped Black Consciousness in its various modes.

While it is readily conceded today that there is no scientific or biological basis for the idea of race, the historical and cultural impact of race continues to be widespread and profound. Indeed, in the modern world, race is often seen as a basis for peoplehood or nationhood. The enduring black freedom struggle has exemplified this complicated—at bottom paradoxical—development. Blacks and their allies have fought to create a world where race does not matter. Unfortunately, in spite of their best efforts, race still matters. It continues to frame group consciousness and affect American life in large and small ways.

During the Movement, it was not enough to replace the social, political, and economic structures of Jim Crow with a fully desegregated environment. Attitudes, behaviors, and institutions among all Americans had to reflect and build upon racial equality. Indeed, racial egalitarianism was seen as both interwoven with and fundamental to the Movement in its entirety. Basic to the struggle was the related assumption that true freedom and equality demanded that Negroes feel good about themselves, their culture, and their history.

Among Negroes themselves, the southern, church-based, grassroots social movement between 1945 and 1965 revealed a growing sense of group affiliation and pride. The widespread Negro commitment during World War II (1939–1945) to fight for democracy at home as well as abroad characterized this intensifying group-based spirit. Negro membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the major civil rights organization of the modern era, grew exponentially. Further evidence of the more assertive wartime Negro mentality was the 1941 March on Washington movement, led by A. Philip Randolph. Indeed, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Fair Employment Practices Committee to alleviate racial discrimination in wartime industrial employment to prevent the threatened mass march on the capitol.

The same increasingly assertive Negro mentality thus sustained the modern black freedom struggle, from the principal local campaigns, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) and the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama campaign, to the inspiring leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ella Baker. That very struggle intensified an expanding group-based commitment to a culturally and historically rooted sense of separateness. That sense of Negro nationhood, of cultural uniqueness, of historical distinctiveness, increasingly contributed to a race-based brand of cultural nationalism that emphasized the importance of an affirmative Negro identity. Race pride and a full commitment to the ongoing Negro freedom struggle were absolutely imperative to that evolving identity.

The full spectrum of the historical experiences and cultural development of Negro Americans—from the period of enslavement to the present—had to be critically yet sympathetically comprehended. This resounding and ever-widening emphasis on truthful yet uplifting resolutions to questions of Negro identity, self-concept, and self-esteem abounded. Taking root and flowering in the soil of the revitalized freedom struggle, this growing awareness of the significance of the cultural dimension of that struggle gave added emphasis to the belief that the realization of Negro freedom was as much mental, emotional, and psychological as structural, material, and physical.

Black Power was the historical moment where cultural nationalism assumed unprecedented urgency and impact. Blackness signified the need to create an ever more positive and empowering group identity, thus alleviating the negativity associated with past representations of group identity, Negroness in particular. As revealed in the militant politics of community empowerment of the Oakland-based Black Panther Party and the valiant efforts to create independent black political parties, Black Consciousness was an aggressive escalation of the ongoing black freedom struggle. As reflected in such practices as African styles of dress, African-inflected naming practices, and the creation of Kwanzaa as an African-based alternative to Christmas, Black Consciousness meant acceptance of the Africanness of blacks, another important component of the liberation struggle. As captured in Dr. King's last effort—the Poor People's Campaign—and the growing awareness of economic justice as crucial to racial justice, Black Consciousness mirrored an increasingly challenging radical politics. Black Consciousness thus represented a desire for black self-definition and greater black autonomy over a black nation within a nation, or black communities. According to this perspective, black lives, black institutions, and black spirit necessitated a militant commitment to the interests of the group. Once blacks had achieved power commensurate with an equal and fair stake in the American dream and they were truly respected as a people, a realistic merger of Black Consciousness with American consciousness and Black Power with American Power might be possible. Regardless, the omnipresence of race as a factor in American life at the beginning of the twenty-first century ensures the necessity and viability of Black Consciousness in the foreseeable future.

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