African-American Ideas

Perhaps more than any other ideology, black radicalism is sensitive to the sociohistorical context. During the slavery period, the radical black perspective advocated the immediate destruction of slavery and the extension of full civil rights to black people. After slavery, as most African-Americans were being incorporated into the semicapitalist plantation economy, things became more complex. Confronting sharecropping, black radicalism required more than the advocacy of black landownership. Circumstances required that black radicals develop a critique of the capitalist system that maintained the plantation economy. Whereas during slavery Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany were radicals, during Reconstruction and the first nadir (1877–1917) Douglass became the quintessential black liberal while Delany descended into conservatism. This hypersensitivity to sociohistorical context derives from the general premises of radicalism: transformation of the fundamental structural and ideological elements of a society. Black radicalism has consisted of philosophies and practices that sought the essential transformation of the system of racial oppression and the social system that institutionalized it.

Peter H. Clark, the first modern black radical, joined the Socialist Party in 1877, during the first nadir. Ironically, Clark's reasons for leaving the socialists probably affected the construction of black radicalism more than his reasons for joining. (Clark left the Socialist Party because it did not confront the specificity of race and racial oppression, preferring to view race as subordinate to class.) The outlines of a distinct black radical perspective, however, did not appear until after World War I, after Hubert H. Harrison (1900–1945), Cyril V. Briggs (1888–1966), and the African Blood Brotherhood (c. 1920s) examined the state of African peoples and the relationship of black and white radicals in the United States. Black radicalism was a unique effort to merge and remake classical Marxist theory and black nationalism into a race-conscious socialist theory. Although Ralph Bunche (1904–1971) and Abram Harris (1899–1963) were radical blacks during the 1930s, unlike W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes (1902–1967), Claudia Jones (1915–1964), and C. L. R. James (1901–1989), their ideas might be too orthodox to be considered foundational for black radicalism. Black radicals, according to Anthony Bogues, are either heretics or prophets.

Heretics, usually highly educated in European-American radicalism, use subjugated knowledge from black experiences to challenge white radical orthodoxies and to rework them into theories that can accommodate black experiences and perspectives. Bogues's prophets come from the realm of religion. They are often undereducated by U.S. standards. They tap subjugated knowledge from sources outside the mainstream academy: the Bible, the Koran, particularly esoteric interpretations of both. In addition to derived religious sources, prophets articulate, in Hobsbawm's terms, an inherent ideology, one drawn from the murkier repositories of African survivals and popular culture. Noble Drew Ali (1866–1929) and the Moorish Science Temple, Elijah Muhammad (1897–1975) and the Nation of Islam, and Prince Asiel Ben Israel and the Original Black Hebrew Israelite Nation represent this type of black radicalism. (Note that, by this author's criterion—opposition to the dominant mode of production—they would not be considered black radicals.)

In more recent times, Huey P. Newton (1942–1989) and the Black Panther Party (1960s), especially their theory of intercommunialism, the Revolutionary Action Movement (late 1960s), and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (late 1960s) have represented the black radical perspective. Since the late twentieth century, the Black Radical Congress has represented this ideological tendency.