Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. By Peniel E. Joseph. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, c. 2006. Pp. [xvi], 399. Paper, $17.00, ISBN 978-0-8050-8335-4; cloth, $27.50, ISBN 978-0-8050-7539-7.)

Peniel E. Joseph's history of mid-twentieth-century black radical personalities, ideologies, and organizing is a tour de force, sweeping from the grass roots of the rural South through the blazing cities of the 1960s' "long hot summers" to the west coast of Africa and beyond. Beginning with the roots of twentieth-century black radicalism in me "New Negro" generation's panAfricanist pride, labor straggles, and anticolonialism, Joseph reveals the blueprint for the construction of what he calls "an unprecedented revolutionary politics" that arose among antiracist activists of both the North and the South (p. 8). Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America shows how two generations of ideologues and activists built on dieir parents' involvement in interwar and postwar radical traditions to form international alliances with oppressed people of color, to challenge the efficacy...