This collection of essays, originally published in 1967, came out of a period of sharp transition, willed & accreted. Like all change—some expected, some past your expectations or even recognition. Moving from quantitative changes until, with the weight of the myriad examples of a new paradigm emerging, a qualitative change, i.e., the broad recognition that, in fact, the new thing had arrived. Especially since what I was to name the jazz “Avant-Garde” was being called by many “The New Thing”! My 1961 essay “The Jazz Avant-Garde” tried to identify who I thought comprised such a group and why I believed such a naming accurate. But actually this essay served to divide the book (not chronologically, because I had written it earlier than all of the pieces collected here), the first part dealing with the more known but still very dynamic musicians, the next part on those I identified with “the new thing.” I think Martin Williams was the first to call the music that—while we were in the Five Spot digging Ornette Coleman’s first appearance. (From the text below.)
Jazz as Black Rebellion eBook and Podcast
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The First National Conference on Black Power (also called the First Black Power Conference) was held July 20–23, 1967, in Newark, New Jersey.
It took place days after the Newark Rebellion (July 12–17, 1967), which left 26 people dead and over 1,000 injured. The event was hosted at an Episcopal Church property (Cathedral House / Diocese of Newark) in downtown Newark. Its theme was “The Unity of Black People for the greater good of all.”
More than 1,000 delegates (contemporary reports range from roughly 900–1,100) attended, representing about 286 organizations and institutions from 126 cities across 26 states, plus Bermuda and Nigeria. Dr. Nathaniel (Nathan) Wright Jr., an Episcopal priest and activist, chaired the conference. It built on earlier planning that included a 1966 Black Power Planning Conference linked to Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Notable participants included Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), H. Rap Brown (SNCC), Maulana Karenga (US Organization), Floyd McKissick (CORE), Gloria Richardson, Jesse Jackson, Charles 27X Kenyatta, Ossie Davis, and James Farmer, along with representatives from more traditional civil rights groups and nationalist organizations. Workshops addressed political power, economics, culture, education, welfare, community control, international solidarity (including opposition to the Vietnam War, support for Muhammad Ali’s draft refusal, and ties to Africa), and related topics.
The conference produced more than 80 resolutions emphasizing Black Power in political, economic, and cultural affairs. The central outcome was the Black Power Manifesto, which condemned “neo-colonialist control” of Black populations worldwide, called for a unifying “philosophy of Blackness,” urged community control of institutions such as education and welfare, affirmed self-defense, and called for a national dialogue on the idea of a separate homeland or greater political autonomy for Black people in the U.S. Other proposals (many adopted “in spirit”) included sports and consumer boycotts, increased Black political representation, rejection of certain birth-control programs, and support for Black-controlled institutions. A press conference was disrupted by participants seeking to exclude white media.
The Newark gathering marked a major organizational expression of the Black Power movement (popularized by Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture in 1966). It continued traditions of 19th-century Black conventions and early Pan-African congresses while shifting emphasis from integrationist civil-rights strategies toward self-determination, nationalism, and institution-building. Later Black Power conferences followed in 1968 and 1969; the Newark meeting is widely regarded as the most significant of the era.
This event is frequently referenced in discussions of Amiri Baraka’s work in Newark, the broader Black Power era, and efforts at community control and political organization in the late 1960s.
Photo-story montage of Malcolm X’s life, featuring archival images from his prison years, family moments, public speeches, travels, and activism, set to Keith LeBlanc’s 1984 track “No Sell Out” that samples his voice.
rbg4lif (bka RBGStreetScholar) operates RBG Communiversity, a blog and resource hub dedicated to Black Studies, Pan-African education, and Nationhood topics, regularly posting books, syllabi, videos, and materials on figures like Malcolm X, Amos N. Wilson, and historical resistance movements.
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Supplemental: On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (eBook Preview, 38 pp.)
On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X is a groundbreaking biography written by Louis A. DeCaro Jr. and published by NYU Press in 1996. It stands out as the very first book-length evaluation of Malcolm X’s life focused strictly through a religious lens, reframing a figure who is most commonly analyzed through a purely political or cultural viewpoint.
Here is a structured overview of the book’s core focus, sources, and breakdown:
Core Objectives & Themes
1. Redemption and Spirituality: DeCaro presents Malcolm X as a “man of Allah” driven primarily by personal salvation and religious commitment rather than solely political ambitions.
2. Religious Evolution: The book examines his dual conversions—joining the Nation of Islam (NOI) in prison and later embracing orthodox Sunni Islam after his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca—alongside his childhood roots, his 1959 Africa trip, and his final year of traditional practice.
3. Critical Analysis: It also analyzes The Autobiography of Malcolm X to understand how his life narrative was curated alongside Alex Haley.
Research Foundations
DeCaro constructs this spiritual portrait using primary materials including interviews with Wilfred Little, declassified FBI files, Black press archives, and audio recordings of speeches and sermons.
Main Chapter Directory
The 10-chapter structure traces his path from his ancestral and Garveyite roots through his early ministry, his split from the Nation of Islam, and his final year as a traditional Muslim convert.
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Abayomi Azikiwe-_-black-history-month-special, including on MX
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Book Summary
Key Overview
The book fundamentally challenges the dominant narrative of the 1950s and 1960s Southern Civil Rights Movement, which often portrays the struggle as exclusively nonviolent. Umoja demonstrates that armed self-defense was not a contradiction to nonviolent organizing in Mississippi, but rather an essential component that protected activists, families, and communities from Black white-supremacist terror (such as the Ku Klux Klan and state-sanctioned violence).
Core Themes & Arguments
Protection of Nonviolent Organizers: Local Black Mississippians often provided armed security for nonviolent civil rights workers from organizations like SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality).
Grassroots Tradition: Armed resistance in Mississippi was deeply rooted in the culture and history of Black working-class communities and military veterans returning from WWII and the Korean War.
Key Organizations & Figures: The book details local self-defense efforts, including the formation of local militias and the role of groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice, as well as prominent local leaders like Laura McGhee, E.W. Steptoe, and Hartman Turnbow.
Path to Black Power: Umoja traces how local experiences with self-defense directly informed the shift toward the broader Black Power movement in the mid-to-late 1960s.
About the Author
Akinyele Omowale Umoja is a professor of African American Studies at Georgia State University. He is an educator, author, and longtime activist in the New Afrikan Independence Movement.
Armed self-defense is the use of force—often including firearms—to protect oneself, family, or community from an imminent unlawful attack when the state cannot or will not provide protection. In U.S. history it has been both a legal right and a contested political strategy, especially in periods of official indifference to racial violence.In the Mississippi Freedom Movement that the shared book examines, historian Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues armed resistance was not a sideshow but essential. Local Black residents and veterans organized informal patrols and later groups modeled on the Deacons for Defense and Justice (founded 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana) to guard organizers, churches, and neighborhoods against Klan night riders and police-Klan collusion.
Umoja’s central claim is that this activity reduced fear, deterred attacks, and made nonviolent campaigns by SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP possible in places where federal protection was absent. Figures such as Medgar Evers privately favored organized self-defense; Freedom Summer field workers routinely encountered armed local people even while national leaders publicly preached nonviolence.
This pattern predates the 1960s. Robert F. Williams in Monroe, North Carolina, formed an NRA-chartered Black Armed Guard in the 1950s after Klan attacks and later wrote Negroes with Guns. Earlier still, Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois endorsed armed protection against lynching. The common thread is that when local law enforcement sided with attackers, communities treated self-defense as a practical necessity rather than an ideological choice.
U.S. law treats self-defense as an affirmative defense with four core requirements: an imminent threat, a reasonable belief that force is necessary, proportionality, and (in most cases) that the defender did not initiate the confrontation. Every state recognizes some version of the castle doctrine—no duty to retreat inside one’s home. Roughly 30–38 states have added “stand your ground” statutes that remove the duty to retreat in any place a person is lawfully present. Duty-to-retreat states still exempt the home. These rules do not authorize preemptive or retaliatory violence; they only excuse force used against an immediate threat.
Empirical estimates of how often guns are used defensively vary sharply because of survey design. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) consistently finds 60,000–65,000 defensive firearm incidents per year, a small fraction of total violent crime. Private telephone surveys, most famously Kleck and Gertz (1995), have produced figures of 2 million or more. Methodological disputes—recall bias, what counts as a “use,” whether the incident was actually criminal—have never been fully resolved. Both sides agree that most reported defensive uses involve display rather than shots fired, and that the legal and physical risks after a shooting remain high.
The historical record and the statistical debate illustrate the same tension: armed self-defense can deter attackers and buy time when institutions fail, yet it also carries risks of escalation, misidentification, and unequal legal outcomes. In the specific setting of 1960s Mississippi, the evidence Umoja assembles suggests it functioned as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, political organizing and legal pressure. Contemporary arguments continue to turn on whether those conditions of state failure still exist and how the costs of private armed force should be weighed against its benefits.
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