“Negro Liberation or Black Liberation?” Black United Front Politics before Black Power

• In Event: Black Power Reconsidered: Rethinking the Provenance and Paths of Black Power Thought and Praxis

Abstract

My paper examines the development of black united front politics in Harlem during the early 1960s, particularly focusing on the Emergency Committee for Unity on Economic and Social Problems. The Emergency Committee was a brief political coalition in Harlem between left-labor civil rights organizers and black nationalists which was brought together by its chief aim – “the principle of unity which allows for the widest variety of participation and action.” Its three major action programs were designed to address unemployment, law and order enforcement, and housing. And although the group’s name and basic structure indicated a temporary coalition which would be put into action around community issues in Harlem, it also pursued more lasting goals in community education and political mobilization.

The Emergency Committee gives a glimpse at the possibility of black unity politics in contentious political communities such as Harlem in the early 1960s. Its meetings not only featured representatives from different political and religious groups, but even allotted space for them to present their programs alongside one another. And while it gave way to liberal integrationist movements such as the March on Washington, other nationalist groups in Harlem such as the Organization of Afro-American Unity emerged to address similar issues. Before the Black Power Conventions and National Black United Front of the late 1960s and beyond, Harlem was home to a coalition which privileged race over other religious and political differences, imagining and debating many of the ideas which would come to define the Black Power Movement.

Author

• Garrett Felber, University of Michigan