The Agonies of Black Militancy

Although black militancy has been one of the veins of American radicalism at least since the abolitionists, it was only during the early sixties that most people started paying much attention to it or even calling it by that name. More people seem to have been militant in the early sixties than ever before. If that is so, however, it suggests something quite important about that stage of the sixties: that it encouraged more hopes of a breakthrough into freedom, and thus stirred more black activism, than any previous period in the century.

When people started speaking of black militancy, they were not naming the tradition of black militant activity itself, but a mode of activism that seemed to be distinctly part of the style and personality of the sixties. And they were referring to black militancy not in the sense of black nationalism but in the sense of a movement whose controlling impulse was to break down barriers that stood in the way of a full and equal participation in ...