We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Suny Series in Afro-American Studies) - Softcover

Smith, Robert C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791431363 ISBN 13: 9780791431368

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 1996

Synopsis

A comprehensive study of African-American politics since the civil rights era argues that the black movement has been coopted by mainstream institutions, due to the political traditions of blacks themselves and the decay of the black community. Simultaneous. UP.

About this title

About the Authors

Robert C. Smith is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University. He is the author of many books, including African American Leadership (coauthored with Ronald W. Walters); John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Ethnic Incorporation and Avoidance; and Ronald W. Walters and the Fight for Black Power, 1969–2010, all published by SUNY Press.

Ronald W. Walters is Professor of Political Science at Howard University. He was an active participant in many of the events examined in this work.

From the Back Cover

This is the first comprehensive study of African American politics from the end of the 1960s civil rights era to the present. Not an optimistic book, it concludes that the black movement has been almost wholly encapsulated into mainstream institutions, coopted, and marginalized. As a result, the author argues, African American leadership has become largely irrelevant in the development of organizations, strategies, and programs that would address the multifaceted problems of race in the post-civil rights era. Meanwhile, the core black community has become increasingly segregated, and its society, economy, culture, and institutions of governance and uplift have decayed. In exhaustive detail Smith traces this sad state of affairs to certain internal attributes of African American political culture and institutional processes, and to the structure of American politics and its economic and cultural underpinnings. Sure to be controversial, this book challenges both liberal and conservative notions of the black political struggle in the United States. It will serve as a major reference for academic study and a point of departure for political activists.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791431363
• ISBN 13: 9780791431368
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 420