The Black Radical Tradition
Channel: Dr. Dominique Thomas
Date: 2020-06-10

What must be stated is that even with oppressive forces conspiring against them Black people resisted and continue to resist. Resistance came in many forms and were each under particular sociohistorical contexts. While many Black people could not rely on electoral politics and voting to save them; they turned to other forms of resistance. Many of the changes toward progress have been pushed forward by the protest and resistance of everyday Black people, not only the great male leaders. Enslaved Africans revolted through rebellions such as those led by Nat Turner or removed themselves from the colonial systems by setting up Maroon societies, sometimes with poor White people and Indigenous peoples (Du Bois, 1924; Robinson, 1997, 2000). These societies were endangered as they constituted a threat to the colonial order; some of these societies were violently wiped out by colonial powers (Robinson, 1997, 2000). Haiti became an independent nation after more than a decade of revolt and revolution (Du Bois, 1924; James, 2001). Frederick Douglass and others were in the forefront of abolition efforts. Others decided to use their intellectual gifts: Radical intellectuals spoke out against the physical violence inflicted on Black people and conducted research that pushed back against the structural and epistemic violence inflicted on Black communities (Robinson, 2000). 

Black radical intellectuals have historically produced scholarship and engaged in activism on behalf of Black people (Johnson & Lubin, 2017; Robinson, 2000). Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s investigative journalism and activism highlighted and documented the rampant lynching of Black men in the south. She started the first Black women’s organizations and help found other organizations including the National Association for Colored Women and the NAACP (Davis, 2003; Wells, 1970). One of her NAACP co-founders was W.E.B. Du Bois. He argued that race was socially constructed and that social conditions cause inequality. His multidisciplinary talents were put on display in his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois, 1903). Similarly, Fanon’s (1970) Black Skin, White Masks posits that racism creates harmful psychological constructs that inhibit psychological health. In The Wretched of the Earth, he states that a new world must constructed that destroys the Black-White binary and that an African revolution must come from the people (Fanon, 1961). His work has been instrumental in understanding the psychological consequences of oppression and the plight of oppressed people. Continuing in this tradition, Angela Davis has been a decades-long advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, women’s liberation, prison abolition, and international solidarity with Palestine (Davis, 2003, 2005, 2016). 

This resistance continued into what we now refer to as the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement, as most know it, emerged from events such as the murder of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycotts, and the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. The landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case involved the citation of Mamie and Kenneth Clark’s famous doll studies to demonstrate the psychological harm that segregation inflicted on African American children (Belgrave & Allison, 2018). Centered at this movement was the attainment of civil rights, especially voting rights. Resistance came in the form of protests, marches, sit-ins, speeches, and boycotts. This mass movement of resistance resulted in gains, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which supposedly ensured formal political equality (Taylor, 2016). Many of these gains would receive a backlash.