In many ways the seeds of this retreat constitute a response against social movements that attempted to re-shape the world. Black radicals played a pivotal role in these struggles by forcefully advocating a radical humanism that called for the end of all forms of racial, political, and economic oppression. This idealism was further emboldened by global upheavals, decolonization movements, and organizations that literally and figuratively imagined a new world. The highpoint of this era came during the early 1970s. While it remains fashionable among certain segments of the left to claim that radicalism died with the demise of SDS, this was far from the case.
Nothing fails however, like success.
While the first half of the 1970s witnessed an unprecedented level of cohesion among various sectors of the black public sphere, the bold vision laid forth at the 1972 Gary Convention was not to be. The betrayal of the dream articulated at Gary provides a backdrop for the savage inequalities that plague predominantly black inner-cities in contemporary America. Black activists who had carefully orchestrated the electoral rise of black mayors and other elected officials were unprepared for the whole-scale retreat from a progressive black agenda that would typify most black urban political regimes. Moreover, the decade witnessed the first signs of deindustrialization, federal disinvestment, and stagflation that would cripple large segment of the black community. Force fed symbols of racial progress juxtaposed against declining economic opportunities, black poor folk fell victim to drug pushers from below and dream traffickers from above.