Race, Roots, and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power Conference Program

Race, Roots, and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power Conference Program

Black Power, Black Experience on Campus

Includes panels on Black Power at University of Illinois.

From conference introduction:

“Race, Roots, and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power”
is the first of several conferences designed to reevaluate the Black Power Movement.
In the mainstream and even in the literature of the White left, “Black
Power” has been presented as a nihilistic moment in which African Americans
unleashed centuries of pent-up anger. A few scholars seem to acknowledge the
outpouring of cultural creativity, only to later reduce it to ideologically driven
Black nationalist discourse. “Race, Roots, and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies
of Black Power” brings together major activist intellectuals of the era with
the generation of new scholars whose work is producing a reevaluation of the
legacy of the movement. It has been dubbed the “New Black Power Studies.”
And it promises a reinterpretation and re-imagination of Black Power. The
new scholarship, like the Black Power Movement itself includes several interpretative
trends, numerous themes and various political tendencies. “Race,
Roots, and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power” proposes to
present the diversity of the new scholarship and to place it in dialogue with the
Black Power generation. That pioneering generation of scholar-activists who
first held their fists to sky, sang “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” shouted “Power to the People,” forged the first “rainbow
coalitions,” and struggled more successfully than previous generations or other social movements to empower
women.
I welcome you to the conference “Race, Roots, and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power.” I welcome
you to the dialogue.
Sundiata K. Cha-Jua

Department of African-American Studies

Unpublished conference program

March-April 2006

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